Heavily-laden trekkers walked northward along the five, some in gregarious groups, others quietly moving alone. Tequila Jack and his dog Manley blended in, just another pair of refugees escaping the stricken city of Los Angeles. Jack found it amusing to walk on an interstate highway and let Manley romp freely across lanes. The on-ramps were marked with ironic road signs, banning bicycles and pedestrians from the freeway and setting a minimum speed limit.
Relics of the oil age, he mused.
The weather was holding fine, sunny but not too hot. Along this canyon known as the Grapevine, I-5 linked Los Angeles with California’s great Central Valley via the Tejon Pass at four thousand feet. The quarantine roadblock and inspection post, with armed guards and shoot-to-kill orders, was only a few miles ahead. Jack didn’t expect any trouble at the containment border, but his mission was too important to take chances. His first task lay off-road anyway. He and Manley left the interstate and hiked west, climbing uphill over browned-out grasses in the occasional shade of a sprawling valley oak.
“We’re on a mission of mercy, boy,” Jack said to his faithful companion, scratching Manley’s head as they rested under a tree. “You’re a hero, just like those dogs on TV.”
The shimmering California Aqueduct pointed toward Wheeler Ridge, part of the North Tejon Oil Field in California’s oil-rich Kern County. They had only a few miles to go, and much of it was downhill.
“It’s tough love,” he continued. “Seems cruel, but it makes things better. We put some of this bad gas down a well and contaminate the whole field. We’ll kill the field to save the people. No more oil addiction. No more bowing to rich Saudi kings. No more wars for oil.”
A few hours later they reached the foot of the mountains and the arid, treeless flat of the San Joaquin Valley. Heat waves and smog distorted the view into the distance. Manley’s tongue hung from his mouth, and he walked rather than trotted at his master’s side. Jack gave him an encouraging pat when he spotted the first oil wells.
The pumpjacks—three of them at this site—rocked and rolled without rest. Jack scanned the horizon for a human presence, but the dirt road scratched in the valley’s dust was empty. He could go about his business unmolested.
The pumpjacks’ horse-like heads nodded up and down, driven by the teeter-totter action of the cross beam and rotating counterweight to which the heads were connected. The movement of the head raised and lowered a long rod which penetrated deep into the earth inside a cement-encased well. At the bottom of the well, oil seeped into the pump barrel and was gradually forced to the surface.
Two pipes stuck out from the side of the well where the rod entered. Manley lifted his back leg and peed on the pipes. Jack pulled a wrench from his backpack.
“Stand back, boy.”
He adjusted the wrench to tackle the metal rings covering the top of the borehole where the rod entered the well. With some straining he managed to expose a small opening. Once he was satisfied that he had access to the interior of the well, he rummaged through his pack for a bottle of the cloudy liquid he’d siphoned from an abandoned car’s tank on the day he left home.
“Here we go.”
He poured about a half cup into the borehole, and the plague-infected fuel disappeared into the depths. Jack expected to repeat this process all the way to McKittrick. They’d replenish their food supplies in Taft. Then they’d complete their mission by looping back east across the valley floor to the city of Bakersfield and to the Kern River oil field where he knew pumpjacks covered the arid plain as thick as paparazzi around an A-list celebrity.
The rod on the contaminated pumpjack rose and fell, rose and fell as Manley and Jack strolled away.