Oil on the Marsh

My Dear Sir,

What a different world it is that you have made! I had always thought myself the common man — and the advocate of the common man — but as I see this present life of the common American, I realize that I had become part of an implicit aristocracy. The conveniences you enjoy — and I think take for granted — I enjoyed only by virtue of a house full of servants who fetched water, cleaned clothes, prepared meals, and hauled us to and fro.

Having lived during what I believed to be a time of invention whose advances were never to be equaled, I had firmly believed that machines could free us from such manual labors, but as I observe what has been achieved, I am stunned (nearly) speechless. I am an English pauper standing, mouth agape, at the magic wrought by a whole world of Hank Morgans. Even those with meager incomes enjoy conveniences the wealthiest monarchs of my day could not have imagined.

But today I found myself standing on the bank of a salt marsh. I could not understand what I was seeing. The tide was low, vast expanses of mud flats exposed. But instead of the dull dark gray I remember, the flats were a glistening ebony streaked & mottled with lighter, chocolate brown areas. The lower half of all the sawgrass blades was stained this same brown-black. A few feet away, the carcass of a fish bobbed against the bank. It, too, was smeared with this thick, greasy mud. The flats were littered with tiny dead sand crabs, their claws thrusting up out of the slime, the last desperate reach of the drowning. Further away, a pair of unidentifiable seabirds, their feathers blackened and heavy, staggered drunkenly, their wings smacking weakly against the mire. One fell, sliding down the bank into the edge of the water, and did not move again.

I knelt down — as well as a spirit can — to take a closer look, & finally recognized the ooze for what it was: crude oil. I do not know whether history has remembered a Mr. Henry Huttleston Rogers, but he became a dear friend of mine in my later years. Indeed, his fiscal acumen pulled this old chuckle-head from the brink of catastrophe more than once. Rogers was an oil man & was fond of regaling me with speculation regarding the potential uses of it. It was a heady time of discovery & invention, & Rogers believed man would transform the world through inventions derived from oil.

What have we done? By what mechanism could Rogers’ dreams have become this nightmare? Was insanity the price we paid for the advances you enjoy? We can perform feats of magic but cannot avoid laying waste to the planet? Just as I was beginning to believe that the human race had finally reached its full stature, I see that it is the same old sham as always — that the only reasoning animal has once again reasoned in his own favor at the cost of any other creature unlucky enough to find itself in the blast zone.

I must understand what has happened. I suppose I shall be forced to sit and stare into one of those kinetoscope devices of yours long enough to put the story together for myself. I do hope that I shall not when done feel fortunate to have lived and died when I did. If I find that my kind has poisoned the seas in pursuit of its own convenience, I shall be forced to petition the Almighty for a divorce from the species.

Yrs,

MT