We’ve just returned from a week in Texas. It was a wonderful trip, and we got a good sense of East, North and Central Texas.
One of the most interesting experiences was visiting a place where they “produce” sand for fracking. It was in North Texas, just south of the Oklahoma border. We’d had a good introduction to the local trees, where the elms are weeping and the Live Oaks bear little green leaves and the Post Oaks tower in all their gnarled glory. We’d been introduced to Tickle Tongue Trees, whose bark can be chewed to numb a toothache, and discussed at length whether the grapevine that adds a swampy effect to the forests should be removed as invasive or not.
In the evening, after excellent barbecue and conversation, we drove about 10 minutes to see the fracking sand facility.
There was a line of about 10 trucks waiting to be loaded, which in itself gave the place an otherworldly feel. The facility is open 24 hours a day, and our host knew the night manager, which is why we went.
The process is pretty simple. They dig up the sand, preserving the thin layer of topsoil which is put back, once the gravel is extracted. The fields are lower, but the same scrappy brush they were before the sand was removed. In the large warehouse the sand is “shaken,” sifted really, through six layers, so that only the finest sand is left.
In the office they test the sand for fineness and impurities, shaking it through a small set of canisters with the same size mesh as the large sifters, looking to see what is left behind and weighing it to see that the sand is getting through.
Then all night and day a loader moves the sand from bay to bay and up into the chute that pours sand into the waiting trucks. This fleet was headed to Dallas or San Antonio, I can’t remember which, but trucks go all over the country.
The sand itself was gorgeous, as white and fine as the beaches of San Diego or, I’d imagine, more tropical places.
That night there were two employees, working very hard. The manager makes $9/hour, more for overtime. He wears a paper mask over his mouth and nose, which hardly seems sufficient. The air is thick with fine dust.
There is some money here, I guess. For the farmer whose field is being dug up for the sand, for the half dozen people who might otherwise not be employed (the other man working that night described himself as a working farmer, though I don’t see what grows in the sandy soil besides hay and a few pecan orchards; mostly we saw small herds of cows grazing in scrubby pastures). There are the employed truck drivers, who stood and visited while they waited their turn in line. It reminded me of the ships lined up off the coast of Long Beach, CA, when there was a dock strike– all that gritty commerce. All that moving stuff around.
There were other discussions in Texas, about the drought and the summer’s fires and the water crisis (and water crisis denial). The rice farmers might not get their water allocation from the Colorado River this year (rice farming in the desert??) There was also a 4.7 earthquake near Dallas, and the people I was with asserted, simply, “It’s the fracking. There will be more and they’ll probably get worse.”
In the week we were there we experienced all kinds of weather– arrived to a raw drizzle that felt like November, moved through to the warm, fragrant scents of April, had one sweaty day that was 80 degrees, then a cold front came through and we were in the dry, crispness of September. It was impossible to get our bearings, before flying back to another cold spell and a high of zero degrees. But this is how it goes in Texas in winter. “Unpredictable.”
The world seems alive with impending changes, and chatter. Much like the chatter over gun control, what seems to be lacking is any kind of collective will. What definitely is lacking is a sense of caution. When I hear on NPR about the scientists trying to decide if a strain of bird flu is too dangerous even to work with in the lab, it makes me think: “How quaint. How unusual.” To wait and think of safety, to fear the effects on a grand scale of simple human error.
As the plane landed, the flight attendant said: “Now you have completed the least dangerous part of your trip. Drive safely.” How strange, I thought, the risk load we are willing to bear. The way we fly through the world; the way we force its contents out of the ground. The way we keep digging, and flying, and moving stuff around.
