Drilling Deep
“I can only stay a week, Dad.” David sounded apologetic. “The other paleontologists are already out digging in Montana, and they can’t survive very long without me.”
“That’s okay.” Arne Christensen gave a nothing-bothers-me shrug. “I’m glad you came at all. It’s been so long.”
David opened the cupboard above the sink where Arne had kept the jelly jar glasses for the past twenty years. He removed a glass and turned on the faucet, but only a thin, murky trickle crept out.
Arne leaned forward in his worn overalls, making the kitchen chair creak. “The well’s gone bad, Davey—and what does come out tastes like salty muck. I’m getting Harry Warner’s rig out here to start drilling a new one.”
David tasted a drop with a simultaneous smile and grimace. “It’s called connate water, Dad—fairly unusual. It’s the salt water from ancient seas, trapped underground when the rocks were formed a couple hundred million years ago.”
“No wonder it tastes like dinosaur piss.”
“You’re off by a few years, Dad. But no matter.” David always liked to explain things, and Arne listened with full attention, since he’d never had a chance to go to college—too much work to do on the farm. Nevertheless, he found the world endlessly interesting, with or without scientific explanations.
Arne smiled, and his single gold-rimmed tooth flashed in the early morning light. He had always (jokingly) watched the gold prices in the paper, threatening to sell his tooth if things got too bad on the farm. Fortunately, things looked good this year; he had rented out most of the usable farmland, keeping only about ten acres for himself, now that he was alone.
David set the glass back on the cracked contact paper in the cupboard, as if he hadn’t actually wanted a drink but simply needed something to do. Arne ran a dirty fingernail along the edge of the gold-flecked Formica of the kitchen table. “What is it your team is doing out in Montana, again? More dinosaur bones?”
David knew the subject would fascinate his father. “We’re looking into the K-T extinction event. Sixty-five million years ago the dinosaurs and a whole list of other animals just died, all at once, probably because of an asteroid impact. To find out more details, we have to dig down sixty-five million years and look at the rocks.”
Arne frowned. “How do you dig down millions of years?”
David relaxed while talking about his work. “In geology, new rock layers are laid down on top of the old ones. Like a stack of bills—new ones on top, oldest ones on the bottom. The deeper down you dig, the further back in time you go.”
Arne’s old fatherly interest had never dimmed despite David’s occasional intellectual coolness. He was proud that his son knew so many things that he himself had never figured out, although David couldn’t help but feel superior to a “hick farmer” who had no real geology training.
“But because of upheavals and weathering,” David continued, “the past is closer to the surface in some places—and it just so happens that sixty-five million years ago is close to the surface in Montana.”
Though the red-winged blackbird’s song sounded like an unoiled hinge, Arne enjoyed the flavor it added to the early morning peace. Regretfully, he started the generator on the well-drilling rig, drowning out nature’s noises with more civilized racket.
David had been away from the rise-at-dawn farm life for many years now, and he was still asleep inside the old house. The well-drilling rig made one hell of an alarm clock, though, hammering the bore pipe like a piledriver with percussive violence.
Thunnngg
The pipe bit into the dirt.
Thunnngg
The rig pounded it below the surface, like a disoriented mole tunneling toward the center of the Earth.
Arne mused to himself, “I’m drilling back in time.” Though he didn’t entirely understand it all, he was fascinated by David’s geological analogy. “Digging down a million years.” He would chew on the concept as if it were an old piece of tough jerky.
If you went back in time by digging down into the ground, then were all the people in those underground earth-homes literally “living in the past?” He grinned at his own joke; he would have to tell it to David as soon as he woke up.
Thunnngg
There, now the rig had sunk the pipe all the way into yesterday.
Thunnngg
And the day before.
Thunnngg
Picking up speed. Now David was still in college, and his mother had just died.
Thunnngg
David a little boy.
Thunnngg
David just born.
Thunnngg
Arne and Elizabeth first married.
Thunnngg
And that was World War II.
Thunnngg
World War I.
Thunnngg
The Civil War.
Thunnngg
The Revolutionary War.
Thunnngg
In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
Thunnngg
King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
Thunnngg
Jesus Christ.
Moses.
Thunnngg
The dinosaurs.
Adam and Eve.
Thunnngg
Even though morning coolness still clutched at the air, Arne discovered he was sweating.
