Heat and Light (28 page)

Pennsylvania History

Second Period

Oct. 1, 1995

“William A. Smith: Unsung Hero of the Pennsylvania Oil Rush”

By Shelby Elizabeth Vance

When the world's first oil well was drilled, right here in western Pennsylvania, Colonel Edwin Drake was given all the credit. As a result, people think that Colonel Drake (who was not actually a Colonel) rolled up his sleeves and drilled the well all by himself. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the driller of this historic well was a man by the name of William A. Smith, known as “Uncle Billy.” (He was not actually any kin to Colonel Drake.)

“Uncle Billy” was trained as a blacksmith and saltwater driller. His specialty was “fishing,” that is, recovering tools that were lost or broken inside a salt well. When Colonel Drake came to Pennsylvania in 1859, he heard of “Uncle Billy's” reputation and hired him (for $2.50 a day!) to come and drill his well.

Progress was slow because of conditions around Oil Creek. The groundwater was close to the surface. The soil was a mixture of clay, sand, and gravel almost forty feet thick. When “Uncle Billy” tried the tradi
tional methods of drilling, the well would fill with water and it's walls would collapse. The story goes that Colonel Drake came up with the idea to drill inside an iron pipe pounded into the ground. This kept water from coming in and kept the well from collapsing. This “drive pipe” as it is now known was a unique invention that had never been used before.

In later years “Uncle Billy” claimed the drive pipe was his invention, but history, once again, gives the credit to Colonel Drake. Who really came up with this idea remains a mystery. The world will never know.

Colonel Drake may have a major highway named after him, but “Uncle Billy” is, in my opinion, the real hero of the Pennsylvania Oil Rush. He was married a total of three times and had nine children (one of whom died while he was working for Colonel Drake, another aspect of his life that is little known). In spite of his personal tragedy, “Uncle Billy” continued to drill wells in the oil region until 1870, when he retired to a farm in Butler County. He never earned any large sum of money from his work (or his farm for that matter), and lived on charity until his death.

The surviving children were named James, William, Samuel, Margaret, Ellen, Adeline, General Grant, and General Washington. (“Uncle Billy” did not actually serve in the Civil War, but was a lifelong patriot.)

It is not an exaggeration to say that the drilling of the first oil well transformed life in America. Though it is best known as a source of heat and light, petroleum also plays an important role in
creating medicines that lessen suffering and make life more pleasant today. In addition, it is used in the making of plastic. If you look around a typical American home, you will see an amazing variety of products made of this material. It is literally impossible to imagine modern life without plastic.

In conclusion, it is important to remember the legacy of “Uncle Billy” as one of the “mysteries of history.” Life is not always fair. When he died in 1890, “Uncle Billy” had the personal satisfaction of knowing he had drilled the world's first oil well, but also the heartbreak of seeing another man take all the credit.

T
he days begin at seven. Beds are made, showers taken, breakfasts eaten. It is, arguably, the most useful part of the program, the dumb animal normality of living in daytime, sleeping at night. For years Darren has kept junkie's hours, nodding off at 9:00
A.M
., at midday, at dusk.

After breakfast, meds are given. Men file in and out of the nurse's office, where the magic Jell-O shooters are dispensed. In light of his last, spectacular failure, Darren is not invited to the party. He is given a multivitamin and a cup of herbal tea that smells like socks.

He takes a small, sad pride in his bed making.

The tea is made from milk thistle, an ambitious herb that is going to detoxify his liver, or at least try.

Fortified with sock tea, he attends his morning group, which is called Steps. This is to distinguish it from the afternoon group, which is called Group.

At Steps, twenty guys work the program. They admit they are powerless over drugs, that their lives have become unmanageable, that a Power greater than themselves can restore them to sanity. They turn their lives over to the care of said.

You might find this hard to do, if you've ever considered yourself powerful. If you're Darren Devlin—as, regrettably, he is—this is not a problem. The first three steps are easy enough.

