Oil is dangerous. Oil is toxic.
These are fundamental scientific facts that I refuse to put out of my head, even as the governor of Mississippi informs us that oil mixed with water is not harmful at all, and as the governor of Florida encourages folks to frolic in the oil-polluted waters of Florida’s western beaches.
And why am I so sure that oil is dangerous and toxic? I’m sure of this for the following reason: my brothers and I were spectacular failures at school science fairs throughout our grade-school years. We were so bad at preparing demonstrations for science fairs that, if a negative grade could have been given for projects, we should have gotten minus points, year after year.
I don’t know what made us ineffectual scientists. All three of us certainly seem to have been born math-challenged and mechanically challenged, something that infuriated my mother, since it was 1) a genetic legacy of our economically feckless and mechanically/math-challenged father, and 2) she found it relaxing to spend hours fiddling with her bank books, balancing them to the precise penny each month.
So every year when the school’s science fair was announced, here’s what we did: we ignored it. We forgot that we had the assignment of preparing a project, right up to the night before the fair.
Then we panicked and cast about for anything—anything at all—to throw together and bring to the fair next day. While our classmates brought in elaborately constructed papier-mâché volcanoes animated by dry-ice smoke, perpetual motion machines, self-constructed shortwave radios, we brought in a potato grated in a dish, to show that raw potatoes grated interact with oxygen in the atmosphere.
Or this: this was one of the few experiments I actually tried to prepare a day in advance. Since my mother had a cousin working in the oil refinery in our town, I obtained from this cousin samples of several grades of crude oil. To show that crude oil comes in several grades. And each grade has a different color. Voilà! and quod erat demonstrandum.
I carefully poured my samples into little plastic tubes with tops on them, pasted these onto a poster, and labeled them. To show that there is this grade of crude oil, and then that grade, and then the other.
The next morning, the morning of the science fair, I awoke to discover, with horrified surprise, that my experiment had had a mind of its own during the night. The oil had eaten through the plastic containers and had dripped down all over my poster, obliterating the inscriptions underneath each container.
Without having tried to prove this, I had proven to myself that oil is a dangerous substance, a toxic one that eats through plastic. I think I may even have taken my poster to the school’s science fair with a little footnote indicating that this was what I had learned from my experiment (oh, the felicities of serendipitous scientific discovery), and that my conclusion was that oil ought always to be handled carefully because of its toxicity.
And so now when I read the remarks of Gov. Barbour and Gov. Crist, I feel inclined to ask both gentleman please to oblige me in another small scientific experiment. If oil mixed with water is a salubrious substance in which I ought to frolic with delight, and is entirely unharmful to the human constitution, would Governors Barbour and Crist please consent to downing a little glass of the salubrious mixture, to prove their point to us? If they’ll agree to do so, they’ll be doing a great favor to the scientific community, not to mention to citizens at large, by putting their mouth where their money is, so to speak.
Meanwhile, in the absence of scientific proof of the validity of the governors’ statements, I remain worried. Here’s what worries me now. As this year’s hurricane season begins, and as storms blow into the Gulf, what’s going to happen in inland states near enough to the Gulf to experience hurricane-spawned rainstorms that pick up the oil-slicked Gulf water and then deposit it as rain inland?
I don’t think this is a misplaced worry. There are reports (and videos online, which I’ve watched) that it’s already raining oil in places like New Orleans, which is a number of miles inland from the Gulf. It seems entirely possible to me that, in this hurricane season, oil-tinged rain (which is to say toxic and dangerous rain) is also going to fall on states like Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, and in northern parts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, etc.
And as it rains, I’ll be thinking of that serendipitous discovery I made with my most glorious science fair project as a boy, in which I found that crude oil eats right through plastic in a single night. And I don’t think my mind will be at rest until I receive word that Governor Haley Barbour and Governor Charlie Crist have done us the favor of downing a glass of water mixed with oil, to reassure us that the rain that will fall on us now that the Gulf is polluted is as harmless as mother’s milk.
An addendum: did I note that I'm science-challenged? Please note some observations in the comments thread by a valued reader of this blog, TheraP, who has set me straight about the science of "raining oil." As I tell TheraP, I will do all in my power to educate myself better re: this topic. The only science course that ever made much sense to me throughout my school years was a college course entitled "Physics for Poets."
