Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  “We don’t want the well drilled,” Amy said. “But if you’re going to drill it, we should have the jobs.”

  A few people glanced in Wallis’s direction. He felt sick to his stomach.

  There was a wind, up in the tallest trees. It already felt like fall.

  A man spoke up from the back of the small, curious crowd—one of the more reclusive residents from the north end of the valley. He would be living within six or seven miles of the construction.

  “Whose idea is it to drill on the other side? Is it Old Dudley’s?”

  Red nodded. “He said one of his geologists worked the prospect up. Said it was a fella who used to live here—his name was Matthew, or something like that.”

  Someone laughed. “Another dry hole,” someone said, and Helen turned fiercely to see who had said it.

  “Where are you thinking about putting the road?” a woodcutter asked, and everyone saw what he was thinking: that there would be a fifty- or sixty-foot wide swath of piled timber wherever the road went, and that it would be available for firewood.

  “Well, I can show you where the old man was talking about,” Red said. He called to one of his helpers, who brought over a map. “Here’s roughly where we’re thinking about,” Red said, spreading the map out and pausing, then following the river’s curve with his finger. Pretending he did not know every contour on the map. Wallis and Mel looked at him and could tell that he would not be content to just blade a path through the forest: that he would want to build a road that would last forever. He’d scrape all the soil away and pack the glacial cobble down with air compressors; he’d blast bedrock, if need be, would carve not just the skin and meat from the earth, but would go deeper, would cut and smash the bones, trying to get to the soft organs beneath.

  “I thought we’d go up somewhere along this side,” he said, pointing on the map. “I think somewhere up in here is where the old man and—what’s his name?—Matthew—have in mind.” Red fell silent and sat there, holding his hunger: trying not to disappear beneath the hugeness of it.

  It didn’t have to be roads. It could have been anything. Timber. Love. Money. Meat.

  “Oil,” someone said. “Old Dudley and Matthew think there’s oil there.”

  “Yeah,” said Red. “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I get paid whether it’s there or not.” He gestured toward the man who’d just made the connection. “What do you think?” Red asked. “Do you think it’s there?”

  The man seemed uncomfortable with this responsibility. “Hell,” he said, “I wouldn’t know anything about it.” He backed a bit farther into the small crowd.

  A small girl spoke up—Suzie, one of the schoolchildren.

  “You don’t need to be drilling here,” she said angrily. “It’s not right. It’ll upset the way things are—the way the animals are—their lives, their . . .” She looked around helplessly. “Their cultures she said. “Their relationships to the land.” Red smiled, listened patiently.

  Wallis thought of Colter.

  It was just a four-mile strip, Wallis told himself. Just fifty or sixty feet wide. Suzie turned to her father, who tried to comfort her. There were tears in her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” Red said. “We have a permit. It’s public land. I’m just doing my job.”

  The herd of people moved in closer, made indecisive by her tears. Some of the boys were beginning to climb up on the giant machines now, sitting in the seats and working the levers.

  “You guys are lucky,” Red said, looking around at the forest. His crew wandered over and sat idly next to him. “One day you’re just living here, kind of having a hard go of it, and the next day—bing!—we find an oil field for you, and you wake up and your roads are going to be better.” He nodded toward the pay phone. “They’ll have to put in phone lines—your phone’ll be upgraded—shit, you might even end up with some in your houses—and hell, who knows, before it’s all over, you might even have electricity. Building codes,” he said, then chuckled before anyone could take him seriously. “Just kidding about that one. Funds for the school. Oil and gas royalties for the educational system. Computers. Field trips. Stuff like that.”

  “Clearcuts for kids,” Belle said, unsmiling.

  Suzie turned and began to walk away, her back to them. She started to run.

  “A new playground,” Red said, nodding across to the school. “Maybe even better teacher salaries.”

  “You came all this way to give us these things,” Belle said.

  Red smiled. A bolt of hunger leaping from the pit of his stomach. “No,” he said, “I came here to build a road.”

  People stared blankly across the river at the dense forest beyond, unable to see into the future—unable to imagine anything beyond that which they had always known. What was the difference, after all, between nineteen wells and twenty? They began to drift away, save for those who wanted to volunteer for a month’s work.

  Red began speaking in a more comfortable, less salesman-like voice as Mel and Wallis were leaving—now that the herd, it seemed, had been winnowed down to true believers.

  “This fucking stone wall,” he was saying. “Who the fuck built this rock wall?”

  Another hot day of late August strained past, like a woman giving birth: the sweat streaming down the side of her face, the earth grimacing and shuddering—one more day, the easiest thing in the world—a sunrise and a moonrise—and yet the hardest thing, too.

  The apples were falling to the ground, the branches of the tree in the schoolyard bending with their weight. Belle went around picking them up and putting them in baskets to store in the school’s root cellar. The south wind would bring fire, which would collide with brief autumn, and then the long winter. The fire had to come.

  Once they began—once people’s hearts had settled so easily back into defeat—the road crew worked quickly. All day and night their saws buzzed as they cut a straight wide line through the wilderness. The diesel engines of the barge growled, sending up ebony plumes of smoke as it ferried men and machines across the river. Iridescent rainbow ribbons of fuel and exhaust drifted downstream, shimmering in the sunlight, and Wallis was glad that the geese were gone, glad that Colter was gone.