Step Four is the searching and fearless moral inventory, which is where the trouble begins.

This time around, Darren has a head start. His last time in rehab—two shortlong years ago—he made it all the way to Step Eight:
We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

Willingness was not the problem. He was willing enough. The problem was the list itself, which included every person he had interacted with since the age of fourteen. The list contained multitudes. The day after he completed his searching and fearless moral inventory, he walked out the front door, caught the 12 bus at the bottom of the hill, rode sixteen blocks, and wandered the neighborhood until he ran into Nelson.

Faced with such a list, an unending litany of shames and failures, anyone—anyone—would want to get high.

Nelson was his best friend, an old junkie. How old exactly, and whether Nelson was his first or last name, Darren never knew. With a few notable interruptions—hospitals, prison—Nelson had been fixing since the seventies, the golden age of Baltimore heroin. When the supply dried up in the eighties, he'd actually gone to live in Afghanistan, where his colossal habit could be maintained for pocket change. Before the terrorists and American soldiers had ruined everything, Kabul had been the junkie's Mecca, his Medina, his Lourdes. Someday, when the bullets stopped flying, Nelson and Darren would travel there together.

Afghanistan was Darren's exit strategy, his plan for the future. High, he'd been impressed by his own foresight.

There was power in having a plan.

THE NAMES ON HIS EARLIER LIST
carry forward like a bad debt.

His senior year in high school, the Bakerton Rotary Club had awarded Darren a small grant, called the Hope Scholarship. Placed in the context of a massive tuition bill from Johns Hopkins, it was more than nothing, but only a little more.

The Rotarians were big on ceremony. They presented the award at a special banquet. Darren was called to the stage and handed a giant replica of his thousand-dollar check, printed on poster board.

The Hope Scholarship existed because of his father. Years earlier, when Darren was still in junior high, Dick Devlin had sold his fellow Rotarians on the idea of funding a scholarship in the sciences.
I was thinking ahead,
he admitted to Darren later.
I thought it might come in handy for you someday.

For years Dick had been laying groundwork, so that Darren could receive the Hope Scholarship. It is—well, sobering—to think.

Arnold Wu had been his first lab partner in Organic Chemistry—a shy, serious kid from Southern California who shattered all Darren's assumptions about that place. Their first experiment involved recrystallization. They'd written the report together, an all-nighter fueled by Red Bull and two Adderalls Darren had bought from a guy in his dorm.

The second week's experiment involved melting points. Darren had been late for class, but Arnold had started without him. He'd given Darren his notes to copy, the calculations written in mechanical pencil, in Arnold's careful hand.

The third week's experiment, Darren can't remember. Whether he'd gone to class high, or had gone only in his imagination, was impossible to say.

O-Chem was a weed-out class. By second semester the class had shrunk by a third. Thanks entirely to Arnold Wu, Darren was not weeded out. His second lab partner in Organic Chemistry was Holly Gillman and this was much, much worse, because Holly Gillman had loved him.

She was not a pretty girl, for what that mattered. As Leah Radulski had in high school, Holly chose him for her own inscrutable reasons.

At the end of freshman year he was invited back to the Rotarians' banquet, to give a speech on his experience at Hopkins. Darren
promised to attend. He'd had every intention of going. He had even borrowed Holly's car.

His academic adviser, at that time, was a woman named Greta Schenkel. That summer she paid him—generously—to house-sit and watch her cat while she visited her parents in Stuttgart. For an entire month he enjoyed the professor's stereo and projection TV, usually with total strangers—people who'd given or sold him dope, or promised to.

One night he returned to Greta Schenkel's and found a smashed window. He never got around to reporting the robbery. That night—that entire summer—he was in no shape to deal with cops. He called Nelson instead.

When he crashed Holly's car he had called her in a panic. There were no witnesses to the accident. He convinced her to tell the police that she, not Darren, had been driving.

He slept with her because it made her easier to deal with.

He still owes Holly Gillman several thousand dollars. More, possibly. He has no idea—he's never asked—what she pays for car insurance.

