Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  He wanted to be there to touch the oil, when it was found: to smell it, hold the oil in his hands, touch it to his cheeks: oil that was 500 million years old.

  The wolves had fallen silent.

  Even back in their cabin, Mel and Wallis could hear the sounds, carried on the hot breezes, of the workers and their engines—the barges running ceaselessly, carrying equipment back and forth across the river, and the sounds of the rig being assembled: shrill screechings and clanging of pipe, motor-roar, torque of steel, diesel smoke. And when the rig was assembled and began drilling—when the diamond-studded bit first began chewing at the earth—they could hear that too, and could feel it—the dissolution of a tautness whose existence could never be proven. And still Mel forgave Wallis—massaged his neck and shoulders and tried to ease the tensions out of them, understanding the weight of his guilt—though not knowing the confusion of attraction he was feeling, the curiosity and mounting excitement, as the drill bit ate its way deeper and deeper.

  She thought that because he lived in a pure landscape he had become pure.

  She forgave him and prepared her lesson plans for the coming school year. Fire would come in September, and snow in October. She would have liked to have had a few more days of summer—there were a few more things she would have liked to have done—but they would have to wait until the next cycle.

  The younger rocks were softer; the drill bit gouged down through them, plunging, as if in free fall, making a thousand feet a day. The harder rocks of the older formations would soon be encountered, and the drilling would slow—Wallis had mapped the oil lying down around seventeen thousand feet—but for now the bit went almost unimpeded through the sands and gravels of the not-too-distant past.

  Wallis could not keep away. Some nights as Mel slept he would slip out of bed and go down toward the rig—crossing the river by canoe, other times swimming, and still other times getting a ride across on the barge.

  He would travel Red’s fine new road until he saw the glow of the rig, the dome of yellow light above the horizon.

  Both repelled and attracted by the thunder of the drilling, he would move closer, to the first rig he’d seen in almost a year.

  He would come around the corner and stand there just outside the ring of light, watching the tiny figures working high up on the drilling platform, illuminated by the incandescence of halogen lights—a light so intense and all-reaching that it seemed they were searching for the oil with that light rather than with the drill bit: as if the oil had already come to the surface, but had escaped.

  The brilliant blue sparks tumbling from the work of a hooded welder below the rig hypnotized him, as did the rawness of the sound: the roaring of the pneumatic drills, and the slamming of metal against metal.

  Finally he would pull himself away and walk home. He would bathe in the river so that Mel wouldn’t smell the scent of the rig upon him, and back at the cabin he would roll in the dry soil of the garden, then rinse off again in the creek, and sit for a while on the porch, and let the breezes carry from him more of the scents of his infidelity.

  He would watch the heat lightning in the distance, would feel the drying forest’s ache for fire, and would wonder why it had not come yet.

  It was almost maddening: almost too much to take, in the daily waiting. There were none of them who would not have forgiven another, were one of them to snap under the tension and run out into the woods with a match and start it all, to get it over with.

  But each small fire ran its course, up in the mountains. A hundred, and then a thousand fires started up, then blinked out. The right place—the one that would allow widespread transmission—had just not been touched yet.

  Always, a thin creek here, a mossy cliff there—a shady old grove or a stretch of barren rock—blocked the fires’ runs; and each night they blinked on and off on the mountainsides like candles. But as the moisture continued to leave the land, that was all about to change, and everyone knew it.

  It was Helen who told them the night it was coming. She had lived through all the other fires, and knew their language. She came across the street and told people in the bar that it was coming that night.

  People began running back to their homes, frightened but almost invigorated, to pour buckets of water onto their shingled roofs, to dampen them against the coming breath of the fire. Wallis hurried across the street and climbed up on Helen’s roof and accepted bucket after bucket from Mel as she handed them up to him. The water ran off the roof in sheets as he emptied the buckets over the cedar-shake shingles. Mel passed the buckets up to him until he had all of the roof wetted.

  When he was done he stood resting, watching and waiting. In the corner of his eye he caught a distant pulse of heat lightning, though it could also have been a wash of aurora. He climbed down, believing. He and Mel asked if Helen would be all right for a while—they needed to go wet their roof—and she said that she would be. They told her they would be back as quick as they could—to not worry—and she laughed at their concern and tried to imagine what there might possibly be to worry about.

  They ran down the road to their cabin, running like deer. Once there, they passed buckets back and forth, wetting the roofs of both the smokehouse and the cabin. They could hear the cracking of lightning off the tops of the mountains to the west now, a sound like artillery. Their breath came fast and shallow, and their hearts beat weak and nervous.

  They finished wetting down their cabins—there was nothing more they could do—and ran back to town. They could taste the fire in the woods and could see shudders of light, cracks of lightning, drifting their way with the wind—the vertical jags of streak lightning moving like the long legs of something striding toward them. There was no rain—only fire and wind, and thunder so loud as to ignite the woods simply from the sound of it.

  They reached the mercantile just as blazing pins of light—burning pine needles—were blowing in tracers down the street. Helen had fallen asleep in her rocking chair, and they carried her upstairs to wait out the storm; to be prepared to evacuate to the river, if necessary.

