Leap of Faith

CHAPTER 1

JULY 27, 2010

JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT TO SUNRISE

Why did somebody dump fuel oil in my driveway? was Laura’s first question as she clawed her way up from the depths of sleep. The question made no sense, but the distinctive odor of petroleum was certainly there in her bedroom, potent enough to rudely eject her from the arms of Morpheus.

Laura rolled over and looked at the clock. Just after midnight. What the hell was going on? Why did it smell so strongly of fuel oil?

As the fog of sleep cleared, memory reasserted itself. Just before leaving the office only a few hours before, she’d read a brief article on the local daily newspaper’s website in reference to an oil spill involving the Kalamazoo River. Laura hadn’t paid it much attention, except to roll her eyes because the local Storychatters who comment on the stories would probably go up in flames. Again.

Earlier that same month, a traffic accident involving a semi had caused the contents of the truck’s fuel tank to spill about 35 gallons of diesel into a storm drain that fed into the river, and the Storychatters had engaged in a considerable amount of hysteria over what was in fact, a common occurrence.

She tried to fall back to sleep, but the odor was too strong. Pulling the covers over her head didn’t help, nor did putting perfume on her pillow, burning incense, or swearing.

The fumes not only stank but they had an effect on her, making her feel light-headed, nauseous, and causing her throat and eyes to burn.

Somewhere around 3 am, Laura started getting angry, and the feeling increased with each sleepless hour. Not just because of the smell, but what it represented. Another incident of humanity’s carelessness towards the Creation that was given to them by the Creator himself.

Instead of taking good care of it, she fumed, humanity has done nothing but pollute the air, the water and the soil. The desire for easy living, disposable everything and the dependence on fossil fuels, was killing the planet they needed to survive.

While she lay there, sleepless, she drafted an imaginary memo from the Creator to His Angels about the problem of humanity’s lack of care for the precious gift that had been given to them.

To: All Staff

From: Your Father and Creator

RE: Creation

It has been brought to my attention that there are some serious problems regarding the sustainability of Creation. Although it was originally built as a system which would require the ongoing administration of the Grigori, their failure to follow proper procedures resulted in the human race assuming the role of system administration for My Creation.

To say that humanity has proven to be inadequate stewards of Creation would be an understatement. In addition to intentional overpopulation, they have also polluted the air, water and land with everything from fossil fuels and human waste to hazardous chemicals and non-biodegradable trash. They are also killing their fellow life-forms, exterminating entire species at a time.

In addition, their infrastructure has clearly reached the state of system failure, as we are seeing in the number of man-made disasters involving mines, oil pipelines and wells, railroads, highways, food processing, etc.

They have intentionally been clear-cutting the trees that were placed there in order to process carbon dioxide into oxygen, they’ve released chemicals into the air which are destroying the ozone layer which was placed there to protect them from solar radiation, and they created something they call nuclear weapons, which sterilize the Creation where they are deployed. And don’t get Me started on the garbage patches which they have created in the oceans, which are slowly destroying the life which was placed in them.

I’m still not sure if they are stupid enough to not know that what they are doing is destroying the world they need to survive, or if they just don’t care.

It has become clear that the human race needs to be removed from the administration of the system. There are several options available:

1. Kill them all. Again. Only this time, don’t let humanity reestablish themselves.

2. Wait and see if they exterminate themselves through war or systemic infrastructure failure before they destroy the environment to the point where it kills them through an inability to support life.

3. Put angels back in charge and let them micromanage humanity. Forever.

Option 1 does appeal to Me, usually when the day’s news includes the announcement of another catastrophic environmental disaster caused by humanity, but after the Flood, I lost my taste for wholesale slaughter. Unlike My children, who still have yet to lose their lust for blood and death. They haven’t even managed to learn to get along with each other.

The downside to this option is that the pigs will most likely seize power, becoming as bad or worse than humanity when it comes to exploiting their fellow mammals.

Humanity’s ongoing lust for blood and death leads to option 2. At the rate they are going, it’s really up in the air as to which will happen first. And whichever does happen first, they are also destroying the other mammals, as well as the fish, birds, insects, etc., who share Creation with humanity.

Option 3 would involve a considerable battle of wills as humanity first accepts that I am real, along with My angelic children, and that they must obey their Creator and the agents of My will.

