Mysterious Black Gunk

"An up through the ground came a bubblin' crude.

Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea."

~The Beverly Hillbillies~

Paul Henning

I was down near the Bayou edge when a startling sight drew my attention to a mound on the ground. There bubbling out of the white sand was something black and shiny..could it be? I prayed that this was not evidence that oil from the recent spill in the Gulf had reached our Bayou. Tar balls! I was heartsick to say the least. I poked at it with a stick..yep..tar. A black, gooey blob coated the end of the stick. It looked like tar, felt like tar and smelled like tar. Yep..tar. Tar balls! But my goodness! What a huge tar ball this was! As I poked around on the sand, I came to realize

that this thing covered an area about eight feet in diameter. Then a thought..what was a tar ball doing this far up the hill? There has not been any tide high enough to push anything this far on shore and I had not seen any evidence of oil anywhere else. Wait! Maybe I was hasty..maybe this is not bad news! Maybe I struck oil like in the old television show "The Beverly Hillbillies"!! Why else is there black, gooey stuff bubbling out of my ground? Black gold..Texas tea! Woohoo! I am rich! What would I do with my millions?? I poked the goop again. Is crude oil supposed to be this gunky? This stuff is like glue..thick, sticky ..hmmm ..probably not. Rats! I am not a millionaire after all. Sigh.....

I persuaded my son to dig around in the sand to see just what was the source of this viscous serpent that was oozing from my hill! The more he dug, the more we found. This mess was everywhere! Then..crunk! Crunk? Huh? He pulled and pulled. After much heaving on one particular wad of goo embedded sand and grass, he managed to overturn a large chunk. The answer at last! My find turned out to be a buried fifty gallon drum of tar..the stuff used to tar roofs and seal boats. How long this drum had been buried there is a mystery. It had to be quite a while since the metal drum had already rusted through. Another

mystery..and perhaps a clue to the age of the drum..and then again maybe not..is an old brown glass Purex bleach bottle stuck in the middle of all of this tar. (The picture is of an identical bottle.. the one in the tar was so covered that a picture identifying it was impossible.)