TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/071789/07178900.043

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 4KB | 72 lines

BOOKS, Page 84

At Play in Fields of Energy

By Martha Duffy


    OIL NOTES
    by Rick Bass
    Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence;172 pages; $16.95

    Rick Bass was a fence post in his third-grade play. His father
still calls him "Animal." As a petroleum geologist around Jackson,
Miss., he drove a lot but was hard on automobiles. After he steered
one company car into shallow water, the boss sent him a 20-ft.
length of chain for Christmas. Bass acknowledges his clumsiness:
"Sometimes I feel almost out of control." But he glories in a rare
natural gift: "I know how to find oil."

    As readers of Bass's stories (collected this year in The Watch)
can attest, he also knows how to write; and like his oil witchery,
this gift is extravagant and natural. His new book is based on
notebook jottings he kept for about three years, 1984-87, chasing
a quarry that was "shy here, coy there, blatant elsewhere." His
father, another petroleum geologist, complained after reading Oil
Notes that he didn't learn much from it about finding oil, but to
the uninitiated it richly reveals just what that line of work
involves. There is no better conversation, spoken or written, than
good shop talk, and this is superb -- direct, expert and reeling
with the joys of outdoor adventure.

    Bass, 31, has likened his job to that of a field-goal kicker,
a man whose calculations must be exactly right ("You can't even
look relieved"). But he revels in the pressure and fevered pace.
"Sometimes day, as opposed to night, loses significance, and also
you feel like you're being washed down a mad stream somewhere.
Fatigue becomes the currency with which you pay. It makes sense
though. It is energy, after all, that you are looking for: buried."
He recalls the mineral's origin, millions of years ago, in ancient
seashores, and feels that there is a "frozen sea in me." Describing
the geology of Alabama and Mississippi, he writes, "The old sea
retreated two hundred and fifty million years ago . . . the sands,
five and six thousand feet down, like plunging porpoises, sounding,
headed back to the deep."

    The author, who now lives in rural Montana and is a consulting
geologist, says little about his writing career. He reveals that
he is a poetic observer of the earth's surface as well as its
depths, ever alert to the sounds of silence -- a cricket, a
katydid, a car passing in the distance, the hum of a freezer. Crisp
winter walks during his college days at Utah State made him feel
like "the president of snow."

    Oil Notes has many such phrases, evocative, amusing, but also
a little silly. Bass writes that "all geologists are hyperbolic";
he certainly is. At one point he suggests putting a small bottle
of oil to the ear, the better to hear the ancient waters. At
another he intones, "You can't find oil if you are not honest; I'm
not sure I know how to explain this." The rueful part, after the
semicolon, redeems the rest. He natters on about his girlfriend,
Elizabeth Hughes, whose mild, pleasant drawings accompany the text.
Is he happy with her? Without her? Will they marry? One wonders
whether, as a suitor, he will ever top an early gambit, when he
invited her to a park to share a bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwich,
then showed up with the ingredients and a portable microwave oven.

    Bass can laugh at himself. His linking of oil with eons-old
oceans may be the stuff of poetry, but how about oil and Coke? The
author, preoccupied with the earth's dwindling oil reserves, was
aghast to learn four years ago that his personal fuel was also in
peril. When the Coca-Cola Co. announced a new formula for Coke, he
began buying up crates of the old stuff. "The world is so thirsty
for oil, uses so, so much. We are down to the last thousand Cokes,"
he mourned. Of course, Coke got a reprieve. That seems unlikely in
the case of oil, but if vast new fields are discovered, Bass and
his notebook will probably be there.