It will get worse when the angels take control of the planet, and return humanity to the simple agrarian life that they were intended for. And force them to do the dirty work of the cleanup of the mess they made, once they stop adding to it. Humanity enjoys their modern lifestyle, which is directly responsible for all of the problems cited above, because they never bothered to figure out how to live well without turning My Creation into a garbage dump.

The only issue with number 3 is that it requires angels, and they do not exactly have a stellar track record when it comes to dealing with humanity. Between Lucifer and his rebels, and the Grigori’s fraternizing with the ladies, a lot of angels ended up being punished by being stuck in the system of Creation.

However, if I can find enough angels who are willing to serve as planetary administrators as redemption for their past sins, this option might just work.

I will be taking this situation under advisement, and will issue a memo announcing the final decision on which option will be implemented, so that a planning team can be organized in order to make it happen. If anyone has any feedback or additional suggestions, please forward them to Me.

Drafting the mock memo kept Laura’s mind busy for a couple of hours, although not so busy that she couldn’t still smell the putrid odor that filled her home with its stench, and filled her heart with anger. Daydreaming about some sort of Divine smiting happening to the people responsible for the spill put a cruel smile on her face as she gave in the inevitable and got up and dressed.

The sun wasn’t anywhere close to being up, so it was not yet possible to go out and look for the source of the smell, a few blocks away in the river that ran through downtown Battle Creek.

She sat in her living room and seethed until daylight.

CHAPTER 2

JULY 27, 2010

SUNRISE TO MID-MORNING

As soon as the outside world was bright enough for her to see where she was going, the well-known local photographer who was a stringer for the local weekly community newspaper, jumped up and grabbed her camera. She left her house and angrily stalked through the humid, stinking air the three blocks to where the Kalamazoo River passed through downtown. The riverfront had been redeveloped to encourage pedestrians to enjoy it, and she visited it daily. A linear path ran along the length of the river.

The Battle Creek River also ran through downtown in a shallow concrete canal more ditch than river. It had been dug by the Army Corps of Engineers to reroute the original river and ensure that a devastating flood just after World War II was not repeated. Unlike the Battle Creek, the Kalamazoo River was a beautiful and tranquil riverfront to walk along and sit beside.

Not today, though, as the whole town stank of petrochemicals which got stronger as she approached the river. She stood on the pedestrian bridge behind her favorite restaurant, housed in a converted train station, and looked down.

What the? The Kalamazoo River looked the same as always to Laura’s eyes. Running a little high and fast because of the stormy summer, a bit murky and choked with water plants that were clearly having a good year, and someone’s bicycle rusting at the bottom. Nothing to indicate that an oil spill had taken place, or account for the horrific odor.

Laura sighed and turned away from the river. There had to be an explanation, but she wasn’t going to find it glaring at the unoffending waterway.

She walked to her nearby office, and went online looking for news. And found not only more information about the spill, but about the river, thanks to a map that showed the current progress of the spilled oil. It had started about 20 miles upstream near the town of Marshall, in a creek named Talmadge that fed into the Kalamazoo River. From their confluence it had flowed down the river to the County line.

She also found out why she hadn’t seen any oil in the river. It was the wrong river.

Facepalm! She’d somehow managed to get her rivers mixed up. The Kalamazoo River was the concrete ditch, and the river she enjoyed walking along was the Battle Creek. Not far from her favorite place, the two came together, the Battle Creek flowing into the Kalamazoo.

She continued reading, and for the first time she saw the name that would soon be on everybody’s lips: Enbridge. The company that owned the pipeline that ruptured was called Enbridge Energy Partners. That company was about to become public enemy number one in the city of Battle Creek and the surrounding rural communities.

She Googled them and found little information, as if they hardly existed. Wikipedia told her that the parent company, Enbridge Inc., was based in Canada, and provided a list of prior spills. She smiled grimly as she edited their entry, updating that list with the published information that 819,000 gallons of oil had spilled into the Kalamazoo River the day before, and linked it to the article she’d just read.

Back to the Battle Creek River she went, following the linear path that ran along it to the confluence of the two waterways. There, Laura found what she was looking for. The two rivers churned up froth where they came together, and the froth was brown.

