Many wrote their names over their doors and began to trade — in soap, in bootlaces, in onions, in leather. They withdrew from the stormy and tragic domain of the fortune-seeker to the pathetic modesty of the small shopkeeper. The shacks that had been built to last a couple of months stood for years, and their provisional frailty became stabilized into a characteristic of local colour. They resemble the flimsy constructions of a film studio or the primitive book-cover illustrations of Californian stories or hallucinations. It seems to me, having seen many great industrial areas, that nowhere else does such a sober business undertaking take on such a fantastic physiognomy. Here, capitalism wandered into the territory of expressionism.
And it seems that this place will hold on to its fantastic nature. For the town moves — and not only in a metaphorical sense. As the old wells stagnate, new ones are opened, and the dusty street wanders towards the oil.
It shoves its little houses ahead, winds into a curve and extends itself zealously in the wake of the capricious oil.
So I can hardly give up the idea that this street will one day be endless, a long, white, dusty ribbon going over hills and into valleys, crooked and straight, temporary and yet permanent, short lived as human happiness and long lived as human desire.
I will admit to you that the appearance of this large town, consisting principally of a single great street, caused me to forget the actual conditions of its social order. For a time, speculation and the passion of money-making seemed to me elemental and almost mysterious. The grotesque faces of greed here, the persistently tense atmosphere, where frightening catastrophes could suddenly occur each day, at any time, awakened my interest more for the destinies that were suited to literary treatment than for those of the everyday. The fact that even here there must be workers and clerks, wage rates and unemployed, was often surpassed by the seemingly fictional quality of the individuals. Fantasy was more alive than conscience.
At any rate, the oil workers are incomparably better off than, for example, coal miners. They are skilled workers even here. The working conditions are relatively favourable. The men work in places that, while not airy, are at least not closed off from air, and the smell of the oil is by no means unpleasant and is even said to be healthful for the lungs.
To the layman, all the instruments that are used for boring appear to be disappointingly primitive. Motors drive the drills. A man circles continuously around a type of basin, holding an iron rod horizontally in his hand. As simple as his motions and activities look, they are in reality equally difficult. The experts say that the skill of a workman consists of his ability to feel by hand the degree and type of difficulty with which the drill meets, the low or high level of resistance offered by the rock. The worker’s hand must therefore have a highly refined sense of touch and, in part, provide a substitute for the function of the eye, which in well-drilling is completely useless. If the bore hole is accidentally blocked by some object falling into it — for example, a large screw — ingenious and crafty methods are used to extract the blockage with the aid of instruments that grope around in the darkness before they grasp and remove it. Their endeavours remind one of attempts to bring to the light a cork that has fallen into a dark and narrow-necked bottle. Hours, months and money are lost on it.
Money, money, so very much money! Remember that boring to a depth of fifteen hundred metres costs about ninety thousand dollars. It is a lottery game for people who don’t need one, for bankers, consortiums, and American multi-millionaires. The men for whom a fortune may erupt out of the ground here have already lost the ability to become happy through material gain. There is a distinct contrast between the fabulous way in which the earth offers its treasures and the stoical calm with which the shareholders of oil stock can await the coming of the miraculous event. These poor treasure hunters live somewhat removed from the scene of Nature’s wonders, in the great cities of the West, and the fact that they are far away, invisible and practically impersonal, bestows upon them the brilliance of gods who direct engineers and workers through mysterious transmissions. Foreign financial titans own the great majority of the oilfields. The employees are paid from a kind of magically replenished chest. Somewhere in the distance, on the great international stock exchanges, shares are traded and transactions take place according to unfathomable laws. Astronomers are more familiar with the genesis and fading of heavenly bodies in space than are the managers and directors of oilfields with the changes in ownership of the wells at which they work. The minor officials can only sit and tremble as their ears perceive the reverberations of larger storms in the world markets. For example, three large enterprises were recently sold to a Western consortium. A small conference was held at one of the world’s markets. Three or four gentlemen took out their fountain pens and scrawled their signatures on contracts. And here in this oil town five hundred officials were put out of work; starvation peered through their windows and was already raising the door latch, all because the Master of a Thousand Oil Wells had spoken a brief sentence: ‘We are going to centralize!’
Sceptics claim that the new owners were only planning a stock-exchange manoeuvre, their purpose being simply to sell the shares at a higher price and not actually operate the wells.
The workmen head home with the same certainty that is only seen in peasants returning from work in the fields, and it is as though they carry the same scythes upon their shoulders that their grandfathers had carried before them. A few poor people stand at muddy pools of water and collect stray oil in cans. They are the lesser colleagues of the great Parisian Dreyfuss. They have no shares, only buckets. They sell their findings of oil in very small quantities and light with it their provisional wooden cabins. This is the entire share that they receive from bountiful Nature. Their shacks stand crooked, brown and resigned in the golden rays of the sun. They appear to be huddling ever closer to one another, trying to become smaller and eventually to vanish altogether. And tomorrow, perhaps, they will no longer exist.
I hope that I have given you an idea of the atmosphere of this eastern California. I have described it to you to demonstrate that it is not my intention to send only idyllic reports from this country.
Meanwhile, I remain
Your obedient servant
J.R.
I then came to a region where they manufacture poisons. These poisons can kill. But since everything on earth contains within it two sides, it is true that the poisons can also nourish. One of the poisons is called ammonia. Using this, they fertilize the earth and kill the enemies of the fatherland.
One of the others is called potash.
In this region there was a village that was visited one day by skilled engineers. They examined the fields and meadows and found that great quantities of potash could be obtained from the earth of this village.
They returned to the poison factory and reported to the Masters of a Thousand Poisons that there was potash in this village.
So the Masters of a Thousand Poisons sent clever agents to the village. These agents told the owners of the fields and meadows nothing about the potash. They simply offered them money, great quantities of money, for their fields and meadows.