We came to learn how to heat up the earth to cool down the sky. On the first hot day of a scorching summer, we drove in two vans, eight PhD candidates and two professors from the University of Illinois, two hours south of campus to the enhanced geothermal testing system at the research institute outside Flat Rock, Illinois. The oil company sponsoring our research had prepared our lodgings by drilling rooms into the ground, covering the top with a movable garden roof with ventilation slats along the sides and an entry down like a cellar. We were sweltering by the time we arrived in Flat Rock; the air conditioning in both vans combusted. Yet down in our underground rooms—with identical sleeping mats and shelves for our things—the air was perfectly cool.
We came to study this flat earth and what lies beneath it, to poke around until it heats up. Down below: striations of Woodbury Limestone, Greenup Limestone, Bogota Limestone, Shumway Limestone, coal, black shale, clay, gray shale. Below that: a reservoir of water. Below even that: hot, dry rock. The crystalline basement of our earth.
We were two miles from the nearest town, but out here, except for our research station, you’d think no one else had ever lived. Out here, we had our remote sensing data and we had the oil guys and their drills and we had set up a computer hotspot and a battery station for our computers. We didn’t have food or water or sanitation; we had to go to town for supplies and otherwise live off grid, as if we were camping. We liked the idea of camping, that was one reason why we came. The other reason was to discover the feeling of rock bursting underneath our feet.
Our names were Gunther, Georgina, Greg, and Jamal; Lila, Lakeith, Lazo, and Mel. The professors were Dr. Griffin and Dr. Lewis. We divided our teams into the G’s and L’s; the two outliers felt fine about that. The G’s took the north end of camp, the L’s took the south.
We breakfasted together, lunched apart, and came back together for evening and liquor. We had a great feeling that we liked each other very much, and the conversation never ran dry: there was always another fact for discussion or story of a geologic discovery. Each of us has had a personal revelation about geology, each of us loves rocks more than most humans, at least more than most humans who don’t love rocks. Due to these personal revelations there was the feeling that we knew each other very well, even though we scarcely knew each other at all. We came together on a common ground that was filled with fissures, gaps between how much we knew ourselves and what we knew of the others, so we asked questions in great haste to fill those holes. Childhood vacations, first loves, last loves, first hates, current hates, everything except for our parents, that was too new to be touched, for most of us, too hot. We asked one another these questions on our first night at camp, with enough beers for four each, at the end of which, we began making eyes at one another across the campfire, wondering who, if any, would end up in the cool stone rooms of the other. We all had spouses or significant others, with whom some of us had agreements about summers away like this, and some did not. Yet it was too soon for this, and besides, the feeling of maybe-ness brought enough heat to our loins to satisfy, which was welcomed, as the night had cooled down to a frigid degree.
Our minor headaches were ameliorated quickly the next morning by a strong pot of coffee heated in the fire’s remains; then the work began. The G team measured the composition of elements in the air and the radioactive activity of the earth. The L team brought their blueprints to the oilmen, who wore dusty overalls and had blue bags underneath their eyes but spoke with a friendly lilt. We wore cargo pants and tank tops and baseball caps, all of which would transform from bright and colorful to the ragged shade of dust. The oilmen knew how to drill a well, they knew how to pump thousands of gallons of water into the earth to break it up, yet rarely had they ever driven a well so deep, below the precious shale and water, skipping over the gas and coal that was their mainstay, ignoring their salaries, their liquid gold, for something better: pure heat. The hot dry rocks that existed between the crust and core, as the elements of the Earth’s mantle broke down: potassium, uranium, thorium, the ingredients of the earth, from when swirling gas and dust were pulled together 4.5 billion years ago, the ingredients that were in perpetual decay, producing isotopes and geoneutrinos and radiogenic heat.
We discussed our findings that second night: the G team bragged about their quick analyses of the readouts, the L team praised the oilmen and their drilling work. If we’re being honest, the G team was initially slightly jealous of the L team, but over the proceeding weeks they would switch places to everyone’s satisfaction: each day, one team gathered data while the other monitored the drilling, both ensuring there were no tectonic faults or joints. On the flattest land in the country, we expected to find none. Our expectations were realized.
Our first goal: create a massive underground pool. The water would be shot down into the middle of the crystalline bedrock, breaking up the hot stone, creating a liquid with the heat of magma. Then we created a second borehole to bring the superhot water back to the surface, where it would be converted to electricity, cooled, and injected back into the earth through borehole number one. Finally, we tested for every possible danger in the process from start to finish to ensure that drilling through shale wouldn’t release the bedrock’s gas, to make sure it didn’t disrupt the nearby watershed, for earthquake risks, unknown drainage, and more, and more.
On the seventh night, the couplings began. Jamal and Mel went to get more firewood and didn’t return to the group. Dr. Griffin asked Greg to check the data readouts in the quiet of his stone room. We all understood, we had seen them inch closer, seen a hand brush against a knee, a thigh touching thigh. For the rest of us, the six who remained, it was only a matter of time. The next night: Gunther and Lazo, Lila and Georgina, Dr. Lewis and Lakeith. Next, they switched in rotation. We forgot who had made prior arrangements with their significant others and who did not, they themselves eventually forgot. Down in our stone rooms, we examined each other’s skin. Our bodies were hard from walks in the sun, tight with anticipation. Our mouths were soft and open, and with them, we explored each other’s crevices, first tentatively, with careful investigations as we clarified one body’s preference from the other’s, then, once we felt confident in our hypotheses of pleasure, with deep intensity.
