The truck leaves the driveway at a quarter past five on Christmas Eve with the tree still lit in the front window. The kids have been told that Santa comes whether Dad is home or not, which is true, and that Dad will be home in the morning in time to see what he brought, which is also true if nothing goes wrong on the unit. The thermos is on the seat. The lunch is in the cooler behind it. The badge is on the lanyard on the mirror where it always is. The street is full of other people's lights and the truck goes down it toward the plant the way it does three hundred and some nights a year, and the only difference tonight is that the traffic is thin and the radio is playing carols and the man behind the wheel is thinking, without any bitterness at all, that this is the trade.
I want to be careful about him. He is not a real man. He is a few dozen real ones and a good number of real women, put together so I can talk about them without putting any one of their names on a website. But everything about him is true of someone in this town tonight, and probably of someone on your street.
The plant does not close. This is the first thing you learn when you marry into it or grow up in it or hire on. A refinery is not a factory in the sense most people mean, a building where a shift arrives, makes a thing, and goes home. It is a process. Crude comes in one side and goes through pipes and towers and drums where it is heated and separated and cracked and rebuilt, and the whole system is one continuous flow, hot and pressurized, and you cannot stop it any more than you can stop a river for the weekend. Stopping it is a job that takes days and a crew of thousands and a name, turnaround, and it happens on a schedule measured in years. In between, it runs. Every hour of every day. Christmas Eve is not on the calendar the plant keeps.
This is not stubbornness, and the reason matters. A furnace that has been holding a tube of oil at several hundred degrees for months does not switch off; it cools over days, and the steel around it shrinks as it cools, and every flange and seal on the unit moves a little. Bringing it back is the reverse, and slower, and it is the most dangerous stretch of the whole cycle. The people who study accidents in this industry will tell you that a plant is at its riskiest not when it is running but when it is starting up or shutting down, when nothing is at its steady temperature and the numbers on the screens are all moving at once. So the safest thing a plant can do, on Christmas Eve or any night, is what it did yesterday. Steady is the careful choice, and it costs somebody their Christmas Eve.
So somebody is on the tower. Somebody is in the control room, in front of a wall of screens that show the plant as numbers and lines: temperatures, pressures, levels, flows. Somebody is outside in the dark walking the unit with a flashlight, checking a pump by the sound it makes, opening a valve a quarter turn because the board said to. There is a lab tech pulling samples, a guard at the gate, a crew in the fire station inside the fence with the lights on and a game show going on the TV. This is some hundreds of people at the complex on the channel and more at the other plants around it, on an ordinary night, and Christmas Eve is an ordinary night as far as the process knows.
They work twelve hours, most of them, on a rotation that turns over every few days, so that a given operator's Christmas falls on nights one year and days the next and off the year after, and the schedule was set months ago by a pattern that did not consult the calendar. You can trade. People do. The ones with small kids trade for Christmas morning; the ones whose kids are grown or gone give it up to them and take the last night of the year instead, or the first. There is a whole quiet economy of this inside every plant, and it is one of the kindest things I know about the place, and nobody outside ever sees it.
What does he see, from up there? Less than you would think and more than you would think.
Less, because he is not looking at the view. Nobody on shift is looking at the view. He is looking at a pump, or a gauge, or the screen, and his attention is where his attention has to be, which is on the thing that could go wrong. The plant is a place where the ordinary is the whole job. A good night is a night where nothing happens, and nothing happens because a few hundred people made sure of it, one small correction at a time, all night.
But more, because when he does look up, on a smoke break or walking between units or standing on a platform waiting for a reading to settle, the town is right there. The plant sits at the edge of it, on the water. From the height of the towers, on a clear night, you can see the lights of the neighborhoods spread out away from the channel, and the bridge lit up over the water with its cables like harp strings, and the ships in the channel with their deck lights on, and the flare of the next plant over, and the flare of the one past that, all the way down the coast. On Christmas Eve some of the lights in the neighborhoods are colored. From up there they do not look like decorations. They look like the town keeping a small fire going in every window.
He knows where his house is, roughly. He has picked it out before, or thinks he has, by the water tower nearest it. The tree is lit in the front window, on a timer, and the kids are asleep, and his wife is doing the last of what has to be done and will not tell him how long it took. The presents are under the tree; he wrapped half of them on his last day off, badly. None of this is on the screens. All of it is in the control room anyway.
Seen from up there on Christmas Eve, the plant is the town's real shape showing. In the daytime the town looks like a place where people live, with the plant off to one side, behind the fence, an employer, a tax base, a thing on the horizon. At night on a holiday it flips. Almost everything in the town has stopped: the stores, the schools, the offices, the city hall, the college. What is left running is the short list of things that cannot stop. The plant. The hospital on Garth Road, where the only labor-and-delivery unit in town is staffed tonight because babies do not check the date either, and some years there is one born before morning who will be a Christmas baby all her life. The police. The fire stations. The water plant, keeping the pressure up so that the taps run in the morning. The grid, somewhere, turning. The ships, which do not anchor for Christmas. The bay, under all of it, moving with the tide.
That short list is the town. The rest is what the town does with its spare time. I do not mean that as a slight to the rest. The stores and the schools and the parade are where the living happens. But the list of things that cannot stop is the list of things the living depends on, and on Christmas Eve, when everything else goes dark and quiet, you can see the list plainly, lit up, with people in it. The town's real continuous process is not the cracker. It is the people who have agreed, in exchange for a paycheck and a rotation and a trade when they can get one, to be the ones awake.
He is one of them. He does not think of it that way. If you said to him at three in the morning on Christmas that he was part of the town's continuous process he would look at you and ask if you were feeling all right and offer you coffee from the thermos, which is bad, and which you should take.
A week later he is up there again, or someone very like him is, on the last night of the year. This one is different. The town does not go quiet at midnight on the last night of the year. It goes off.
It starts early and ragged, a pop here and there in the neighborhoods from about ten on, and then somewhere around a quarter till it starts building, and at midnight the whole flat spread of the town beyond the fence lights up at once from a thousand backyards. Bottle rockets and fountains and the big mortar shells somebody drove to a stand outside the city limits to buy, all going up together, red and green and white and that blue that is hard to make, over every subdivision from the bay to the interstate, a thousand small shows instead of one. From the tower it is silent, or nearly. The sound arrives late and soft, a crackle under the hum of the unit, because light gets there at once and sound takes its time, a mile every five seconds, so that the far side of town is still exploding a few heartbeats after it has already gone dark. What you see is a town announcing, all at once, in colored fire, that it is still here.
And in the middle of it, steady, not going up and not coming down, the flare. A fire that has been burning on this channel, in one stack or another, since the first furnaces were lit here in 1920, doing what it does every night, burning the little the plant could not find a use for. The fireworks are the same chemistry, strontium and copper and an oxidizer to make it go, and they came from the same kind of drum, in the long run, and they are over in a minute. The flare goes on. He looks at it, and looks at the town going off behind it, and looks back at the gauge, which has not moved, and he thinks the thing everybody on the night shift thinks at midnight on the last night of the year, which is: well, that's that. And then he walks the unit.
By a quarter past twelve the sky is clearing of smoke and the last stray rockets are going up alone. The colored lights in the windows are still on. The ships are still moving. The tide is still coming in under the bridge. The truck is in the lot with frost on the windshield, if there is frost, and the thermos on the seat is empty, and in six hours the sky over the plant will go grey and then gold, and he will drive home down a street full of spent cardboard tubes and go in the front door as the tree in the window clicks off.