Where the Sea Used to Be

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

BOOK ONE

BOOK TWO

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

First Mariner Books edition 1999

 

Copyright © 1998 by Rick Bass
All rights reserved

 

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

 

www.hmhco.com

 

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Bass, Rick, date.

 

Where the sea used to be / Rick Bass,
p. cm.
ISBN
0-395-77015-7
ISBN
0-395-95781-8 (pbk.)
I. Title
PS
3552.
A
8213
W
47 1998
813'.54—dc21 98-12842
CIP

 

e
ISBN
978-0-544-34157-9
v1.0514

 

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

The author wishes to acknowledge the use of various entries from Alexander Winchell's 1886
Walks and Talks in the Geological Field
, from which many of the “lectures” in this book were adapted. The author is also grateful to have quoted from
Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux,
by John G. Neihardt

 

The photographs on the title and part-title pages are by Stuart D. Klipper

 

 

 

 

For my editors
—
Harry Foster
,
Dorothy Henderson
,
and Camille Hykes

 

 

 

 

The Wolverine, Carcajou, or Glutton

 

This Species of animals is very numerous in the Rocky Mountains and very mischievous and annoying to Hunters. They often get into the traps setting for Beaver or searching out the deposits of meat which the weary hunter has made during a toilsome days hunt among mountains too rugged and remote for him to bear the reward of his labors to the place of Encampment, and when finding these deposits the Carcajou carries off all or as much of the contents as he is able secreting it in different places among the snow rocks or bushes in such a manner that it is very difficult for man or beast to find it. The avaricious disposition of this animal has given rise to the name of Glutton by Naturalists who suppose that it devours so much at a time as to render it stupid and incapable of moving or running about but I have never seen an instance of this Kind on the contrary I have seen them quite expert and nimble immediately after having carreyd away 4 or 5 times their weight in meat. I have good reason to believe that the Carcajou's appetite is easily satisfied upon meat freshly killed but after it becomes putrid it may become more Voracious but I never saw one myself or a person who had seen one in a stupid dormant state caused by Gluttony altho I have often wished it were the case . . .

 

—Osborne Russell,
Journal of a Trapper, 1854–1843

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

H
E HAD BEEN EATING THE WHOLE WORLD FOR THE SEVENTY
years of his life; and for the last twenty, he had been trying to eat the valley. It was where he, Old Dudley, sent his young men to look for the oil he told them he was sure was there, but which they had never found.

He preferred to chew through his geologists one at a time, so that he could focus the brunt of his force upon them without dilution. In his fifty years of searching for oil and gas, he had burned out over a dozen good geologists, burning them to a crisp like an autumn-dry piece of grass lit by a match, though other times crushing them to dust by manipulating their own desires against them: by allowing them full access to their urge to search the earth below.

He allowed them to drill wherever they wanted, and as often as they wished; and after they had burned to ash or been crushed to dust, it was as if the wind blew even those traces away. He never saw them again. And he would go out hunting for a new geologist to train, teach, and control.

Old Dudley avoided searching for them in the schools. In Dudley's mind, by the time a geologist had been through a university, he or she was ruined. And he chose only young men, knowing full well that the women would be harder to crush—more enduring, and able to outlast him. Dudley knew also that his own brittleness within—the tautness of his aged but still-intact libidinal desires—would end up burning or crushing him, rather than the other way around. He knew that with a woman geologist, he would be creeping around the office, forever wanting to crawl under her table as she mapped—wanting to sniff beneath her dress, wanting to lick her calves. He would look at a woman geologist and see only sex: he would not, could not, see the universe below.

So he chose only men, boys, really: eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old, nearing their physical peak, and still operating fully on passion rather than technique or intellect. He had to catch them before someone got to them and taught them to believe in borders and limitations. Once they got that into their heads, it was very hard to coax them into flaming out or smashing themselves to dust. And once they'd been taught or lectured by another, they might question his vision of how it was in the netherworld—the comings and goings of things below.

He had to get to them first. He had to let them be born into the world and go about their own business of growing up—he couldn't just put them in a pen and farm them, nor did he exactly go cruising the streets at night looking for young men about to ignite—but he was always alert, ever aware of the possibility of encountering such a recruit.

