Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  Some afternoons he would catch some, and would gut them and carry them on a stringer thrown over his shoulder, would take them back to the school, where, if school were still in session, he would peer in at Mel through the window, as if a drunkard, and would gesture to the fish he had caught for her.

  He would remember his own days in the little schoolroom, not so long ago, but seeming as if centuries past. Mel ignored him.

  The woods kept burning, though the main teeth of the fire had passed through the valley, and now there were only the steady, random creepings of fire, like a dog clacking and grinding on the same bone for days on end. Old Dudley had been trying, with the satellite phone, to find a new rig crew—calling contractors in Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, even Russia and China—but none were available immediately, so that finally he stopped calling, and announced one evening at the bar—baby Mary on his knee, as he warmed to her slowly—that he was going to drill the well himself, he and Matthew, and that they were going to start the next day. “We’ll need a third hand,” Dudley said, casting around the room for Wallis, and whether Wallis was recruited or volunteered, he could not really say.

  Later that night, in bed, he talked it over with Mel—told her how it would probably be his last prospect, and how it felt like that whole part of his life was slipping away, as if sealed beneath ice, and how he wanted one more glimpse. He told her how he wanted it to be a dry hole—though he knew it wouldn’t be—and how he wanted to be out on the rig—wanted to be among the first to know, one of the first to see what he had discovered.

  He told her the money gotten from two weeks of work on the rig would be enough to carry them, and the baby, through whole other years.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have to explain.”

  “This will be the last one,” he said.

  “Shhh,” she whispered. She didn’t want him to tell her something that might later turn into a lie. Then she realized what a peculiar thought that was, as if a mountain could turn into a sea, or a desert into a forest.

  Slowly the valley was being revealed and returned to them as the smoke pulled away, leaving patches of blue sky above. The wolves had left the valley, so that there was a silence, but the autumn nights grew frostier by a degree or two each night, and the leaves of cottonwood and aspen, as well as the needles of larch trees, burned gold amidst the partially blackened landscape—though as the smoke cleared in tatters and streamings, the villagers could see that there was still much among the forest—the deep green-blues of spruce and fir—untouched.

  The gold cottonwoods and aspen, as well as the gold candles of the larch, had grown brighter during the last week, though they had a peculiar timeless, burnished look, as if the smoke had softened them, like scraps of hide or leather worked by hand. The yellow sunlight of late September struck them as if it had come to rescue them, but still they began falling from the trees, falling in the least breeze and landing on the blackened landscape like golden coins or needles. They cast a net, a mesh, across the charred land, and held the coals and ashes in place, as if claiming those ashes, not wanting to let them be blown or washed away. Tumblewheels and dervishes of yellow leaves skittered in front of the tongues of any breeze, and the winds were colder now, though still the sun in the middle of the day carried warmth. The fires up in the mountains had for the most part stopped their runs, and had boxed themselves into corners and were trapped, dying out, gnawing at nothing.

  “Don’t let him hurt you,” was the last thing Mel said to Wallis before he went off to work that first day. She fixed two lunches: one for herself to take to school, and one for him to take to the rig. Cheese sandwiches, and an apple. They were out of meat. “Be careful,” she said. “Don’t let them hurt you.”

  They rowed Dudley across the river in a high wooden dory. They took a wheelbarrow with them, with which to transport Old Dudley, once on the other side: to save his old energy, he said, for the task at hand. There wasn’t room in the dory for the wheelbarrow and the three of them, so Matthew swam, slowly, crossways to the current.

  Once across, Matthew lay in the sun spitting out river water while Dudley sat in the shade and waited for him to recover. It was already warm and there were no morning clouds. Old Dudley, who had been studying Matthew the way a fisherman might view a beached and rot-bloating mullet or suckerfish, tapped his watch and said that it was only a ten-year lease they had from the government, and that if they didn’t hurry up someone else was going to go in there and take it and drill it themselves.

  Matthew rolled over onto his hands and knees, then rose stiffly. He pulled down fresh fir limbs and placed them in the wheelbarrow to form a seat, to give padding for Old Dudley, and then helped him in.

