Mid-October is homecoming in this part of Texas, which means mums. If you did not grow up here the word needs explaining: not the flower so much as the object built around it, a silk chrysanthemum the size of a dinner plate wired to a board and hung with ribbons that reach the knee, with bells and trinkets and the girl's name in glitter, worn to school on the Friday of the game and carried around the rest of the day like a small, cheerful anchor. The boys wear a garter version on the arm. The whole thing is heavy and ridiculous and taken absolutely seriously, and on some Friday in the fall you will see them in the hallways of all three high schools and up the road at Barbers Hill, and on the side of the yellow bus that brought half of those kids to school, the name of the district itself: Goose Creek.
Ask a kid at the game what Goose Creek is and you will get a shrug. It is the district. It is on the bus. It is the name on the stadium the way a river's name gets attached to a bridge without anyone thinking about the water. But there is a creek, still, a real one, running into Tabbs Bay on the west side of town, and a little over a century ago it was the most interesting piece of water in Texas, and the town you are sitting in exists because of what came out from under it.
The story is simpler than the ones people tell about oil. Nobody here found it by luck. There had been signs for a long time: gas bubbling up through the creek bottom, a smell in the marsh, seeps that the people who lived along the bay had noticed and talked about. The first wells, around 1908, were shallow and modest, the kind that convince a few speculators and no one else. What changed everything was the boom that came in 1916 and 1917, when the drillers went deeper and hit the main pay, and the wells came in the way wells in those days came in: without control, a column of oil and gas thrown over the top of the derrick, the roar heard across the water, the crews scrambling to cap what they had opened. A gusher was a disaster that made you rich. It was the sound of an ancient sea, pressurized under rock for a hundred million years or more, finally finding a hole.
What made Goose Creek unusual was where the oil was. The field did not stop at the shoreline. It ran out under the creek and under Tabbs Bay, and so the drillers did the obvious thing, which was to build the derricks in the water. They drove pilings, laid boardwalks, and stood their rigs on platforms over the shallows, a forest of wooden towers out in the bay with the pumps thumping and the boats moving between them. It was one of the first oil fields anywhere worked from over open water. I have never found a photograph that shows the whole of it at once; the ones that survive show a few rigs and a boat and a man looking at the camera, and you have to imagine the rest. When people talk about offshore drilling as an achievement of the late twentieth century, the Gulf platforms and the deepwater rigs, remember that the idea was tried first on the ordinary scale, by men in rubber boots on plank walkways, a short drive from any of the three high schools.
There was a price, and the land paid it. Oil in a reservoir does not sit in a cave; it sits in the pore spaces of rock, holding the rock up the way water in a sponge holds the sponge open. Pump the oil out fast enough and the rock settles, and the ground above it comes down with it. At Goose Creek the surface sank. Parts of the field that had been land became tidal flat and then open water. It was one of the first places anywhere that people watched the ground drop because of what they had taken from under it, and it was studied as such, an early textbook case of subsidence, written up by geologists in the 1920s while the wells were still pumping. The lesson would come back to this town twice more, once when the whole region pumped its groundwater and sank by feet, and once at Brownwood, the subdivision that went under the bay and is now the Nature Center. But the first time, it was oil, and it was here, and the creek got wider.
Then the refinery came, because a field wants a refinery the way a farm wants a mill. Humble Oil, a Texas company then, not yet part of a global one, chose a stretch of shoreline a few miles from the field and began building in 1919, and the refinery ran its first crude in 1920. From there the story is the one everybody knows: the plant grew and the town grew around it, the small settlements that had clustered near the field and the refinery eventually folding together under the name Baytown, the aviation gasoline of the Second World War, the chemical plant and the olefins plant after it, the complex that is now one of the largest in the country. The field itself is nearly a footnote. A few wells may still pump a little. The boardwalk derricks are long gone. What is left of the boom is the name on the school district and the shape of the shoreline.
But think about what actually happened there, in the plainest terms, and it stops being a footnote. For all of human history before the industrial age, the energy a person could use was the energy of the day: the sun on the field, the wood in the stove, the wind in the sail, the horse. A man could do a man's work and a river could turn a wheel, and that was the ceiling. What the drillers at Goose Creek tapped was the energy of an unimaginable number of days: plankton that lived and died in a sea when the continents were in different places, sunk, buried, cooked slowly under rock, and held there. A barrel of it carries the concentrated work of a very long time, and a gusher spent barrels by the thousand before anyone could get a valve on it. When the gusher came over the derrick, the sound was the sound of deep time being spent all at once. The town that grew up next to that sound has spent a century learning how to spend it more slowly and more carefully, in furnaces and columns and crackers, and that learning is the actual business of the place.
There is a kind of fact about a town that you can only see from inside it, and this is one. Baytown was called into being by a hole in the ground, on the near shore of a creek, and everything else, the schools and the hospital on Garth Road and the parade down Texas Avenue and the mums in the hallway, is the long consequence of that hole. It is easy to be sentimental about this and easy to be cynical. The creek does not care either way. It is a piece of brackish water that empties into a bay, with a sea breeze on it in the afternoon and egrets in the shallows at dusk, and it holds no opinion about its name.
Aristotle would have said that the oil under Goose Creek, before 1908, was there only in potential. He had a word for what a thing is when it is merely capable of something, dynamis, and another for what it is when it is actually doing it: energeia, being-at-work. A reservoir sitting under rock is not at work. It is a possibility. It had been a possibility for longer than there had been people, and it would have stayed one. The instant it is brought up and burned or cracked or refined, it is at work, and the work travels: into an engine, a hospital generator, a plastic bag, a rocket. The line from that word to our word "energy" is direct. What the drillers did in 1916 was move a hundred million years from potential into actuality, and the town has been the site of that transition ever since, a place where stored possibility is turned into work by the thousand tons, around the clock.
At the game on Friday the band plays, and the mums shed their glitter on the bleachers, and under the lights the field is as green as money because the lights are as bright as noon. The power for those lights comes down the wire from a turbine that burns natural gas, and the gas came from a field somewhere like the one under the creek, and the plastic on the mum ribbons and the polyester in the uniforms and the asphalt in the parking lot all came through a plant on the channel, which was built where it was built because of a gusher a long walk from the end zone. None of this is on the scoreboard. It does not need to be.
After the game the traffic thins out on the road toward the west side of town, and if you go far enough you get to the water. The creek is dark. The bay beyond it is dark, except for the plant lights across the way. Somewhere out in the shallows, under the mud, there may still be the stubs of pilings that once held up a forest of wooden derricks. The tide comes in over them twice a day and goes out again, and has done so for a hundred years, and will keep doing so long after the last well is capped, patient as only water is.