  From Helen’s porch they could see the whole street illumined with gold and orange tracings of light, and as the windswept pine needles landed they began setting spot fires wherever they could find tinder. Across the street, through the smoke, Wallis and Mel could see Artie sitting on the porch in a rocking chair, drinking a beer.

  It was only an hour or two before daylight, but now the sky opened with crevices of brighter light. The winds were so strong and swirling that they were extinguishing the grass fires, and now whiptail pine and larch trees were being blown over, crashing across the road, and the shakings and crackings of thunder were superimposed over each fork of lightning, each clutching finger of fire, so that the noise and light came not from any one direction but from all directions, and all known order seemed to be rendered meaningless.

  The lightning was both horizontal and vertical, and though Wallis knew he and the town itself were insignificant, and though he felt things were relatively safe in the greener strip along the river, it was still hard to throw off the old beliefs, the old notions of self’s center, and not believe that they were the object of the storm: that it had come hunting for them, and had found them.

  Mel thought, Helen has to see this, has to smell this, even if she has to be carried in the rocking chair and set out in the middle of the street. She could wet her hair and put a baseball cap over it to keep the sparks from finding a nest in it. The winds, the heated gusts, would rock her chair with no effort by her. She could glory in the smoke. She could smoke a cigarette, if she wished. One more. One more day. One more event, one more hour, one more anything.

  Mel and Wallis hurried upstairs to get her.

  When they reached the top of the stairs and went into her loft bedroom, they thought at first that she wasn’t in there, even though they were looking right at her. She was sitting up in the corner of the bed with the hides around her, and her head was tilted forward—
as if still sleeping; as if exhausted—but they knew by the way there was no feel of her in the room, no essence, that she had gone on.

  The thunder and lightning continued to explode, lightning without rain, just outside the window, but it seemed as far away as if on another planet, and they kept staring at the husk of Helen—of who she had been.

  “Shit,” Mel said, angry that Helen had missed it—the fire’s drama—and frustrated that there was no way to slow the earth down enough, or halt it in its tumble, to turn it back even one small click, to the point where Helen could see it and feel it—what it was like out there on the street.

  They carried her down anyway—loaded her into the rocking chair and carried her out into the dry firestorm and set her in the road, facing the wind: but it wasn’t the same, wasn’t even remotely the same as life.

  Once or twice—as the ferocious wind howled past her, rocking her chair, making it seem as if she were back in the world—Mel felt pulses in her own blood that hinted to her that Helen’s still-warm brain was registering, even if only through brute friction, the mildest of sensations—but then that feeling was gone, and as the forest and the mountains flamed, Helen grew cooler, and her memory settled down inside Mel like an animal turning round and round, arranging itself for a winter’s sleep.

  There was still one thing they needed to do for her, in the echo of her living. She had died in fright and they could only hope that after she crossed over there was less of it.

  They carried her and the rocking chair around to the back—amazed at the radiant nothingness that was coming from her—and left her on the back porch, staring shut-eyed out at the smoke, and went upstairs to hide the proof of her terror from those who had loved her.

  The lightning had captured her fear at the moment she’d sat up in bed and stared out the window; the ancient dusty glass, and the superbrilliance of the lightning—a flash of immense light through some shifting peephole of total darkness—branches waving, back in the forest, in the rainless storm—had acted as camera and flash; had etched her likeness, her moment of maximum terror, into the window glass, as if onto a photographic plate.

  Wallis and Mel went over to the window, lit a candle, and studied it. Helen’s mouth was wide open in protest, her eyes bulging, her gray hair frayed and wild. They told themselves it was over—that she wasn’t feeling that anymore.

  The bursts of lightning that were still torching the sky kept illuminating the window visage like the candle behind a jack-o’-lantern, and in those moments, the terror still seemed to have a pulse to it: but it was the pulse of the sky, not Helen.

  Mel took a pocketknife and began prying out the ancient molding that held the windowpane in place. The nails were rusty, and the wood pulled free easily. They popped the windowpane out and held it as one would some portrait that revealed a terrible truth about one’s self: a failure of courage, an inability to be alive to the world, or an inability to be loved.

  The storm was winding down—the lightning exploding only every half-minute or so. They could feel the storm passing over as one feels the shadow of a hawk passing between the sun and one’s self, drifting. They could feel the fires up in the mountains sawing hungrily at the dead and dry rotting wood and boiling the sap within the living trees. They could feel the winds’ fingers shaping and sculpting the directions of the fires, sending them this way and that, laying down ash and coals.

  They carried the pane downstairs and took it into the woods and placed it under a rotting log, giving it a head start on being absorbed back into the knowledge of the world. They mounded orange log mulch around it. Let creeper vines grow over it, Mel thought, and kinnikinnick. Let grouse feed on the berries, and let falcons smash the grouse into explosions of loose feathers. Let it all start over again.

