Analogic Geology: Toxic Trail

Analogic Geology: Toxic Trail

The air is the emergency
or the unnamed spill
in Suisun Bay today, which
failing at first to be sourced
(turns out it’s CHEVRON) evaporates
driving a few to the hospital
with nausea from a burning
smell coming from the WATER
by way of the refinery
or from TANKERS—extensions
as they are of the industry and
industrial CAPITAL said to have caused
(as I recently read) geology to exist
as a discipline. But, I thought,
geology doesn’t cause refineries
any more than chemistry does
except in that the required knowledge
can be seen to be pre-monetized
by the entities that endow its chairs and
hire its workers. It is a strange pleasure
to think that way as I did and do,
reminding me of the original sin of my Catholic
youth or the Spicerian fix that’s always in.

In 1876, oil was discovered in California
by STANDARD OIL, which soon acquired
600 acres in Point Richmond. Standard
was incorporated in 1905 but then dismantled
in 1911 into 33 companies in a trust-busting
move. But was it? The REFINERY’s own
history tells how it was critical in WWI
and more so in WWII. Meanwhile, in 1915
automobiles boomed. J. D. ROCKEFELLER
was the richest man in the world. African-
American workers arrived from the South
and were hired. Women were hired. Standard
had become Chevron by then. COMPANY
and TOWN are reported by the Richmond Museum
to have been glad together for advanced-for-then
personnel policies, eight-hour days, training, etc.
A group of women called the CHEVRONETTES
appeared and were photographed. Today Chevron
LOOMS over bay and town steaming
night and day toxically up into the horizon.

Not completely unlike having, say,
MOUNT RAINIER an hour from Seattle—
a big beautiful mountain you can ski and hike
and gaze at it, but if Rainier goes it takes the town.
Though maybe not good to make such a comparison
as God or whatever makes volcanoes
or geology or tectonics, or the GODDESS does.
Anyway, volcanoes are not part of CAPITALISM
except as everything is or in how resources
are used but in their sublime power are
not always usable and can be catastrophe itself.
As earthquakes are also more common, so more feared are
seen as planetary powers—EARTH, wind, and fire—
not as evil but as forces of NATURE, as people
are sometimes called that and CAPITAL
has that reputation or is ascribed
that inevitability. If you regulate, reps of
VALERO say, they will be forced out of California
to a less regulated state where they will
contribute more to global warming.
Seriously, that was the argument along
with their having already fixed the problem
(mainly operator error, natch) resulting
in the two-hundred-grand fine otherwise
known as the cost of doing business,
as we in business say.

Refineries are not the only elements of the toxic trail.
Famously, ZENECA Agricultural Products, a chemical
plant on the bay near MEEKER SLOUGH and
STEG MARSH, was cemented over in an unregulated
clean-up that ultimately ravaged now-activist
Sherry Padgett. She ran an electrical cable business
across the street and swept up poison dust intentionally
spread near her business before the CEMENTING,
after which rare bone and thyroid CANCERS
hollowed out her small frame. Other residents
had other cancers, but cancer is rarely connectable
to the cause of cancer, as any lawyer will tell you.

The BAY TRAIL includes this cemented site
surrounded also by a chain-link fence with warning signs.
Nearby are duck-filled lagoons, formerly called
Chemical Pond A and Chemical Pond B, where
arsenic, lead, zinc, and mercury once degraded
to become even more toxic. Also sulfuric acid, as in
gases from volcanoes, which is why it can be
dangerous to go out in a boat near Kīlauea
in Hawaii to see the LAVA. It’s not as benign
as one might imagine or hope the TOURISTIC
SUBLIME reliably to be.

But let’s talk about sublimes. RICHMOND is more
quotidian than SUBLIME in its toxicity
with the genuinely TOXIC SUBLIME truer, for my
money, of other sites such as the leaden white pools
of MALAKOFF DIGGINS, now a state park,
a century after it was created by gold miners
in the nearby foothills of the Sierra Nevada
still part of the drainage of the Sacramento Delta.
Or you picture CHERNOBYL. The rising
of the level of the SACRAMENTO RIVER by six feet
of mud during the Gold Rush is not nothing, though
in Ukraine there is that no-people rule and the
half-life of poison on a COSMIC SCALE.

There are other SUPERFUND SITES, as they are called,
in California but, as Sherry Padgett
points out, there is no super fund or funds
of any kind to clean the Zeneca
site, which has, unsurprisingly, not happened,
though the place is part of an upscale housing development
and state park and is almost as BUCOLIC these
days as Chernobyl appears to be in rhapsodic selfies.

You are often on the TOXIC TRAIL when you hike
in the East Bay Regional Park, as I do frequently.
Such hiking is a bit like conceptual
art in that it provides many chances
to observe, investigate, and participate in
these toxicities, not limited to Richmond,
but which the city has, well more than its share.
LIFE and NON-LIFE is the subject. More on that.
The Bay Trail is a formal and historical construct
as well as an actual trail that follows the outline of the
San Francisco and San Pablo bays. One notes
on the map of such things that there are no toxic hot sites
in the upscale Marin County sections of the trail.

Unlike—again—Richmond, where TERRA NOVA
is the phrase ornately used on the signage
at the West Contra Costa County Sanitary Landfill
visible from my window as a man-made PROMONTORY,
and where I sometimes go. This closed disposal site
for HAZARDOUS WASTE is being treated with layers
of topsoil, gravel, plastic, compacted clay, UNNAMED
wastes, liquid leachate, and bay mud—all said not to allow
drainage to the Bay. It’s a three-mile hike amidst
pickleweed, crows, derelict boats, tires, marbled
godwits, sandpipers, long-billed curlews, greater
white-fronted geese, and magnificent turkey
vultures, which land before you only to take lazily off
as you pass by. There are often smoky fires
at the top of the GARBAGE MOUNTAIN, as it is
called in other signage around which
you walk, burning God knows what unspeakable
detritus. Adjacent to the park is the Golden Bear
Transfer Station or dump where one actively brings
big and/or toxic things and pays to leave them.
It is an easy though mentally challenging hike that
affords excellent views of the Chevron Refinery
a few hundred yards across the Bay. Turning
your back on it,you encounter a chemically
bright green LAGOON filled with American white and
brown pelicans, mallards, American widgeons, and
green-winged teals. Further signage points out
that wetlands are the KIDNEYS OF THE BAY,
filtering pollutants from urban runoff. There are
solar power collectors to your right as you arrive
back at the parking lot, where you usually find yourself
alone or with one other car and might think,
as I have, well, it’s better than it was. But is it?

 

---

Publishing Information

• The Richmond Museum refers to the Richmond Museum of History in Richmond, California.
• Signage for and maps of the Wildcat Marsh and Landfill Loop Trail provide information about the closed disposal site at the West Contra Costa County Sanitary Landfill.
• The information about Sherry Padgett comes from various blogs and articles, including the Richmond Confidential: "One Woman's Quest to Clean up 100 Years of Chemical Waste," December 6, 2012.

Art Information

• “Port of Richmond Harbor, CA” © National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; public domain.