Tell folks that you’re making a grand tour of polluted places, and they tend to get excited. A surprising number of people say they want to come along, and, although this turns out to be mostly talk, it’s gratifying to know the market is there.
Most of all, people want to know about the list. How am I choosing my destinations? Based on what? And they have suggestions. Everyone has a favorite: a city that struck them as horrifically smoggy, a developing-world landfill they read about. Some make an easy leap from Chernobyl to Bhopal, taking up the theme of industrial disaster. But that doesn’t seem quite right. And what if I want to check out a place that is the perfect embodiment of an environmental problem but that isn’t particularly gross? Should I abandon it, just because I’m worried it won’t count as “most polluted”? The criteria flood in: kinds of pollution, areas of the world, recreational possibilities…
“I’m trying to get a nice spread,” I tell them.
From Alberta, a powerful suction pulls south. And so they would like to build a pipeline. Another pipeline, that is—longer and better than what’s already there. Leaving Canada, it would pass underneath the Alberta-Montana border and run clear through the heart of the United States to the Gulf Coast, ending at a clutch of refineries in Port Arthur, Texas.
Opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline, as it is called, argue that it would pose unacceptable environmental risks, even leaving aside the issue of how dirty oil sands oil is. The pipeline, three feet in diameter and buried underground, would transport diluted bitumen through such ecologically invaluable regions as the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides nearly a third of all groundwater used for irrigation in the United States, and is also a major drinking water supply. The threat to the Ogallala, the argument goes, is too great a risk to take. And then there’s the question of whether the project would even be economically viable.
Pipeline supporters, on the other hand, claim that Keystone XL would be reliable and safe, and they contend that it would double the amount of oil sands oil that can be imported to the United States.
What Keystone XL definitely has going for it, though, is irresistible symbolic value. Judged by this admittedly dubious metric, a pipeline connecting northern Alberta and Port Arthur, Texas, is almost too good to pass up. Because if the oil sands represent the future of the oil industry, then Port Arthur represents its past, even its birth. And Keystone XL, should it be built, would physically link the two, feeding the future to the past, and tying the history of petroleum up in a tidy bow.
They called it folly. To most people, it seemed ridiculous to imagine that there was oil waiting underneath the low hill known as Spindletop, near Beaumont, in Southeast Texas. But Patillo Higgins had been obsessed with it for nearly a decade. A local businessman and self-taught geologist, he had led multiple failed attempts to find oil under the hill, and still he persisted. The quintessential example of an entrepreneur driven beyond sound judgment, Higgins spent year after year chasing oil with nothing to show for it. He pursued his goal with a faith matched only by his own religious dogmatism, and even ceded ownership of his own company to attract new investors—all in an age when oil was used only for lamp fuel and lubricants. As a business plan, it was idiotic.
On the morning of January 10, 1901, Higgins wasn’t even on Spindletop. Neither was his drilling contractor, a similarly obsessed, Croatian-born engineer called Anthony Lucas. They had no idea what was about to happen. Not even the drilling crew, as they ground the well deeper, past 1,100 feet, knew what they were about to unleash on Texas and the world. No idea that by lunchtime their well would be producing more oil than every other oil well in the country—combined.
It was the first gusher: the violent fountain of oil that in the old days would explode out of the ground when a new well broke through to a rich deposit. (Go see There Will Be Blood if you don’t know what I’m talking about.) Nowadays, drillers understand how to control such things, but the gusher remains an archetypal American moment, as central to our folklore of wealth as gold rushes and tech IPOs.
Beginning on that January morning, the well called Lucas No. 1, or the Lucas Gusher, ran for nine days, spewing millions of gallons of oil onto the ground before it was brought under control. PURE OIL SPOUTING HIGH IN THE AIR—MUCH EXCITEMENT IN THE CITY ran the headline in Beaumont’s Daily Enterprise on that first day. Just how much excitement can be traced in the work of the Enterprise headline writers over the following week:
January 12: MANY OIL PROSPECTORS ARRIVED TODAY.
January 14: FEVERISH AND EXCITED…BIG THINGS PLANNED WHICH WILL BE CARRIED OUT.
January 15: EXCITEMENT STILL HIGH. EVERYBODY GRABBING FOR LAND—PRICES SKY HIGH.
Their best effort, at once breathless and circumspect, ran on January 16: CROWDS STILL COME!…VARIOUS RUMORS OF IMMENSE TRANSACTIONS BUT VERIFICATION WAS NOT OBTAINABLE.
Within months, the population of Beaumont had quintupled; the sleepy town of Port Arthur, twenty miles down the road, was on its way to becoming a petrochemical mecca—and the Texas oil boom was on.
An oil industry already existed in the United States at the time. It had been built by John D. Rockefeller and his contemporaries, following discoveries made in Pennsylvania starting in the late 1850s. But oil had nothing like the dominance it has today. The internal combustion engine barely existed, plastic was decades away, and gasoline was considered an uninteresting refinery byproduct. Kerosene, the world’s first bright, clean-burning lamp fuel, was the real game.
The Lucas Gusher produced more oil than anybody knew what to do with. Well after well was sunk into Spindletop in an orgy of drilling and speculation, and hundreds of new oil companies sprang up; you may recognize names like Texaco, Humble (now ExxonMobil), and Gulf (now Chevron). In Beaumont, the price of a barrel of oil dropped to below that of a barrel of water, so severe was the oversupply. Complicating this dilemma was the fact that this new Texas crude was ill-suited for making kerosene. Even if it had made for good kerosene, the writing was on the wall: kerosene lanterns were being replaced by electric lightbulbs.
The oil industry needed new markets. But what they eventually found—and founded—was a civilization. The dominoes began to fall almost immediately. First were the railroads: in 1901, the Santa Fe Railroad had a single oil-powered locomotive; four years after the Lucas Gusher, it was running 227 of them. Steamships in the Gulf of Mexico weren’t far behind, changing over to fuel oil and lining up to take advantage of the glut. Mechanized agriculture and manufacturing took off in Texas, now suddenly the proving ground for the oil-based economy. Before long, the pattern was being repeated around the globe. Navies of the world switched to oil as well, signaling the abrupt geopolitical centrality of petroleum to the unfolding twentieth century.
And then there was the automobile, coming of age with eerie synchrony to the oil industry’s burgeoning second wave. Several energy sources had been proposed for cars, among them electricity, but oil’s new availability sealed the deal for the internal combustion engine. And the Texas crude refined nicely into gasoline. Before, gasoline had been considered a near-waste product; now it took its place next to fuel oil as the power source of the new age. It was time to pave America, and the rest of the world.
Over the following century, finding new markets for petroleum—new uses, new products, new classes of products—would prove to be one of the things that oil companies do best. And there is a direct line from the glut of oil on Spindletop to the omnipresence of petroleum today. As any oilman or environmentalist will tell you, oil seeps into every corner of our lives—our households, our economy, our politics. It fuels or abets almost everything we do, from tourism to warfare. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. We live on oil, and by it, and its use is responsible for more than a third of global emissions of carbon dioxide, which, in an era of man-made climate change, is perhaps the most fundamental pollutant of all.
On Spindletop, though, on that January morning in 1901, all that was yet to come. Nobody knew that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would be made of petroleum. And there had never been a gusher before. Nobody knew that a well could, without warning, explode into a glistening, green-black geyser. Nobody had ever danced in oil raining from the sky. When Lucas finally saw the roaring fountain that would immortalize his name, he just shouted, “What is it?”
The late afternoon is a good time to drive to Port Arthur from Houston. You’ll arrive at sundown, under a lavender sky deepening into purple, and see the distant lights and towers of a city, a wavering Manhattan spread out along the water, just where Texas decides it would rather be Louisiana.
What you see is not a city. Draw closer, and what you thought were buildings resolve into the spires and turrets of industry. They are refineries. Soon you’re surrounded. In one direction, there is water—in every other, the humming, roaring machinery of petrochemical digestion, a rusty Oz that churns through a million gallons of oil every forty minutes. It is from places like this that we receive our gasoline and jet fuel and plastic and everything else that we can’t do without. Port Arthur is a refinery town, with oil in its veins, toluene in the breeze. It is the pungent center jewel in America’s petrochemical tiara, also known as the Gulf Coast, a region that accounts for nearly half of the country’s refining capacity. The US Department of Energy notes that the region has “the highest concentration of sophisticated [refining] facilities in the world.”
Port Arthur, much like Fort McMurray, has a reputation as a shithole. But while the Albertans have managed to keep the oil sands mines at a discrete remove, Port Arthur is utterly dominated by its refineries, in ways that are impossible for even a casual observer to ignore. The downtown is literally encircled by steel forests billowing sulfurous air day and night. It smells like rotten eggs. Then there are the occasional upsets—accidents or malfunctions that sometimes result in the emergency release of fuel and other refinery goods into the atmosphere. The gases are burned off as they’re released from tubes high above the plant, and people invariably describe refinery flares as awesome events, artificial auroras that paint the sky a glowing orange.
