Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
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 Mex-
ico 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 flock-
ing to its spectacle and wealth.
The
Deepwater Horizon
spill would dwarf anything that had ever happened in Port Ar-
thur'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 ex-
plosive.
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.