Gritting her teeth to keep from shrieking curses aloud in her rage at the desecration of a precious natural resource, Laura turned on her camera and got to work, clicking away as she walked downstream. As the river settled down past the confluence she saw the distinctive rainbow-colored sheen of oil on the water for the first time.

Along with elevated anger levels, Laura also started experiencing another symptom of the fumes she had been inhaling since the night before. She was feeling a bit loopy. Here at the river’s edge, the fumes were far more potent.

What she was seeing kept her focused. Along with the brown water and the rainbow-colored sheen, there was a thick black sludge several inches high along the grassy banks of the river. Tree branches that drooped into the water were coated with the foul stuff. Clumps of foamy brown material floated past her as she focused her lens on the water and kept clicking the shutter.

A tiny island in the river was almost completely coated with black sludge at the upstream end.

As she continued to walk downriver, she spotted another photographer shooting from a bridge over the river. He was wearing a hat with the logo of the weekly newspaper that both of them worked for. He was a staff reporter; she was in her third month of being a stringer. Laura left the linear path and climbed up to the bridge.

Morning Doug, she greeted him.

Unbelievable, isn’t it, was his only greeting.

Laura nodded. They compared notes briefly and then stood side by side shooting in silence for a few more minutes before he threw his camera in his car and drove off with a jaunty wave.

As her colleague drove off, a car driven by a friend of hers pulled up. City Commissioner Ryan Hersha got out and joined her at the bridge, scowling down at the river and exchanging angry comments with Laura as she continued to photograph the iridescent sheen and the small gobbets of thick black material that could only be crude oil.

A City employee in a yellow safety vest approached them, The best place to see the oil is at the Burnham Street bridge.

Laura hadn’t the slightest idea where that was, but the Commissioner knew, so the two of them piled in his car and took off, headed upriver from the confluence to a bridge overlooking an area of the river that was known as the Millpond.

The bridge, at the intersection of Burnham Street and Riverside Drive was filled with people and vehicles. Laura remained safely on the curb, while Ryan made his way down to the river’s edge, pulling out his phone to take pictures and make calls.

You’ll fall in, the worried photographer called after him, but he was beyond listening as he squatted down and looked in to the water.

Finding a place on the bridge that afforded her a good angle, Laura continued to document the oil spill the best way she knew how. Although her assignments for the Shopper News required her to write everything from feature stories to theater reviews, Laura was best known for her revealing candid portraits and photo essays that were published in the paper and on her community news blog, the Village Thinker. This was a little more challenging, and not just because she was loopy from the fumes in the air.

Directly beneath her, the river’s current was visible because of the heavy oil sheen that moved rapidly along it, catching the morning sun like scintillating ribbons of gold. She noted, not for the last time, how bizarre it was that something so ugly could be so beautiful. Very loopy.

Alongside the ribbon-like flow of heavy sheen, lighter sheen in a rainbow of colors swirled like fractals. In the middle of the swirls, sizable clumps of thick, black crude oil moved below her feet.

She moved slowly across the bridge to the other side of the river, deftly avoiding the spectators gathered to watch and point, without even looking up from her viewfinder. There, along the far bank of the river she saw the thick, resinous crude flowing sluggishly. Laura stood and photographed it for a long time, crossing the bridge several times to catch it coming towards her as well as flowing away from her.

And then she saw the muskrat, pointed out to her by Commissioner Hersha. He was in a place that nobody could get to without going into the river, a few inches of river bank in front of him and a sheer wall behind him. Completely coated with thick black oil, he was frantically licking himself to try and rid himself of the mess. Entirely innocent of the fact that what he was doing was poisoning himself as he ingested the highly toxic petroleum.

The humans stood helplessly by and watched the small creature, which seemed to embody all of them at that moment. A small kernel of hatred began to blossom in her for the company responsible. She began to hate Enbridge. Whoever they were.

CHAPTER 3

JULY 27, 2010

LATE MORNING TO LATE AFTERNOON

Their next stop was on Jackson Street, which runs along the river, just downstream from where they originally met up. Rumor had it that the street was closed and a clean-up operation with a hundred trucks was underway.