Old Dudley could tell in a glance whether one of them had those coals within. He could see it in the shape of the young man's shoulders and in his posture. He could smell it, and he could see it in the young man's eyes. He could gauge it in every manner—sensing the internal temperatures and possibilities and heat of that young man as if holding his hands in front of a campfire to warm them.

It was never a blind allegiance that Dudley was looking for—that would have made it too easy, and in the end that geologist would never be able to become any better than Old Dudley himself. Old Dudley was more sporting than that. The best, the absolute best, was when the geologist, after a long time, came to understand Dudley for the monster he was—the manipulator, the domineer—but also understood that it was too late to turn back, that only with Old Dudley could the geologist keep drilling his wells when and where and however he wished—as long as they were not dry holes.

That was when the geologist finally began to crumble, or to smolder: when he became aware of the trap Dudley had laid for him from the beginning.

It was very strange. This was also when Dudley began to take pity on his geologist, and even feel love for him, or a thing as close to love as he could achieve.

The struggle of the geologist between his two masters—the young geologist's bondage to Old Dudley's horrific nature, and the young geologist's pure desire to reach, again and again, those craggy lands below—so unattainable, possibly even invisible, to other geologists, as to perhaps seem maddening to the seer who knew of them—reminded Old Dudley of some model of the very workings that so fascinated him: the earth's volcanic strainings and belchings, as one continental plate drifted over another like massive fire-breathing animals procreating: fissures and clefts channeling magma to the surface and giving birth to islands, new stone, then soil, then life.

Huge chunks of continent were forever falling back into the magma and lava—melting back into the mixture, caught and shredded between the gearworks far below, with the earth's brute physical desires at the center; mountains rising only to be sanded down in the blink of an eye, to then be redistributed in layers of wind-whipped sediment on the other side of the globe, even as new mountains were swelling like waves at sea rising to loom over and then crash down onto those earlier sediments, leaving no trace, not even a memory . . .

To go down into that battleground and find the oil—to travel into those lands—to avoid being crushed by those falling mountains, or drowned within those swamps and seas—this was as close to love as Dudley could get, and once his geologist found himself imprisoned by the knowledge that Dudley was his master—that was when Dudley felt a small warmth, and sorrow.

The sorrow fulfilled a space and a need within him. It helped him achieve his fit in the world. Perhaps it helped keep the gearworks, and perhaps the world itself, turning. The sorrow, however, was insignificant to the warmth Dudley felt watching the geologist flee deeper into those subterranean lands—the geologist trying, in that manner, to escape his bondage to Old Dudley, and in so doing, bruising himself against those rocks.

Whereas before in the young geologist there had been the grace of innocence, an absence of self-knowledge, there were now sparks of friction as the geologist tumbled among those gearworks like a falling bird with an injured wing.

Old Dudley was not a pleasant man to look at. Though ancient, he appeared to be no older than his early sixties, and he had the build of an ex-athlete who had labored to keep himself firm and steady. His eyes were a shade of gray that somehow—whether he wished this or not—gave others the illusion of deceit. His thinning hair, cut close, was silver. He carried, at all times, an air of roughness, no matter how dapper his dress. Something about the build of his frame—his musculature, his stance and carriage—made it easier to imagine him doing some physical violence to someone—swinging a wooden club—than being sedate and civil. The disparity between his fine dress and the awkwardness of his posture only made him seem more unpredictable—as if he were trapped, and as such, always within only a stone's throw of rage or harm-making.

Further unsettling, to anyone who knew the specifics, was his nearly immeasurable wealth—the hundreds of oil and gas fields that he had discovered, lying at varying depths all around the country: billions of dollars of reserves.

More troubling still was the fact that he capitalized very little on his great riches; whatever money was gained from the production of his oil and gas fields went always and unceasingly into the drilling of more, so that his operation was always expanding, oil flowing up his discovery wells to fuel the downward drilling of new wells elsewhere. The effect was that of a relentless sewing machine; but instead of stitching anything back together, he was forever piercing the earth, jabbing more holes into it, so that his company was more like some sharp-toothed beast eating the world, the lower jaws forever rising and gulping, the upper jaws simultaneously clamping down; and growing ever larger as it fed.