Word: geologist
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...NOTES by Rick Bass (Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence; $16.95). There is no better conversation than good shop talk; here a petroleum geologist ("I know how to find oil") tells many of the tricks of his trade and proves, in the process, that he also knows how to write...
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...
...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...
...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...
...still to go to the top. The temperature is unreasonably far below zero, hands and feet are numb, and the air is so thin that a few tentative steps leave the body screaming for relief. Perhaps this is how Hans Meyer felt when, 100 years ago, the German geologist became the first to ascend to the rarefied heights of Mount Kilimanjaro, an immense dormant volcano 49 miles long and 24 miles wide that straddles the border between Tanzania and Kenya. Or the myriad of tourists who have since gasped their way to the roof of Africa...