  Once Dudley was situated—sitting cross-legged like a swami—they set off down Red’s new road.

  Old Dudley was heavy—like unnumbered sacks of wet concrete. They took turns pushing him. His face was serene as he tried to get a feel for the thing he would begin destroying in a few days. His face was at times slightly expectant, too, like a well-behaved child at Christmas anticipating the possibility of a gift. He looked around at the cathedral shafts of light coming down through the trees, and at the soft flutter and sound and movements of birds in the canopy high above—the lime-green and coal-black wispy lichens hanging above like seaweed—and he was calm, and rode like a dignitary. Occasionally they would pass a gravelly creek flecked with nuggets of pyrite and shiny wafers of mica, like children’s glitter poured into the stream, which caught Dudley’s eye with a far keener interest than did the birds or trees; and as they crossed these shallow creeks, moving their way upstream along the big river, he would stare up each little creek-canyon and sniff, flaring his nostrils, would glare unblinking up toward each creek’s source, scowling, and Wallis could almost see his mind working things out, evaluating the lithology of source rock above and weaving out in his mind the story of its slow destruction, dissipation, and redistribution below—the ongoing web of mountain death that was gushing down the creeks at the rate of a millimeter per year.

  They pushed on. When it was Wallis’s turn to push him, Dudley would twist and look back at Wallis balefully, as if distrustful of Wallis not to dump him—but when finally he had made his point clear, he would twist back in his perch and continue his survey, voiceless all the while.

  A large bird, the dark shape of a raptor, flew through the trees. Dudley twisted to follow the bird’s quick flight. “Goshawk,” he said. “Northern goshawk.” He stared in the direction the goshawk had flown. “Male,” he said finally, “immature male.”

  After two miles, they stopped for water. Matthew and Wallis crouched at the river and drank from it like lions; Dudley, though thirsty—his balding head gleaming—remained in the wheelbarrow. When they resumed their journey and came around the last bend and saw the rig erect amidst the forest, untouched by the fires, it was to all three of them as if they had come upon an altar, some shrine built by souls more kindly and intelligent and worshipful of beauty than their own.

  “Sweet motherfucker,” Dudley said, and climbed out of the wheelbarrow. He ascended the hinged steel ladderworks as if going up the outside fire escape of an abandoned office building. The rig’s motors had run dry after the crew had fled the fires, but Dudley found some drums of diesel and got the engines going again with no more trouble than a man starting a garden tractor or a chain saw. The noise, after so much silence, fractured the quietness like an exploding tree.

  Old Dudley and Matthew climbed up into the crow’s nest and as the sluggish drilling fluid began circulating into the hole again, Dudley wrestled another stand of pipe into position and called down to Wallis, explaining to Wallis how to set the tongs to hold the pipe in the hole and then break the thread in order to screw in a new stand of pipe.

  Wallis did as he was told. All his work before had been in the office, on the maps, in the abstract, and this was not an unpleasant feeling—leaning in against the force of the tongs, wrapp
ing the chain around the new pipe and then leaning back with the huge wrench to fasten in the new pipe, and feeling in that moment the precision fit of the threads. The earth seeming to accept another length of pipe.

  Matthew climbed down from the crow’s nest and told Wallis he was a natural. He and Wallis stood there on the derrick floor, watching the shining steel pipe disappear so slowly, an inch every few minutes, into the hole.

  Dudley, dressed in a pair of Matthew’s old overalls, hosed down the drill pipe as Matthew and Wallis lowered it into the hole, and Wallis thought how it must seem to Dudley as if he had gone back in time half a century: as if he were roughnecking, working so long ago on one of his first rigs out in West Texas, and how too it must have seemed to him as if there were a fault or fissure in time, a setting-back of things, in a way that was vital and necessary—and Wallis thought that it must have been pleasing, even heady, for Dudley to feel so young and strong again.

