The Western Light by Susan Swan Read Free Book Online Page B

tactfully avoided a dangerous subject, and accepted the letter my aunt handed me. It had been sent to Old Louie, my great-great aunt, and there was no doubt about its author. You could tell it was my great-grandfather by his bred-in-the-bone optimism. It tainted our family history with myth, a propensity (and yes, I knew I was using the word properly), a propensity I was guilty of myself. For instance, when he was an old man, my great-grandfather claimed it had been a beautiful, hot June afternoon when his ship floundered in the oil slick. This was one of Old Mac’s exaggerations; in 1862, June on the Upper Lakes had been sunless and cold. He also claimed that the oil danced with iridescent lights. Crude oil is dark green as it spurts from the ground and it only sparkles if the oil is thinly spread, but according to the letters he wrote as a young man, that afternoon the oil lay as thick on the water as black mud.

8
    June 30, 1862,
Oil Springs, Canada West
    Dear Aunt Louisa:
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    Thank you for giving me the letter Father sent Mother in which he stated that she was to forward her letters to him via Fort Gratiot, Michigan. I believe circumstances beyond Father’s control were the reason he failed to contact us after Mother died in childbirth. I hope Father won’t hold it against me that I was baptized a Vidal and not a Davenport.
    Will you believe me if I say I have profited from seeing the waters of Lethe first hand? It happened after we left Detroit. The evening before, the lake was clear of oil; but, the next morning, it was overcast and cold and the frost had froze off the tails of cows on the American side. Soon the reason for the gloom became apparent. A half hour out of port, our scow ran into an oil slick. It covered the surface of the lake for miles with a black and vile-smelling pitch.
    The smell of rotten eggs was overpowering. I could hardly breathe in the stench. My eyes burned and all of us in the crew cried like whipped spaniels. In no time the smelly pitch coated the hull of our ship from bow to stern; it is no exaggeration to say we resembled a bark from the underworld.
    The oil was from geysers in a hamlet called Oil Springs and it stopped shipping on the Upper Lakes. A single spark from a ship’s boiler room would have set the oily waters ablaze. So we were obliged to head for Mitchell’s Bay on the Canadian shore along with all of the Mackinaw fishing fleet.
    After the lakes cleared, we ran into oil again in the marshlands below Wallaceburg, where the filthy stuff had finished off most creatures. The tall grasses along the riverbanks were flattened by oil, and we saw helpless sandpipers and crows flopping in the ooze. Strange to think this place is called “The Venice of America.” In the marsh, we used pike poles to kill off the rattlesnakes, which crawled on board to escape the oil. A tug came and towed us up river, and that is when my fortunes changed. I hope you will not think poorly of me for jumping ship in Wilkesport, a real boomtown, very rough-and-ready. I felt compelled to see what had unleashed such a catastrophe.
    So I followed an Indian trail along Black Creek and found myself standing on a vast floodplain when I came out of the oak forest. Not a single tree had been left standing. Tall, three-legged structures covered the plain, which resounded with the click-click of metal drills. I counted 200 oil derricks. Possibly there are a great many more. On the plain, men were making bungholes in barrels and others were engaged in filling them. Still others waded through puddles of oil to stack a wagon with the barrels. On a ridge, men stood stirring huge smoking kettles.
    I was looking at the aftermath of the Bradley gusher, which had coated our ship with oil. From the mouth of the Bradley Well, where oil bubbles up in every direction, there is a perpendicular tube some sixteen feet high and four inches in diameter from which the oil is conducted into six or seven large