Deep Down

Posted on April 17, 2003 in Book of Days Nature Neighborhood

Note: This is second in a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days.

Today’s Topic: Write about what’s under your house.

The habitable part of our condominium ends its fall from the sky at a long seam separating its concrete foundation from the tarred over asphalt of our cul de sac. How far does the concrete sink into the ground? I don’t know. I don’t know if it is supported by pylons or driven piles or just a gigantic, steel reinforced block of reprocessed Slover Mountain, which is being slowly ground down near Colton. I’m sure that they needed to burrow past the thin layer of top soil into the bedrock, which is Eocene sandstone, a fossil sand dune.

Drill deeper in some parts of Southern California and you’ll find oil. People don’t remember or know that Los Angeles floats on one of the nation’s larger petroleum lakes. Turn of the century photos of the town show an oil derrick in every backyard. The stink of the oil cloud got so bad that the city council banned drilling for oil. But in those libertarian days before it became mandatory to hook up to the municipal water mains, citizens found an out: they bored holes “looking for water”. And, of course, they came up with oil. Once the black gold bubbled up from the ground, there was no stopping it. The city could only let the property owners hook up to the pipeline, sell their find.

Every now and then, a capped well bursts, flooding someone’s office or home with goo. I don’t know what they do with the oil that comes up in those cases. Maybe they can it and take it to Long Beach for processing. Or haul it out to a toxic waste dump.

There’s no oil here. A few miles to the north, along the dirt road that winds up to Mounts Modjeska and Santiago, you can see blue mud traces in the road cuts. Prospectors used to work this for its silver. I doubt that it’s economical to refine it or else we’d have quite the concentration of mills and foundries up that canyon. The land immediately beneath us lacked mineral resources other than a scanty topsoil that could barely grow grass to feed cattle. Below that dirt lay a thick hump of petrified sand, sand that blew around when the wind whipped off the new mountains behind it, sand that the mammoths, dire wolves, and other interesting fauna of the Eocene found distinctly uninteresting. Their bones ended up in the far more dangerous La Brea tar pits about fifty miles northwest of here. Nothing roamed to these parts it seems, except perhaps sabre tooths seeking kitty litter.

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Tomorrow’s topic: Just beyond the edge of the woods.