Most important, there are the habitual emissions of volatile organic compounds, things like toluene, benzene, and other contaminants that—it has been plausibly argued—result in elevated rates of respiratory disease, birth defects, and cancer for the communities that live with them. And once in a blue moon—seriously, only very occasionally—the plants self-annihilate. They explode. In Texas City, ninety miles to the west, a 2005 refinery explosion killed 15 people and injured more than 170.
The industry here is the direct legacy of the boom sparked by the Lucas Gusher, and the plants that overshadow downtown Port Arthur are the same plants that were built to receive Spindletop’s oil, although a century’s growth has transformed them. Valero (whose refinery first opened in 1901) and Motiva (1903) now cover almost as much land as downtown Port Arthur itself, and Motiva—in the middle of an expansion when I visited—is on its way to becoming the largest refinery on the continent.
Nevertheless, you can drive down Port Arthur’s main street and fail to see another human being. With its rows of brick storefronts spread along a breezy coastal ship channel, downtown Port Arthur has the bones of a charming small city. But they are just that: the bones.
There are no grocery stores, no hardware stores—in fact I saw no surviving stores of any genre in downtown Port Arthur. There are no operating banks. Building after building sits vacant. Most are boarded up, burned out, or otherwise deserted. The industry that inhabits this city manages somehow not to sustain it.
As was traditional across America, the middle and upper classes of Port Arthur fled their city’s downtown in the 1970s and ’80s. Unlike in many other cities, though, the presence of the refineries has kept anyone with money from moving back. The result is a community that’s among the poorest and most polluted in the nation—yet surrounded by multibillion-dollar companies. It’s the perfect place to refine oil, incinerate toxic waste, and expand a petrochemical plant: a place where they’re used to it. A place already so dominated by industry that nobody who matters will care.
The neighborhood to the north and west of downtown is poor and black. There are roofs still dressed with blue FEMA-issued tarps to cover damage from hurricanes of years past. I saw one FEMA tarp that had itself been repaired with another FEMA tarp. Beyond them towered the metal thickets of the refineries.
The best place to sit down for lunch in central Port Arthur—possibly the only place—is a soul food restaurant called Kelley’s Kitchen. With its orange awning and hand-painted purple sign, it stands like an oasis among the vacant lots and boarded-up buildings. Inside, there is a single room with a painted concrete floor, a half-dozen tables, and a counter and stools in back. A young woman named Daisha served me shrimp, okra, and sausage over a pile of rice, with a pair of turkey wings and corn bread on the side.
Kelley’s Kitchen was no mere restaurant. It was the latest venture from Hilton Kelley, Port Arthur’s leading environmental activist and all-around force of nature. Soul food is not typically a part of the environmental agenda, but Kelley took a holistic approach. “I’m about creating job opportunities,” he said, as I buried my face in okra. “I’m about serving the community. I’m about encouraging young people to get business licenses, to do things that will help them get off the streets. ’Cause these streets will kill you faster than the pollution.”
A tall, ample man in his early fifties, Kelley had an energy that was both generous and pugnacious. Above all, he was a man with hustle. When I first found him, he was sitting at a table working on his laptop while eating lunch; moments later he was outside with a crew of helpers, hauling a pair of heavy wooden stalls to a spot in front of his restaurant. In preparation for the upcoming Mardi Gras parades—the only time of year when central Port Arthur sees some life—Kelley was planning to sell “food and hats and whatnot” to passersby. Moments after that, we were back inside the restaurant and Kelley was pointing out the new dance floor, off to one side. “I love dancing. That’s why I built me a dance floor.” He was an experienced carpenter, and power tools littered the cab of his pickup truck.
But above all, he had devoted himself to picking environmental fights in Port Arthur. His organization, the Community In-power and Development Association, had recently blocked the importation of PCBs from Mexico to a nearby incinerator. It had also fought the Motiva refinery expansion, holding it up and forcing concessions from the company on monitoring and community investment.
Kelley was also working with a group called the Southeast Texas Bucket Brigade, doing grassroots air-quality measurement, in hope of filling the massive gaps in monitoring left by industry and government. The figures available for refinery emissions, one environmental lawyer told me, are based not so much on actual monitoring as on calculations made by the EPA—calculations that can be decades old. As a result, it’s nearly impossible to know exactly what’s drifting out of a refinery in any given week.
“Toxic exposure!” Kelley said. “You’ve got hydrogen sulfide. Benzene, a known carcinogen. Thirteen butadiene. Occasionally, you’ve got explosions that will rattle your windows. Some people are living with storage tanks sixty feet from their backyards. If one of those things went up, it would incinerate everything within a quarter block.” He had strong words for the state regulators—“They have to actually do their jobs!”—as well as for the Environmental Protection Agency, and before I knew it, he had become a one-man poetry slam, performing a piece called “My Toxic Reality,” written after he’d spent a sleepless night listening to his house being rattled by a nearby refinery flare.
In Kelley’s pickup truck, we rode slowly through West Port Arthur, taking what he called his “toxic tour” of the city. Until 1965 or so, he said, segregation meant that African Americans weren’t allowed to live anywhere but the West Side. It was no coincidence that this was the part of town closest to the refineries, hemmed in by Valero and Motiva.
As we drove, Kelley told me his life story with the fluency of someone used to talking to journalists. He grew up in Port Arthur in the 1960s and ’70s, then joined the Navy and ended up in California, where he became an actor and stuntman. In 2000, he came back to Port Arthur for Mardi Gras and was shocked by the poverty and hopelessness he found.
“I would take these little walks,” he said. “And I started wondering, what the hell happened?”
He decided to move back, hoping to find some way to help, and soon found himself focused on the local environment: lobbying for better monitoring and enforcement, and standing by the refinery gates with signs demanding change.
“I thought I’d be here two or three years when I came back,” he told me. “Now it’s been ten years, and I don’t see no end to this environmental fight.”
We drove on, heading along West Seventh Street, the artery running from downtown, through the poor neighborhoods, toward the bridge that crosses the ship channel. “People are just appalled to even drive through here,” Kelley said. “They talk about building another bridge, just so people don’t have to drive down Seventh Street, so they don’t have to go through the West Side.”
He told me it was part of a larger pattern—a conspiracy, even—that threatened to starve West Port Arthur out of existence. “I think a plan was developed,” he said. “A sinister plan. I don’t have any proof, but I’d stand up and say that in front of anybody. You have a community with a thirty-billion-a-year company on one side and a forty-billion-a-year company on the other side, and yet it’s one of the most dilapidated communities in Texas. It don’t add up.”
Driving past the football field of the deserted former high school, Kelly pulled the truck over. He was looking in the rearview mirror. He had done this more than once during the tour, letting people pass us as we crept around the neighborhood.
“Come on, drive around me!” he said. Finally the car passed us. He watched it go.
“I’m real leery about people following me,” he said. “I wouldn’t say paranoid. I’m cautious. And of course, I’ve always got my little friend.”
He pointed at a small soft case resting between us on the floor of the cab.
“Oh,” I said. “You mean—”
“That’s right,” and then he was holding it up, a heavy piece of metal that looked very much like a handgun.
The afternoon had taken a turn. “I keep it loaded,” he said. “And one in the chamber.” He said he carried the gun partly because of the crime rate in Port Arthur—but only partly.
“There are some people here who hate my guts,” he said. “They think I’m a troublemaker. That I’m going to make them lose their jobs. But I am not trying to shut the refineries down. I just think they need to abide by the regulations we already have. By the Clean Air Act. And they’re not.”
A phrase like “abide by the Clean Air Act,” I noticed, took on a nice urgency when you waved a loaded .40 caliber around while saying it.
We passed by a storage yard full of components for the Motiva expansion. Kelley was talking about the products that came from the refineries. He knew they were important. He knew we all used them. He was, after all, driving a truck that probably got about fifteen miles to the gallon.
“My campaign has always been, it could be cleaner,” he said. “It could be done safer. Our health could be protected. The companies should open up. Let us know what’s going on. Let us make informed decisions.” We made a pair of right turns onto roads flanked by pipelines.
“In fairness,” he said, “they’re doing a little better.”
He stopped the truck. We had come to the Carver Terrace housing projects, a set of two-story brick buildings facing the Motiva refinery. Kelley pointed down a pathway.
“I was born right in there,” he told me. “First floor.”
He twisted around in his seat and pointed at a small, deserted playground across the street. “That old swing is the one I used,” he said.
Several hundred yards beyond the playground were the storage tanks of the Motiva refinery, and beyond them the refinery itself, a jungle of pipes and towers, steam plumes and winking flares. The breeze carried a rancid aftertaste.
“We would breathe this air,” said Kelley, staring at the refinery. “We used to joke about it. My mother would say, ‘That’s money you smell.’ And we’d say, ‘No, that’s death!’”
“I guess it’s both,” I said.
