Places We’re From

Leave a comment July 5, 2022 Steve Wiggins

The places we’re from aren’t always where we’re born. The funny thing about reaching “middle age” is the amount of reassessment that goes on. Where we’re from has a tremendous impact on who we become. Not that we can’t change how we turn out, but we will always carry along with us some of where all that coming about took place. I wasn’t born in Rouseville, but I lived there from the time I was eleven until I left for college, and then for good. A recent creative project sent me back to the web for some information on my former home. I’d been a (fairly local) immigrant, and I didn’t know much about this tiny town. Although from only sixteen miles away, I’d never heard of it before moving there. It was a small town of about 900 people.

The home of a smelly Pennzoil refinery, not everyone wanted to stop there on their way through, along route 8. What prompted this post, however, was that web search. According to a recent census, the population of Rouseville is now just over 500. The Pennzoil refinery closed years ago, and my return trips to the area have always been bittersweet. Those teenage years were tough, but formative. Growing up in a town that small you have no connections. You eventually learn that connections are how you get ahead in life and if you ain’t got ‘em, you ain’t got ‘em. Even as I met other Pennsylvanians during college, none of them had heard of Rouseville. The one exception was my advisor who’d recalled a former student from the town.

I’m not certain that it will ever become an actual ghost town—many oil boom towns did back when the petroleum industry began—but it has started on that trail. The last time I visited, the house where I’d lived was gone. The elementary school I’d attended had been razed. The huge refinery was missing. Some of the paved streets had reverted to gravel. Part of my childhood was being erased. Rouseville wasn’t an easy place to live. The nearest bookstore was thirty miles away. You couldn’t buy regular groceries, or ironically, even gas for your car in town. Drug use was rampant and violence wasn’t unheard of. Even so, I know the town will always be part of me. And even if Rouseville never becomes a ghost town proper, there will always be ghosts from there living in my mind.

Keystone

1 Comment March 13, 2020 Steve Wiggins

I don’t carry many keys. Working at home has that distinct advantage, and combination/electronic locks of various kinds are becoming pretty standard. I do wonder about the impact this has on the keyring industry, though. Not a fan of bulky rings of keys and fobs in my pocket I tend to stick to novelty keyrings for entertainment purposes only. A few years back, before we’d considered moving to Pennsylvania, we picked one up that was shaped like, well, the Keystone State. Laid out like a tiny, very large scale map, it lists the big cities and some tourist sites. Since you seldom hear people say, “I’m going to Pennsylvania for vacation” you might well wonder about the latter. The reason that we bought this novelty was one of the places listed: Oil City.

Currently around the 82^nd most populous city in the commonwealth, Oil City isn’t a place most folks would look for. It is near the birthplace of the oil industry, thus its name, but it doesn’t seem to have the tourist draw to merit a keyring fob. I grew up very near Oil City, and I attended Oil City High School. It’s a pleasant enough town, although it has been ravaged by big box stores that left its downtown the haunt of ghost store fronts. Many of the big boxes then left because the area has been economically depressed for decades. It’s an example of the kind of victims that capitalism tends to leave behind. The fob on which this “map” is printed is plastic, likely a byproduct of petroleum. That industry had its start in this area and when larger oil fields were found elsewhere it simply moved on.

The keyring had been stuffed into a box within a box, well forgotten before we moved to Pennsylvania. While going through some things the other day, it surfaced once again. I had a key needing a ring, so it was put to use in its native state. Often I ponder how oil has played into my life. Pennzoil still had a headquarters in the area, and refineries dotted the river valleys, but larger fields with bigger payoffs lay to the south. My gypsy-like family didn’t settle in the region because of oil. Not part of the petroleum industry, we simply lived in its shadow. I haven’t visited the area for a few years now, at least not to appreciate the life of a town that helped initiate the modern world, but then was quickly forgotten. Even keyrings can tell a story.

Lingering Memories

Leave a comment September 14, 2016 Steve Wiggins

Visiting northwest Pennsylvania always makes me think of oil. I suppose the fact that I attended high school in Oil City has something to do with the fact. Many people suppose that the oil industry began in Texas, but Pennzoil and Quaker State have earlier roots back to the days when people flooded to Oil City and Titusville to get rich from the petroleum underground. I grew up in a refinery town that is becoming a ghost town, like Pithole City and Petroleum Centre before it. And when I returned home to New Jersey I wanted to find my Oil City book. Yes, there is a book. I first saw it in junior high school and I coveted it. Hardbound and large format, it was a book about my town. I had no idea where to get one, however. There were no bookstores in Oil City, or nearby Franklin. Any further afield than that and nobody cared.

I used to work as a janitor in my junior high school. It was my summer job for several years. One day our task was to haul out the garbage bins. I saw my opportunity. The library was discarding several copies of the book. They were in the trash. I dumpster-dived for the first (but not last) time in my life. I had the prized book. It had been locally printed. There is no publisher listed. It bears no ISBN. Nothing like a book to validate where you’re from. You see, I’ve always wanted to write a history of the area where I grew up. No major publisher would touch it—it can’t possibly sell enough books to cover its costs. It would be a labor of love.

