Fuel City

Behind the Farmer’s Market on Buford highway is a thing of graceful, quiet competence hidden behind a rusting steel facade of pumps and pipes and kerosene.  I call it Fuel City, a cathedral of sorts for engineers, and while calming and beautiful in its own right, this isn’t entirely about pumps and tanks and gasoline. 

As it says on my car, and in my pocket: 

Ignoti et quasi occulti

Unknown and partially hidden in the world, as great and beautiful things tend to be.

You can drive down Longmire and see the trucks and the pipelines, but look closer, feel the deep vibration in the earth, hear the rush and whisper of moving liquids, the anvil chorus of heavy Diesel, the faint smell of kerosene.  What is this place, and why am I sitting here at 4:00 AM watching the sky turn red as our earth eclipses the moon?

Well then:

Every drop of fuel that runs Atlanta and most of the state travels through here.  This is the single point…  

If Fuel City stumbles and the pumps run dry, the trucks stop, the cars stop, the shelves are empty, and the city falls into chaos.  For lack of a nail a horse was lost, for lack of fuel the bagpipe drone of the city’s engines stop and the city stops with it.  

The motor of the world needs this place of triply redundant backups quietly, invisibly, perfectly keeping the wheels turning, the cars rolling, the trucks moving, the houses warm.

So perfect and so reliable is this place that the people who’s lives depend on it have never heard of it, and should never hear if it.  Quiet competence needs no applause, no recognition, no Monday holiday in May.  It Just Is, and that is how it should be.

But:

The man behind the curtain can make no mistake, no misstep, no miscalculation, or the curtain falls and the world can see him:  Pumps and pipes, men and electronics, nothing magical, nothing more.  By grace and by calculation the curtain never falls.  Everything works, and people can rely completely on something they don’t even know exists.

This is why I come here.  Quiet enough to be unseen, good enough to be unknown, reliable enough to be forgotten.  In technology and in life there is no higher calling: You  are the primary structure of the world.

I love this place.  It reminds me that, yes, it can be done.  And is being done.  And will continue to be done.  And the trucks roll, and the cars drive, and the houses are warm in winter and the man behind the curtain remains —

Unknown and partially hidden in the world, as great and beautiful things tend to be.