Striking Oil with Rick Bass

Where The Sea Used To Be, there are now forests, mountains, tremendous layers of rock.  This deeply-layered novel has multiple depths as well - several layers of storylines going - the topmost being the search for oil, led by Old Dudley. 

Old Dudley echoes characters in books I've previously read:  Marcus in Iris Murdoch's A Message to The Planet, Sam Pollit in Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, and Maurice Conchis in John Fowles' The Magus, all impish master manipulators, sometimes sadistic, seemingly impervious to the human/physical destruction they leave in their wakes.  Despite his extremely difficult and often repulsive personality, Old Dudley is loved.  It is not, however,within his capacity to return it; the only thing he feels any passion for is his constant search for oil as he penetrates the rocks beneath him, and his dominance over others as he strives to attain this end.

Although I've probably read short pieces by Rick Bass in lit journals, as his name was familiar, I had never read any of his books.  For a first novel (1998), this book is profound, learned, and polished.  At times it is mythic, as in the moving scene when the great black bear joins the dying Helen at her picnic table for a late-night pancake feast.  It's also deeply grounded in reality -- Bass's descriptions of the tiny mountain town of Swan and its surrounding land and water, of its inhabitants both human and animal, and of the relationships that develop among them are as sharp and clear as November mountain air.

Even the town's name has echoes and reverberations, layers like the rock Old Dudley seeks to master.  There are two Swans - when Wallis, one of Dudley's proteges, first seeks out the town, he is told to go onward to the second Swan.  At the end of the book, Artie, the owner of the town bar, says he spotted two swans for the first time in thirty years.  The swans, which had been plentiful before that, had been killed by wolves many years since, so their visits had ceased.  Matthew, Old Dudley's finest protege (until Dudley sapped his essence, his oil, his richness) tells how the only time swans make a sound is "right before they die.  It's the only sound they make in their whole life.  That's why they call it a swan song.  They lie down and stretch out their neck and whistle.  It's not a pretty sound -- not at all like you'd think.  It's horrible."  Matthew then goes on to say that he heard this sound when, as a kid, he caught one and stoned it to death.  Perhaps this is why Matthew allowed Old Dudley to sap the life out of him -- he was caught ( baited) and, like the swan, gradually killed (the swan's stoning by Matthew like Old Dudley's repeated shots to Matthew's life force).  Stoning - an appropriate image in a book filled with images like this, of the earth's various layers being, in one way or another, put to mankind's service. 

Old Dudley's manhood could be compared to the oil drill - his worst nightmare is waking with a flaccid penis (dry oil well).  What constitutes manhood?  In Dudley's mind, it is bending others to his will, whether it be his proteges, women, townspeople, or nature in its various forms.  Although he feels superior to the rock he drills, Dudley is still afraid of the nature he doesn't know -- the woods, the upper layers of the earth, animals, snow --  and repeatedly curses these things. 

The one thing he can't control is his daughter Mel.   She retains her independence from him, having chosen long ago to stay in Swan and track the wolves( see Women Who Run With the Wolves - Mel personifies one of these archetypal women).  Although she's inherited Dudley's stubbornness, she refuses to be cowed by his cruelty, his sarcasm, his will.  She's connected to the upper earth (people, the wolves and other animals around her), to the townspeople (particularly Helen) and possesses a respect for life, nature, and self that Dudley lacks. 

Dudley teaches Matthew and Wallis how to find oil; Helen teaches the townspeople how to read the weather; Matthew teaches Wallis how to track elk; and Mel leaves her decades-long tracking of wolf patterns to teach the town's children.  Along the way, people learn as much from the world around them as they do from their specific tutors.  One character, young Colter, springs free from the confines of the town to explore farther north, out of reach of the rigs and Dudley's grasp, leaping over the rock wall Matthew built years ago (it runs for miles through the land) and which was lengthened and built on since by all the townspeople.  This wall is a constant work-in-progress.  It connects the people to their land.

Rick Bass is a wonderful nature writer with a deep understanding of human nature as well.  I knew I would love this book after reading the first sentence:  "He 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."  Clever Bass, hooking me.