Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

The first full-length novel by one of our finest fiction writers, Where the Sea Used to Be tells the story of a struggle between a father and his daughter for the souls of two men, Matthew and Wallis-his protégés, her lovers. Old Dudley is a Texan whose religion is oil, and in his fifty years of searching for it in Swan Valley he has destroyed a dozen geologists. Matthew is Dudley's most recent victim, but Wallis begins to uncover the dark mystery of Dudley's life. Each character, the wildlife, and the land itself are rendered with the vivid poetry that is that hallmark of Rick Bass's writing.

Genres: Fiction, Nature, Novels, Geology, American, Love, Literary Fiction

464 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Rick Bass was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in Houston, the son of a geologist. He studied petroleum geology at Utah State University and while working as a petroleum geologist in Jackson, Mississippi, began writing short stories on his lunch breaks. In 1987, he moved with his wife, the artist Elizabeth Hughes Bass, to Montana’s remote Yaak Valley and became an active environmentalist, working to protect his adopted home from the destructive encroachment of roads and logging. He serves on the board of both the Yaak Valley Forest Council and Round River Conservation Studies and continues to live with his family on a ranch in Montana, actively engaged in saving the American wilderness.

Bass received the PEN/Nelson Algren Award in 1988 for his first short story, “The Watch,” and won the James Jones Fellowship Award for his novel Where the Sea Used To Be. His novel The Hermit’s Story was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year in 2000. The Lives of Rocks was a finalist for the Story Prize and was chosen as a Best Book of the Year in 2006 by the Rocky Mountain News. Bass’s stories have also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have been collected in The Best American Short Stories.

Reviews

[Peter Tillman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Off to a slow & uncertain start, and not at all what I was expecting. I saw it on the Lab Lit list, and was intrigued by the author's background in petroleum geology. Well, the young geologist who's one of the MCs, is certainly not like any young geologist I've known. While I'm not an oil geologist, I did go to school in Houston, had a career in mining geology, and have a brother-in-law whose Dad was a very successful wildcatter. So I have a pretty good idea of what goes on in that business. It's not much like what Rick Bass is writing.

I'll skim ahead a bit before I give up. But the many other 2 and 3-star reviews here are not encouraging. And the 1998 New York Times review is very unflattering: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytim...
Excerpt: "Mel, for example, carries the arriving Wallis on her back as she skis the 10 miles into town" -- an unlikely exploit. "They dropped lower down into the mountains, descending, corkscrewing, as if into its interior. He could feel the pleasure coming straight through her -- could feel it like heat conducted, as if it were his." . . .

Old Dudley himself turns out to be less Zarathustra than simply a lecher and a megalomaniac. He impregnates a woman by spraying her with sperm from a distance of six feet (another tall tale). He leads Wallis and Matthew to drill a hopeless well, which makes one wonder, if that is Dudley's modus operandi, how he managed to gain his immeasurable wealth."

So I'm done. Well, it was a first novel. Abandoned early on. At least I didn't waste much time on this turkey. Oh, well.

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite short stories is Rick Bass, “Where The Sea Used To Be.” Some days I don’t qualify it; I don’t say “one of,” it’s just my favorite story. Other days, another Rick Bass story is fresh in my mind so I get around it and say “one of.”

This is the novel, by Rick Bass, by the same name. Wallis is here. Old Dudley is here. The oil is here; the buried sea. But it’s a whole different beast. First I thought it took place after that story, fleshing it out, expanding. Then, I thought it might do the same thing, but take place before. It’s neither. It’s alternate history. An alternate universe. The story and the book, they each have details that exclude the other. Even Wallis, Old Dudley. That Wallis, in the story, he couldn’t drill at the coast, he couldn’t drill anywhere but his buried beach in Alabama. He would say, “Why would a man want to go into a country he was not familiar with, knew nothing about?” This Wallis is drilling the coast, this Wallis is mapping millions of years in Montana. That Old Dudley was not good at cruelty. He was predatory by exception, not the rule. This Old Dudley is eating the world.

And there is Mel, and there is Matthew, and there is Helen, and there is no Sara. And I love it. That the thing I love could be two things instead of the one. What Wallis thinks: “As if a man could be both awake or asleep, or both good and evil.” Or, also? That it’s either/or. A binary. What Mel thinks:

A thing could be either one way or another. There didn’t need to be any more variance in the universe than that most basic rule of binary. A thing— glacier, fire, flood— happened or didn’t. A thing came or it went. A thing was either being born and was growing, or was dying. And with only those two possibilities— the day and night of things— transcribed across every object of the world, came all the mystery and richness one could ever hope to seek.