  It took about half an hour for each new length of pipe to chew down to its full length—about a foot a minute. The noise was deafening, so that it precluded all daydreaming, though in its own brute way it was hypnotic. Often, that first day, Wallis found himself staring down at the earthen tank of drilling mud next to the rig, sloppy and frothy. It seemed to him like some artificial pond or aquarium in which dwelt the most hideous creature, so awful that it could never be seen by humanity.

  “How deep will you go?” Matthew shouted to Dudley, over the diesel roar. Dudley was up in the crow’s nest again, swinging the pipe into position, while the two younger men below worked the tongs. “How deep will we go?”

  “To the bottom of the fucking world,” Dudley brayed, “to the United fucking States of China.” He kept hosing the pipe, which was shiny and silver. Mud and river water dripped in sheets from up on the rig floor, a sound like rain, though it was a bright blue day. It was a messy operation, Wallis thought—like cleaning and butchering a deer, or an elk, or a moose.

  There wasn’t time for daydreaming: Wallis could see that right away. It was different from his old life—the days he’d been spending with Mel. If you took your eyes off what you were doing or allowed your mind to wander even a slight distance, you’d get your ass kicked; you’d have five hundred pounds of pipe fall on you, or you’d get a hand, even an arm, wrapped up in things, and lose it. It was all chain-rattle and torque, all wrench and clatter.

  The wind gushed a curtain of gold leaves down past them and onto the ground, the riverside aspen leaves showering the forest floor again, and Wallis paused and stared at their beauty for a moment.

  “Hey!” Old Dudley shouted, “hey, numb-nuts!” Wallis jumped back just as a twenty-foot length of chain, thick as a snake, fell from up in the crow’s nest and crashed onto the rig floor where he’d been standing. Sparks bounced from where it hit the steel grid of the deck. Wallis remembered—in that half-instant when he’d leapt back—only speed, and force, and the slightest, sickest whisper of sound—the limp chain unfolding only a little, as it fell—and now, seconds later, it lay there totally motionless, totally harmless. Matthew, who had been standing a few steps back, out of harm’s way, stepped over to where the chain lay and moved it out of the way.

  “Would’ve tore your head clean off,” Dudley was bellowing. “Would’ve snapped it off your neck like wet toilet paper. Ninety percent of rig fatalities occur right there where you’re standing, numb-nuts—the combat zone, inside that three-foot radius right where you were standing with your head up your ass. Jesus God,” he said, “be careful. You would’ve made a hell of a mess.”

  Wallis said nothing, only looked up at the image of Dudley aloft, silhouetted against the sky, and moved back in and unhooked the pipe tongs. Dudley laughed and released the drilling brake. The diamond bit bounced and shuddered, trying to get a bite on the new rocks far below. There was a horrible caterwauling that resonated throughout the rig’s frame, and through the men, a metal against metal sound, as the pipe torqued and spun and bit and fought, settling back to its duty. Dudley revved the throttle. Black smoke coughed into the blue sky, and the pipe’s squalling quieted to a steady clattering purr. It would be an hour or so before the first drill cuttings would begin circulating back up on the current of drilling mud, which was cycling back into the mud pit. They would catch the cuttings with a strainer—like netting salmon leaping up the falls, Wallis thought—and examine the cuttings to see what kind of old earth they were piercing, down there. To begin—to continue—putting the story together: as if it were any different from the one going on up above.

  The day passed quickly; it melted into work, passed like a muscle’s contraction: there was little thinking, only brute effort and rhythmic, mechanical repetition. They stopped working at dusk, weary and sore, Dudley and Matthew unaccustomed to the consequences of physical labor, and as the engines sputtered back down into silence, the quiet came washing in over them as if cleansing them.

  Old Dudley slept in the wheelbarrow, exhausted: rode in it as if in a nest, like some enormous fledgling, and he did not wake even as they loaded him into the dory and paddled across in the clearing night crispness, with all the fires on the mountainside visible now, though much reduced, and dying out, with fewer and fewer each night.

  Amy would be waiting for him with a lantern on the other shore, with the baby Mary in a little pouch hung around her chest. They would awaken him by splashing water on his face. He would blink slowly, ascending from dreams of nothingness—would blink at the distant mountainside fires and the stars—the woman and her baby standing in the lantern’s glow—and the group of them would walk slowly home.

