Oil, That Is

They rise and fall like gargantuan steel metronomes set to the most sluggish beat. Along PCH in Huntington Beach, bordering the 60 Freeway in Montebello, fenced off in unexpected one-acre pockets near downtown or on 1,200-acre lots in Baldwin Hills, our “horse head” oil wells drone silently and tirelessly day and night. Dating from the ‘20s, the horse heads are neither as photogenic as their predecessors--the towering wooden oil derricks from so many Signal Hill postcards, pulled down as fire hazards in the ‘60s--nor as costly as the latter-day underground ones, which constitute most of the 3,500 producing wells in L.A. County (including a few beneath the Beverly Center). They sap crude from depths as shallow as 2,000 feet or greater than a mile, but much of their labors are as futile as a would-be actor at a casting call--a particularly hard-working horse slurps 900 barrels of water for every 70 to 80 barrels of crude from one of the 300 active pumps atop Baldwin Hills (named “Inglewood field” when it was discovered in the 1920s). Still, the relentlessly bobbing horse heads are constant reminders of the city’s early boom, of a business barely older than film that made wealthy men of Getty and Doheny. And they figure as haunting silhouettes in our more spectacular sunsets.