Day after day, the rig hammered each section of pipe up to its neck in the dirt. Arne screwed together another section and set the rig in motion again, letting his thin probe bore through the ancient strata.
The work wasn’t too hard, it wasn’t too monotonous. The hose dumped water down the shaft, and the rig hammered it into muck, pounding the pipe sluggishly downward. Arne pumped up the gray sludge, spilling it across the sloping farmyard like a dead lake of wet cement.
Two hundred feet down.
Arne’s eyes bounced up and down, watching the center pipe in the rig as it rhythmically rose and fell, like the pendulum on the biggest grandfather clock of all. He could easily run the rig himself, but David did his best to seem helpful (which mostly entailed standing around and talking a lot, keeping his father company). The summer stillness was broken only by his conversation and the cyclic thunnngg of the rig.
The insert pipe came up, spilling battered sludge, but now a glistening black stain swirled in the gray clayish ooze, like a shadow from the past. As the mud continued to spew from the shaft, the black became darker. David bent down in the mud and ran his fingers through the black ooze. “You just struck coal!”
Arne was both surprised and proud to see his son so willing to get his fingers dirty. “Coal? Like real coal?”
David sounded like a lecturing teacher again. “It’s not too uncommon to hit coal when you dig a well, Dad. This is probably low-grade stuff, but I can take a sample to a friend of mine, so he can analyze it.”
Arne was genuinely amazed. “So, how far back did I drill?” Seeing David’s puzzled look, he added, “I mean how many years down did I go? To hit the coal?”
“Oh.” David’s face looked like a jumble of jigsaw puzzle pieces falling into place. “Of course. Let’s see, coal would be about three hundred million years ago, during the Carboniferous period. Not too bad for six days work.”
Arne beamed. David saw the expression, smiled, and described the picture for his father. “Lots of swamps covered the land. Towering fern-trees, giant insects, big lizards. Volcanoes. The air hot and steamy.” He raised his eyebrows. “Do you know what the coal is, Dad? Why it burns?”
“No.” He knew David wanted to explain it to him.
“Rocks don’t burn. Anything that burns had to be living at one time. Wood burns because trees spend their lives soaking up sunlight, storing ‘solar power’ in their trunks. When you burn wood, you release that sun-energy again.
“Coal is from those big, steamy swamps of three-hundred million years ago, all the vegetation crushed under layers and layers of rock over time, squeezed and concentrated. When you burn a lump of coal you’re releasing 300-million-year-old sunlight.”
Arne let out a sigh. “Ah, Davey, you should have been a teacher.”
Less than an hour later they struck water.
The sun nudged toward the southwestern horizon, and Arne stood in his mud-splattered overalls, hoe in hand, at the edge of the vast garden. He realized he looked like an old cover from Reader’s Digest, the kind that were “Rural with a Vengeance” according to David.
Each spring Arne planted a garden six times larger than he needed for himself, but he enjoyed the work, and he enjoyed giving the vegetables away. And if he didn’t feel like harvesting everything that ripened, he threw it all in the compost pit; the vegetables didn’t care if they were harvested or not.
Inside the farmhouse, David had cooked a fancy farewell dinner for himself and his father. Arne usually cooked for one, and—thanks to the fouled well—he had become accustomed to not cooking at all in the past week. David had filled a few old milk jugs with water at the neighbor’s to tide them over until the new well could be hooked up to the house’s existing plumbing.
By himself outside, Arne waited in the expectant silence, looking out across everything he had known. It had changed very little since his own childhood. The unplanted half of the garden stood in black, hard chunks, just as the plow had piled them a month before. The garden seemed transformed in the reddening sunlight of the dying afternoon.
Arne stared at the lifeless earth, amazed at the lack of weeds. Although there had been no rain for two weeks, several viscid puddles lay in the dirt, covered with slimy green. He hadn’t noticed them before. As he watched, the pools seemed … alive, crawling, oozing, glittering with ancient secrets: algae groping for a foothold on the blasted, sterile landscape of a newborn Earth. When Arne pulled in a hitching breath, the air seemed oppressively damp and steamy.
Suddenly, something felt wrong. The sun hung motionless on the horizon, but as he watched, it picked up speed in the opposite direction and heaved itself above the edge of the world, like a fiery red behemoth whirling from west to east. The huge clock-hand of the sun moved backward, counterclockwise.
