You see the derrick and the derrick is the tower that pulls the earth inside out. The derrick stands in the field or on the platform or in the desert and the standing in the field means the derrick marks the spot where someone believed there was oil beneath the ground. The derrick is faith made structural. The derrick is a bet. The hole goes down and the hole either finds oil or finds nothing and the finding nothing is called a dry hole and the dry hole means the derrick comes down and the money is gone. The derrick is named after Thomas Derrick who was a hangman at Tyburn in the sixteen hundreds and the naming after a hangman means the oil derrick carries the name of a man who built structures for lifting weight.

The Lucas gusher at Spindletop in nineteen oh one blew oil a hundred and fifty feet into the air for nine days and the nine days changed Texas from cattle country to oil country. Captain Anthony Lucas drilled on a salt dome near Beaumont and on January tenth the well blew. The oil shot over the top of the derrick and the shooting over the top of the derrick meant no one could control it. A hundred thousand barrels a day poured from a single hole in the ground. The gusher doubled the oil production of the entire United States overnight. Within a year Spindletop had six hundred derricks and the six hundred derricks were so close together you could walk from one platform to the next without touching the ground. Texaco was founded at Spindletop. Gulf Oil was founded at Spindletop. The oil that built Houston and Dallas and the Texas economy came from one hole that blew for nine days in nineteen oh one.

The Drake well in Titusville Pennsylvania in eighteen fifty nine went down sixty nine feet and the sixty nine feet started the petroleum age. Edwin Drake was not a colonel. Drake gave himself the title because he thought it would help him lease land. Drake hired William Smith who was a blacksmith and a salt well driller and Smith drove an iron pipe through the shale and the iron pipe through the shale was the innovation because the pipe kept the hole from collapsing. On August twenty seventh the drill bit dropped into a crevice and the dropping into a crevice meant the bit had reached oil sand. The next morning oil was floating in the pipe. Drake had no barrels ready. The first oil of the petroleum age was collected in a bathtub. Within two years Oil Creek Valley had seventy five derricks and the seventy five derricks produced two million barrels and the two million barrels crashed the price of oil from twenty dollars a barrel to ten cents. Drake died broke in eighteen eighty. The petroleum age did not remember its father.

In the Persian Gulf the derricks stand in the water. The offshore derricks of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and the Emirates pull oil from beneath the seabed and the pulling from beneath the seabed means the derrick must be built on a platform and the platform must be built on legs that stand in a hundred feet of water. The Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia is the largest oil field ever discovered and the largest ever discovered means Ghawar has produced more than seventy five billion barrels since nineteen fifty one. The derricks at Ghawar are the straws in the largest drink on earth. The offshore platforms in the North Sea stand in six hundred feet of water and waves of a hundred feet and the standing in six hundred feet and waves of a hundred feet means the platform is an engineering achievement as complex as any building on land. The Piper Alpha platform exploded on July sixth nineteen eighty eight and killed a hundred and sixty seven men and the killing a hundred and sixty seven men was the price of the derrick in the sea.

You stand beneath the derrick and the derrick reaches up and the reaching up is the structure and the structure exists to lower the drill and the drill goes down. The derrick is vertical. The hole is vertical. The oil is horizontal down there in the rock in the formation in the reservoir where it has been for millions of years. The derrick. The tower in the field. The gusher at Spindletop. The sixty nine feet at Titusville. The platforms in the Persian Gulf. The geometry of extraction. The structure that reaches up to pull what is below. The earth keeps its oil in the dark. The derrick finds it. The derrick lifts it. The derrick turns the earth inside out.