'Hermit's Story' goes underground to reveal the light

You might say that Rick Bass' sense of direction is all turned around. In the general cosmology, "up" is the direction with good connotations. There's heaven, the warm sun, mountaintop enlightenment. Underground? That's home to Hades. The dirt nap.

Yet frequently in the stories of Bass, a former petroleum geologist whose 17 books include the memoir "Oil Notes," much wonder lies just beneath the Earth's skin. Going underground means probing something more elemental, a literary wildcatting in which characters — and Bass — tap into the essence of things.

"Landscape — geology — is all there is," the author has said. "I can write (different) stories, but if landscape's not a character, I'm not much interested in them. It fascinates me, to start at the bottom, and work up."

That oilman's impulse is very obviously present in two of the more memorable stories in his new collection, "The Hermit's Story" (Houghton Mifflin, $22). In "The Cave," a former coal miner and his new girlfriend find an old adit in West Virginia, strip down and descend into the mine. In the blackness, their eyes "as large as eggs," they are somehow more attuned than ever to their surroundings. Time seems to stretch like taffy.

Something similar happens in the book's title story, in which a dog trainer and an older Indian man escape a blizzard by crawling through a hole in a lake that is frozen on top but is drained underneath. Under the ice is a blue world, protected, so vivid that the trainer can smell the adrenaline of the hunting dogs, "a scent like damp, fresh-cut green hay."

Bass' best stories often have a moment of it-could-happen magical realism, and "The Cave" is no exception: The couple climbs aboard an old pumpjack boxcar and races through the mine as the screaming steel wheels illuminate them with orange sparks, "as if they had been painted or even created by that light." They finally emerge like some sooty Adam and Eve. "They could taste the green light on their bodies," Bass writes.

And yet in these stories, the wonder characters feel, and the gratefulness for that wonder, is repeatedly tempered by the sadness of knowing that nothing lasts. Decay always comes, so "that even an afternoon such as that one could become dust."

The story "Swans" is filled with familiar, outsized mountain people influenced by Bass' life in northwest Montana's rural Yaak Valley. "I have seen men here lift the back ends of trucks and roll logs out of the woods that a draft horse couldn't pull," says the narrator, who lives in a fictional valley. "Dogs live to be 20, 25 years old."

Of these people, the narrator most admires Amy and her husband, a Bunyanesque logger named Billy. Amy and Billy's life together is so in tune with nature's rhythms that time seems to stand still for them. The flawed, burdened narrator can only wonder at their lives, and enjoy its reflected light. They are as mythic and magical as the wild place they call home. Yet in time, even strongmen like Billy are as fragile as these few remaining special places.

Time has taken a toll on all of the marriages in these stories. Husbands muse on moribund relationships, sometimes hoping to kiss life into them, with varying levels of success. The same could be said of Bass' explorations of this theme.

The standout, however, and the collection's best story, is "The Fireman." In it, a volunteer firefighter finds that the dangerous, adrenaline-infused moments inside a burning house mysteriously reinvigorate his relationship with his wife. The fire captain compares the conflagrations to rivers of magma in the Earth, "rivers of the way things used to be and might some day be again — true but mysterious, and full of power."

Chris Solomon: 206-515-5646 or csolomon@seattletimes.com.