At night, we carried out our bodily examinations many times over: conclusions are never inevitable, a good test must be replicated. Yet when the sun was high, we were all business. After two weeks of switching between tasks, the L team found that they preferred to analyze the data, and the G team preferred to hang around the drill site. They came to this conclusion all at once over dinner, after their fifth drink. It was a grateful conclusion, that their preferences lined up so perfectly, for now they didn’t need to switch responsibilities but could deepen further into their own. The couplings continued to switch at a rapid pace, however, sometimes within the same night, sometimes in groups of three. We became the furnaces in our rooms, creating and heating our own underground pools.
As weeks went on, as the two teams settled deeper into their own tasks, our preferences transformed into a competitive nature. We would brag over who wrote more words for their culmination paper that day, which pages were more useful. The competitiveness ran into animosity, leading the groups to now take breakfast and dinner separately, and building two separate campfires at night, each trying to make their fire larger than the other. Yet at the end of each night, once properly liquored up, we selected the largest fire, then all came together and felt a love deeper than family.
We completed our research. The competitiveness led us to compose pages and pages of beautifully crafted and analyzed work. We determined how to diminish all potential dangers and risks. With such new parameters, the potential for geothermal was enormous: a simple study of air readouts and history would allow communities across the country, far from tectonic barriers, volcanoes, and other typical sources of geothermal energy, to drill and create an everlasting heat, in a process that was entirely self-contained, no excess energy or pollution, everything contained in its pipes.
The professors put their names on the paper and submitted it to every scientific journal; each journal clamored for acceptance. Then the oilmen left; their funding had come to an end. The professors left, too, with the vans and computers and hotspots. But we students, we stayed.
The professors couldn’t understand our wishes. They tried to get us to leave with them. They enjoyed the summer but they had lives, and out here, without funding, we had nothing but each other. We told them they were wrong: we had enough trees for a lifetime of campfires, we had a lake nearby for water, we had enough food stores leftover to make do, and a knife with which we could kill rabbits and squirrels, and the gardens on our roofs with which we would grow winter squash and kale. The two diminutive professors were not in the role of lifting bodies, and besides we outnumbered them, so they eventually shrugged and left.
We students continued in our work. The L team ventured further and further to study the composition of air and earth. The G team picked up where the oilmen left off, having learned enough throughout the summer to continue the task themselves, finding new drills to bore, bringing their wells even further into the crystalline bedrock. We created an underground world of connected fractures, of water and rock and steam.
During the day the teams did not speak to the other; during the night, the separation remained, even during our nighttime couplings, which sometimes still breached the teams, but were always carried out in silence. Legs, lips, hair, sweat. The teams did not discuss their findings with the other, so the L team did not mention when the composition of gas increased in the air, and the G team did not mention when they reached a slip-strike fault line.
We loved each other like lions, we learned everything there is to know about one another’s pasts, so eventually, as summer became fall and fall became winter, we turned to games of recreation. The L team became very skilled at charades, guessing each other’s phrases within thirty seconds, then ten seconds, then half a second, then one person would simply stand there and give a knowing look and the others would shout their guess correctly all at once: “Pleistocene!”
The G team performed tarot, breaking into that inexplicable realm of the future: from the next day to the next week to the rest of our lives to our life beyond death, we saw our lives together. We also saw our lives from the past: our great-great-grandparents, our nomad ancestors, Neanderthals. Four of Wands: the element of fire brings a community together. Hermit: seek your truth from within.
Eventually, as divorce papers were mailed unread to our PO box in town, the L team ignored the data readouts and the G team let the oilmen’s equipment fall into disrepair. There was no time for rivalry or science. We ran out of liquor so started brewing our own, we scavenged fruits and berries and carried out hunts for deer. When our cargo pants ripped at the seams, we created new attire from deerskins.
One morning, we woke to a boom, then a rumble. We scrambled out of our underground stone rooms and saw, a mile away, a fire. It surrounded us, at the edges of a perfect circle, two miles wide. We ran to examine it without putting on shoes or goggles. It took ten minutes of sprinting to reach the flames. The fire came from a canyon, a split in the earth. Once the flames died down, it was easy to learn what happened: the hydraulic boundary of our area of study had slipped into a faultline and extended upwards. Our home separated from the rest of the world.
We celebrated. Everything we needed was inside our circle. No one visited the camp, no one else saw us again. We had children, and our children had children, and our community stretched into eternity. Nothing bad ever happened except for a small explosion here and there due to gas leaking from the abandoned drills.
Our research similarly extended into eternity, the tarot cards told us so. The professors who put their names on the paper gained international acclaim, gave talks around the world for years to come. They told the world about the untapped resource beneath our feet, the one we can use without any need for volcanoes or geysers. They discussed the low-level radiation that’s perpetual and infinite, at least for the next few billion years, and how it could benefit humanity. Just as our professors, eventually, were forgotten by geologic time, so did they forget about their poor old PhD students; after all, they hardly knew us.
Denise S. Robbins grew up in Madison, Wisconsin and now lives in Washington, DC, where she runs a climate change communications company. Her writing has been published in the Barcelona Review, Gulf Coast Journal, Epiphany Magazine, and more. This piece is part of a larger collection-in-progress inspired by solutions to the climate crisis. Find more at her website. Instagram: @denisesylvie
Photo by Ir Solyanaya from Pexels