Word: basses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...