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

“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