A thousand conflicting thoughts battered on his mind, terror yet awed fascination at the same time.
What if, in his thoughtless drilling, he had punctured a bubble of the past, a cyst buried three-hundred million years below the surface? Like the primordial water that had invaded his old well, causing it to dry up? What if that ancient past was even now seeping toward the surface?
Arne blinked, and the illusion of the sun’s motion vanished, leaving it half-sunken on the horizon. When David called him to come in for supper, he almost ran to the house.
That night, Arne had no nightmares because he never slept at all.
He lay tossing on his creaky bed, smelling the taint of brimstone in the air. He and David had sat up and talked next to the fireplace, where Arne insisted on burning a few old lumps of coal he had found in the basement. His eyes sparkled with childlike fascination as the 300-million-year-old light spilled into the present.
David had to leave the next morning to catch a flight to Great Falls, Montana, and already Arne felt more lonely than he had been in years.
In the numbness of night, Arne could hear the echoing drip of the faucet in the kitchen. How could a faucet drip with no water pressure behind it? The dripping pounded deep into his consciousness, into his imagination.
Drip drip drip drip drik drik trik tik tik tick tick tick tick
Nature’s own clock. Time was passing … but he couldn’t tell which direction it moved.
From outside, through the window screen, came night sounds he had never heard before, awful and primeval. Eerie calls and haunting burbling noises as of something moving slowly through a swamp. The air in the bedroom felt hot and humid, intensifying all sounds.
A thrill of fascination traced Arne’s spine, a thrill of fear. He had immersed himself in something strange, a true mystery of nature. He didn’t know whether to be eager for morning, or to be terrified of it.
Arne stood on the porch in the still-wakening dawn and stared out into the new universe of what had been his backyard. His jaw hung open in an unabashed expression of awe.
He took a step off the porch, compelled to walk toward the misty, primeval swamp that had appeared during the night, seeming to stretch beyond his distant fields. Ruddy sunlight shimmered and reflected in the steamy air, as if slowed down by plowing into the past.
The ground felt spongy and damp beneath his work boots. He could smell the bizarre vegetation and the sultry ooze lurking in the swamp. He paused, torn between his fascination and the urge to run and hide under the bed.
He thought about calling for David, but the sense of wonder clouded all his fear. Arne was experiencing something no one else had ever imagined. David would never believe this; in fact, Arne feared that his son might not be able to see it at all. This simply couldn’t be real.
The air was hushed and brooding, as if noise-making creatures had not yet evolved. Far off, beyond where neighboring Tucker’s farm would someday be, Arne could see the smoke-belching crown of an ancient volcano, but the rumble had been reduced to a low drone in the steamy air.
Giant rushes and wide-spreading ferns rose around him, dripping star-points of dew. Huge fern-trees towered overhead, some rising almost a hundred feet high. Primitive evergreens and trees with no flowers clustered in the wet undergrowth. When a sound like a chainsaw whizzed past, he gawked at an armored dragonfly with a wingspan of two feet. The dragonfly circled Arne’s head and then sped deeper into the swamp, as if beckoning him to follow.
He walked along, hypnotized by the primeval beauty.
Billowing seed-ferns and giant, cactus-like club mosses shed green reflections into the heavy forest. A large beetle scuttled sluggishly down the fallen trunk of a fern-tree, picking its way across a wet mass of algae.
Arne pondered beside a quiet, glassy pool crowded with bored-looking fish. All around him was a pervasive, relaxing hum, like a cicada’s song played backwards. A spider the size of an apple watched him from a scale-tree but did not seem interested in prey so large.
Arne felt a delicious lull in himself and enjoyed a moment of peace. He had always known there were mysteries in the world far greater than himself. This made the most profound religious experience seem like no more than a sneeze. He wished David were here with him. He decided to return to the house—at least to within shouting distance, so he could rouse his son. No one should miss this!
Arne didn’t think he had stayed in the swamp for long, and the sun still hung low in the morning sky. He hadn’t gone far, but when he turned back toward the farm house, the prehistoric swamp had swallowed everything, and stretched for miles and miles in all directions.
The past sprawled forever and ever before him, and he had to go three hundred million years to get home again.