Its shoreline was dotted with white wooden signs onto which black skulls and crossbones had been painted. They warned visitors that the lake was poisoned with the byproducts of the oil industry. For under Lake Maracaibo lies Venezuela's wealth, black gold and natural gas. Back in America I have driven through the oil patches of Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. I have seen the black tarry pools of crude at the base of wells, the long black trail of sticky oil left by the trucks that haul the crude to the pipelines and the refineries.
Oil is a dirty business.
So is coal. After Maracaibo came West Virginia, a tour taken in my father's more comfortable 1957 Buick. In the late 1950s West Virginia was a moonscape. For a century it had been raped by strip miners who took the valuables and left holes where tree-covered mountains had been. Rivers ran red from the chemicals leached by wind and rain from the open sores of coal seams.