The last Monday in May comes in hot here. By the time the flags go up at the cemeteries the dew has already burned off the grass, and the small flags on their wire stems lean whichever way the bay wind pushes them. Somebody has been out early. They always have. You see the rows of them from the road before you see the stones, a low field of red and white that moves together like a crop.
Memorial Day started as Decoration Day, after the Civil War, when towns on both sides went out to put flowers on the graves of soldiers. It was a day for the dead before it was a day off. That order matters. The long weekend, the sales, the first swim of the summer at the water park, the smoke coming off grills from one end of town to the other — all of that is what the day grew into, and none of it is wrong. But the day is still, underneath, a field of small flags leaning in the wind.
I want to say something about those flags that I think is true and is not usually said. The people under them were carried to where they died by fuel. Every one of them. The trucks, the ships, the landing craft, the bombers, the fighters that flew cover for the bombers. A war of that size was a war of engines, and an engine is a way of turning fuel into motion, and the fuel had to come from somewhere. A good deal of it came from here.
The refinery on the channel was about twenty years old when the Second World War began. Humble Oil had started building it in 1919 on the flat ground by the water, after the oil field under the town had proved there was a reason to build one, and it was running by 1920. By the early 1940s it was one of the largest in the country, and during the war it made 100-octane aviation gasoline — the fuel for high-performance piston aircraft engines — in quantities that put Humble among the largest producers of it anywhere. The town you live in fueled the airplanes. That is not a figure of speech. It is a manifest.
To understand why that mattered you have to understand what the number means, because 100 is not just a bigger number than 87. Octane is a rating of how much a fuel can be squeezed before it explodes on its own. In a piston engine the mixture of air and fuel is compressed by the piston and then lit by the spark plug at exactly the right instant, and the flame front moves across the cylinder in an orderly way and pushes the piston down. That is the engine working. But if the fuel is compressed too hard or gets too hot, it can go off before the spark, or in several places at once, in a sharp uncontrolled bang. That is knock. You can hear it in an old truck climbing a hill under load, a rattle like gravel in a can. In a car it is annoying. In an aircraft engine at full power it will break the engine.
The scale is set by two molecules. One of them, a branched eight-carbon chain called isooctane, resists knock very well and was given the number 100. The other, a straight seven-carbon chain called heptane, knocks easily and was given zero. A fuel rated 87 behaves like a mixture of 87 parts of the one and 13 parts of the other. So 100-octane gasoline is fuel that behaves like pure isooctane: it will take all the compression and all the boost an engine can give it, and wait for the spark. The difference is the shape. A straight chain is easy to break in the heat, and once it starts breaking it goes off all at once; a branched chain, the same atoms arranged with side arms, holds together a fraction of a second longer, and a fraction of a second is all the spark needs.
That patience is horsepower. An engine designed to run on 100-octane can be built with higher compression and can be supercharged harder, forcing more air and fuel into each cylinder on each stroke, and every extra pound of pressure it can hold without knocking is more power from the same displacement, the same weight of metal hanging on the wing. A fighter is a set of compromises around weight. Give the designer a fuel that lets the engine make more power without getting heavier, and the airplane climbs faster, turns harder, and flies higher than the airplane that has to run on something worse. In a fight between two machines of similar weight, that margin is the difference. The British found this out early. In the summer of 1940, when their fighters went up against the German air force over their own island, they were burning 100-octane fuel that had come across the Atlantic in tankers, most of it from American refineries, and it gave their engines a margin of power the enemy's fuel did not. Nobody in Baytown saw that fight. Some of what was burned in it may have started here.
Making a fuel like that in wartime quantity was itself a kind of battle. Ordinary distillation — heating crude oil and taking off what boils at each temperature — does not give you isooctane. There is not enough of it in the ground. You have to make it. The refineries of that era built up processes to take small, low-value molecules from the cracking of heavier oil and join them into the branched chains the engines needed, and to break large molecules over catalysts into smaller ones with better shape, and then the finished gasoline got a measured dose of a lead compound that raised the rating the last few points. These were new operations on a new scale, built fast, run around the clock, and staffed in part by people who had never worked in a plant before, because many of the men who had were overseas. The plants ran hot, they ran full, and the aviation gasoline went out by tanker and by rail to wherever the airplanes were.
I think about that when I drive past the fence at night. The steam off the towers now looks the same as it must have looked then. Nobody on the shift, then or now, sees the airplane. An operator on the tower sees a gauge, a valve, a temperature that has to be held. The product leaves the gate as a number on a manifest, and its meaning is somewhere else entirely — at eight thousand feet over an ocean, in a cockpit, in the throttle hand of a nineteen-year-old who has been awake for twenty hours. The fuel does not know what it is for. The person who made it does not know who used it. That gap, between the work and the meaning of the work, is the most ordinary thing about a refinery town and the thing I find hardest to get used to.
The fuel had to cross an ocean to be used, and the crossing is the part of the story that belongs to this day more than any other. In 1942 German submarines came into the Gulf of Mexico and worked the tanker lanes out of the Texas and Louisiana ports. They sank ships in sight of land; people on the beaches saw the smoke. The men on those tankers were mostly civilians, merchant seamen, and they died that year at a rate that stood beside the armed services'. So the number on the manifest was carried by a crew who knew the odds and sailed anyway, in a hull full of the most flammable cargo on the water, out of this bay and down the channel and into a Gulf where something was waiting under the surface. I do not know how many of them had walked around Baytown the week before they sailed. Some had. A tanker that loaded here left with men who had eaten in town the night before, and there are crews from that year who never got farther than the Gulf. The town made patience in a can and shipped it, and some of the shipping cost what the flags cost.
And then the day has to turn back to the flags, because the fuel is not the point.
Some of the young men who left this town for the war never came back, and some who did come back had flown on the very gasoline their fathers or their sisters had made. There is no way to draw that circle cleanly and I will not try. I only want to say that the connection is real. The refinery and the cemetery are in the same town, on the same low ground, and the wind that leans the small flags at the graves is the same wind that carries the steam off the towers toward the bay. The people who made the fuel and the people it carried lie, some of them, in the same few miles of ground.
There are names on memorials around town, and I am not going to list them, because the names belong to families and not to an essay. Go read them. Read them on the last Monday in May when the grass has been cut and somebody has been out early with the small flags. Read them and then, if you want the whole story, drive out Bayway to the park and look at the plant across the water and think about a number on a manifest that flew.
It is strange to be proud of a fuel. I am not sure I am. Pride is the wrong size for it. What I feel is closer to what you feel when you find out that your grandmother's hands built something that is still standing: not pride, exactly, but a kind of correction of scale. The town is small and the plant is big and the war was bigger than both, and the line running through all three is a hydrocarbon with eight carbons in a branched chain, made here on purpose, so that an engine somewhere would not knock.
The wind picks up in the afternoon on that Monday the way it always does when the land heats faster than the water. The flags lean harder. Out on the channel a tanker is coming in low in the water, loaded, and the flare on the far shore is a short steady orange in the daylight, almost nothing, a pilot light on a kitchen the size of a town. The grill smoke drifts across the street. The small flags move together in the wind like a field of something growing.