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

Radley shook his head, lips pursed. “I said to him, ‘I been in there with a dozer ten years ago. It’s already been disturbed.’”

In the early afternoon, drilling on the new well broke down. The power swivel was leaking mud, I think, and needed to be pulled apart. Radley’s father, a cheerful man in his mid-seventies who looked likely to show up to work for at least another twenty years, inspected the power swivel, which now lay on the drilling deck, ready for him to operate. “This business would be okay,” he muttered, “if it wasn’t for breakdowns.”

I walked over to one of the orange fences set up by the archaeologist. KEEP OUT! a sign read. AVOID ALL CONTACT AND ENTRY TO THIS AREA. I peered over it, into the history of Spindletop. Tall grass grew out of the gravel.

The last section of drill pipe was just being pulled out of Radley’s new well when I showed up again three days later. The drill head came out caked with earth, dripping with drilling mud, fresh from its journey a thousand feet into the earth.

“We didn’t get to what we wanted,” Radley said. He had called off the drilling around 1,150 feet, 100 feet short of their goal. “We were drilling that gypsum, we think it was, and it’s just so slow. A foot an hour, or slower.” So they had stopped.

I wished Radley a happy Earth Day. “Is that what it is? Well, we got some earth right here,” he said, pointing at the drilling rig.

The question was what kind of earth it was. Radley and his crew were waiting for a contractor to log the well, lowering sensors to measure the properties of the soil and rock at different depths, and determine whether it was likely to produce oil. (Logging his wells was one of the few things Radley couldn’t afford to do himself.) This was the critical moment, on the basis of which Radley would decide whether to make the investment of lining the well and outfitting it with a pump or to cut his losses and go drill his next well.

While the roughnecks horsed around and told jokes—it was the first time I had seen them at ease—Radley and I leaned on the bed of his truck and waited for the logging to start, and soon we had begun the political debate that I had known was coming ever since we first met. In a matter of minutes Radley was pounding his fist on the truck and telling me in a full shout that Obama was “not an American.” I won’t even repeat the things he said about people in Africa, and how they were responsible for the world’s overpopulation. I told him that where I came from, people went to hell for talking like that. He leaned on the truck and let out a giant sigh.

With that out of the way, I asked him what was in store for the oil industry. Wouldn’t supplies dwindle someday? Would his grandchildren be able to spend their lives on an oil field?

“Oil is actually a renewable resource,” he joked. “Just not in our time. There’s still shit down there rotting and decaying. It just hasn’t turned into oil yet.” But even in the short term, he wasn’t worried about oil running out. “It may get scarce,” he said, “but it won’t run out. The technology isn’t there to reach a lot of what’s there, but it will improve. There are big pockets of oil offshore that ecologists won’t let us drill. I love ecologists. They keep the price of oil up.”

But that brought us to the question of whether the remaining oil should be drilled. I asked him what he thought of climate change.

He let out a deep breath. “I think what we’re seeing is just the Earth’s natural cycle,” he said, and kicked the powdery soil by the truck. Human emissions might have some effect, he allowed. “But not as much as people say. Al Gore, he’s full of shit.

“Look,” he said, cutting to the chase. “If you drive an electric car, you still have to get the electricity. What makes electricity? Oil. Coal. And who made the tires? Who made the plastic? Who transported it to you? Everything in this world is affected by oil.”

It was the same chase that everyone else cuts to. Whether they’re celebrating the fossil fuel economy or execrating it, everyone genuflects to oil’s market-finding, world-powering genius. In both cases, there’s an undercurrent of fatalism in the cataloging of oil’s uses, a recognition of how difficult it would be simply to unmake the choice of fossil fuels as a basis for our society. The investment is so total—in infrastructure, in industry, in our way of living—that oil cannot simply be swapped out for another source of energy or materials, however much promise the alternatives may hold. Until another industry actively displaces its uses—or until scarcity makes it impractically costly—oil will not simply abandon the markets it dominates. Nor will the uncountable people and companies that make up the universe called the oil industry simply give it up. Not while it still has life in it.

Maybe, then, Spindletop is not only a relic of oil’s past but also a vision of its future, however distant. Maybe one day this is what it will come to: every oil field a field of stripper wells, managed by a single family. A lone oilman, with his own derrick and his own bulldozer, producing locavore petroleum for refineries down the road. That’s the power of the long-since-taken path. You don’t unmake such a choice. You ride it into the ground.

On my way out, I visited Lucas No. 1.

Earlier, Radley had pointed out the spot, down a short gravel road that dead-ended on a shallow pond. A flagpole stood on the shore. But there was no flag. Just a lonely exclamation mark of metal planted in a squat trapezoid of concrete. “That’s the one that done it,” Radley had said.

It had been raining, and we didn’t stay long. But today was windy and bright, and I had the run of Spindletop. I drove along the dirt service roads until I found the turn.

It was a peaceful spot, the only noise the blind pinging of the flagless, wind-driven rope against the flagpole. I ran my hand over the rough concrete of the base. On one side, it wore a metal badge embossed with the tiny image of a derrick fountaining oil to twice its height. I leaned over to read the words engraved on the medallion.

SPINDLETOP GUSHER—LUCAS NO. 1—ORIGINAL LOCATION

I scrambled onto the top of the base and hooked my arm around the flagpole, looking out at the marshy lake. It was streaked with some kind of algae or floating weed, pushed by the wind into clumps on the near shore. The distant sound of a train floated on the wind, the clanging of tanker cars being jolted together. Far off to the right, I could see the pump on one of Radley’s wells.

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 Mexico 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 flocking to its spectacle and wealth.

The Deepwater Horizon spill would dwarf anything that had ever happened in Port Arthur’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 explosive.

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,