He sighed. “Yeah. It’s both. But it wasn’t our money.”
It was an irony of Kelley’s work. With one breath he called the refineries a “cancer” that needed to be cut out of the city, and with the next he lobbied for their owners to hire more locals.
“Look which way all the traffic’s going,” he said as we passed the gate of the Motiva plant. It was the end of the shift, and all the cars were headed out of town. “These people work here, but they don’t live here.” Kelley wanted jobs for West Port Arthur. If it was going to suffer the refineries’ effects, shouldn’t it also share in the wealth? In an area so dominated by industry, half the point of environmental activism was just to get a piece of the action.
On a bright weekend afternoon, I went for a run. Valero shone in the sun as I approached it at a blistering saunter. Seen like this, with time to look, it was somehow hypnotic in its tangles of silver and rust, its smokestacks and flares and steam plumes. Deep inside its chambers and towers, the entire roster of hydrocarbons was dividing itself into fractions of kerosene, gasoline, and jet fuel, and being cracked and catalyzed, cousin by cousin. I peered sweatily at the atmospheric distillation unit and the vacuum distillation unit as I passed, at the catalytic cracker and the hydrocracker, at the hydrotreater and the coker, at the catalytic reformer—not that I knew which was which.
No less than with Chernobyl, it is excruciatingly difficult to make definitive statements about the health effects of Port Arthur’s environment. But there is at least one clear effect, which is that many people here—not just the environmental activists—simply assume the worst.
A taco truck was parked at the southeast corner of the Valero plant, just outside the fence from the resplendent steel sphere of a storage tank. The truck’s owner was a genial Mexican immigrant who told me he had seen the plant release flares so large that he could feel the heat on his back, even here outside the fence. Through the window in the truck, I asked him if he thought the air from the plant was bad.
Of course it’s bad, he said. It smells terrible. Feo was the word he used—Spanish for “ugly.” You get all kinds of things from that air, he said. Cancer.
When I suggested that he find some other place than the Valero fence line to park his taco truck, he laughed.
You’ve got to make a living, he said, and handed me a taco, al pastor, on the house.
Then there was Ray, a refinery worker who struck up a conversation with me at a bar downtown. He had worked at the BASF petrochemical plant for twenty-two years.
“Lemme tell you something,” he said, drunkenly waving a plastic cup of Boone’s Farm. “By the time I’m fifty, I know—I don’t guess, I know—I’m gonna have some kind of cancer. Everybody at that plant knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt.” Ray was also of the opinion that a terrorist attack on one refinery could lead to a catastrophic chain reaction that would level fifteen plants between BASF and downtown. “This place is a time bomb,” he said with some joviality.
In Port Arthur even the most ardent civic booster may shift seamlessly onto such topics. Five miles north of downtown, at the convention center, I met Peggy and Laura, two friendly ladies in charge of the Majestic Krewe of Aurora’s annual Mardi Gras Ball. Peggy was such a loyal daughter of Port Arthur that she was still nursing a grudge against Janis Joplin (who grew up here) for once having talked trash about the local high school. But I barely had to let it drop that I was a writer interested in the environment before Peggy took up the cudgel.
“Cancer!” she exclaimed. “We’ve got lots of cancer around here. It’s the refineries. And the incinerator. You know about the incinerator, out by the highway? Where they’re burning all that nerve gas? Why, they burn all kinds of horrible things out there. That stuff is going to get into the aquifer,” she said. She sounded almost proud.
But I wasn’t here to follow cancer down the rabbit hole. I could have spent a lifetime trying to nail down what portion of the city’s elevated cancer load was real and what was merely assumed—not to mention the health effects of a citywide assumption of cancer. Leave it to the epidemiologists. What I wanted to see was how the landscape and culture of Southeast Texas had been shaped by more than a century spent as Big Oil’s ground zero. An economic and cultural ecosystem of sorts had been created when the Lucas Gusher spat itself onto the earth, one that persisted to this day.
“Would you like to come to the ball?” Laura asked. She had tickets in her hand.
By the time I returned to the convention center the following night, it had been transformed into a fantasy of glitter and noise. Smiling men and women wearing tuxedos and evening gowns flowed by in a cackling stream, bringing a palpable enthusiasm to the project of getting drunk.
My friends Scott and Lorena had come out from Houston for the occasion, and although we had tried to spruce ourselves up, we stuck out. It turns out there is no way not to stick out in a convention center full of people dressed as harlequins and playing cards. This year’s theme was “The Games People Play.”
It was a party fueled by beer and oil. The projected logos of its sponsors bejeweled the ballroom walls. Both Budweiser and Bud Light were represented, as well as the Valero Port Arthur Refinery, Total Petrochemicals, BASF, Sabina Petrochemicals—all the major players. They were here to celebrate with the city’s upper crust, the inheritors of the economy created on Spindletop. People who I doubted lived in West Port Arthur. Dance music pounded from speakers hanging overhead. Green lasers shot out over the crowd from the stage, tracing twitching planes in the fog-machine atmosphere. It was hard not to think of the “feverish and excited” scene described by Beaumont’s Daily Enterprise in the first weeks of 1901. I turned around to see a young woman in an elaborate Cinderella costume. The Queen of Diamonds? Then Scott was there, holding three aluminum bottles of Bud Select.
“You must not miss the tableau,” Laura had told us. And now it had begun, an elaborate ceremony that was most likely descended from pre-Columbian human sacrifice rituals, and that had now been retasked for the apportionment of social standing among high-status members of the Krewe. To validate this status, chosen individuals would appear in male-female pairs, draped in gaudy costumes conforming to the ball’s theme—in this case, games. Duly announced, the couple would then parade around the ballroom on small chariots pulled by young men in maroon vests.
The first couple appeared. I don’t recall whether they were dressed as Yahtzee or as craps, only that the man was equipped with a large, feathery headdress and a suit of blazing sequins, and the woman with a massive corona of flowered ruffles. The couples kept coming, each dressed as a board game or a card game or a game show. It took hours. The crowd thronged around them, a riot in formal wear, waving madly to catch the plastic beads and party favors being thrown by the couple of the moment, who would eventually ascend to side stages where they would pose for the remaining duration of the tableau, feathery demigods on display.
Motiva was in the house. Soon to be the largest refinery in North America, it had sponsored a couple dressed as the board game Mousetrap. After seeing the snaking insanity of the refinery itself, it seemed almost too good to be true that Motiva would come to a party dressed as a Rube Goldberg machine. I got up from our table to get a closer look. Lady Gaga beat her fist against my chest. A quartet of dancers gyrated across the stage in the distance. Small Frisbees with blinking LED lights flew in parabolas over the crowd. The Motiva queen showed her teeth to the ceiling. Beads exploded from her hands, filling the air with plastic shrapnel. Through the haze, I saw the silhouette of a young man in a perfect cowboy hat, his profile seething in the flare of a spotlight.
Scott and I found Laura on one of the side stages, utterly transformed from the day before. Then, she had been a short, unprepossessing woman in jeans and sensible shoes. Now she was dressed as Wheel of Fortune, a Pat Sajak fever dream of sequins and feathers, with an enormous model of the wheel rising from her shoulders. She was ten feet tall, an Aztec high priestess of TV game shows, with a floppy BANKRUPT wedge running down her leg. One of the first out of the gate, she had been standing in presentation for upward of an hour, next to a nebula of plumage that was a woman dressed as Monopoly.
Beneath her towering outfit, Laura’s smile had frozen into a rictus of determination. I was concerned she might collapse.
“You look amazing!” I shouted over the music.
“Thank you!” she screamed.
“I don’t know how you can stay on your feet with that costume!” I said.
“It’s much lighter than it looks!” she warbled, and took a swig from a bottle of water.
The tableau was reaching its climax. Shafts of light exploded from a giant mirror ball. Laser-light unicorns galloped across the back wall of the ballroom. A king and queen were announced, and all hell broke loose. Confetti swirled in drifts. A conga line fought its way through the hurricane. An elderly woman danced alone in circles, her arms raised in triumph, or surrender.
Within two years of the Lucas Gusher, overdrilling bled Spindletop dry. The rush was over—or rather it moved on, spreading out to new oil strikes elsewhere in the state and country. Later, in the 1920s, a new wave of exploration led to a second boom on Spindletop. Then, in the 1950s and ’60s, the land was mined for sulfur and salt brine, causing the ground to subside in broad depressions, as if letting out a great sigh of geological exhaustion. The forest of derricks was long gone. The place was left empty. Today it is a range of sand and scrub, dotted with the wreckage of oil production past.
On the south side of Beaumont, between Highway 287 and the Lamar University driving range, I went looking for Lucas No. 1. It was raining when I got there. On a wide, soggy lawn, a stone obelisk stood cold and lonely in the damp. I read the engraving on its base:
ON THIS SPOT, ON THE TENTH DAY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, A NEW ERA IN CIVILIZATION BEGAN.
