Heat and Light

For Rob Arnold

Our decision about energy will test the character of the American people and the ability of the President and the Congress to govern this Nation. This difficult effort will be the moral equivalent of war.

—PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER

    APRIL 18, 1977

Murmurs from the earth of this land, from the caves and craters, from the bowl of darkness. Down watercourses of our dragon childhood, where we ran barefoot.

—MURIEL RUKEYSER

B
y now these events are forgotten. No one is old enough to have witnessed them personally. According to Ada Thibodeaux, Saxon Manor's only centenarian, the story was repeated by candlelight in the fledgling mining camps, in the years before the county was electrified.

Ada heard the tale in childhood, from her own grandmother—like all the women of that clan, famously long-lived. This places her account nearly two centuries back, predating even the Baker brothers, who dug the first coal mine in the valley and named an entire town after themselves.

Ada's people came from two counties over, what had been Seneca land—given to Chief Cornplanter by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, for a few years anyway, until the state changed its mind and took it back. The white settlers were timbermen, French Canadians and Scots-Irish. They built churches and a sawmill. Up close, their post office and mercantile had a flimsy, provisional look, as though made of stage flats, easy to dismantle and reassemble elsewhere when the logging was done.

It was a small town, a nothing town, until the Colonel came.

He arrived on the back of the mail coach, which came twice a week from Pittsburgh—a tall stranger in city clothes, not young. He took a room above the mercantile and hired a wagon out to Pine Creek, to call on a farmer who lived there. Later he was seen poking around the creek bed on his knees—filling glass jars with water,
according to the driver of the wagon, who became for a few days a kind of celebrity in this town where nothing happened and no one visited, a town in no way remarkable, except for its smell.

The odor seemed to emanate from Pine Creek—a smell of burning or, more precisely, of something long ago burnt.

More than most places, Pennsylvania is what lies beneath.

Rock oil was considered, then, a local nuisance, a malodorous black gunk that floated like a rumor down the creek, filthening whatever it touched: a farmer's overalls, a cow's hide, a child's shoes. Enterprising citizens tried to find some use for it. At the sawmill it served as a lubricant. The town doctor believed it had medicinal value. What it cured was not known.

On the banks of Pine Creek, Colonel Drake set up operations. A wooden tower was built. His hired man, known only as Uncle Billy, was spotted in the mercantile, buying tools and rope.

The tower resembled a hangman's gallows. A local wag called it Drake's Folly, and the name stuck. The Colonel's madness was a general topic, like the price of lumber or the weather—a point of universal agreement, until his well came in.

Overnight the little town changed unrecognizably. Strangers arrived in startling numbers, city men in a hurry. Wooden derricks sprang up like fast-growing trees. Finding rock oil became the local obsession. Professional smellers crawled along the ground, hoping for a whiff of it. Divining rods waggled portentously. Séances were held.

Along Oil Creek, as it was renamed, rowdy boomtowns burst to life. Fortunes were made and lost, made and lost, Fate's machine pumping like a bellows, an inhuman heart. Men arrived in wild hope and left angry or crazy. Before he shot the president, John Wilkes Booth came to Petrolia and drilled a duster. He wasn't the first.

The men came hungry and thirsty. Local merchants rushed in to meet their needs. Saloons were built, gambling parlors, a music
hall. The Franklin Silver Cornet Band learned “The Petroleum Gallop” and “Coal Oil Tommy” and “Colonel Drake's Polka.” Painted women appeared, bright and sudden as daffodils.

The towns were called Pithole, Petroleum Center, and Antwerp City—names the old-timers have forgotten and the young never learned, ghost towns that boomed once, when a well came in, then busted and stayed busted the rest of their days. Turkey City, Parker City, Rouseville, Oleantum. There may have been others.

Even Ada Thibodeaux can't remember their names.