WHERE THE SEA USED TO BE
By Rick Bass
Houghton Mifflin, 445 pages, $25
Late master of the short story Raymond Carver insisted its structure more closely resembles that of the lyric poem than that of the novel. The story and poem focus on few scenes, sometimes one, and neither has space for a wasted word.
To the writer, that means the story must imply a history while the novel affords world enough and time to create one. But for Rick Bass, who has been among America’s finest short-story writers for the past decade, conceiving a first novel demands less of a leap than it would for most. The transition should be easy for Bass because, like Alice Munro, there has long been a rich abundance to his stories that approaches novel mass.
“Where the Sea Used to Be” benefits most, however, from Bass’ professional orientation. By education a petroleum geologist, Bass likes to bore deep, and his sense of time embraces eons.
When Old Dudley, a wildcatter who for decades showed an uncanny knack for finding billions of dollars worth of oil, sends his newest proselyte, geologist Wallis, from Houston to a tundralike, northwestern Montana valley on the Canadian border, Wallis soon finds himself deep in a wrenching conflict. In that remote frozen valley (which feels a lot like the Yaak Valley in Montana where Bass has lived for years, a half-hour from the nearest phone), Wallis rooms with Mel, Old Dudley’s fortyish daughter.
Mel is vibrant, beautiful. She spends her days tracking wolves, recording their migration. For years she has been the intermittent lover of Matthew, Old Dudley’s longstanding protege, now more a brother to her, used up and burnt out, as everything becomes that Dudley touches. Mel has escaped Dudley’s pernicious evisceration only because her gender made him think her not worth the effort. ” `If you’d been a boy,’ ” he tells her, ” `I wouldn’t have let you go.’ “
Torn between the virtuous Mel and her baneful father, Wallis should find his choice easy. Having come to love this pristine valley, and with little lust for wealth, Wallis should also find easy the decision not to gut this frosty paradise with oil rigs. But Wallis is no ordinary man; he’s a petroleum geologist, and his profession itself is a conflicted paradox of parasite and august calling.
That conflict shows most clearly in Dudley himself. Repulsively crude, he reeks of hubris and egomania. Everything about him seems vulgar, yet Wallis finds Dudley’s old journals filled with evidence of extraordinary learning and a philosophic mind. At 70, Dudley even impregnates a Montana woman in a conception that is a bizarre mix of salacious and immaculate.
Dudley has a necromantic hold on Wallis. For Dudley, “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. . . .” Wallis, by profession, thinks like Dudley. When Mel tells him everything in the valley is 10,000 years old, formed by the last ice age, “It bothered Wallis that Mel thought ten thousand years was a long time.” To a geologist, the ice age is a mere tick ago on the Rolex of Eternity.
Slowly, however, there develops between Wallis and Mel the most fertile of all grounds for a healthy love: They bring out in each other the person each most wishes to be. Mel personifies a theme of increasing concern in Bass’ recent fiction: the choice between intimacy and freedom. Before Wallis came, Mel was free but isolate. Now, though, “she was honest enough with herself to realize the depth of her loneliness, and her homesickness for human company. . . .” She stops tracking wolves and begins teaching in the local school. With Wallis, she risks connection and shares with him her love for the land. From there love expands.
For Wallis, the conflict runs deeper, “twenty thousand feet and two hundred million years deep,” when he thinks he has found a reserve containing 250 million barrels of oil. He “felt a cleaving inside him when this happened: an incandescence in which every fiber of him became part of something larger and heretofore buried.”
Mel and Wallis will move toward their choices, but, with one thinking in terms of thousands of years and the other in millions, their decisions evolve at a glacial pace.
Bass is in no hurry here. He clearly loves the land he writes of and fills the narrative with copious, closely observed detail. He pauses frequently to mine the nuanced interior reactions of Mel and Wallis to their respective transformations. What most makes this novel swell far beyond the confines of story size, however, is its complex strata of metaphor. This rippling of poetic evocation reflects Bass’ maturation, his power to see a multiplicity of connections among things and the patterns starting to clarify in the world around him.
When a moose passes by with a silver arrow poking through four years’ worth of protective scar tissue in her side, Bass is preparing us to hear a few pages later about the scar tissue forming in Wallis over the recent death of his previous sweetheart. When a journal entry tells us an earthquake’s origin “must exist at some considerable depth beneath the surface,” it is to suggest that, “All perturbation lies at depth.” When Bass shows us deer whittled down to nothing by winter, starving to death only days before the new green shoots appear “right in front of the deer’s unseeing, unmoving eyes,” he echoes how we fall so tragically short of our own goals. When Dudley talks about wearing down and breaking an eagle (for use in hunting), he’s really describing how he breaks his geologists.
The most frequent subject of Bass’ metaphors is predation, which had been central to his last book, “The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness,” the middle novella of which was the seed from which this novel grew. We see the wolves and coyotes born in April so they’ll be ready for the elk and fawns born in June. We observe wolves clearing trails to lure the deer, and at one point see the wolves even eat the raven “who was supposed to be their partner in the hunt. . . .” All these predators remind us here of the lycanthropic Dudley, capable of loving nothing but the quest for oil, who “had been eating the whole world for the seventy years of his life.”
Rick Bass’ first novel, therefore, becomes a luminously written journey toward the choice of three options: solitary freedom, participation in the human community or surrender to the predator.
