Interrogation at the Oil Refinery

GaryCGibson - 11:38am Apr 4, 2005 EDT (#54 of 55)The physical Universe exists within the will of God. At the largest and smallest scales it's parameters are unknowable except as revealed by Non-Contingent Being.. The scalable universe is rational.

He said; “The F.B.I. wants to know the name of anyone who takes a picture of the oil refinery”.

Standing there by my bicycle being interrogated and I.D. checked by three policemen with a private security officer watching from the parking lot of a convenience store on the corner next to his large red pickup truck that he’d used to pursue and shout at me to halt from before calling the police force I said “It’s like the Soviet Union isn’t it? They too had restricted photo zones in the time before liberation.”

Around the corner next was the refinery, turning from Highway 82 onto Highway 285, between curses inspired by a lengthy difficult ride through the oil fields between Lamesa Texas and Artesia New Mexico, high pulse rate, and the importunity of being delayed by lazy mechanically conveyed dumped servo-units of the trans-national oil when I finally had a chance to have the wind direction become positive instead of negative (several days of jet stream wind up to 50 mph at surface level that flowed along the west slope of the Rocky Mountains from Canada made a hard left turn at southern New Mexico to the east making bike trekking quite tough) I explained why I had taken the pictures of the refinery briefly resting on the public highway shoulder “Because it’s so ugly”.

Indeed it was. The seventy miles of oil fields to the east punctured and polluted the landscape in increasing density as they approached the refinery at Artesia. It’s an old field yet there is lots of recent drilling activity and new wells. The high prices for oil have made drilling profitable again, yet the new development must have been planned at least a couple years ago. The use of so much land for oil drilling at moderately high altitude over 3500 feet made it difficult to find a safe place to set up a tent at dusk. During the night ambient waves of fossil fuel gases produce and unhealthy odur.

The oil refinery in Artesia a couple of blocks from the main road, and nearly to the intersection of Hwy 82 and Hwy185 is an obvious target of photography for those inspired by Andy Worhol motifs o searching for web page wallpaper. Because of its prominent location imposingly situated like a representative post-modern castellae of doom one can’t avoid tilting past the evil monstrosity.

Until abruptly halted on the bike and told by a law enforcement official, I had forgotten that oil refineries are “military targets”, and perhaps subject to articles by environmentalists and citizens concerned with returning to a balanced federal budget with an alternative energy driven economy. A sign with a camera on it with a bar through it should be posted before the refinery to forewarn the public about the FBI photo trap.

If I can every afford to travel by air, would I now get extra scrutiny or ‘no fly’ classification on the secret FBI verboten person’s listing distributed to airpork security personnel?

Has Os Bin Ladin asked his engineer father or brothers for blueprints of vulnerable points of oil refineries, or used ‘Ask Jeeves’ to locate use oil refineries? Should cigarette lighters in the United States be outlawed?

The Artesia refinery is such an easy access for detonation target apparently that it could serve as evidence for the disinterest of Al Qa’eda in blowing up U.S. oil refineries to raise prices above the anticipated 100-dollar per barrel oil possibly coming soon. Destroying U.S. oil refineries would raise per barrel prices to the 500-dollar mark, and perhaps push congress into doing something meaningful about alternative energy and national energy independence with a more egalitarian and democratic production capability.

New Mexico has vast potential for wind and solar power development. A national energy independence holiday should be given each year so the public has an opportunity to picket oil refineries until they close and the congress orders power lines to be placed into federal highways for electric engines and intertie to the power line rights for homeowners.

Beyond the abandoned 15,000 acre township of Blackdom New Mexico, founded in 1908 and left in 1922 when Pecos River water supplies were decisively unreliable, I continued to ride. Will U.S. prosperity also dry up because of a parallel reliance on unreliably and costly, fossil fuel supplies?

You may ask yourself “Isn’t it time Congress creates new alternative energy legislation with profuse onomatopoeia, cantos flowing in alliterations, dactyl feet and consonance?" Perhaps not, even so some progressive alternative energy legislation should be written into a redrafted federal budget bill in order to liberate the nation from a deficit producing, trans-national enriching federal policy supporting the degradation of U.S. workforce wages and environmental security.