Sawhorses and signs indicated that the street was closed, but that was not about to deter one local elected official and one local photographer. Ryan detoured around the barricades and they saw that ahead of them one side of the street was lined with vehicles.

Pickup trucks, vacuum trucks, and trailers galore showed that this was clearly a hive of oil cleanup activity. As they passed them, they noted the unfamiliar business names. Future Environmental, Inc. Emergency Spill Equipment read the side of one semi, a smaller truck from the same company advertised Industrial Services.

There were boats being unloaded from some trailers, and everywhere were long strips of bright yellow vinyl that she recognized as inflatable boom. It was being prepared and placed in the river to catch the oil flowing downstream.

It was there that the angry local resident first saw a vehicle bearing the logo of the company she hated. In red, the word Enbridge, accented with a yellow spiral. As they got out of the car, she resisted the desire to write, "The Moon rules A#1″ on the side of the truck with a key, as a sign of respect and friendship. She didn’t think that those people would understand the pop culture reference, so she contented herself with glaring fiercely at the logo, and then followed Ryan.

They entered the cleanup site, where they were completely ignored by the workers. The Calhoun County Sheriff’s deputy who was ostensibly providing security looked them over and decided to ignore them as well. The pair walked down to the shoreline; she shot pictures while he talked on his phone.

They wandered over to the yellow Caution tape around the work area; outside of it they found a photographer and a reporter from the daily newspaper, the Battle Creek Enquirer, both wearing prominent MEDIA badges.

They’ve been keeping us out, complained John Grap as he shifted his camera to a more comfortable position.

Laura shrugged, They haven’t paid us the least bit of attention, she noted as she lifted the yellow tape and ducked under it. Not for the first time she blessed her status as a local celebrity which usually made an ID badge unnecessary. Except on the rare occasions when she was issued one for an event, she never wore any type of badge to identify her as a member of the press. That habit came in handy at times.

She shot a few more pictures of the sheen on the river and then returned to the more interesting side of the yellow tape, winding her way through the cleanup workers in their hardhats and safety vests. It was looking to be another of the too hot and too humid days the area was known for. Those days were the reason her northern Michigan born mother had referred to Calhoun County as the sweaty armpit of Michigan.

A crew was using a motorboat to lay more boom in the water and Laura switched to a telephoto lens and photographed them engaged in their task. The pictures showed their grim faces, the droplets of oily water dripping off the rope as they hauled the boom behind them, and the oil that covered their bare arms to the elbows. The high-powered lens also picked up the thick oil stuck to the side of an orange inflatable boom that crossed the river and the red and yellow logos on the many Enbridge vehicles,

Once they’d seen what there was to see, Ryan led the way downriver. At one point, he stopped and dipped a branch of a plant into the water. Delicate white daisy-like flowers emerged as sodden brown clumps.

They climbed up to the next bridge over the river, well beyond the booms. The heavy oil sheen on the water was as thick as it was above, and there were numerous clumps of thick crude floating by. Laura photographed their shadows, cast by the morning sun on the surface of the fouled river.

They turned back and walked under the bridge, where the high water caused by recent heavy rainstorms had flooded the linear path. Ryan knelt down to inspect the crude deposited there. He stepped in the brown muck, leaving a footprint, and Laura promptly photographed it.

She checked her watch, I have to go, it’s getting late, and I’ve got the Michigan Prisoner Re-Entry Initiative’s annual luncheon to cover at noon.

Ryan nodded and the two drove silently to the community center that was the site of the lunch, the stench of petroleum still in their nostrils. They talked of an upcoming press conference scheduled for 4:00 that afternoon and she said, I’ll be there.

The luncheon was surreal to Laura, because nobody was talking about the oil spill. As if they weren’t aware that it had happened yet. She chatted about the city’s crime problem with her tablemates while they ate. The members of the Battle Creek Police Department’s Gang Suppression Unit were among her favorite friends in blue.

Three years before, Laura had become a local hero when she provided photographs which allowed a couple of gang crimes to be solved, including one very high-profile shooting which involved a school bus and would have had the community, and the media, screaming for blood if it had gone unsolved as most gang crimes do. Instead, it was solved in a couple of days. Laura received a special commendation from the Chief of Police for taking photos of the gang members as they passed through her yard on the way to and from the shooting.