  The workers lived in a tent-camp by the river, sharing twelve-hour shifts, so that they were continuously gnawing at the road. They shot deer out of season, as if helping themselves to the pantry of the unlocked house of a stranger. They were loud and slovenly and their camp soon took on a stench.

  People in the village continued, however, to be unalarmed by the road. It seemed only what it was—a strip, a lane. They could not grasp it as a thing larger than itself.

  They swam in the river to escape the maddening heat, and often to go examine the road’s progress. Wallis and Mel summoned the courage after a few days to paddle across in a canoe and inspect the finishing stages of the road.

  The dust on it was already ankle-deep. The fronds of ferns and cedars on either side were coated with dust. There was the asphaltic smell of diesel everywhere. Mel remembered the last time she had been there, and had smelled the thick scent of a herd of elk. Neither Mel nor Wallis could avoid feeling revulsion at the uprooted stumps, the giant ruined spruce, the huge slash piles of dirt and moss and fern and timber, and yet they were confused by how strangely satisfying they found the beam of light through the darkness: the light-filled tunnel of the road.

  They canoed home.

  “It’s all going to burn anyway,” Wallis said.

  The valley was now so primed for fire, so hot and still, that it seemed the simple friction of one’s movement against the air—the raising of one’s arm, the tilt of a jaw—would be sufficient to set off sparks, which would then ignite the rest.

  Soon Red had the length of the road cut and was laying in culverts, hauling gravel across on a small barge and sending road graders up and down the lane, compacting gravel over gravel: doing his best to make a road that would last forever. There was only one horse left in the valley
, Amy’s pony, and he had rented it, and rode it up and down the road, inspecting everything; and sometimes when he was riding hard, the steel hoofs of the pony struck pieces of flint in the gravel and the sparks skittered into the drying grasses and ignited brush fires, which splayed like fingers for short distances into the old forest before extinguishing themselves in the deep mosses and shady rot farther in. Some of the slash piles on the edges of the road were ignited in this manner, and they blinked into life in a trail behind Red’s hard rush, the flames crackling sometimes to heights of fifteen and twenty feet.

  The workers would hurry along in Red’s burning wake, breaking up the fires with shovels and axes—Red cursing at them over his shoulder, as if the fires were their fault—Red turning savage, almost crazed, for if the fires burned up the forest that was now the road’s border, there would be no borders, hence no road—and everyone now, even the outsiders, the road-builders, could feel the forest drying and the south slopes baking and asking for more heat, and for sparks, and for fire.

  He finished the road. He took pictures of it with a little video camera. He rode the gravel-packed lane—as tight and planar as if he had poured concrete—and from the back of Amy’s little pony (the hoofs clopping gently) he filmed it to take home with him. He took pictures of both himself and the crew standing on it, not like artisans but conquerors.

  There was a going-away party for the crew—a gathering at the bar, and a feeling of relief on both sides—the villagers happy to be getting their town back, and the workers, ready to flee this dark land—and Wallis went into town for the celebration, and to be sure they were really leaving. Mel was gone—had carried Helen back over to Joshua’s to view the finishing touches to the eagle-raven. The woodworking was finished, and now it was being painted—coat after coat of glossy black and gold paint. Yellow eyes, now, rather than opal.

  Several of the men were sitting on the porch, having already packed. They were drinking beer, while down in the camp below, others gathered their cookware and folded their tents and cots. It was dusk.

  There was the blast of a shotgun, followed by an animal moaning and squalling—Wallis thought at first one of the workers had shot himself—but then he saw the shape of a black bear, Helen’s big bear, running awkwardly through the brush, dragging a bloody hind leg and roaring. A man shouted, “I got ’im!” and ran behind the bear with a gun, too excited to reload and shoot again.

  The bear went right through what was left of the workers’ camp. It ran through their midst, knocking over skillets and pans, and straight down the dock and out into the river.

  The bear did not linger in the river, but kept swimming, his broad head striking a hard and resolute V through the dark water of nightfall.

  Wallis had thought and hoped it would end there. But even as the ashes were settling from where the bear had run through the fire, the men were dragging their canoes and drift-boats into the water, and they set out paddling after the bear. One of the men pulled an iron surveyor’s rod out of the sand, more of a pike than a rod—it was six feet long, like a spear, but solid iron—it weighed forty pounds—and he rode in the bow of one of the boats, while another man paddled.

  The men on shore cheered.

  For a few moments it looked like the bear might make it. He was about halfway across even before the men launched their boats; but the bear was tiring, and the men were eager, and the distance closed quickly. Wallis wished the bear would dive, like a duck or an otter, but the bear kept swimming. The men circled him with the boats; forced him to swim in circles. They slapped at him with paddles; sometimes they would hit him, and the sound of the flat wood against his skull carried across the water. Wallis shouted at them to leave the bear alone, but now the man with the pike moved in closer, the pike raised high in both hands as a man might harpoon a whale, or perhaps as men had surrounded mastodons and mammoths, in this same country, only a few thousand years ago.