It’s a love story. It’s the high and rich cost of metamorphosis. It’s the hot sea of oil. And it’s slow and languid and reckless and animal and I sank down into it like a place to live.

“You could never figure it all out,” Mel said, watching the blinking of orange. “The closest you could come is to learning a small thing really well, and then hoping the big things run pretty much the same way.”
“What small thing would you learn?” Wallis asked, and Mel laughed.
“You’re right,” she said. “There’s probably nothing that small.”

Or Matthew, with my thoughts exactly:

“Shit almighty,” Matthew said, still grinning.

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the greatest stories I've read in years. Bass pits a larger than life, world-eating geologist, Dudley, against the combined forces of an pure, remote community, relentless weather, and millions of years of bedrock. Should be read in the winter months in front of a warm fire with a cup of something warm in hand.

[Daniel Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

I will start by saying I would read more of this writer's work, he's good, his descriptions, many of his metaphors, but this was a slog. Perhaps he's trying to do too much, veers off course, I don't know, but it seemed like a lot of superfluous text that interferes with the flow of the story. Often a chore to see this one through to the end....

[Marvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really hard novel for me to score. I’m not sure it always worked, and I am sure that I didn’t get much of what the author wanted me to get, but I give him credit for his ambition, for writing a novel that is totally unique, not even remotely like anything else I’ve ever read. It’s a sort of environmental novel that takes place over the course of a year in a remote valley in the mountains in northwestern Montana that is cut off from the rest of the world from about the first of November until April or May. The story centers around a young man, a geologist, who comes into the valley to determine where his boss can drill for oil. His boss is a crude ogre, but he has a daughter, more or less the hero of the story, who lives in the valley and loves it, and the young geologist is sent to live with her in her cabin. Much of the story revolves around their relationship, but we meet a fair number of other interesting characters among the 40 or so who live in the valley. And, in fact, it is really the valley itself that is the main character. Much of the novel is not realistic or believable, but it can’t really be categorized as magical realism, either; it feels more mythic. It’s a grand epic well worth exploring.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has some intriguing qualities, but overall a fair number of flaws as well. Bass creates an interesting world in his remote Montana valley but for me many of the realities he wants us/needs us to believe just aren't believable. So, I kept finding my self saying things like, "how can it still be snowing", how can someone be laying and buried in the snow for hours and not be dead", "how can two men be out tracking elk with almost no gear, with soaked clothes for more than a week in bitter cold temperatures and nonstop snow and not be dead from hypothermia"...and so on. There were many others. As an avid winter wilderness traveler and rural living person there were just too many things that didn't read as believable. Yet I kept reading to the end, so there were redeeming qualities. I got this book at a little free library and that is where it will return. An ok read but nothing I would recommend whole-heartedly.

[Lyra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. It's Rick Bass' first novel. Takes place in a fictionalized Yaak valley in remote northern montana. It's full of interesting characters and their relationships, geology, natural history....it's a love story, but also much more...

[Magnus Ver Magnusson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really wished it was better. For short stories Bass has no peer. Non-fiction too. Novellas, A1. I think the novel form tends to exagggerate his weakness in characterization. Novels are harder to keep aloft by voice and image, even a voice as singularly wonderful as Mr. Bass.

[Trey Piepmeier · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book gets into my head.

[Bill Harper · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was certain that I would be disappointed having read all of Bass's other work. He's a short story guy Right? NOT the case, I couldn't put it down one of the best stories I have read. Well done.

[Maria Headley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was startled to see that this book was published in 1998, because I have it in hardcover, and thought I read it only a couple years ago. Apparently not so. I am a huge fan of Rick Bass'. He doesn't always get there, no, but I don't care. He is hugely prolific, and what's more, he's a fighter of the good fight in regard to protecting the Yaak Valley where he lives. His nonfiction is pretty terrific - it's like the reverse to the Ernest Thompson Seton coin, in that Seton as an old school naturalist (early 1900's) tends toward joy in outsmarting canny animals (I'm thinking of his writing about wolves in particular) and Bass writes in a much more conservationist but no less visceral fashion. Anyway - this book is fiction, but draws on the naturalist impulse. It's got lengthy sections of journal entries as written by a geologist, which I found less than enlightening as far as larger story went, but the sections in which the story/world is developed are really gorgeous. I felt so THERE reading this book set in a remote valley near the Canadian Border, and when you succeed in depicting a place that is a character, almost the narrator of the book, so intensely, I think you've won. One of my favorite Bass stories is The Myths of Bears, from The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness, and this is as rewarding. Literary, and at the same time grounded in the real, troublesome world. The problems of people in their apartments don't turn me on half as much as those in which the problems are of a more life and death nature. So, I dig Bass - that's pretty much where his writing lives.

