SLEEPING BEAUTY & The 1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill

The action in Ross MacDonald’s Sleeping Beauty is dominated by a devastating oil spill that threatens the coastline off Pacific Point, California. PI Lew Archer first catches sight of the resultant slick from the air as he is flying back to L.A. from Mazatlán: “It lay on the blue water … in a free-form slick that seemed miles wide and many miles long. An offshore oil platform stood up out of its windward end like the metal handle of a dagger that had stabbed the world and made it spill black blood.” Archer is so shaken by what he sees that, instead of driving directly home after landing, he retrieves his car and heads for the coast. Walking along the beach he happens upon a young woman, Laurel Lennox, whose family owns the ruptured well. In a poignant scene, Archer interrupts Laurel as she is futilely attempting to rescue a small bird that has been covered in oil. Later, when a despondent Laurel leaves Archer’s apartment with a bottle of sleeping pills, the detective has no choice but to go looking for her. Archer’s search which (ostensibly, at least) turns into a kidnapping recovery, enmeshes him in a web of jealousy and greed that stretches back twenty five years and encompasses three murders and yet another disaster … a fire on a US naval vessel off Okinawa in 1945.

The environmental motif that surfaces in MacDonald’s earlier novel, The Underground Man (1971), becomes the central unifying image in Sleeping Beauty. Here, the oil spill becomes a multivalent symbol for the mysterious way in which the past continues to exert an almost occult influence on the present. Indeed, the characters in this novel all desire to either hide from or to exploit the past in some fashion. MacDonald uses the oil spill to demonstrate just how perilous it is to attempt to effect one or the other of those results. The muck and ooze of our lives, the alluvial deposit of our past, he seems to be saying, must somehow be owned up to on its own terms. It must, in other words, and to use overtly psychological language, be integrated into the present or it too will soon begin seeping disastrously around the edges of whatever artifice we have contrived to contain it. One member of the ill-fated Lennox family, at least, appears to intuit just that when she remarks: “It’s a recurring theme. Other people burn their bridges … we do things on grander scale in our family. We burn ships and spill oil. It’s the all-American way.”

It’s worth noting that the oil spill fictionalized so powerfully in Sleeping Beauty, written in 1973, is based on real-life event. In January, 1969, an oil platform owned by the Union Oil Company and located six miles off the Santa Barbara coast ruptured. The slick that resulted spread over 800 square miles and, all tolled, fouled 35 miles of the coastline. While the spill was (more or less) contained in two weeks’ time, residual oil and gas continued to seep into the surrounding waters for months. Ultimately the blowout was blamed on inadequate casing. Since the rig was positioned beyond California’s “three-mile” territorial limit, Union Oil did not have to conform to more stringent state standards.

The ecological impact of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill was devastating. The lungs of marine mammals such as whales, dolphins and seals in the area were, not surprisingly, fouled with oil. Many suffered massive hemorrhages and died as a result. The greatest effect, however, appears to have been on the seabird population. Official estimates indicate that nearly 4,000 birds died as a result of oil contamination. Incoming tides would bring the carcasses of dead birds to shore daily for months after the onset of the spill. Laurel Lennox’s effort to save one such animal in the opening pages of Sleeping Beauty takes on even more meaning when it is recalled that the zoo in Santa Barbara (MacDonald’s fictional “Santa Teresa”) was set up as a bird shelter/treatment center. Despite the best efforts of all concerned, however, only 25%-30% of the birds treated there for oil contamination eventually survived.

The negative ecological impact of the 1969 disaster was, however, somewhat offset by the profound repercussions of that same event for the (at the time) fledgling “green” movement. Historians of the era cite the 1969 Union Oil spill as one major impetus behind the “modern” environmental movement … a movement which really gathered “steam” (as it were) in the ensuing decade. Many also credit (if that’s a word that can be used in this context) the Santa Barbara spill as the event which, ultimately, spawned the annual celebration of “Earth Day” which was inaugurated in April of 1970.

Only a few short days after the disaster, the aptly named organization GOO (“Get Oil Out”) was founded. Of interest to MacDonald fans is the fact that Ross (Ken Millar) and his wife, Margaret, quickly joined its ranks. Before long, MacDonald became actively – and quite publicly – involved in both the clean-up efforts and the protests that were precipitated by the spill. The details of those efforts are well-documented by Tom Nolan in his masterful biography of Ross MacDonald which was published in1999. Here it’s enough to point out that a famous photograph was taken of Ross MacDonald carrying a “Ban the Blob” sign at one of the aforementioned protests. That photograph was, understandably, picked up by and reprinted in newspapers across the country.

Sleeping Beauty is both a rich and a rewarding story. It’s probably not too much of a stretch to suggest that no small part of the novel’s depth and texture owes itself to the fact that the seminal event in its plot is based on a real-life natural disaster … a disaster that, by all accounts, had a profound influence on the book’s author. The novel showcases Lew Archer’s unrelenting investigation into the moral and psychological basis for America’s ambivalence toward the past and its avarice toward nature. The detective’s overt preoccupation with such matters appears to stem (at least in part) from his creator’s reaction to an environmental catastrophe that was, in many ways, a watershed event at the close of one of the most tumultuous decades in American history.

REFERENCES:

Nolan, Tom. Ross MacDonald: A Biography. New York: Scribner’s, 1999. See pages 282-286.

Santa Barbara Oil Spill Summary Article & Images at: http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~jeff/sb_69oilspill/69oilspill_articles2.html

Santa Barbara Oil Spill – A Retrospective at: www.geog.ucsb.edu/~kclarke/Papers/SBOilSpill1969.pdf

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SLEEPING BEAUTY & The 1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill