1. Black
When oil first entered my consciousness it was black as a bridge jerry-rigged and rusted, held together with heat-stained paint that bubbled. The malleable oil stain bloomed my face into rainbows in a puddle on the Natchaug River bridge. I learned to drain quarts of oil under the hood of the silver two door Saab that bled the stuff. Oil was the lifeblood of machines. Tractors and trucks exsanguinated themselves empty. Oil blackened the cracks in my father’s hands and turned them into maps. The stains in his hands turned me into a skilled palm reader in a red dress with a small tanned face. Take a whiff of the slick stuff — it won’t smell like its cousin gasoline without the addition of cloying benzine. Powder-black hoses ran under the hood in arches and junctions that pleased the eye. Touch the thick rubber of the water lines and the black slakes off like powdered sugar in your hands. Cursed are the veins of the automobile when they are punctured; they wear out and spill their mixes onto the asphalt at forty five miles per hour, all black and wheeling.
2. Fluids
Where I come from, there was always more oil. It wasn’t that expensive to buy a quart at the gas station. The quarts were stored on wire racks outside Chuckie’s before people started stealing them. The shelves stood next to the tall cigarette ads in the window beside the rainbow colors of windshield washer fluid in their translucent plastic jugs. The Slushie-colored contents entice kids to drink it so frequently that the wiper fluid manufacturer must put a warning label on the front of the jug. The opaque black bottles of oil stood above the gallon containers of washer fluid on the bottom of the rack. These rainbow-hued units were the biggest in the food chain and stood firmly at the bottom of the food pyramid of auto-bodily fluids.
3. Tundra grease
When I picture oil fields I see geese on the tundra in Canada. Geese are used to green grass on both ends of the continent, they fly over oil fields capped by prairie and ocean all in the same year of migration. When I see the geese on the corner, by the farm field I imagine the other half of their year and an aerial view of their journey intersecting with caribou paths that run like arterial pictographs across the Yukon. I see my friend John Russell, the caribou biologist, seated on the humped scrub plains during the 1970s, while he watched four hundred thousand caribou march a fresh line along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, their hooves meandering paths deleted from the land.
I zoom in and picture heat-wavering oil derricks that pump continual iron like overfed weightlifters too big for their t-shirts, longer contained by sleeves alone. An oiled bicep on the derrick wavers on a television of my memory. I see oil pumps hollow the deserts from inside old western films in their clunky black and white, the pumps rendered still by the busts and booms of the free market. An old horse rides by a bobble-headed oil pump looking for a place to drink. In the movie I see an empty metal trough meant for watering horses, while in the background California stands with its mouth open wide in want of water.
4. Fire
The loop of hose that stems from the handle of the gas pump tightens like a snake that has woken from a millennial nap and decided to hunt for food. While I pump part of an oil drum into my car, I wait for someone to pull a cigarette from a tight pack and bounce one into their mouth. I wait for the ash to flick into the snail trails of oil and gas around the pump; I imagine the whole place up in flames. I imagine the oil fields in Kuwait on fire. I imagine the overhead sprinklers failing. I imagine heavy bombs dropped on open deserts that hold oil deposits.
The pump ticks and ticks and ticks as it carries the old oiled center of the earth over land and through my hand. The gas pump clicks like a printer that sticks tongues of black voided paper into empty rooms. My hand on the snake oil pump pulls black medicine out of the ground. This black oil medicine makes us all bad patients. I smell for the oil leak under the hood and understand that to find the source of the bleed is necessary.
5. Toyota
From the bed of a white Toyota pickup I rode behind silver Chevron trucks, up and then down mountain passes in Ecuador, from the source. Those silver ships from the center of the oiled universe seemed the slowest thing on wheels. The red white and blue Chevron logo draped across the curvature of the stainless truck tube was covered in thick slices of mud slung up from the dirt road. Soon there would be landslides. The underground land grab was already underway in the Amazonas. Sandwiched between trucks that carried invisible wealth, every hairpin turn threatened to tip them over and send them to the bottom of the mountain, driver screaming, a sodden jungle engulfed in improbable flames.
6. Ipecac for a cure
Oil ingestion happens daily. We wrap cold shoulders in oil processed to look like fabric. The blue plastic bowl in the kitchen was spun through silken fumes into a vessel for my breakfast, the plastics factory itself powered by oil. Asphalt shingles rain petroleum down the roof and into the weeds. There is no way to extract oneself from the extraction.
When I imagine a treatment for accidental oil ingestion, I wonder if there is an equivalent to the Ipecac syrup once used to induce vomiting after the ingestion of poisons. Ipecac is derived from the Carapichea ipecacuanha plant native to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, and Brazil.
Follow oil to its source and find its antidote too. Ipecac cannot however provide a cure for thirst, need, or necessity.
7. Full synthetic driving instruction
Stay to the right of the double lines at all times. Do not deviate. Swerve left and you face a head on collision. Swerve right and you may topple mailboxes and kill small children while they wait for the bus. You will dent telephone poles and porches. You may even taste your own blood. Make sure the car runs well and smooth on a synthetic blend of motor oil, it offers “the best of both worlds.” You want your car to purr like an obedient house cat. Don’t run it on “conventional motor oil.” You wouldn’t want to be conventional. Full synthetic is “ideal for vehicles that demand peak level performance.”
I remember the removal sound of a package of new rotors being lifted from the box, a sharp sucking as they separated from their grease. My father looked down their machine flat surface with an eye trained straight as a laser. It can be hard to stop such strong, well-lubricated machines.
8. Drums
When the clogged artery of the Panama Canal is pumped up with water from the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, the canal fills with boats full of oil drums from Ecuador and Columbia and Brazil. The smell of jungle rainwater perspires down the sides of the slick drums. I can hear the steel pan drums, made from oil drums left on the U.S. military bases in Trinidad and Tobago. It starts to rain from a full grey cloud while people play long forbidden music on a beach after a war. They pull the rhythm of oil straight out of the drum while they dance underneath the island’s heavy rain.
Image by Jared Brotman on pexels.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