But someone should carve that obelisk a footnote. This was not, in fact, the spot where it all happened. The obelisk had been moved from the original site when the ground began to subside. This was merely the front lawn of the Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum.
It’s not a bad museum, otherwise. They have built an entire replica boomtown village, and next to the obelisk, there is a life-size replica of the Lucas No. 1 oil derrick, fitted with a large nozzle, as if from a fire hose. For a hundred dollars, I was told, you can have this nozzle turned on, and it will spray water at the same pressure and to the same height as the original Lucas Gusher. Oil companies sometimes bring new hires there to celebrate.
As for the actual Lucas Gusher, it’s about a mile south of here, on private land. The Spindletop oil field has been designated a national historic landmark, but it’s also designated Authorized Personnel Only.
The oil that once came from Spindletop now comes from more remote oilfields, or from offshore wells in the Gulf of Mexico, or is imported by tanker from overseas. One day it may come, by pipeline, from Alberta. In any case, the refineries of Port Arthur are tied less to the people living outside their fence lines than they are to the distant sources that keep them humming.
But in Southeast Texas, oil sustains more than refineries. Its nourishment spreads out through circle upon circle of lesser players that cluster and compete at the oasis of its wealth, living off its power and success—and even off its disasters.
On January 23, 2010, an oil tanker called the Eagle Otome entered Port Arthur’s ship channel, the Sabine-Neches Waterway, with 570,000 barrels of crude oil on board, destined for the ExxonMobil refinery in Beaumont. To make its delivery, the tanker would have to transit the length of the ship channel, a thin, man-made strait that runs inland from the Gulf, along the frontage of downtown Port Arthur, and then up toward Beaumont. The channel measures not even three hundred yards wide at points, and the navigable waterway—the part deep enough for ships—is even narrower. It is a hard needle for any large vessel to thread, and the Eagle Otome was more than eight hundred feet long.
While the age of gushers is long past, there is still occasion in Port Arthur for the unplanned flow of petroleum. As the Eagle Otome came around a mild bend in the channel, it swerved off course, fishtailing slowly down the channel as it approached the wharf in downtown Port Arthur. The tanker—nearly as long as the channel was wide—skewed across the waterway, colliding with a vessel tied up at the wharf and obstructing the path of an oncoming towboat. The towboat, pushing a pair of 250-foot-long barges, had no choice but to plow directly into the Eagle Otome, ripping open a neat gash in the oil tanker’s hull. In what seems like a great stroke of luck, though, only 2 percent of the tanker’s oil spilled through the opening.
On the other hand, we’re talking about 2 percent of more than 23 million gallons of cargo. It was the largest oil spill Texas had seen in two decades.
As with an oil find, so with an oil spill: for as long as it lasts, it is a source of work. On Spindletop, that meant on and off for decades. In the case of the Eagle Otome, it meant a little over two weeks. There were cleanup companies to deal with the spilled oil, and tugs to tow the damaged ships away for repairs. There was the media, trying to puzzle out the causes of the accident and covering the closure of the channel. A more catastrophic incident might have sustained them for a month or more. (As for me, it was just dumb luck that I happened to show up in Port Arthur only a couple of weeks after it happened.)
An oil spill is a boon of sorts even to environmental activists, whether as additional motivation or as convincing, public proof of an issue’s importance. The threat of poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas from the spill prompted a short evacuation of downtown Port Arthur—a fact that had already become another arrow for Hilton Kelley to shoot at the refinery companies.
It might not be the most efficient way to extract value from oil, but the fact remains that a spill is not only a spill. It’s a massive carcass, which we gather around to eat.
At my hotel, the parking lot was crowded with trucks bearing the logos of companies like Clean Harbors and Oil Mop LLC. I was not the only one who had chosen the Ramada: the Coast Guard had set up its spill response headquarters in one of the conference rooms. Khaki-wearing men strode in and out of the lobby with an air of can-do seriousness. At its height, the cleanup had put something like two thousand people to work, but now things were winding down, and the mood was almost festive.
“I hear you’re leaving us,” said the hotel manager to a passing cleanup contractor.
“Well, maybe we’ll be back,” said the contractor.
“For the next oil spill?” called a woman from behind the check-in desk.
In the empty hotel restaurant, I met with Jeremy Hansen and Bryan Markland, two well-scrubbed Coast Guard officials working on the cleanup effort. “You’ve got all these local cleanup contractors poised to jump,” Hansen said. “It’s cutthroat.”
Markland told me that cleanup contractors often begin their work even without being hired, confident that if they do the work, someone will have to pay for it. And so skimmer boats materialize, hungry for oil, and lines of floating containment boom sprout to cordon it off, and the cleanup’s economics bloom.
It is discouraging, though, to reflect on how little even an effective cleanup can achieve. “Most oil spills, if you get more than 15 percent of the oil recovered, you’re doing good,” Markland said. “We think we’re up in the 30 percent range on this.” The rest of a spill, he told me, simply evaporates or disperses to what he called an unnoticeable sheen. Which is to say, most of the cleanup is actually done by nature—or isn’t done at all.
Hansen was sitting back, his arms crossed. He looked a little mischievous.
“Did you see the Port Arthur slogan?” he asked.
I laughed. I had seen it, on the website of the Port Arthur Chamber of Commerce. It might have been the most ill-advised civic motto of all time:
Port Arthur: Where Oil and Water Do Mix. Beautifully.
Hansen smiled and shook his head in disbelief. “It’s a good thing they don’t,” he said. “Or it would be a lot harder to clean up.”
Then there was Rhonda, the grumpy pelican lady. She was in charge of rescuing and rehabilitating birds oiled by the spill. A bustling woman in a salmon-colored shirt exploding with pockets, she struck me as deeply unsentimental about her work, and she didn’t hide her annoyance that I was interested in it. Had I been naive to imagine that the bird savior of record would share a little enthusiasm for bird saving? But Rhonda was no simple bird lover. She was the director of Wildlife Response Services LLC—just one more contractor providing post-spill services.
“What is it you want, exactly?” she asked.
Eventually she resigned herself to my presence, and soon we were standing in the corner of a cavernous warehouse, staring at a pelican. Miraculously, only nine birds had been oiled in the spill: a loon, a cormorant, a seagull, a spotted sandpiper, a black-crowned night heron, and four pelicans. With one exception, they had all been released back to the wild after being cleaned, fed, and housed until they were back in fighting form. The lone holdover was a brown pelican now living in a plywood pen with a sheet over it, in a temporary rehabilitation center downtown.
A rehab worker raised the corner of the sheet and the three of us peered through the narrow opening. I held my breath. Inside, lit with the radiant orange glow of a heat lamp, the single pelican sat motionless on a low perch, a Buddha with folded wings.
“He’ll puke if you pick him up,” Rhonda said. She was advising the rehab worker not to let the pelican take a test swim yet. “You can’t mess with them when they eat.”
It had been a rough century for pelicans on the Gulf Coast. A hundred years earlier, fishermen had gotten the idea that pelicans were competing with them, and had slaughtered them wholesale. Worse still, by the 1950s, our release of pesticides into the environment had become a two-pronged machine of pelicanic destruction: DDT weakened their eggs, killing chicks before they even hatched; and Endrine killed off the fish that were their food, starving pelicans en masse. By the late 1960s, they had almost completely disappeared from the Texas and Louisiana coasts.
The late 1960s and ’70s saw pelicans reintroduced from Florida, and a ban on the persistent organic pollutants that undermined their niche in the ecosystem. Today, the coast is once again crawling with them. Which is not to say they are invulnerable, even without oil spills.
“We have a pelican die-off every year,” Rhonda said as the rehab worker closed the sheet over the pen. “There are some pretty harsh cold snaps. The fish move off, and the birds don’t get enough food.” She shrugged. “I don’t know, I’m not a biologist.”
Then she laughed. “These guys were actually lucky they got oiled,” she said. “They’ve been fed quite well.”
The Hotel Sabine is the tallest building in Port Arthur, and the best vantage from which to watch the aftermath of an oil spill. There’s simply nothing more pleasant than to book a south-facing room on an upper floor and enjoy a gimlet as the cleanup workers buzz up and down the waterway.
At least, it would be pleasant. The Hotel Sabine has been abandoned for years, and now stands vacant and eyeless, not only Port Arthur’s most prominent landmark but also its most obtrusive eyesore. Unless you plan on breaking in, there will be no tenth-floor views of the ship channel for you.
Instead, I drove down to Pleasure Island, the grassy artificial landmass on the other side of the channel, to watch the men in Tyvek wrap things up. Oil Mop boats dragged lines of floating containment boom up and down the waterway, their hulls smeared brown with crude. The Eagle Otome had already been spirited away for repairs, and the mood was calm—pastoral-industrial.
The channel’s surface was unremarkable from a distance, but closer inspection revealed that a not-yet-unnoticeable sheen of oil persisted near the shore. I crouched on a sloping concrete slab that formed part of the bank and watched the filmy rainbow burble over the rocks.
