Free The Salt God's Daughter by Ilie Ruby Page B

to take them home and try to revive them. Dagmar Brownstein said she couldn’t even count the number of animals she found while walking down the beach with her daughter, Sasha. The oil had already been leaking out on its own, flowing everywhere it shouldn’t have. Some folks say that once the oil rigs were built and the siphoning began, no more oil-soaked animals were found along the beach.
    Today, if you are standing on the shore in Long Beach and gazing out at the sparkling Pacific at night, you might see floating cities, a mass of white skyscrapers, appearing on the waves. Hues of red, green, and yellow fan up from the water, bathing the buildings in an array of colors. These lights fall upon the deafening forty-five-foot waterfalls nestled between the scrapers and palm trees. If you look more closely, these islands appear to be part of a tropical resort filled with fig trees, irrigation systems, and wildlife.
    But all this is just an illusion, still, a trick of urban camouflage, a by-product of theatrical design meeting genius engineering. The skyscrapers are actually skins that cover massive 175-foot oil derricks. Painted white with green and blue faux balconies, they are part of a plan, carefully constructed in the 1960s by the creators of Disney’s Tomorrowland, to allow the oil industry to flourish while preserving the scenic California coastline. They disguised the oil drilling activity with man-made waterfalls that buried the noise of the pumping and digging, and they brought in hundreds of palm trees to give it a tropical ambience. Huge boulders quarried from Catalina Island were positioned around the edges of each artificial island to keep the soil in place.
    Today, the man-made drilling platforms are known as the THUMS Islands, named for the original field contractors: Texaco, Humble (which became Exxon), Union, Mobil, and Shell.

    The natural world absorbed the artificial in a show of dominance. The islands, along with several free-standing oil rigs, became artificial reefs—home to a plethora of marine mammals and thousands of fish and birds, including herons, falcons, and even parrots.
    An illusion, as pleasing to the eye as a carnival, which was the point.
    Beneath the surface of these rigs, sea lions could be found diving through the silvery bubbles created by millions of swirling fish, spinning turrets beneath the blue-green water. If you are swimming or kayaking off the coast, chances are, you might run into one of the cows or bulls. Though gentle by nature, they are territorial here. The drilling platforms are their home, the reefs their turf.
    Throughout the city, massive prehistoric flamingos appear to rise out of the ground, dipping their beaks in. These are well pumps that siphon oil from the earth, in plain sight. Once the oil industry began to flourish, revitalizing the Long Beach coast, oil executives would sometimes throw lavish parties to keep their workers entertained. One year, a teenage boy who had been swimming in one of the canals discovered the body of a young woman floating in the water, clothed in a fancy dress and still wearing her high heels. She had been a guest at one of the parties, had gotten drunk, and had fallen into the ocean, people said. No one had followed her.
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    WHEN DAGMAR BROWNSTEIN opened the Twin Palms Motel in the heart of Belmont Shore back in the late ’60s, she never dreamed that her entire life would be governed by things she could not see, oil as well as millions of animals.
    Dagmar said that nearby, there had been a factory that crushed oyster shells for road cover, before asphalt was the preferred material. She loved the history of the quaint neighborhood with its Spanish-style buildings and beach bungalows.
Built in the 1920s and ’30s, these were modest homes made for workers in the area, the train conductors for Pacific Electric, the school librarians, and the folks that worked in the oil industry. The houses had small