She hadn’t set out to become a hero; it was a bizarre coincidence that she took the photos. She did use that as part of a successful PR campaign which quickly turned her into a local celebrity.

After the luncheon, she returned to her office building, where everyone was talking about and wondering at the smell. And she realized that they didn’t know what had happened. While she waited for it to be time to leave for the press conference, she answered questions, read the articles being posted online by various media outlets, talked to her editor at length and processed photos.

When she walked into the small room at the downtown hotel where the first press conference was to be held, she found a number of familiar faces. The new Emergency Services Coordinator for the City, Officer Mike McKenzie was at the back of the room talking with Jackie Hampton, the Chief of Police.

How’s my favorite journalist, the Chief asked her when she walked smiling up to him and gave him a hug.

The room started to fill up with reporters and local officials, so Laura quickly staked a claim on a seat in the second row, where she nodded greetings to several staffers from the Enquirer who were seated in front of her.

Laura found it all quite exciting. She’d never been to a press conference before. Hardly surprising as she’d only been a working reporter for about three months at the time, although she had done event coverage and the rare foray into investigative reporting as a hobby for the prior two years. Her background was in information technology and communications. Her beat for the newspaper wasn’t hard news but community events, local festivals, live music and church happenings.

As she normally did when she was bored, she took pictures, photographing the preparations for the media briefing. In front of the American and Michigan flags, a long table, neatly skirted in blue, had been set up and there were a number of people busily at work.

Six people were seated at the table, each with a paper sign that only gave their name. Laura hadn’t the slightest idea who any of them were, not one looked familiar.

She looked each one over carefully, committing their faces to memory as she made a list of names on her pad.

At the far left, Steve Wuori, a boyish-looking man with shining blond hair, reminded her of Dennis the Menace, except for his grim face as he rummaged through his briefcase. Next to him, wearing a shirt with an EPA logo above the breast pocket, Ralph Dollhopf looked distinctly unhealthy and unshaven.

Beside him was Patrick Daniel, an older man with artfully-silvered dark hair reading through a stack of papers in front of him. He looked uncomfortable as Dollhopf talked first across him and then behind his back with the next man, Durk Dunham, whose brown shirt embroidered with the star badge of the Calhoun County Sheriff’s Department proclaimed him an employee of that agency.

Next to him, Jim Rutherford yawned as he watched another man setting up a speaker phone for the call-in portion of the briefing. At his side, the only woman at the table, Lisa Williams.

Finally, they were ready to begin, and they started with introductions of the people at the table. She rapidly scribbled down titles next to their names. Dollhopf was the EPA’s representative, Dunham in charge of Emergency Management for the County, Rutherford from the County Health Department, and Williams from the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

They were the heroes at the table. Two villains were seated at the table as well. Steve Wuori turned out to be the Executive Vice President of Liquids Pipelines for Enbridge Inc.; Patrick Daniel was identified as his boss, the CEO and President of the company.

At last, Laura had a focus for her hatred. Daniel instantly became her worst enemy, and the Dennis the Menace lookalike, his number one minion of evil.

She got up from her chair, putting more distance between herself and these hated executives of the organization that was already being referred to as the oil company. She continued to take pictures as she moved around the room, documenting everything, occasionally glaring at Wuori and Daniel through her lens.

If hatred could kill, there would have been nothing left of Daniel but a tiny pile of ash on the table, and Wuori would have been running screaming around the room trying to put out the flames that consumed him. Although she prayed to the Creator for some smiting to take place, no gigantic lightning bolts struck the pair down.

Laura could not bring herself to ask questions of the pair, but listened as reporters from Channel 3, the Michigan Messenger and the Kalamazoo Gazette asked the same question of Daniel, Was that your truck on Sunday night?

Firefighters had reported that a white truck bearing the Enbridge logo had been sighted near the spill site Sunday night, when responding to 911 calls made by residents complaining about a smell of fuel oil or natural gas.

To each question, Daniel gave the same answer, I am not able to confirm or deny that unsubstantiated rumor.

Reporters exchanged knowing looks with each other. This situation was starting to stink, and not from the benzene fumes. The spill had clearly taken place Sunday night; they had their truck at the site at that time. It wasn’t reported to the government until