There was a man standing on the bank just up the channel. He was short, with blue-tinted glasses and a suede cowboy hat jammed down on his head. And he was fishing.
His name was Nelson. Originally from El Salvador, he said he had been in the United States for ages. He owned a dump truck in Beaumont and made his living hauling dirt and gravel for road construction jobs. In a drawl that was half Texas and all Salvador, he told me this was his favorite spot to fish.
“Last weekend, they had that spill?” he said. “I show up here, a lot of oil. A lot of oil. I went further up the channel. Where it was clean.”
We looked at the edge of the channel below our feet, where the waterline curled in colored wavelets of petroleum.
He frowned with approval. “Today, though…I think is okay.”
“It doesn’t bother you at all that there’s still oil on the water?” I asked. “I mean, there’s still guys in orange suits.”
“No, man!” he said, and waved at the channel. “If you fish like this, with some oil there, then you don’t have to use no oil when you cook it!” He cackled. “That’s a joke.”
He had extra fishing rods. I probably hadn’t fished in twenty years, but it came back after a pair of somewhat hazardous casts, and soon we got on with the business of letting the crabs of Port Arthur steal Nelson’s bait from our hooks. The Oil Mop boats continued their rounds, and Nelson cracked open his supply of Coors Light.
He seemed glad to have me there, and soon we were talking about his divorce, about how much he missed his sons. He told me he wanted to find a girlfriend from overseas, and about his complicated attempts to find one over the Internet. It sounded less like online dating and more like a Nigerian banking scam, but that didn’t seem to bother Nelson.
What about you, man? You got a girlfriend?
I told him I did.
As a matter of fact, I was engaged. The Doctor and I were getting married. And once we were married, we were going to India, to take the world’s first pollution tourism honeymoon. That she considered this even tolerable seemed like further proof of true love. Cruising the world’s most degraded rivers, just the two of us…I was pretty sure it was going to be more romantic than it sounded.
There was a tug on the line. I did as Nelson had taught: I pulled up sharply on the rod to set the hook—and waited. “You feel something again after that, you’ve got a fish,” he’d said. But so far the tugs on my line had signified only that my hooks were now empty of bait.
But this time there was another tug on the line, and another—an irregular rhythm drumming against the rod and reel. I started reeling, and like magic, two large fish appeared in the water.
Two.
Nelson threw down his rod, whooping. “Pull him in!” he cried. “Pull him in! You got two!”
I pulled and reeled and yanked the fish toward the bank, where Nelson grabbed the line and pulled them out of the rainbow-stained water, beaming at my success. The fish hung from the line, exhausted and gaping, each of them a good sixteen inches long. They were the largest fish I had ever caught. Larger, perhaps, than any fish ever caught in the history of the world.
“That’s called drum,” Nelson said. Drum. I had caught oily drum. He slapped his leg. “That’s going to cook up real good!”
Rhonda was on the phone. They were about to release the pelican. Over the line, I could hear her teeth grinding. She hadn’t wanted to make the call, but I had put in a request with the Coast Guard to ask her to.
She sounded hopeful that I wouldn’t be able to make it, and gave me only very vague directions. Her team was already on the road, she said. It was probably too late for me to find them.
But if she thought she could hide this pelican release from the world, she was mistaken. I sped across town, crossed an imposing cable-stayed bridge over the northeast elbow of the ship channel, and then doubled back to the south. Pavement turned to gravel, and the road plunged into a wetland park, stands of grass interlaced by channels of placid water. To the west, the horizon was decorated with the distant skyline of the refineries, tiny thickets of smokestacks and fractionating columns.
Driving south, I passed the occasional clot of trash—a shattered television on the shoulder, a pink recliner submerged to its forehead in a placid side channel. Cormorants and pelicans wheeled by, and cranes and herons, and other long-necked beasties. Here and there, men sat by their pickup trucks and fished. The fish were not biting, they told me.
Of course they’re not biting, I thought. You’re fishing in clean water.
Finally I spotted a pair of SUVs parked by the canal that ran parallel to the road. It was Rhonda’s crew. I had caught them in the act.
The pelican was already in the water, floating next to the reeds on the far side of the channel, maybe fifty feet away. I walked up to Rhonda and her three colleagues. She registered my presence with obvious disappointment. The rehab worker from the warehouse was there, too. “Hey, buddy!” she said, proving that not all pelican ladies are grumpy.
We watched the pelican. There was an air of expectation, even concern.
“C’mon!” someone said. “Fly!”
But the pelican did not fly. It merely floated. And the longer it floated, the more tense everyone became. At last, it dunked its head and unfurled its wings, and, with a broad flap, splashed itself with water. The crowd broke into applause.
“Yes!” said Rhonda. “That’s what we’re looking for!” She took some pictures. “Do that again!” she shouted at the pelican, and it obeyed, stretching and flicking its wings over and over, bathing in the churning spray, improbably majestic.
Rhonda turned to me. “See?” she said accusingly. “It’s not very exciting.”
“It is exciting!” I protested. I couldn’t span the absurdity of not being able to convince a rescuer of wildlife that wildlife rescue was, in fact, interesting.
Rhonda turned back to the pelican, now swimming in idle circles, and began screaming at it.
“STAY AWAY FROM PEOPLE!” she bellowed. “FLY OFF INTO THE BUSHES! STAY! AWAY! FROM PEOPLE!”
She caught her breath. “That’s the problem, is if he got used to people.”
“He’s gonna miss that heat lamp tonight,” someone said. The forecast was calling for cold weather. “He’s gonna wish he were back in that warm cage.”
“No,” said Rhonda. “He hated it in there.”
It heaved toward us: a mountainside of black steel. I was standing on a gangway, clutching the rail as our boat rocked and turned. I was facing port. That means left. It was hard to look anywhere else; the thing approaching to port had no end. It spread up and out from the water, an endless wall of rust-streaked metal, and we were falling toward it.
Duane was there, the trim Boy Scout of the sea, wearing a backpack.
“Don’t let go of the railing until you have a good grip on the ladder,” he said. I made a noise like a strangled fish.
The tanker was so tall and so wide that it seemed to outstrip my entire field of vision. Yet the distance between it and us was surprisingly nimble in the way it diminished. At this rate, I thought—
Then we were at the ladder, a wooden ladder hanging down the rain soaked hull. Wood? Its treads hung from thick ropes dark with sea scum. I grabbed it and found myself clinging to the outside of twenty million gallons of Mexican crude. We had boarded the Pink Sands.
When Port Arthur began its life as an oil town, ships came here to take the stuff away. But now, of course, they bring it in, by the half-million-barrel load. The question, especially pointed in the aftermath of a spill, is how to make sure these ships don’t crash, despite taking so much cargo up such a narrow waterway. Or perhaps the question is why they don’t crash more often. The answer, I was here to learn, is that any large tanker that enters the Sabine-Neches Waterway is required to carry a pair of Sabine pilots.
On the wide, linoleum-floored bridge, we met Captain Tweedel, Duane’s colleague and president of the Sabine Pilots. A tall, clean-cut man wearing chinos and a braided belt, Tweedel had grown up in Port Arthur. (Though he now lived in Beaumont. His wife had insisted on not living in sight of a refinery.)
The two captains got down to work, staring out the window with that look people get when they have just taken control of fifty-five thousand gross tons.
“Full ahead,” Tweedel ordered.
“Full ahead,” said the helmsman.
I was on my second visit to Port Arthur, several months after the Eagle Otome oil spill, and the channel had long since returned to normal operation. But questions still lingered; the government had yet to finish its investigation into the cause of the accident.
In the meantime, the Sabine Pilots had begun working with a public relations consultant, and were surprisingly willing to let me tag along. They wanted their story to get out.
The trick to keeping an oil tanker from crashing and spilling oil all over your ecosystem, it seems, is to have Charlie Tweedel and Duane Bennett standing on the bridge. They stand there, staring out the window, at a piece of water they have studied and navigated for years, and occasionally tell the nice Filipino man at the helm to adjust the rudder by ten degrees. It’s more complicated than that—but not by much.
“Port ten!” said Duane from the captain’s chair. He looked like a nicer, nerdier Captain Kirk.
“Port ten!” came the response. Nothing happened. The deck continued to vibrate with the power of the engine. Then, six hundred feet in front of us, the nose of the tanker began creeping to the left.
Hardly any major harbor or channel lets ships enter without a local pilot aboard. The stakes are simply too high—and the navigation too tricky—to leave it to some guy who doesn’t know the route’s every curve and shoal. The pilots meet their charges in open water, before the ships enter the channel, and clamber aboard—pirates by invitation. Tanker captains are more than happy to hand over the controls, as they must.
“We consider ourselves as the buffer, as protection to the environment,” said Tweedel, staying on message. “The government expects us to act to protect the waterway and the populace from some radical conflagration or pollution.”
“And the accident in January?” I asked.
