The Gift of the God
It’s been several years since you checked Google maps to see the actual distance between your modest farm and the giant oil and gas plant that lights up your horizon every night, silvering the southern sky, except for when they flare off unrecoverable gas. Then the sky goes red under a plume of flame. The wind is always blowing so the plume curls and twists like a shapeshifting angel.
Given the wind, you could line the hilltops with wind turbines, but no, people say, turbines would be ugly and bad for the environment, as opposed to the fracking rigs, cracking plants, fractionators, loading areas, and overburdened trucks full of sludge. As opposed to the strip mines, coal trucks, spoil banks. As opposed to the green and orange acid pools left over from the last time they came here scooping mineral wealth out of our soil. As opposed to the coal pits.
A bonus about those coal pits, though: if you know where to find them, and need a secret spot for an autumn rendezvous or fire ritual, and don’t mind a few peaty fumes, the coal pits are the best. No need to collect kindling, just set the rock on fire. Like you’re some kind of wizard passing a wizard-test: next thing you know you’ll be chewing metal or turning men into snakes. Next thing you know you’ll be able to fly (just keep telling yourself that).
The old coal reeks of tar and dirt, but you can get used to it. You can get used to anything, even learn to love it. Light enough campfires down in those gullies, drinking clandestine beer and passing a joint around, eventually you’ll get to associating that dirty-coal smell with something other than being poisoned. You’ll associate it with youth, adventure, transgression.
You studied German in college. You can recite Rilke down in the coal pits.
Du im Voraus
verlorne Geliebte, Nimmergekommene,
nicht weiß ich, welche Töne dir lieb sind …
The German word for “poison” is Gift.
You know this shit is all bad, bad for everyone, bad for the land, bad for our chances of making a transition to clean sustainable energy before we make the planet unlivable. Someone somewhere else out there says it’s a gift though: for themselves, for the shareholders.
You really ought to Google how close you are to that plant. Find out what will happen to you if the Flame of Mordor on the horizon becomes a conflagration. But you keep putting it off. Also, you keep forgetting whether it’s technically a “cracking plant” or a “fractionator,” and your mind goes foggy about certain details in spite of your having done some research on the fracking boom, and even wrote a novel set in the oil and gas “play.”
You could Google why they call the areas where they drill for oil a “play,” and whether it’s supposed to be comedy, tragedy, or farce.
You could try to find out, at least, where the next rigs are going up, so they don’t keep surprising you. They’re actually rather beautiful when you first spot them at night, all lit up like slender Eiffel Towers. When it comes to that, the cracking plant at night looks like some kind of futuristic elegant spaceport where Luke Skywalker might be touching down in his x-wing, come to save you, because he knows what it feels like when you’re going nowhere.
If the sun went out forever and you didn’t see what they’d done to the old lovely farms, if you didn’t see the cows grazing under the shadow of giant smokestacks, the soil churned up for pipelines, if you could just become a night-creature, you could dance in the dark under the twinkling silver lights, listening to the hum of the hydraulic drilling. It could be better than setting rocks on fire, even. Better than turning men into snakes. If you could only accept the Gift.
You know you’re subconsciously choosing to be vague, ignorant. You’re not so unlike those people who drive you crazy because they refuse to pay attention to politics. The others near me, they’ve been here a lot longer, and they accepted their Gift long ago. They love it fiercely now, and won’t let you say a thing about it. I Love Coal say their bumper stickers. At the farmers market they come shopping for organic tomatoes because they heard organic might cure their cancer or black lung. They come lugging their oxygen-tanks along with them.
There’s that sociological theory about systems, how at a certain point they exist only to exist, how they protect themselves. So in a certain sense it’s not that you really want to be vague and ignorant: the gas itself is doing this to you. Sure, it could protect itself by blowing up everyone else, but then who would be left to draw it up out of the deep where it’s been buried in silence, like a sleeping god, waiting to be discovered, awakened, recovered, enthroned, worshipped? The god needs you. He will have his way.
He isn’t the kind of deity confined to one place. He’s pooled beneath the stones, trapped in the shale. When released, he comes gurgling up from countless shafts. He burns in the sky.
Maybe when you aren’t looking he comes creeping, a murmuring gray fog, along the skin of the earth. Maybe he twines his way up your leg, smoothing himself along your skin, tentatively creeping into your nose mouth ear eye. Maybe he is becoming a part of you, so you quietly refuse to do anything that would really oppose him, and you keep using electricity, and as long as you need electricity you need him. His Gift.
Maybe the rigs, the silvery metal giants that appear in the night, come stalking like the automatons of the fire god Hephaestos, his high priests, his catamites, summoning you to worship.
You really ought to Google, you know. You need to wake up and prepare for whatever might be coming.
Maybe one of those silvery, spidery rigs that comes stalking across the fields at night, leveling the ground, settling in. Testing the skin of the soil with its metal proboscis. Reaching its long gleaming finger through your window, testing the skin of your body, seeking what lies within, what is willing to worship in quiescence.
Everyone says “frack” for “fuck” now. What the frack. All this fracking shit. Frack you, too, asshole.
The giant insect is fracking away at the earth. This is how to honor the god.