[Jim Leckband · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rick Bass impresses me as the type of author I generally try to avoid. Regional and somewhat old-fashioned storytelling is my prejudice I think. Boring, I think. Well, I really should know better. One of my favorite all-time authors is Willa Cather. Regional? Yup. Old-fashioned storytelling? Yup. Boring? Never in a million years.

While not in the same class as Cather, Banks tells the story of a Brigadoon-ish town in a secluded valley of Montana. Cut-off from civilization by snow in the winter, the people have only themselves to trust and depend on. Banks excels at giving us the atmosphere where really everyone does know what everyone is doing.

The plot is really about the veiling and unveiling of many things - the oil where the sea used to be is beneath miles of rock is unveiled by Wallis' map - but veiled by trickster nature, the boy that became the devil Dudley is unveiled by journal entries but veiled by the man Dudley became, and the realization that Dudley's daughter is not a lone wolf is unveiled during the book's year. All these things seem to symbolize that the nature of things is not easy to find, but it does exist and our happiness or well-being is tied to how closely we realize that.

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

While beautifully written, this book was a bit of a slog for me. Rick Bass was recommended to me several years back as an eloquent conservation-focused writer. I've had The Nine Mile Wolves on my to-read list for a while now, but when I saw this (his first novel) at the local used bookstore-- I thought I'd give it a shot. The book paints a vivid picture of a pristine valley town in northern Montana that is just wild and remote enough to still be insulated from the relentless march of human progress, particularly in the winter months. Old Dudley, one of the least likeable characters I've ever met in a book, is the father of Mel, who lives in the valley and has been conducting a multi-year study of the local wolf population. Mel has developed relationships with two geologists that Old Dudley has brought to the valley (at different points in time) to prospect for oil. The main plot centers around the drama of whether oil will be found, but the bulk of the 400+ pages are a character and landscape study. Many, many pages were also dedicated to the journal entries of a younger Old Dudley, which are hard to describe.... but they cemented my deep dislike of the character, and at a certain point I finally just ended up skimming or skipping them. I can't recommend this one.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

While this was a rather challenging read at times, overall it is a very well written and powerful story of nature and place and human relationships. I sailed through the second half of the book as the characters became more vivid and the story picked up its pace. Set mostly in an isolated valley in northern Montana, the tale is of an old geologist still searching for oil deposits, his two proteges, and his daughter, variously involved with the two younger men and in conflict with her father. Bass' ability to bring the landscape - fauna and flora - so brilliantly to life alongside the struggling, defiant and floundering characters is magnificent, and overcomes the sometimes excess wordiness of the old man's early exploration diaries (which one of the young men is reading).

[Patricia James · Rating 2 out of 5]

I cannot recommend this novel, because Bass tries to do too much in the development of the plot and characterization. It is vastly overwritten. If a reader searches the NYT review, it will be seen that this review is brutal. That said, I really enjoyed the core environment, the development of that little village, etc. I enjoyed all that a reader can learn about animals, plants and a lifestyle that most of us will never experience.

We were in a little beach town and I bought this novel for a dollar in a used book store. For the positive comments above, I feel I have a bargain in this purchase. But, I'd not recommend the book.

[Elaine Burnes · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like his writing, so gave this novel a try. Very literary, meaning slow to get into. Definitely not plot driven! Characters thrown together to see what would happen. It started off well enough, but eventually became boring. A lot of separate, unconnected scenes. This is one of those plotless, character-driven stories that female writers get accused of. See, men can do them too. I like his writing, but it’s just beautiful writing. I ended up skimming because nothing happens. Just stylish language wrapped around nothing.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me this was a book more about language and voice than plot or character. Similar to the way I felt about _Snow Falling on Cedars_ by David Guterson. The language and imagery are wonderful, and while it took me nearly two years to read it, that was because I only picked it up when I was in a certain sort of nesting mood. Not a summer beach read at all. You need a fire, a big leather chair and a dog by your feet.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a difficult read, but worth it. Set in the majestic Montana mtns, the residents of Swan Valley have no last names, they are mostly "just folks" except Old Dudley who is just crazy. They face beauty and hardships and challenge, including the wildlife. Great story, altho I did skim over Old Dudley's journal entries, they were mostly over my head...

