Nothing goes "boom!" like a duck in gasoline.
Okay, a lot of things in gasoline make a great boom, but let's just go with the duck idea.
I was walking along the shore of Lake Superior. I know. You're going to ask me how magnificent it looked, how the breeze made all the troubles go away, blah, blah, blah.
The truth is the lake didn't look good. It smelled putrid. A thin film of something rainbow spread on the surface, and the sight of dead and dying seabirds was not what I wanted for my morning jog. We locals knew something was up, but we knew we couldn't possibly fix the problem by ourselves.
Except I certainly wanted to the bottom of this. Thus, my morning jogs around "Death Lake."
"Hey Kristen," Mrs. Andrews greeted. She was a gentle woman, and like the rest of us, she was worried about the local fishing industry. But I was worried about something far worse.
I wanted to know where all of Standard Oil's latest shipment of crude oil went. It was my job at the company to keep track of things like that. And when I asked my boss about the missing oil, he shut me down. Hard. No one since has heard of the September 28 shipment.
"How are you?" I asked Mrs. Andrews. As always, she was sitting on a bench next to the water, knitting something exotic. Her latest project looked like a piano string cover, though I wasn't sure how that was going to work, with the holes and all.
"Fine. And you, sweet child?" Mrs. Andrews inquired.
I nodded. "Same as every morning," I replied. "Rest your bones, Mrs. Andrews!"
I continued on my jog, taking mental notes of the lake. For three weeks now, the smell had been in the air, the water with its rainbow sheen, and the birds and fish had been dying. It was a strange situation, I have to admit, but there had to be a cause. There had to be a–
Suddenly, I noticed Peter, the owner of the fish shop in town, was leaning over the pier, smoking a cigarette while tossing bread to the pond ducks. He took a long drag of the cigarette, the butt glowing faint orange in the dawn light.
While reaching for more bread, Peter switched his cigarette to his other hand. Resupplied, Peter ripped off a good chunk of the Wonder Bread into smaller pieces. Instead of tossing just bread, he tossed the lit cigarette in as well, and the source of flame sailed into the lake, leaving a faint amber arc glowing against the gray downtown background.
Immediately, the lake exploded into flames. The ducks cried out in shock and pain as the hot curling fire enveloped them in black and orange. The air quivered, smelling like burning crude oil. I stepped back, the heat painful even from a good distance to the burning shore.
And in that moment, as firefighters rushed to fight the rapidly burning lake, I realized I had solved both of my problems.
Standard Oil's crude oil shipment had disappeared into Lake Superior. And it was all going up in smoke.
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