Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
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 can-
cer. Everybody at that plant knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt.” Ray was also of the opin-
ion 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 burn-
ing 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.