  There would be no one waiting for Matthew. Sometimes Wallis and Matthew would go get a beer at the bar, as if trying in some faint way to honor the past, and each other, but more often than not, Matthew would go into the mercantile to get ready for bed and Wallis would go straight home, where Mel would be waiting.

  They met each morning before daylight in front of the mercantile, and one morning there was a sheet of white cast over the world—not snow yet, but frost; and as the sun rose the frost turned from silver to fractured diamonds: the world melting back into the birthing colors of autumn: red, gold, yellow, blood brown. Dudley had started out in a foul mood, sore and weary, ranting once again at the drilling crew’s cowardice, but after they had rowed across the river, and as they began pushing him down the road in the wheelbarrow toward the rig, his mood improved, until he was well on his way to a thing that could almost be called good cheer. It felt to Wallis almost as if they were a family, walking down that leaf-strewn road in the fall, and it felt as if Dudley’s mood, the risings and fallings of it, had enough power and force to be cutting or scoring little striations upon the landscape, shaping in some way the face of the earth itself.

  Often Matthew worked the crow’s nest now while Wallis and Dudley stayed below on the rig floor, fastening pipe and monitoring the drill rate and pump pressure. There was always the danger of drilling into a cavern, which would swallow all the lubricating mud and then twist the pipe. Or the drill bit could strike a pocket of gas, which might blow all the heavy mud—and the flammable gas, in addition to all the steel pipe—back up out of the hole. Anything could happen. There was always a tenseness, a vigilance, up on the rig.

  Dudley worked the drilling brake through the soft stretches to keep the pipe from descending too fast—to keep it from twisting and getting stuck. He seemed to Wallis to be inflating with power and happiness as he rode the drilling brake, leaning his whole body against the long-handled lever. It was something someone in a rest home could have done, if they knew how—something subtle but also imprecise, like the occasional flex of a paddle as one rudders a canoe down a small stream—but he was enjoying it, so hopped up and anticipatory—always eager to let the bit down farther—that Wallis believed at any second a trickle of drool might escape his mouth. The rig’s throbbings and tremblings shook Dudley around as he leaned the upper half of his body against the drilling brake. It had
a safety chain fastened to it to keep the entire pipe string from falling down into the void, should any be encountered.

  From time to time Dudley would twist and look up at Matthew, would stare at him impassively a moment or two, but there was nothing that could be shouted over the roar of the rig, and Dudley would just stare, curious as to why such a strong man was unable to endure. Pleased but disappointed both, that he had finally worn him down.

  Often Wallis could feel Dudley’s eyes on him. For long stretches of time Dudley’s hand would be steady on the brake, but then he would bump the throttle up a bit, impatient. Wallis could feel that Dudley was just about to call out another warning—a call for Wallis to pay attention. A mile and a half of rock still separating them from the oil. Old Dudley ignored Matthew and Wallis, now. He shifted his attention to the pressure scale—the great clock-face dial, the red needle leaping and trembling—the slow etch of the geolograph scribbling like an EKG the drill rate below—the brute story of endurance and resistance versus weakness and fatigue—the drill rates transcribing the story of which layers of earth were easy to drill through, and which, more resistant.

  Later in the afternoon Dudley put the drilling brake on automatic and took Wallis down to the mud pit to strain for samples. It was far too early to be thinking about oil or gas, but he examined them anyway: rinsed the mud from them, sniffed them, rolled them around in the palm of his hand, looked at them with a hand lens, then put them in his mouth and tasted them, sized them for grain dimensions, clay content, and grittiness, and tried to taste any oil or gas that might be in them.

  He gave Wallis a clean handful with which to do the same. It felt to Wallis like taking communion. The sun was level with the trees now and it was orange from the fire’s smoke. It seemed strangely as if the sun were descending to the same place they were drilling into. Wallis tasted the grains of rock: tried to taste where they had once lain on the surface, and tried to taste the sunlight that had once shone on them.