07/10/2023
78. Trespassing.
On the 4th of July, I got on my bike for the first time in a long while. There were violent pocket storms in the sky, the kind that flood roads in seconds, but that can be dodged by changing direction, or waiting at a gas station an extra few minutes.
I went to check out a site I’ve been fantasizing about recently, down in an empty-ish section of Houston south of where the Astrodome still sits, waiting for its fate to be determined by overburdened Harris County bureaucrats. The site itself is off a road closed for reconstruction, undeveloped, scrubby and scarred, pock-marked with a handful of black and olive crater lakes that you can see from satellite pictures. Further south, the land has been scraped and punctured, its surface white and chalky, with more lakes - bigger ones, distinctively rectangular with rounded corners, graduated embankments and depth meters, white rings of salt left at edges where water has ev***rated away. This territory belongs to Texas Brine Company, as all of this sits directly atop one of the Gulf Coast’s many salt domes - underground geological features known for bearing pockets of oil and gas. Salt domes are often used to store vast petroleum reserves and other potentially toxic substances because the salt is considered impermeable.. ‘til it comes into contact with water..
A casually curious individual like myself has no access to this. But I want to see the little pothole lakes revealed in the satellite pics in person. What do they smell like? How deep are they? Do their surfaces ripple with iridescence? Does anything live in them? And what else exists in this rare, urban uninhabited landscape? Are there oil derricks and are they still working?
I could have ridden into it, past sleeping earth movers and sodium v***r work lights, down a dirt road, where the lakes are and beyond. There was no fence, only a green flooded trench I could have ridden through if I were a more aggressive and better skilled rider. But I don’t take trespassing lightly where there are multidirectional security cameras in a state with a legislature that encourages folks to shoot first and ask questions later. But I got close enough. For now.