He is not entirely sure when the cat ran away.

The stories are numberless.

THE SCHEDULE SETS ASIDE
two hours for phone calls. From eleven to noon is Phone Out. From five to six
P.M.
is Phone In.

Twice a day Darren stations himself at an actual pay phone, the kind that used to exist in the world and now is found only in rehab, where cell phones—with their treasure troves of stored numbers, the suppliers on speed dial—are not allowed.

He starts small. All things considered, he doesn't feel too bad about Arnold Wu, who'd requested, and was assigned, another lab partner. Arnold, at least, had the stones to save himself.

Now a post-doc at MIT, he doesn't at first, and possibly not even later, remember who Darren is.

“Oh,
Darren,
” he says finally, in a parody of remembering. “How are you, man?”

As though the words
I'm in heroin rehab
don't answer that question.

“No sweat,” he says, when Darren explains his reason for calling. “Actually—this is kind of funny—my lab partner after you? You remember Wendy?”

Darren thinks, Did Wendy sell smack? No? Sorry, don't remember.

“We're married now. With a baby on the way. So I guess I should be thanking you.”

You're welcome, Darren thinks as he hangs up. I'm so glad my addiction has worked out for you.

Greta Schenkel no longer teaches at Johns Hopkins. Possibly she went back to Germany, says the indifferent graduate student who answers the phone.

Gia Bernardi's cell phone number is stored in his own cell phone, which had been confiscated at Intake. From some remote part of his brain undestroyed by opiates, he conjures forth her parents' phone number, where he'd phoned her every day for an entire summer, a lifetime ago.

Rocco is winded, a little wheezy. He sounds very old. “Hang on,” he rasps. “I'll get her.”

“Hello?” says Gia. “Hello?”

Darren remembers clearly the first time they got high. Without him she would never have picked up a joint. Of this he is utterly sure.

He hangs up the phone.

The first time he calls Holly Gillman, she hangs up on him. The second time she weeps. The third time she hangs up again. None of this is the actual problem.

The problem is that he can't call his mom.

THE NEXT DAY
he tries again. This time, Gia herself answers. His contrition seems to amuse her.

“Sorry for what? We had a fucking blast that summer. Anyways,” says Gia.

And just like that, she changes the subject. About Darren's Eighth Step—his moral imperative to make amends, his paralyzing guilt and shame—she has nothing to say.

“You doing good?” she asks. “What do you do for fun in there?”

“Fun is discouraged.”

“I was really sorry to hear about your mom.”

The words cause him physical pain.

“It was a beautiful service. Stoner's did a great job. Even Rocco said so, and he's critical.”

The pain lodged in his throat like something that could choke him.

“She looked good. She was pretty banged up, you know, but they covered everything.”

Darren swallows very deliberately, searching and fearless.

“They tried so hard to find you. Your dad even called
me.
He thought I'd know how to reach you. I tried your cell, but it wouldn't let me leave a message. The mailbox was full.”

Darren had been, at the time, unfindable. This was no accident. This was completely by design.

They tried for days to find him. He learned, some months later, that his brother Rich had come to Baltimore to track him down. He was seen lurking around the old apartment in Charles Village, a big blond guy who looked like a cop. Darren was by then locked out of his apartment. He heard the rumor third-hand from Gary Beasom, who lived in the building and sold substandard weed, cheap quarter-ounce bags of seeds and stems.
They're watching you, man,
said Gary, a conclusion Darren recognized as pot smoker's paranoia but did not dispute. It was in some way flattering, that he was
important enough to be watched by cops. It never occurred to him that his brother would come looking for him, or why.

That spring, like every spring, Sally's daffodils would bloom before the snow melted.

The family postponed her funeral as long as possible. Finally, the day before Christmas, they put his mother in the ground.

B
ecause somebody really should, Wesley ponders the question of water.

Two million gallons spilled during the accident; untold gallons contaminated during the cleanup. (The radioactive crust packed into underwater canisters. The water sprayed by wheeled robots at the basement walls.)