“I don’t want to talk about that much,” he said. “It’s still under investigation.” He told me there was no single factor the accident could be hung on.
We slid forward through the cold, misty morning, passing from the outer harbor into the green mouth of the channel. Idle oil platforms lingered against the bank to our left, waiting for contracts or to be torn apart for scrap. On the navigation table, I had seen a map of the coast, marked with dozen upon dozen of offshore oil wells, punctuating the Gulf with surprising density. “They’re like fleas,” Tweedel had remarked.
Port Arthur’s ship channel is not only so narrow that two large tankers going in opposite directions would have no room to pass each other, but also so shallow that Tweedel described it as a “muddy ditch.” He told me that, at the moment, we were drawing thirty-nine feet. That meant the bottom of the hull was riding thirty-nine feet below the surface of the channel.
“What’s the maximum draft you can have in the channel?” I asked.
He smiled. “Forty.”
“Midship!” shouted Duane.
“Midship!”
The task of piloting a tanker requires continuous attention. “As a pilot, you’d really be taking a risk to leave the helm for more than a minute or two,” Tweedel said. He pointed at an oncoming barge. “If he ran aground, I’d have to immediately take action. And I’ve seen those guys run aground lots of times.”
“We’re compensated for the risk,” said Duane. Piloting paid well.
Tweedel peered out at the low, misty sky. It was also up to the pilots, he told me, to stop tanker traffic in the channel if visibility was too poor. Today’s conditions were just good enough.
“It gets foggy for three or four days, and people start screaming for their crude oil,” he said. If the supply of oil didn’t keep up, the refineries might have to lower their production—and that would cost them money. There was huge pressure on the pilots to keep traffic moving.
“We want to support the industry guys,” Tweedel said, “but we don’t answer to Motiva or Total.”
We slid forward, an impossibly great momentum, a floating machine literally as long as a skyscraper is tall. I looked over at the helmsman. He was holding a semicircular wheel not unlike the steering wheel of a go-cart. It seemed like it would be very easy, had I wanted, to shove him aside and twirl that wheel, and create a new round of honest work for nearly everyone I had met in Port Arthur.
“Starboard twenty,” said Duane.
“Starboard twenty,” said the helmsman.
Starboard? Earth to Duane! Starboard? I would have said we needed some port rudder, if anything.
“Midship,” said Duane.
“Midship,” said the helmsman.
And with that, subtly, our leviathan shifted its attitude and slid true, perfectly congruent to the grassy shores of the channel.
Duane handed the command off to Tweedel and walked over to the window. I told him I had been playing a game called Drive a Supertanker, and losing.
“It’s more art than science,” he said. “You have to know the science, but there’s a feel you get. If you can’t feel the vessel, you won’t be good as a pilot.”
He took my notebook and started drawing diagrams, explaining the hydrodynamics of a large ship moving through a narrow channel. The size of a ship affects how it handles in such a limited space. As the ship comes closer to the side of the channel, the water being displaced by the vessel creates pressures and suctions that interact with the narrowing space between the ship and the bank. The ship begins to handle differently, steering itself, resisting in ways it wouldn’t in open water. These effects not only constrain how the vessel can be piloted, and how quickly, but also allow the person in control to sense the ship’s position in relation to the channel, based on how it’s handling.
“A ship is a totally different animal in these channels,” Tweedel offered.
Barges passed us coming the other way, carrying refinery products, wood chips, grain. We were the only large tanker; because the channel was too narrow for two such ships to pass each other, their comings and goings were scheduled so that it never happened. But even the movements of smaller craft had to be carefully coordinated to ensure safe passage through such constricted waters. So Tweedel and Duane were also traffic controllers, scrutinizing the approach of other vessels, ordering them around, negotiating what maneuvers they and the Pink Sands would take as they met.
“I’m gonna need some of that water, Cap’n,” Tweedel said over the radio, cajoling an oncoming tug into position.
We were entering Port Arthur, passing under the soaring eyesore of the bridge that connected Pleasure Island with West Port Arthur. The Valero refinery crawled by on the left, superb in the mist. The Sabine Pilots should charge for tours of the waterfront. Throw in a bottle of champagne and some strawberries, and nobody would ever have to ride in a hot-air balloon again.
On the right, I spotted the concrete slab where Nelson and I had gone fishing. He had called me earlier in the week, leaving a joyously unintelligible message, inviting me over for dinner the night before my ride with the Sabine Pilots. He still had my oil spill fish in his freezer. We cooked them in foil packets on a grill in his front yard, next to his dump truck. The fish that needs no oil, steaming and succulent, with rice and tortillas on the side.
We had reached downtown Port Arthur.
“Isn’t this the place where the accident happened in January?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” Tweedel said. “It was a ship just like this.” And there was silence on the bridge.
Tweedel and Duane were deeply skilled men, dedicated to their craft and fully aware of its importance. But any system that depends on a high level of human skill is, by its nature, vulnerable to human error. Many months later, when the government finally announced the results of its investigation into the Port Arthur oil spill, it would point the finger largely at the Sabine Pilots. The lead pilot on board the Eagle Otome, in particular, had started his turn under the bridge too late, and then failed to correct for the sheering motions that resulted, pushing the tanker into a grand swerve that ended in its collision at the wharf. The government report would acknowledge other contributing factors, but it would place the most specific blame at the feet of the pilots. In the end, it came down to bad driving.
I went outside on the port deck, a steel platform that jutted out from the wheelhouse, high over the water. The rain had stopped, and the breeze was warm under the clouds, and faintly rank. Earlier, the air had been full of birds, a squad of pelicans coasting overhead, just out of reach, and black-headed Bonaparte’s gulls cavorting behind the ship. They were attracted to the wake of the vessel, Duane said, to the tidbits churned up from the bottom of the channel as we passed.
And that is how we rolled along. A half-million barrels of oil coasting inland at seven knots, attended by a host of dancing birds. Enough petroleum to sustain the needs of the nation for a whole forty minutes.
A sign once pointed tourists to a viewpoint from which they could peer into Spindletop and see, distantly, the actual site of the Lucas Gusher. But a hurricane blew the sign down, and it has not been replaced. To people driving past, Spindletop is a void space, a low mile of trees by the highway that goes unremarked, even in the area whose prosperity it once sparked.
But however invisible, the wedge of land between Sulphur Drive and West Port Arthur Road holds a secret. And the secret is this: the oil rush on Spindletop is not over. Not quite.
Steven Radley is the last man standing. More than a hundred years and 150 million barrels of oil after Patillo Higgins’s hunch first came good—and a half century after the major producers left this land for dead—he is doing his damndest to squeeze every last cup of petroleum out of its stubborn soil.
We met up by a set of large, squat oil tanks that hunkered in the predawn darkness. Radley was a boyish man of fifty, his face creased by decades of work in the oil fields of Southeast Texas. In his truck, we bumped down the dirt tracks that counted as roads on Spindletop, and I asked him about the new well. Was there any chance it would be a gusher?
“I hope not!” he said, smiling. “That’d be fun for about ten minutes. And then we’d have to clean it up.”
He was planning to drill to a depth of 1,250 feet, just short of the layer of rock that crowns the salt dome that is Spindletop’s dominant geological feature. It was along the edges of this huge underground tower of salt that oil had collected over the ages. The new well would be similar in depth to the famous Lucas No. 1, but unlike its precursor, Radley’s well was not about to make oil cheaper than water, or to outproduce the rest of the country. When I asked him what the new well would be, if not a gusher, he grimaced. “Probably not a very good one, honestly.”
Beyond the trees there was a cold, artificial glow. We had reached the drilling area, tucked between a woody thicket and a curve in the service road.
For most wells, it is no longer necessary to build a stationary, towering drilling derrick, like you see in old pictures. Instead, Radley was using a mobile rig, mounted on the back of a sky-blue vehicle the size of a fire truck. It had been parked on a level pad laid down on the loose, powdery soil, and then its derrick had been folded upright. A narrow steel scaffold, maybe seventy-five feet tall, the derrick had red and white struts that were fitted with the glare of a dozen fluorescent bulbs.
Radley parked next to the trees. A hopeful thought rattled into my fore-brain. I pointed at the rig.
“You know, I’d be happy to lend a hand.”
He laughed.
“No, really,” I said. “Just hold a wrench, or whatever.”
He laughed again, as though I’d told him some great double-punch line joke about a jerk who wants to help out on a drilling rig—when instead, in a stroke of brilliance, I’d just invented the oil field dude ranch.
We got out of the car. Three roughnecks were clambering around on the derrick. Radley pointed out the driller, the derrick hand, the floor hand. “Just call them roughnecks,” he said. “They all do everything.” The division of labor broke down on operations this small.
We walked over to the base of the derrick. In front of it, three dozen lengths of drilling pipe, each thirty-two feet long, were laid out. At the base of the rig, lying disconnected on its side, was the rotary drill bit: a trio of knuckled wheels that formed a heavy fist of red-painted metal. Its surface had the hefty gleam of a toolbox.
