Travel Reference
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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 be-
fore. 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 tri-
umph, 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 Spind-
letop. 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 exhaus-
tion. 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:
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