  It was hard to breathe. They walked down through the woods toward the river. Occasionally they would come across little candles of flame burning in the underbrush, but there was still just enough moisture, just enough life, held in the forest along the river to keep those fires from spreading and running; they blinked out after a short while on their own. Mel and Wallis passed through them as if walking through a dark woods lit with tiny lanterns, and after a while they didn’t even bother trying to snuff them out with their feet.

  When they got down to the river, they undressed and waded out. Occasional streamers of flame drifted past—burning wisps of lichen and floating leaves—but the winds had dwindled with the storm’s passage—the strange electricity had departed—and now there was only thick smoke as the forest burned. It smelled good and they had faith that the fires would braid themselves around them, weaving and running like rivers themselves: that a mosaic would be cast across the valley, and they could both feel the richness the fire was imparting—all the locked-up nutrients it was releasing from trees and logs that would have taken centuries to rot, now being made available to the soil, and to life’s use, in a single night, as if in the ultimate gluttony.

  They floated out into the river’s center. Sometimes a particular dead tree lining the river’s edge would catch a spark and ignite quickly into incandescence before dying out—trees leaping into flame in this manner on either side of the river for as far as they could see—but those fires died out quickly, and there was only more smoke. Sometimes branches and limbs and whole tree trunks would fall into the river, and their flames would change from red to yellow as they drifted slowly downstream before sputtering into hiss.

  Wallis and Mel swam out to the center and treaded water and watched the burning trees drift past. The river was still cold, as if the world’s fires could never touch it.

  They were not the only ones in the river. Deer were standing ankle-deep in the water, peering nervously over their shoulders. Scent was the way they saw the world and with everything smelling of smoke they were blind. Elk were easing into the river too, the bulls with their great racks of antlers held high, as were other animals whose dim shapes could not quite be identified as they swam laboriously for the other side, as if it would be safer: and perhaps it was. Coyote, black bear, fox, badger—they were all crossing the river, not noticing Wallis or Mel, or if so, taking them as one of their own, and Wallis and Mel could feel at a distance the turmoil in the hearts of the wolverines and the grizzlies. Mel thought of the wolves as she might a lover of twenty-five years ago, whom she had not seen in all that time.

  Through the smoke they saw and then heard the barge crossing the river as the crew’s second shift abandoned the drilling rig. Trees had fallen across their new road, some burning and others wind-thrown, so that they had not been able to drive, and they had run the whole four miles down the dusty new road, as panicked as horses.

  Lanterns lined the edges of the barge, and Mel and Wallis could see human shapes standing out on the bow, peering nervously ahead—as if not believing the other shore lay right in front of them—and Mel and Wallis could hear their frightened curses. Wallis wondered if any others had been left behind, or lost. He wondered if they had shut the rig down or had just abandoned it and run for their lives, leaving the pipe spinning in the hole, still bearing down and searching for the bottom.

  When the barge found the dock, the men leapt from it like rats; didn’t bother to moor the barge but simply leapt to shore and climbed into their trucks and drove off, abandoning their campsite; and the barge, unfastened and with lanterns still burning, swung in the current and began floating downriver.

  Wallis and Mel watched the dark shapes of swimming animals veer slightly to accommodate it. As it drifted past them, they were tempted to climb on board and ride it downriver to wherever the current would take it: the river gripping the barge as a hand would a pen, writing a script with its passage in the same manner that the fire was writing its way through the forest.

  Instead they let it pass, lamps sputtering, its eerie glow dimming in the smoke as it moved farther away. Mice swam toward it, and small birds were landing on it too, drawn to its lanterns amidst all the darkness: understandi
ng somehow that the fires in the lanterns were safe.

  In the last light that was visible to them, they saw a coyote swim quickly out to the barge, scrabble up over its edge, and immediately—the last image they could discern—it began snapping at mice and birds, gulping them down. There were no sounds from the barge; and slowly the barge disappeared into the darkness and smoke.

  They were getting chilled, treading water in the river’s center. They swam to shore and climbed out, clean as fish.

  “What should we name him, if it’s a boy?” Mel asked. “What should we name her, if it’s a girl?”

  The crew was gone, their camp fully abandoned, and the people of Swan had gathered at the saloon. Charlie was on the phone to the outside world, reporting the fires and trying to learn if all of the Northwest was aflame, or only their valley—and a telephone operator in Spokane, the direction from which the winds were blowing, said that no, she knew nothing of any fires, nor had they had any bad weather.

  Ash began floating down on them as they walked. It coated them like snow, and landed on the backs of the caribou, who lifted their heads and stared straight up into the sky.

  The sun began to filter orange through the smoke. People went down to the river to wash charcoal off their faces. They waded into the river, and into the smoke, as if for baptizing. Mel and Wallis began telling people about Helen, and one by one, they went up onto the back porch to pay their respects, and to gaze at her, as if a century had fallen away, and there were none among them who did not grieve.

  Though the fires were still burning in the mountains, the valley was relatively calm—only random spot fires—and people began to go back to their homes, reassured, for a while. It was hard to breathe the smoke, and hotter than ever, but they understood now that most of the burning was going on up in the high country. A group of women gathered to go check on Amy, who had not shown up. Mel and Wallis went with them.