“That’s brand-new,” Radley said, nodding with approval. “You can use one like that for four or five wells.” After that, it might be possible to rebuild the bit. More likely it would become a paperweight.
Drilling an oil well is an art, one that was developed, in part, right here on Spindletop. The bit is fixed to heavy lengths of drill pipe. The pipe is then turned—driven in this case by a large, hanging tool called a power swivel. The rotating pipe rolls the wheels of the drill bit against the sand and rock below, grinding and shattering downward. At the same time, a slurry of drilling mud is forced down through the pipe, emerging at the bottom of the well from an opening in the bit. As it circulates back to the surface, the mud carries away the cuttings, the loose fragments of rock or sand that the bit has ground through.
“Drilling mud was invented right here!” Radley said, as we watched the roughnecks prepare the rig. “They actually had a bunch of cows tramping around in a pen to produce it.” It was Anthony Lucas who had pioneered the use of drilling mud, and it was a key innovation. Rotary drilling had been around for a while by the turn of the twentieth century, but the use of drilling mud prevented the narrow sides of a well from falling in against the shaft of the drilling pipe, causing it to seize up. This was especially critical in the young geology of coastal Texas, which confronted drillers with layer after layer of clay and sand. Drilling mud has been a staple of oil exploration ever since, even on the most sophisticated offshore rigs.
Radley’s roughnecks threw themselves into their preparations like lively, oil-stained pirates. The bit was fitted to the heavy first stage of pipe, and the driller mounted the control station. The power swivel swiveled. Mud circulated. A mercenary focus concentrated the air; I stared at the rig like a midshipman watching the sails for wind. The sun had come up. Then, at the pull of a lever, the rig’s engine revved, the shaft spun, and the bit dropped through a hole in the drilling floor into the ground below. Returning mud flowed up out of the well and along a small trench to a large pit out back, where it would be filtered and cycled back into the pipe. We were drilling for oil.
Radley’s gear was recent technology: powerful, mobile, and automated. Tasks that even a few decades ago required multiple workers—like adding a new section of drilling pipe—could now be accomplished by two people with a power swivel and a pair of hydraulic tongs. But the basic elements of rotary drilling—derrick, pipe, bit, mud—hadn’t changed. Anthony Lucas would have known with a single look what Steven Radley was doing, and why. The difference is that, while Lucas was convinced he could find large reservoirs of oil, Radley wasn’t looking for anything but dregs.
Most oilmen focus on discovering and extracting deposits that haven’t yet been found or tapped into. From the speculators buying up land around Beaumont in 1901 to multinational corporations using sophisticated seismic imaging off the coast of Brazil, the purpose of the game is to secure a prize that can justify the vast up-front investment.
Eventually, though, the returns begin to diminish, and the expense of reconfiguring and maintaining existing wells—not to mention sinking new ones—is no longer justified by the declining revenue coming out of the field. It’s at that point that an oil company abandons a place. Not when the oil is completely gone, but when there’s too little of it to be worth the effort.
Such a field becomes known as a stripper field, and will be left for smaller companies with less overhead or less ambitious profit targets. Such companies depend on keeping their costs down and on using whatever technology or ingenuity they can to squeeze out of the ground what Big Oil left behind.
“I don’t have a lot of overhead,” Radley told me. “We do things the least expensive way possible. I’ve got it down to where I don’t think anyone can drill cheaper than we do.”
He started drawing lines in the sand, counting off the strikes against big oil companies. They had CEOs, and executives, and lawyers on staff, and on and on. In contrast, Radley’s corporate structure was uncomplicated: He owned 40 percent of the company, and his father owned the rest. And unlike the chief executives and board members of, say, ExxonMobil, Radley and his dad were their own middle management and technical staff, working their own leases every day. Radley’s wife ran the office, and his son worked for the company as well. (The roughnecks were freelancers.)
Radley’s other trick was to avoid rental and contractor fees by owning his own oil rig. Usually, a small operation like this would contract the drilling to someone else. But not Radley.
“That’s mine!” he said, pointing at the drilling rig. “That bulldozer, that’s mine! Everything out here is mine! That’s why I can make it on a five-barrel well. And we do our own geology.”
This meant they saved money by forgoing sophisticated geophysical analysis, like seismic reflection or gravity surveys. Instead, they used a simpler method. Radley demonstrated it for me by scratching his head and then pointing at a spot on the ground.
“This looks good!” he said.
By eleven in the morning, we were 250 feet deep and settling into the rhythm of the work. The rig’s engine would rev up, and the section of drilling pipe would descend into the ground, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, depending on the character of sand or rock the bit was working through. Once the section of pipe had fully descended, it was time to detach the power swivel, pull another piece of heavy pipe off the rack, hoist it upright, and thread it into the string. One of the roughnecks would reattach the power swivel to the top of it all, and then drilling would begin again.
It wasn’t easy work. The roughnecks were in constant motion, guiding the new lengths of pipe into place, making sure they sat correctly, spraying excess mud off the drilling platform with a hose, readying the next stage of pipe. Radley timed the intervals between stages of drilling, to see how efficient his workers were in the changeover. “About three minutes,” he said. “Pretty good.”
This was Radley in the role of both “pusher” and “company man,” the two people whose job on a well is to make sure that it gets drilled without wasting time or money. And if Radley was a bit casual as a pusher, that was only because he knew and trusted his crew. The most important thing, in his view, was that he manage the well in person.
“On those big rigs,” he said, “the pusher’s in a trailer, he’s got screens with pressure, drill speed, temperature, how many feet per minute, per hour, or whatever. And he just sits there and watches the screens.”
He shook his head. “To me, that’s not drilling. That’s bullshit.”
Section after section of the drill string descended into the ground, and we got bored. Radley and I hopped into his truck and took a spin around the lease. He had owned oil wells in one form or another since he was fifteen years old, when his father had encouraged him to invest in one. His father had been working his own small-time wells on the weekends and after hours from his job as an electrical contractor. Radley had started going along to help when he was still a little boy. It was all part of the world of Little Oil, in which it was completely reasonable for a teenager to buy his own share in a well, and where a mom-and-pop company could end up with the mineral rights to the oil field that sparked the petroleum revolution.
The problem with sinking wells is that it’s hard to tell which will produce and which won’t. We passed a nearby well that wasn’t producing anything; eighty feet farther was one that yielded four or five barrels of oil a day—and fifty of water. The small, lazy rocking horse of the pump dipped up and down as we drove by. Radley told me that just on the other side there was a well that produced even less oil, but more water. The area was all fractured, he explained. The ground was still shifting. It was impossible to know exactly where the oil was, in what direction it wanted to seep, and where the blockages were. Even Lucas No. 1 would have come up dry if it had been drilled fifty feet away.
“Oh, I would love to go down one of them holes,” Radley said. “We can’t know what’s down there.” It was only through deduction that he could become anything less than blind, piecing together an idea of what was going on at the business end of his drilling pipe, hundreds or thousands of feet underground.
We passed another well, and another. Radley estimated that he had thirty-five on the two leases he operated on Spindletop. Added to what he produced from a few other leases he owned, his company pumped about a hundred barrels of oil a day. I couldn’t decide whether that sounded like a lot. Was he making much money?
“I don’t even watch the price of oil anymore. I haven’t looked in three weeks,” he said. But of course he couldn’t ignore it completely. “At forty dollars a barrel, it’d be eating on me. When it was a hundred, hell yeah, I was happy. It’s a living. I ain’t gonna get rich.” He chuckled. “But I’m gonna eat real good.”
We headed back to the drill site, passing a wide pond. “You can fish in that water,” he said. “There’s bass. But they’re wormy.”
For a long time, Radley had had the area almost completely to himself. “It used to be we were the only ones out here,” he said. “It was literally just me, my dad, and my son.” But life on Spindletop had changed in recent years. There was a new wave of activity, and now perhaps a hundred people were working there on any given day. The natural gas business had landed.
But it wasn’t here to extract the stuff.
In a weird twist, the real action on Spindletop was no longer in taking fossil fuel out of the ground but in putting it back. For a range of economic and logistical reasons, natural gas companies need to store their product in large quantities, and creating caverns in underground salt formations is one of the best ways to do it. The huge salt dome underneath Spindletop, along the flank of which so much oil once collected, was now being hollowed out with caverns, each several hundred feet in diameter, thousands of feet tall, and more than half a mile underground. Gas storage companies planned to use them as impermeable storage tanks, each of which could hold billions of cubic feet of natural gas.
So the hill was a giant layer cake, divided for different purposes according to depth. The storage companies took the bottom layer, from about 6,000 to 2,500 feet belowground. From 1,500 on up was Radley’s territory, the specific depth for which he held the lease for extracting oil. Then, on top of it all, there was one last, tenuous layer.
“You see those orange fences over there?” Radley said when we were back at the drilling site. “Those are archaeologist playpens.”