Not that I’m a fan of Big Oil. Quite the opposite, in fact. I don’t appreciate their proprietary arrogance toward ownership of the planet. Of their pollution of the world to gain more money for themselves. I support alternate energy. But still. This is where I’m from. Not that anybody’s making much money off of oil there these days. The shallow wells ran dry long ago. The local oil companies were bought out by larger corporations but they kept the local names. Once in a while I pull out my old, salvaged Oil City book and scan the pages with wonder. Many of these towns wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the prehistoric sludge that flowed under the rocks and stones. It’s easy to believe that the town would stay the same forever. Heading out of Oil City there is a church. A crude cross stands atop a truncated oil derrick. I stare at it and the irony is only half complete.

Too Much Stuff

Leave a comment May 21, 2015 Steve Wiggins

The informal name for economics, rightly, is “the dismal science.” When I recently learned about The Story of Stuff (storyofstuff.org), I found myself again shaking my head in dismay. I have no problem admitting that I’m a liberal pretty much through and through. I believe what I believe is right. Statistics show that the older we grow the more conservative we become, but in my case the opposite trend seems to be in effect. I grew up in a conservative backwater and I saw first-hand what it did to those who adhere to it most religiously. Rouseville, the town where I spent my teens, was an industrial armpit, dominated by a large Pennzoil refinery, now derelict. The town smelled bad despite the pristine woods that surrounded it, and pollution was everywhere evident. People didn’t move away because they couldn’t. Drugs were a rampant problem and I never felt safe going out at night, even though it was a town of less than a thousand souls.

Growing up I often wondered about this. When you live close to the edge, you hang on. The existence of the working class is precarious. Living in a cancer factory like that, you needed your job more than you needed food. If you were to survive, you had to work. Pennzoil was the only game in town. Local pride at being near the fountain head of the oil industry helped only a little. I turned to spirituality to cope. I’m now told that’s naive. I’m told that meaning is found in consuming. The most disheartening part of The Story of Stuff was learning that this was all intentional. Victor Lebow’s 1955 assessment of where our dismal science must go chills me:

“Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives today expressed in consumptive terms.”

Our spiritual satisfaction in buying? And what is more, this advice has been heeded as gospel by the government. Is it any wonder that one percent tell the rest of us what to do? It is time for civilization to grow up. Our infantile need for more stuff has poisoned the very well from which we drink. It may cost you some sleep, but take a look at the Story of Stuff. What you lose in sleep you may gain in peace of mind. And soul.

Sonoco

Leave a comment October 24, 2009 Steve Wiggins

sonoco2

What do God and great pools of gooey, flammable, decomposed ancient biomass have in common? Quite a lot apparently. A picture in this morning’s paper of a Caribbean Petroleum Corp. storage facility explosion took me back to my childhood. I was born in the same place as the oil industry, although I think it was in different hospitals. Northwestern Pennsylvania is where the industrial use of oil was discovered (ancients had learned that the stuff was extremely flammable and used it for cruel weapons, but never figured how to grease an axle with it). One day my brothers and I were playing outside and noticed flames jetting up from an adjacent hillside. We saw giant ashes, some nearly the size of dinner plates, floating down on a summer day and it seemed like a strange gray snow was falling. A funny smell was in the air. That night on the news we learned that a local oil refinery had exploded and when we went to the site to gawk, it was amazing to see colossal storage tanks melted like so many ten-ton candles. It is an image I’ll never forget.

Lord Balfour envisions chariots of fire

My wife’s favorite historian is Barbara Tuchman. We’ve read most of her books. Bible and Sword, however, was especially eye-opening for me. This book describes, step-by-step, how the British Empire forged its alliance with Israel. Tuchman is a meticulous historian, noting minute details that add understanding to the overall picture. One of the key motivating factors that led Lord Arthur James Balfour in his support of a homeland for the Jewish Diaspora was his belief that a physical Israel was required before the Second Coming of Christ could take place. This is a sentiment that has been shared by some recent, very highly ranking American politicians.

Enter Col. Edwin Drake. Drake was the first person to have the idea of drilling for oil. Several local prospectors scampered through the hills of Pennsylvania looking for oil streams where petroleum could be skimmed off the water and refined into kerosene. As an alternative to whale oil, petroleum was much easier to collect and didn’t involve peg-legs spearing great white whales — oh wait, wrong story. As an alternative to whale oil, petroleum made a market impact and soon other uses were descried. There was an oil boom near Titusville, Pennsylvania when Drake hit oil, and soon the industry that give birth to Quaker State, Pennzoil, and Enron was up and running. As uses for petroleum multiplied demand shot through the roof. Drake died in poverty and the industry he helped found rolled ever forward.

Col. Edwin Drake envisioning a drink

After the Second World War, vast oil beds were discovered in the Middle East. Israel was declared a nation, and world-wide demand for petroleum was astronomical. Not all nations of the former Ottoman Empire welcomed the sudden interest in their natural resources or the presence of an allied nation in their midst. Although the roots go deeper and are much more complex, the scenario was set for a crisis that has lasted for my entire life and shows no signs of slowing down.

So what does God have to do with a complex mix of hydrocarbons and other organic compounds? The unbelievable wealth generated by petroleum products has been under-girded with a religious gullibility and deeply held faith that Jesus needs some help in returning. As long as we’re waiting, we might as well get filthy rich. Politicians with connections to Big Oil and the Big Guy have it all figured out. Take all that you can and wait for the God who has blessed you so richly to come home. I still remember that refinery explosion, and some childhood memories have become paradigms and parables that have as many applications as petroleum itself. When the oil beds run dry, what will grease the axles of Kingdom Come?