  The first blow drove the bear underwater. The pike stuck him in his thick neck, and the sound of it—deeper and different from the paddles—reverberated not through the air, but underwater, and through the water: perhaps to the sea.

  For a long time the bear did not come up, and the men began to curse, thinking they had lost it—they all stood up in their boats, waiting—and finally the bear surfaced, fought his way back to the top as if summoned, and the man with the pike wasted no time, struck him again almost immediately, and this time the pike’s tip penetrated the bear, rode down between his shoulder blades and lodged at a depth sufficient, Wallis gauged, to have reached his heart, and Wallis turned away, sickened.

  The bear sank quickly now, despite the men’s attempts to hold on to the heavy pike; and there was a ring in the water, a wake in the center of their boats, where the bear had been, and then nothing, only calm water.

  The men did not know how to react at first. But soon it was as if they reached a consensus, as if they had had a communication between themselves without speaking, and they began to cheer, a little halfheartedly at first, but then with real enthusiasm, as if having bluffed themselves into believing, in their own hearts, that loss was instead victory.

  Red and his crew had not been gone for more than a few hours before townspeople began paddling over to the other side, that same night, in canoes and rafts and drift-boats, to examine the road. Many of those who did not have boats swam. They carried their drinks with them, swimming sidestroke with one arm held above the water, gripping an open bottle of beer, while those in boats paddled with their drinks resting on their bow—an open bottle of wine, or some sweetened fruit drink—a margarita, green as a meadow, or a daiquiri, or some cool blue drink, glowing in the moonlight like a beacon.

  They walked the new road, then—walked it like a city street, claiming it, up and down most of its four-mile length—Amy swam her pony over there, and rode sitting sidesaddle—still sore from Dudley’s visitation, and looking as if she were about to give birth any minute—and Wallis went over there and walked with them.

  They walked it in wonder, marveling at the edges of the great subdued beauty. They strolled, sipping their drinks in that moonlight, all the way to the end, where they milled, trying to sense the oil they had been told was beneath them.

  Later they headed home, strung out in small straggling groups, talking among themselves. There was a consensus to bring a picnic table over, or two or three: to set them up along the river for evenings such as these. Some of the townspeople admitted that they wouldn’t mind living over there. The road was still immaculate—it could be walked on barefoot—and Wallis knew someday there would be a store over there, too, and roads branching off of the main one, and that soon the weeds of the world would come somehow drifting over the high valley pass and find purchase in the disturbed soil, the arid gravel and dust of the roadbeds.

  If the well discovered oil, there would be pipelines and perhaps a small sulphur refinery; but even if it found nothing, the cut had been made, the slash to wildness: and they walked it flat-footed, all of them, admiring it and smelling it and breathing in deeply, always so hungry for the last of the new, and unable to help themselves, unable to turn away.

  No one told Helen about the bear. When Wallis got home that night, and settled in to the fit of Mel’s arms, he saw that she had black and gold paint on her.

  The rig, and rig workers, came next. They came like a wave, crossing over the summit and descending into the valley even as the road builders were leaving. The trucks and tractor-trailers came creeping into town as if in a parade: a slow chain of large and small trucks, with the barge immense among them, barely able to negotiate the bends in the road—crushing branches and saplings on either side—and behind it all crept the lying-down framework for the drilling rig itself, being pulled slowly down the road like the deposed king in a funeral procession.

  The drilling crew—roughnecks, tool pushers, drillers, and roustabouts—seemed coarser, happier than the road builders, and as they set up camp by the river, where the ro
ad builders had also stayed—the sound of hammers striking steel tent stakes—it was as if a circus had come to town.

  Wallis and Mel, along with several others from town, walked down to the river and watched them set up. Helen, too tired to walk, watched from her upstairs window. Already a dented mobile home was being set up, with generators and a satellite dish to transmit and receive information. Workers with saws were felling new trees to make more room for the many tractor-trailers that were gridlocked by the river, and they had a big fire going in the center of the camp, though the day was hot as iron and the danger of fires was present in everyone’s mind.

  Already they were shoving the barge into the river and loading the first of the rig’s framework onto it, along with a bulldozer and winch for muscling the iron and steel onto and off the barge.

  There were great ropes and chains, huge tanks to act as mud pits, reservoirs for the drilling fluid—the lubricant with which they would enter the earth—and floodlamps too, so that they could work at night.

  Amid the din and motion of the machinery and the heat of the bonfire, it seemed to the townspeople that the rig workers had come here to hunt a thing—some huge beast that was moving away from them; and yet it seemed too that the workers had already trapped it, captured it, and that they were here now only to clean and quarter it. Some of the villagers expected to see giant saws and axes, as if to be used in dismembering their quarry.

  Mel gripped Wallis’s hand tightly, forgiving him. Wallis watched them with fascination and horror: feeling strongly the desire, the urge, to step across and join them in his project. He didn’t want them in the valley, but he had summoned them, and now that they were here it seemed false to turn away. He wanted it to be a dry hole, and yet he knew it would not be.