Untold because no one is asking. Fucking journalists! Wesley is outraged by their slapdash methods. They never ask the questions he wants them to.

The basement of the reactor building was too hot for humans. Cesium-137, a by-product of atom splitting, had soaked into the floor and walls. In spraying them, an untold volume of water was contaminated. Which, of course, had to be disposed of somewhere.

“Fuck,” Wesley says.

It's his new favorite word, deployed when anything aggrieves him: shoddy reporting, night sweats, or, today, the childproof cap on his Lumox, which is nearly impossible to open even with two adult hands. At least twice a week the cap defeats him completely. He pries it off with psychotic force, sending a shower of (blue, 10 milligram) capsules flying. Jessie refilled his Lumox just yesterday. This morning ninety capsules—a full month's supply—landed on the bathroom floor.

“Fuck,” Wesley said.

The mess was, in that moment, too much to face. He closed the bathroom door and returned to his desk. The half-life of Cesium-137 is thirty-three years. He has, somewhere, a monograph on its other properties, though he can't remember where it is. In the spare bedroom are four full-size filing cabinets, each half-filled. On the floor, the desk, the nightstand, the bed, a dozen piles of documents are waiting to be filed. There are newspaper items and engineers' reports. There are memos on the letterhead of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—made public under the Freedom of Information Act, acquired over several trips to the Pennsylvania State Archives in Harrisburg. There are full issues of his favorite periodicals,
Radiation Oncology
and the
Journal of Environmental Medicine:
double-blind, placebo-controlled studies of treatments that don't work, and longitudinal population studies that prove this is so. Jessie has offered to help organize his papers, but Wesley has, so far, resisted. Once something is filed, it is lost to him forever. He has a problem letting go.

He returns to the bathroom to gather up his Lumox, handling the capsules gingerly. After insurance, he pays a dollar a pill. At his new daily dosage of 30 milligrams, he can't afford to toss them in the trash. He can't afford to consider what sorts of microbes are living on his bathroom floor.

The containment building flooded with reactor water—two, maybe three million gallons, highly radioactive. Where the fuck did it all go?

He began cursing one morning as they drove away from the hospital, a morning of bad news. Jessie was at the wheel—even before his illness, a near constant in their marriage. She had always been the better driver.

“Fuck,” Wesley said.

Reflexively she hit the brake. “What did you say?”

“Fuck,” he repeated wonderingly. “You know, I don't believe I've ever said that out loud.”

This occurred seven weeks ago. He was—still is—thirty-three years old.

He marvels, now, at his old prudery, his lifelong rejection of strong language. Why had he denied himself the pleasure? His parents had believed in godly speech. His father, especially, tolerated no lapses. It was his main grievance against television, which he judged full of profanity, portentously changing the channel when an actor said
hell
or
damn.

Thirty-three was Jesus's age at Crucifixion. The half-life of Cesium-137 is thirty-three years. The most ordinary sort of coincidence, and yet from long habit Wesley probes it for significance, some deeper meaning hidden in the number. He recognizes the ridiculousness of the impulse. Years of Bible study have turned his brain to mush.

The containment building contained a container, which contained other containers.

He curses behind closed doors only, out of respect for his congregation. He does it badly, with no ear for the nuances.
What the shit?
he once fumed, when a minivan cut them off in the hospital parking lot. Jessie had laughed herself purple. He had married a laughing woman, the best decision of his life.

Supplying meaning where none exists is a rare cognitive skill, useless except in certain professions—fortune-telling, advertising. For the biblical scholar it is a necessary aptitude—the only one, possibly. Nothing can be allowed to mean only what it means. Numbers, especially, are fraught with subtext. (Seven: completion, perfection. Forty: the time needed for God to act.) The ultimate test of this ability being, of course, the book of Revelation—a bedtime story for the fanciful, the desperate, the paranoid, the mad.

