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

by Andrew Blackwell

  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, but thick and black and green. I stared upward, at the space into which th
e 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.

  The sun blinked. A hawk had crossed it. The shadow coasted away on the ruffled surface of the lake. It was Earth Day. Half a mile back, Steven Radley was sinking well after well into the miserly ground. In the Gulf, BP’s well was running and running. It would be months before anyone could stop it.

  But not Radley’s well. He called me before I left town. The well was dry, he said. They were going to plug it and move on.

  FOUR

  THE EIGHTH CONTINENT

  In my sleep, I heard the call. All hands. Someone had shouted it into our cabin. All hands to strike sail. We fell out of our bunks, struggled into our rain gear, and went above half-awake.

  The deck was a starless uproar of wind and sound. “The Navy’s running an exercise nearby,” said the first mate. “They’ve ordered us to head north. I asked them to let us run downwind, but they just repeated the order.” The ship, under engine power, was running directly into the wind, the sails flapping powerless and wild. They would be torn to shreds.

  We wrestled the foresails in the dark. The air filled with spray, with thick rope jerking and snapping in chaos. There were six of us in the bow. Four were out on the bowsprit—the long spar extending forward over the water—and two on the most forward part of the deck, where the bowsprit joined the ship.

  I was on the deck, feeling with my hands in the dark, trying to find the downhaul lines and gaskets that would draw down and fasten the sails. After weeks at sea, I knew what I was looking for, but that didn’t mean I could find it.

  The ship crested a large wave. We felt the bow rise higher and higher into the night. It seemed to pause at the top. For a moment we floated in the salty air.

  Then we fell. The ship buried its prow in the oncoming wave, deeper than ever before. The four on the bowsprit—my friends—disappeared below the surface, foam churning over their heads. Were they clipped in? The deck went under with them. The water surged to my waist, tugging at me, sliding me aft. Robin grabbed my arm and I grabbed the rail, and we kept ourselves from tumbling backward down the deck. I looked at the bowsprit and thought, All I see is foam.

  A second more and the ship came through, rising out of the swell, and I saw them. They were still there, still clutching the bowsprit, all four of them. I counted them again. Four. Had there been more?

  “Is everybody there?” I shouted. “Is everyone still on board?”

  But they were already working again, grappling the sails, water streaming from their jackets, shrieking like bull riders.

  Robin let go and we returned to the tangle of lines at our feet. But my head was swimming with the afterimage of the water rising up to us, of the sea invading the deck. I still felt it, how it pulled at my body, an overwhelming force that swirled around and through us, the alien gravity of another universe, the black remorseless ocean.

  You will have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: an island of trash, formed by a giant vortex of currents that gathers all the eternal, floating plastic in the northern half of the Pacific Ocean into an endless, swirling purgatory, a self-assembling plastic continent twice the size of Texas.

  Let’s nip this in the bud: It’s not an island.

  I’d like to say that again. It’s not. An island.

  There is no solid mass, no floating carpet of trash, no landfill. But it is real. It was first discovered in 1997 by the yachtsman and environmentalist Charles Moore, who made it the focus of his nonprofit, the Algalita Marine Research Foundation. It is thanks to Moore’s observations that the Pacific Garbage Patch entered the popular consciousness, sometime in the mid-2000s. As for who’s responsible for the irresistible image of a plastic island, I don’t know. But someone should run them down and give them a nice, quick smack. Furthermore, an exorbitant fine should be levied on anyone—anyone—who describes this non-island as being “the size of Texas” or “twice the size of Texas.” When I was doing my preliminary research, it seemed impossible to find a piece of media about the garbage patch that didn’t mention Texas.

  Why Texas? Is there no other territory that could serve as a reader-friendly reference point? Has hack journalism become so impoverished an art form that its practitioners can’t even be troubled with the five googling seconds it would take to craft an entirely original gem like “three times the size of California,” or “two Nevadas and an Arizona,” or “nearly as big as Alaska, if you leave out the Aleutians”?

  The real problem is that, although two Texases clear a trim half-million square miles, nobody knows how large the Garbage Patch actually is. Unlike Texas and, critically, unlike an island, it has no defined boundary, only a general area. So let’s just call it big, and be done with it.

  A more appropriate analogy would be that of an ecosystem. System is the key here, implying something much more complex than a simple floating object. From tuna-size hunks of Styrofoam and discarded fishing nets that lurk like massive jellyfish, down to microscopic pellets that hang in the water like artificial plankton, it is a vast, plastic simulacrum of the living ocean that is its host. And precisely because it is so complex, and so far from land, its nature is poorly understood.

