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.