He returns his Lumox to its amber plastic bottle—
WESLEY PEACOCK LUMOX 10 MG TAKE 3X DAY WITH FOOD
—and places it on the shelf. When did it become
his
Lumox? It is terrible to contemplate, this intimacy with the drug, an arranged marriage brokered by Big
Pharma. Courtship happens in thirty-second increments, between segments of the evening news, a grim variation on speed dating: the ailing elder introduced, night after night, to a series of drugs, any one of which might become
his.
A true match depends on a constellation of factors: symptoms, side effects. Like all romances, it comes down to chemisty.
Talk to your doctor,
the avuncular voice-over advises.

The evening news is lousy with these commercials, in which lively active seniors enjoy their grandkids without worrying about acid reflux or hip fractures, atrial fibrillation or sudden stroke.

Wesley will never have grandkids.

The ugly truth is that he resents them, these spry happy oldsters with their pharmaceutically generated erections. Their dogged pursuit of health seems the worst kind of greediness.

“Seventy or eighty years: that isn't enough for you?” he asks the handsome old gent pushing his granddaughter in a swing.

“Die already,” he tells the screen.

With the clinic staff he is surly, unpleasant. After twenty-six irradiations to the head and neck, he is questioned about side effects. “How does your skin feel?” he was asked this morning, by a pretty young nurse who looked nearly old enough to drive.

“It feels burnt.”

“Like a sunburn,” she said, making a note in his chart.

It will be the defining memory of his time in treatment, this unending talk of sunburns, which began at the initial consult. By week three, the radiation oncologist explained, most patients noticed a slight flushing of the treated area.
Like a sunburn,
he added with a wave of the hand. At the time it seemed a reasonable comparison, if unhelpful. Wesley had rarely spent more than ten consecutive minutes in the sun.

This morning, finally, he had enough. “You people need to stop saying that.”

The child nurse looked up from his chart.

“I understand it's a useful shorthand. You all say it, and I'm sure you believe it.” Wesley's heart worked loudly; his face felt hot. Like a sunburn, he thought.

“Maybe nobody's ever told you, or maybe you don't care, but in case you're interested, it feels nothing like a sunburn.” And there is no Santa Claus, and no comfort and no justice. All that you cling to is false.

The child nurse looked at him as though he'd lost his mind.

At week three the skin begins to redden.

At week four the skin begins to weep.

His cancer, caused by radiation, is being treated with radiation. The irony does not escape him. The irony is nearly too much to bear.

He has learned that the dying are not saintly, a shattering discovery. In his years of ministry, he regularly visited hospitals to comfort the sick. Now the memory shames him, the scripture verses he regurgitated, the hollow platitudes spoken in the smugness of health. He believed, then, what all healthy people believe: that the dying are critically, profoundly different from themselves.

Now that it has left him definitively, he understands the true nature of faith.

The day of his first treatment, an intake nurse had asked his religious preference. He explained that, to his great surprise, he rarely thought of the afterlife. Now that it was just around the corner, eternity held no fascination at all. It was the present that called to him, the physical world that had never interested him until he was about to leave it.

He explained that faith is the child of fear, a primal terror shared by all animals, the dread of our own negation. Desperate to believe himself eternal, man will embrace the wildest fiction: the ultimate redemption, the final justice, the godman who walked the earth. Faith, in the end, is human stubbornness on a heroic scale—the passionate denial, the absolute and abiding refusal to die.

“Religious preference?” she repeated.

“None,” Wesley said.

NUMBERS, ESPECIALLY,
are fraught with subtext.

Twenty-six years ago, at the time of the disaster at Three Mile Island, the boy Wesley Peacock was seven years old.

The mean latency of radiosensitive solid tumors is twenty to thirty years.

Even Jessie doesn't understand the impulse, his need to know what killed him. Note the past tense: in every way that matters, Wesley is already dead. And yet, thanks to technology, he is a corpse in possession of abundant information. Each day he adds to his store.