  Nobody can say for sure exactly where all the stuff comes from, but there is broad agreement that its sources are disproportionately land-based. A surprising amount of trash manages to avoid the landfill, and when it does, it often makes its way to the sea, whether by way of storm drains, rivers, or other avenues.

  Since plastic objects don’t degrade easily, if ever, they have plenty of time to work their way out from land and find the ocean’s currents. A plastic bottle taken by the currents off San Francisco will travel south as it heads out into the Pacific, passing through the latitudes of Mexico and even Guatemala before heading west in earnest, caught by the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. This vast counterclockwise vortex will take the bottle clear across to the Philippines before shooting it north toward Taiwan, close by Japan, and then spitting it back past Alaska, toward the rest of North America.

  Around and around the Gyre goes, and the plastic bottles and hard hats of the North Pacific go with it, we assume, until at last they drift into the becalmed zones spinning at the eastern and western ends of this oceanic conveyor belt. These are the Eastern and Western Garbage Patches. (The Eastern gets all the attention because it’s closer to the United States and was the first to be discovered.) Here, our plastic bottle finds its friends: all the other bits and pieces of plastic that have made it into the ocean in the previous who-knows-how-long. And here they wait, year upon year, breaking into fragments from the action of the waves, and strangling hapless turtles, choking overzealous albatross that mistake plastic for food, and being eaten by fish.

  Eventually, the scientists and the activists and the adventurers come. Whatever part of our plastic history that floats, the Garbage Patch is the place for them to find it: our bottles, our plastic tarps, our popped bubble wrap, the tiny plastic “scrubbing beads” of our exfoliating face soap. It’s all here for the hunting.

  Or so I hoped. But without a single cruise line running through, how was I to know for sure? Which brings us to another interesting thing about the Garbage Patch: hardly anyone has actually seen it. It takes serious oceangoing chops to get out there. And there’s almost no reason anyone with a boat would bother. Most people with yachts and things are more interested in going to places like Hawaii, or the Bahamas, or anywhere. But the Garbage Patch, inherent to its formation, is in the middle of the biggest nowhere on the planet.

  The Gyre had seen several expeditions from researchers and activists the previous summer, in 2009, so I took to the phones, beginning a campaign of sustained pestering that I hoped would be my ticket onto one of this year’s voyages. And that’s how I met Project Kaisei.

  I found the Kaisei docked in Point Richmond, across the bay from San Francisco. A steel-hulled, square-ri
gged, 150-foot-long brigantine, it was a striking sight. Think metal pirate ship and you will have the image. The ship is the namesake and floating linchpin of Project Kaisei, a nonprofit venture dedicated, as its motto reads, to “Capturing the plastic vortex.” I had somehow convinced Mary Crowley, one of its founders, to let me come along on a three-week voyage to that plastic vortex, a thousand miles away, but I had my doubts about capturing it.

  Especially if we never left. We had spent more than a week without a clear sense of when we might set out to sea. A departure day would be announced, only to dawn with the new radar unit still absent, or with provisions yet to be delivered, or with a cook not yet hired, and we would not sail.

  In the meantime, a subset of the crew would show up each day to help clean the boat, patch its rust holes, touch up the blue paint on the hull, or install an extra life raft, and I had time to develop my mixed feelings about the Kaisei. From the moment I first stepped aboard, I had tasted that flavor of excitement that has a note of terror. She had two great masts, the forward one boasting four spars: the yards, from which majestic square sails would drape, sails that belonged in a biography of Lord Nelson. Dozen upon dozen of cables and ropes—lines, we learned, not ropes but lines—led from wooden pins on the deck to points above; this set of lines to pull a sail down, that to pull it up; lines to orient the yards to starboard or to port; lines to raise and lower the spar of the gaff sail; lines to raise and lower sets of pulleys that were connected to still further lines.

  Was I going to be asked to climb those masts, to edge out along those yards, approximately a thousand feet up? Like most sensible people, I don’t really have a fear of heights—only a fear of falling to my death. Which is not a fear at all, but a sensible attitude. On the other hand, what is the point of being on a tall ship if you don’t experience the tallness? I knew that when asked to go aloft, I would overcome or at least bypass my fear and force myself to do it. And so what I really feared was that I wasn’t afraid enough.