Driving through America

February 8th, 2009

There’s something strangely beautiful about the landscape that surrounds Interstate 20 near Odessa, Texas. It’s not that it’s particularly scenic. The views aren’t much different than much of the the American West, with arid plains and low hills stretching away in all directions, eventually meeting the unbroken dome of sky that towers overhead. Furthermore, in the case of Odessa those plains are crowded with buildings, road and oil wells, which put Odessa way down the natural beauty list.

But that, surprisingly, doesn’t really make it ugly.  When I drove through — at sunset — the darkening sky lit the buildings and power-lines up with oranges, reds, and purples. The landscape, man-made and natural alike, wore the colors well, in a way that a truly heinous stretch of country, like the I-5 south of Sacramento where it abuts a gigantic feedlot, couldn’t.

No. It took me a while to figure it out, but that stretch of I-20 bisects a celebration of petroleum. Every business along the road was an oil field services company, or a pump maker, or an earthmoving equipment rental firm. (Ironically, the business I would have thought would be the biggest, the infamous Halliburton, had the smallest office on the whole stretch). I passed at least one refinery, and a company that manufactures the giant ICBM carrier-looking derrick trucks used to drill wells.

The traffic on the road yelled oil, as well. The derrick trucks rumbled too and fro, as did flatbeds carrying bulldozers and graders. At one stage the procession was joined by a chain of trucks carrying wind turbine parts. They looked sadly out of place.

When I focused my eyes on the distance, I saw the oil pumps themselves, smoothly rocking up and down. Even so late in the day, trucks plied the dirt roads that connected them, raising rooster-tails of dust in the fading light.

The houses were different, too. Cinder blocks and corrugated metal were the norm, and often times the attached carports were as big as the house itself, crammed to overflowing with massive Chevys, Fords, and the occasional Toyota Tundra.

So why wasn’t it ugly? The evidence of industry cut a gaping gash on what should have been a lonely, majestic Texas plain.

But the scene had an unexpected appeal. Partially, I think it’s due to the town’s singularity of purpose; every person and every business has as it’s goal to wrest as much oil from the ground as possible. But I was also surprised by the names of the businesses I saw on the buildings– with the exception of Halliburton, none of which I knew. Nowhere did I see an Exxon logo, or even a Texaco– nothing that I can point to as “big oil.”

I’m sure that some of the businesses I saw were multinationals that I simply didn’t recognize, and to be fair, owning a refinery sort of makes a company “big oil” by default. But it seemed to me that much of the town was dedicated to “small oil.” A building emblazoned with “Rick’s (may have been Bob’s or Steve’s) Petroleum” looked to me like nothing more than two guys and an oil well. I just hadn’t thought that such mom and pop oil companies existed.

The small, rough and ready businesses gave town a feel of honest work and a sense of authenticity. For better or for worse,  I felt like I was watching the American experience play itself out in front of me, and though I know  the industry that supports the landscape is both irresponsible and unsustainable (hypocrisy note: I was driving my car through it), at the time that seemed irrelevent. It was kind of pretty.

Entry Filed under: Pointless Musing, Whereabouts