[John Benson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was Rick Bass' first novel. It takes place in a remote snow-covered Montana valley. An old geologist, Dudley, has always hoped he could strike oil there. His daughter, Mel, lives there and counts wolves. Two of Dudley's proteges, Matthew and Wallis, fall in love with her. Mainly the story follows a year in the lives of Wallis and Mel. It is written well, but a bit too long.

[Bronwyn Hegarty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning. Rick Bass knows how to create atmosphere, and viscerally describe a landscape and the people in it. What a read. All the characters jump out at you on the page, and none of them are that likeable because they have so many human faults, are so ordinary, yet extraordinary. This story will move you and tip you into a place of much discomfort. Read it if you dare.

[Sonya · Rating 2 out of 5]

Floundering, overreaching, unsatisfying. Bass is a master short story writer; this novel was nothing like I wanted it to be.

[Sherri · Rating 2 out of 5]

A fun read, but unlike Helprin's Winter's Tale, I couldn't suspend my disbelief about the fantastical winter in this tale.

[Joyce Reynolds-Ward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Evocative language, not so strong on plot.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well written and excellent descriptions of the seasons in a remote valley of NW Montana. Somewhat weak story-line but it leaves ones imagination to explore possibilities.

[Bucket · Rating 4 out of 5]

At its root, this is a book about the struggle for power, and how fighting against the powerful or just plain coping can change your psychology or even destroy you.

Dudley has his own background of trauma, but he's the source of destruction, fear and sadness for everyone else in the book. He sets out to control people, to own them, but even that isn't enough. He also needs to destroy them. Or at least, in the case of his daughter Mel, destroy everything they love.

His perspective is man overpowering nature. He is a rich oil prospector and presents a view of natural history that is about his own dominence: "With man in possession of the earth there is room for no wider-ranging animal. There is place for no successor."

There are beautiful, vivid descriptions of nature throughout the book. But nearly all are about the power struggle between humans and nature - even when we're in the perspective of someone like Mel who more or less lives in symbiosis with the natural world. Over and over, people are nearly freezing, being buried alive in snow (by accident or on purpose), or using every last drop of energy and strength to move through the snow.

"I think we teach them to confuse hunger with love, and love with hunger."

Mel is fascinating. She is nearly as calculating as he is, but for the protection of herself and her home in the valley. She accepts a life of solitude rather than fighting to either keep Matthew (her lover, Dudley's protégé) or let him go completely. She rolls the dice repeatedly with Dudley's endless search for oil in the valley, a thinly veiled attempt to take the last thing that matters to her.

But Wallis (Dudley's new 'mark' for destruction) changes everything for her. He's the first person she can love who also has strength to be free of Dudley. So her worldview changes: "...the distance between being alone versus lonely was narrowing."

And she gives up Matthew completely, and finally:

"But there was also an incredible lightness and freedom, a giddiness. She had given up the wolves, and her old lover, and now she found herself wondering if there were anything else she could give up."

The end of the book is unfortunately flat, especially after such intricate psychological turmoil. Bass loves his characters too much, I suppose, and wants their world to be happy.

[Paul Gaya Ochieng Simeon Juma · Rating 1 out of 5]

Readers are like stone rollers. It is easy to compare the task of reading with the spiritual attitude of Albert Camus' Sisyphus. We labour to push the stone that is our books up the mountain, and plunk, we go down at the bottom to start over. Up again, down again. Over and over. We spend our times reading books, we think it will be enough, but before we know it, we are thirsting for more. Never, I tell you, it will never stop. The stone is always down at the bottom, waiting. Unfortunately, this was not my kind of stone. Evidently, I am not susceptible to geological enthusiasm which this book is partly about.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not as powerful as his short stories, but still packs a pastoral punch. Maybe Jack London meets Hemingway meets Cormac McCarthy. And then diluted a bit.

The best parts are his descriptions of the snowy Montana wilderness. You can tell it was written by a man who has lived it and loves it deeply.

Recommended for fans of ornate custom coffins.

[Kristy · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5⭐️ it was slow, but I was invested. These characters sucked me in and I had to know what happened. Book Two was much more eventful than book one. Every time I wanted to put it down I read something so profound I had to keep reading.

[Michiel Bourdrez · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too long

I had a rough time with this book. I’m glad i stuck with it because I liked the ending. Finally some actiom.

[Josh Schlossberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rick Bass is making me want to move to NW Montana.