Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

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