The smell made its way into the house through the open kitchen window, but raised no immediate alarms. The guys were just outside, digging up the old underground fuel oil tank which had taken to leaking some long time ago. Fumes were to be expected as it was unearthed.
“I smell oil,” Imaginary Keith had said.
“The guys are digging out the old tank,” I told him. “You should see the hole. Big enough to bury a small elephant, if we had one.”
“I don’t think we do.”
“No, we don’t. Anyway, that’s why you smell oil.”
The oil tank, unused for as long as I can remember, which on a good day means about fifteen years, had been replaced by an above ground tank after it had started to take on water, which meant only one thing - a leak. Never a good thing for an oil tank. I’d always assumed the tank, once discovered to be leaking, had been drained. The tank had two pipes sticking out of the ground, which I’d stepped around literally thousands of times over the years, lying as they did in the center of the path that leads to the front of the house, yet in all those thousands of times, including the three or four times I’d cracked open my shins on them in the dark, not once had I actually stopped to poke a stick down one of those pipes to check on the fuel level, which brings me to the point of this whole fuel oil story - shortsightedness.
You know, I sometimes think that the overall success of our species is going to hinge upon our ability to look into the future and see things clearly, so that the actions we take today are not detrimental to those people who will come after us. And it’s easy to start laying blame when things go wrong, like they seem to be going with my oil tank. For instance, it might be easy to blame the long-dead Mr. Cooper, the man who I must assume buried the metal oil tank in the ground in the first place, not twenty feet from the home’s fresh water supply. Surely the man was familiar with the concept of rust, as well as the idea that fuel oil seeping into the ground so close to his drinking water supply couldn’t be a good thing. Or maybe I could blame my own parents, who owned the farm before me, for not pulling up the tank themselves. Perhaps there’s a county extension agent who knew of the leak and didn’t make it his business to see things through. Maybe even the Cooper children. Couldn’t they have made it their business? It’s easy, you see, to go back in time and hunt for people to blame, but much harder to look forward and follow the path back to yourself. We’re funny that way. Everything about me. Me, me, me, right up to the point of standing up to take the blame, then we try our best to become invisible. Truth is, if you look into either the past or the future, we are invisible. It’s a hard thing to face.
Imaginary Keith wakes up shaking sometimes, worried that our own shortsightedness will be the sole cause of our species undoing, and honestly, I don’t know what to say to him. What do you say to someone who has recognized his fellow creatures’ inability to see much beyond the length of their own noses? Do I lie, and tell him it’ll all work out? Comfort him with religion? Turn on the television to distract him from his thoughts? If you have something, let me know, because lately I’ve been coming up empty. I usually just get him a cup of water and tell him to go back to sleep, although now, with this whole oil spill adventure nipping at our heels, I’m not sure how long the water is even going to last.
Oh geez, look at me, getting ahead of myself, talking about oil spills. This story is supposed to still be on last Wednesday, and here I go and jump right in with Friday’s version. Lazy, laissez-faire writing if I’ve ever seen it. Forgive me. Let’s try and go back to Wednesday for a moment, when all still seemed to be going according to plan. Think: giant hole, large tank, and nothing more.
Imaginary Keith came back into the house with news from the dig site. The tank had oil in it! The guess was roughly 200 gallons. It would have to be pumped before it could be lifted from the hole. I got on the phone and made arrangements. For a hundred bucks a truck would arrive to remove the fuel. No, no government agencies would be contacted. There was no paperwork. The driver would call to schedule a pickup time.
The hole was covered with planks and plywood to keep children and dogs from being lost. It looked mysterious, like an abandoned mine shaft or an old well, waiting to lure someone to their death.
“Or an elephant grave,” Imaginary Keith said. “Tell them it looked like an elephant grave.”
“I will not. That’s stupid. Besides, how many people have actually seen an elephant grave? You can’t count on the imagination of others. I won’t do it.”
“How about a tiger trap, then? Everyone knows what a tiger trap looks like.”
“They do?”
“Sure, a big hole with bamboo leaves covering the top.”
“But I just wrote: covered with planks and plywood, not covered with bamboo leaves.”
“No one reads that close. Especially blogs.”
“Really?”
“Trust me. Just say it and see.”
“Okay.”
The hole was covered with bamboo leaves to keep children and dogs from being lost.
“Hold on,” I said. “That makes no sense.”
“Blog readers.....” Imaginary Keith folded his arms across his chest, looking self-satisfied, like he knew more than the rest of the world.
“You’re getting me off subject. I’m trying to say what happened next, not what didn’t happen then.” I wondered what an imaginary friend trap looked like, but didn’t ask.
“Have you written about the oil truck arriving today?” Imaginary Keith asked. “Have you told them about the tank being empty today, and that all the oil leaked out into the ground before it could be pumped?”
Don’t get me wrong, when it comes to shortsightedness, I’m not saying I’m any better then the next person. I should have maybe tried harder to envision that it was the ground itself holding in the oil, and that parts of the tank had maybe become so rusted that exposing those rusty parts would cause them to leak worse than ever before. If I had been less shortsighted myself, I might have seen that 200 gallons of fuel oil that had somehow stayed inside the tank for more than fifteen years would all leak out overnight once I became involved. I might have also been able to see that Imaginary Keith would spoil the climax of my little story.
“Thanks a lot.”
“For what?”
“For spoiling the climax. I hadn’t mentioned the oil spill yet. I was building up to that.”
“You think that’s the climax?”
“Yes.”
“Just wait until the oil hits the water. That’s a much better story.”
“I don’t want to think about it. Besides, maybe the tank was filled with mostly water.”
“Yes, of course. Wishful thinking. Why didn’t I think of that?”