He nearly says it aloud one night at dinner.
I died in the Golden Age of terminal illness.
Jessie's face stops him, because he loves her terribly. Because, even enraged, he is not cruel.

In the spring of 1979, President Carter appointed the Kemeney Commission to study the accident. Politically, the timing was delicate. With the election looming, panelists were chosen carefully. The main criterion for selection was a lack of conviction about anything. Carter lost the election anyway.

Four days after the accident, he toured the site in yellow booties, to keep from contaminating his shoes.

In 1979 the Pennsylvania Department of Health set up the Three Mile Island Population Registry, a list of people who lived, at the time of the disaster, within five miles of the plant. The list is compared each year against the state's record of death certificates. Of the 32,135 names in the Population Registry, three are Wesley, Eugene, and Bernadette Peacock. Wesley Peacock is dying. Eugene and Bernadette are already dead. Both names have been ticked off the Registry, the cause of each death duly noted: Cardiac Arrest and Undetermined. Their deaths were not attributable to Three Mile Island.

Radiation at levels above 5 millirem will cause fogging of high-speed photographic film.

Wesley's father suffered a heart attack a week after his retirement. The timing is not unusual, in men especially. Death comes when a man loses his higher purpose—in the case of Gene Peacock, the selling of animal feed.

The Registry makes no distinction between Gene's death and that of his wife, who on March 28, 1979, was pregnant and didn't know it; who wouldn't live long enough to develop leukemia or breast cancer and so, according to the Registry, was no more a casualty than Gene. At the time of her miscarriage, Bernadette failed to see a doctor, and so the Population Registry doesn't account for the unhatched Peacock, the baby desperately wanted and grievously lost.

Undetermined
is, possibly, a misnomer. Wesley strongly suspects—he will never know for certain—that his mother was determined to die.

That summer, engineers from Eastman Kodak went door-to-door in the neighborhood, collecting undeveloped film. Bernadette, who didn't own a camera anyway, heard the doorbell but was too tired to move. She had finally seen a doctor, who prescribed Valium to help her relax.

Carter lost the election because of the hostages.

None of the film showed unusual fogging.

She took a fistful of Valium and drifted off to sleep.

Years later, after Chernobyl exploded, a team of Russian scientists appeared in Pennsylvania to ask questions. They made phone calls and knocked on doors. The Russians took blood samples from twenty-nine people and performed cytogenetical analysis. Their findings are not known.

(Fucking journalists: why those twenty-nine people? What were the principles of selection? What dark, inscrutable Soviet knowledge drove such choices? Dead Wesley wants to know.)

In Pennsylvania, four dead Peacocks.

The spring after Chernobyl the starlings never came.

Like all legit catastrophes, Three Mile Island has been explained by academics. The Theory of Normal Accidents: an unanticipated interaction of multiple failures in a complex system. The disaster was unexpected, incomprehensible, uncontrollable, and unavoidable, according to people who know.

Hundreds of photocopied pages, studies of studies. The studies look at rates of various cancers, of stillbirth and miscarriage, and arrive at the same conclusion: there was no significant increase in cancers, stillbirth, or miscarriage. (All calculations assume minimal exposure to radiation, a condition imposed by the courts.)

Wesley replaces the childproof cap and gets to his feet and feels, too late, a precious blue gel cap crushed beneath the heel of his slipper. Four months from now, his name will be crossed off the Registry. His anaplastic thyroid cancer, diagnosed seven weeks ago, will not be attributed to the accident at Three Mile Island.

If minimal exposure is assumed, a statistically significant correlation is impossible. Which raises the question—

(
You're making yourself crazy,
Jessie tells him periodically.)

Which raises the question—

(
Please stop,
says Jessie.)

Which raises the question: If the study design makes it impossible to disprove the null hypothesis, why do the study at all?

(His wife is grateful to go to work each morning.)

Why do the study at all?

To Dead Wesley the answer is obvious. Do the study to have done the study. To have pages of data suitable for photocopying, for filing away in a drawer.