The top several inches of soil on Spindletop were also being prospected—for historical evidence. A university archaeologist had fenced off the areas he thought most promising for his investigation of the early oil industry.
“It’s kinda neat being part of history,” Radley admitted. “The world changed right here.” But he took a dim view of the archaeologist, who Radley said hadn’t been coming to the site nearly often enough to get his work done—and get out. Meanwhile, Radley was supposed to stay out of the areas enclosed by the orange fences.
“I’ve got to get in there and drill a well,” he said, plainly annoyed. “I’m trying to be patient.” It was a testy relationship. Radley had already intruded once into a fenced-off area to do some maintenance on an electrical line. The archaeologist had complained, upset that the area had been disturbed.
Radley shook his head, lips pursed. “I said to him, ‘I been in there with a dozer ten years ago. It’s already been disturbed.’”
In the early afternoon, drilling on the new well broke down. The power swivel was leaking mud, I think, and needed to be pulled apart. Radley’s father, a cheerful man in his mid-seventies who looked likely to show up to work for at least another twenty years, inspected the power swivel, which now lay on the drilling deck, ready for him to operate. “This business would be okay,” he muttered, “if it wasn’t for breakdowns.”
I walked over to one of the orange fences set up by the archaeologist. KEEP OUT! a sign read. AVOID ALL CONTACT AND ENTRY TO THIS AREA. I peered over it, into the history of Spindletop. Tall grass grew out of the gravel.
The last section of drill pipe was just being pulled out of Radley’s new well when I showed up again three days later. The drill head came out caked with earth, dripping with drilling mud, fresh from its journey a thousand feet into the earth.
“We didn’t get to what we wanted,” Radley said. He had called off the drilling around 1,150 feet, 100 feet short of their goal. “We were drilling that gypsum, we think it was, and it’s just so slow. A foot an hour, or slower.” So they had stopped.
I wished Radley a happy Earth Day. “Is that what it is? Well, we got some earth right here,” he said, pointing at the drilling rig.
The question was what kind of earth it was. Radley and his crew were waiting for a contractor to log the well, lowering sensors to measure the properties of the soil and rock at different depths, and determine whether it was likely to produce oil. (Logging his wells was one of the few things Radley couldn’t afford to do himself.) This was the critical moment, on the basis of which Radley would decide whether to make the investment of lining the well and outfitting it with a pump or to cut his losses and go drill his next well.
While the roughnecks horsed around and told jokes—it was the first time I had seen them at ease—Radley and I leaned on the bed of his truck and waited for the logging to start, and soon we had begun the political debate that I had known was coming ever since we first met. In a matter of minutes Radley was pounding his fist on the truck and telling me in a full shout that Obama was “not an American.” I won’t even repeat the things he said about people in Africa, and how they were responsible for the world’s overpopulation. I told him that where I came from, people went to hell for talking like that. He leaned on the truck and let out a giant sigh.
With that out of the way, I asked him what was in store for the oil industry. Wouldn’t supplies dwindle someday? Would his grandchildren be able to spend their lives on an oil field?
“Oil is actually a renewable resource,” he joked. “Just not in our time. There’s still shit down there rotting and decaying. It just hasn’t turned into oil yet.” But even in the short term, he wasn’t worried about oil running out. “It may get scarce,” he said, “but it won’t run out. The technology isn’t there to reach a lot of what’s there, but it will improve. There are big pockets of oil offshore that ecologists won’t let us drill. I love ecologists. They keep the price of oil up.”
But that brought us to the question of whether the remaining oil should be drilled. I asked him what he thought of climate change.
He let out a deep breath. “I think what we’re seeing is just the Earth’s natural cycle,” he said, and kicked the powdery soil by the truck. Human emissions might have some effect, he allowed. “But not as much as people say. Al Gore, he’s full of shit.
“Look,” he said, cutting to the chase. “If you drive an electric car, you still have to get the electricity. What makes electricity? Oil. Coal. And who made the tires? Who made the plastic? Who transported it to you? Everything in this world is affected by oil.”
It was the same chase that everyone else cuts to. Whether they’re celebrating the fossil fuel economy or execrating it, everyone genuflects to oil’s market-finding, world-powering genius. In both cases, there’s an undercurrent of fatalism in the cataloging of oil’s uses, a recognition of how difficult it would be simply to unmake the choice of fossil fuels as a basis for our society. The investment is so total—in infrastructure, in industry, in our way of living—that oil cannot simply be swapped out for another source of energy or materials, however much promise the alternatives may hold. Until another industry actively displaces its uses—or until scarcity makes it impractically costly—oil will not simply abandon the markets it dominates. Nor will the uncountable people and companies that make up the universe called the oil industry simply give it up. Not while it still has life in it.
Maybe, then, Spindletop is not only a relic of oil’s past but also a vision of its future, however distant. Maybe one day this is what it will come to: every oil field a field of stripper wells, managed by a single family. A lone oilman, with his own derrick and his own bulldozer, producing locavore petroleum for refineries down the road. That’s the power of the long-since-taken path. You don’t unmake such a choice. You ride it into the ground.
On my way out, I visited Lucas No. 1.
Earlier, Radley had pointed out the spot, down a short gravel road that dead-ended on a shallow pond. A flagpole stood on the shore. But there was no flag. Just a lonely exclamation mark of metal planted in a squat trapezoid of concrete. “That’s the one that done it,” Radley had said.
It had been raining, and we didn’t stay long. But today was windy and bright, and I had the run of Spindletop. I drove along the dirt service roads until I found the turn.
It was a peaceful spot, the only noise the blind pinging of the flagless, wind-driven rope against the flagpole. I ran my hand over the rough concrete of the base. On one side, it wore a metal badge embossed with the tiny image of a derrick fountaining oil to twice its height. I leaned over to read the words engraved on the medallion.
SPINDLETOP GUSHER—LUCAS NO. 1—ORIGINAL LOCATION
I scrambled onto the top of the base and hooked my arm around the flagpole, looking out at the marshy lake. It was streaked with some kind of algae or floating weed, pushed by the wind into clumps on the near shore. The distant sound of a train floated on the wind, the clanging of tanker cars being jolted together. Far off to the right, I could see the pump on one of Radley’s wells.
Two days earlier, about three hundred miles up the coast, an offshore drilling rig had exploded. Now it had sunk. In one of the country’s worst environmental disasters ever, an open underwater well was giving out fifty thousand barrels or more into the Gulf of Mexico every day. There were still real gushers.
Soon, every piece of containment boom in the country would be in Louisiana. Armies of workers would arrive, flocks of media, the National Guard, the president. Oil Mop’s boats would be starting their engines. Rhonda, the grumpy pelican lady, would soon become the wildlife director of BP’s oil spill response. Another disastrous bloom, and thousands flocking to its spectacle and wealth.
The Deepwater Horizon spill would dwarf anything that had ever happened in Port Arthur’s ship channel. But as a gusher, it wouldn’t touch Lucas No. 1, which had thrown as many as a hundred thousand barrels of oil into the sky in a single day—on this very spot.
I stood on the concrete cenotaph, next to the flagpole, and thought of the water gusher at the Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum. I had gone there again this morning, with a hundred dollars, which I had given to the nice lady in the gift shop—the gift shop that sold souvenir vials of Spindletop crude, provided by Steven Radley. A man called Frank, who knew how to turn the spigot on, had come by—they called him the Gusher Guru.
The replica derrick stood in front of us, in the broad field outside the museum, where the obelisk marks the wrong spot. The Gusher Guru was in his late eighties. In a thick drawl, he told me he had worked all his life in refineries and on oil wells. Now he did this.
“You ready?” he asked.
“Yup,” I said.
He pushed a green button on the exterior wall of the gift shop, and we turned to look at the derrick. There was a hiss, a gurgle, and then water erupted out of the nozzle, brown at first, then white—white—oil’s perfect inverse, because they do not mix, roaring and explosive.
I walked over to the derrick. Inside, water was blasting out of the nozzle, a sparkling, violent froth. I looked up along its silver length. It crashed upward, battering the interior of the derrick as it burst out the top and hurled itself into the air. I walked to the other side, to where the water was falling, and it drenched me, cold and clean, pelting me with clear pebbles that glittered in the sun.
Now, at Lucas No. 1, I tried to imagine the violence of that water gusher springing out of the flagpole’s base, but thick and black and green. I stared upward, at the space into which the Lucas Gusher had exploded. But I couldn’t quite see it. The more I tried to picture it, the more I felt its absence—an empty blue volume where oil had said its name.
The sun blinked. A hawk had crossed it. The shadow coasted away on the ruffled surface of the lake. It was Earth Day. Half a mile back, Steven Radley was sinking well after well into the miserly ground. In the Gulf, BP’s well was running and running. It would be months before anyone could stop it.
But not Radley’s well. He called me before I left town. The well was dry, he said. They were going to plug it and move on.