The week before the big game, the grocery store on Garth Road moves the chicken wings to the front. You know the one. There is a cardboard display shaped like a goalpost, and a pallet of soda, and a bin of the foam fingers that nobody buys and everybody's kid wants. The folding tables come out of garages. Somebody's brother-in-law has a television the size of a garage door and he becomes, for one Sunday, the most popular man on his street. In the parking lot at the hardware store the guys with the smokers on trailers start taking orders. This is the week the whole country agrees to sit down at the same time and look at the same thing, and this town is no different, except in one way.
The plant does not know it is Sunday.
That is not a figure of speech. A continuous process runs on a twelve-hour shift schedule that rolls through the calendar without looking at it. Days, nights, days, nights, a stretch off, and around again. There is no version of the schedule where the big game happens to land on everyone's day off. So when the coin goes up on Sunday evening, some fraction of the town is on a couch with a plate of wings, and some fraction is walking a unit on the channel with a radio on their hip, and the second group, if they are honest, does not mind as much as you would think.
The stadium, wherever it is, is a building lit like a small sun. Thousands of lamps in the rigging above the field, a screen the size of a city block at each end, the concourse, the kitchens, the elevators, the broadcast trucks in the lot outside drawing power to send the picture to more than a hundred million people. All of that is electricity, and electricity has to be made in the same moment it is used. Somewhere, right then, something is spinning to make it, and it is spinning because something is burning.
In this country, more often than anything else, and in Texas most of all, the thing burning is natural gas.
Picture a jet engine bolted to a concrete floor. That is a gas turbine, and it is not a bad picture; the two machines are cousins. Air comes in the front and is squeezed by a stack of spinning blades until it is hot and dense. Gas is sprayed into it and lit. The burning gas expands, hard and fast, and pushes its way out the back through another stack of blades, spinning them, and the shaft they are on is connected to a generator. The generator is a magnet turning inside coils of copper wire. When a magnet moves past a wire, the wire feels a push, and that push, running out of the plant and up onto the high lines and down the poles, is the electricity. A good plant catches the exhaust heat as well, uses it to boil water, and runs the steam through a second turbine so that less of the fire is wasted up the stack.
In this country the shaft turns sixty times a second, because that is the rhythm every clock and motor and lamp on the grid has agreed to keep. And it is not one shaft. Every generator on the grid turns in step with every other one, locked together by the wires between them, so that a turbine on the coast and a turbine in the panhandle are, in a real sense, one machine with a very long axle. Texas keeps its own grid, mostly, separate from the rest of the country, which means that on Sunday the turbines lighting the houses along Bayway Drive are all keeping time with each other and with nobody else. When the stadium's lamps come up to full, somewhere a valve opens a little wider to hold the beat.
Before it is a show, it is a magnet and a wire and a fire.
Now follow the fire back. The gas in the turbine came out of a well, and between the well and the burner it went through a plant that dried it and took out the heavier parts, the ethane and propane and butane, which are worth more sold separately than burned. In this part of the world a great deal of that heavier stuff ends up in the salt caverns under Mont Belvieu, fifteen minutes up 146 from the couch you are sitting on, waiting to become something else. Some of it comes down to the channel and goes into a cracker, a furnace running at roughly eight to nine hundred degrees Celsius, and comes out as ethylene, which becomes plastic. The screen on the giant television is plastic. The foam finger is plastic. The bag the chips came in is a few layers of plastic film, each one a slightly different molecule, one to keep the grease in and one to keep the air out and one to hold the ink. The green field itself, in many of the big stadiums, is plastic grass, millions of blades of polyethylene stitched into a mat. The cooler is plastic. The chair. The cable from the wall to the television. The rubber bladder inside the ball.
You could make the point that everything on the couch came through a drum on the channel, and it would be true, and it would be the kind of point this series makes often enough that I will not lean on it. The point tonight is smaller and stranger. It is that the broadcast is live, and the electricity it rides on is more live than the broadcast.
There is no warehouse for electricity, not at the size of a state. A battery can hold a little of it for a while, but the grid as a whole keeps no stock. The current coming out of the wall behind the television was not made yesterday or this morning. It was made this instant, in a turbine somewhere, and it is being used up in the instant it arrives, and the turbine is adjusting, second by second, to how much the state is asking for. The picture on the screen runs a few seconds behind the field, so that somebody in a truck can catch what should not go out. The light the picture is made of has no delay at all. When the load on the grid rises even a little, a few hundred thousand refrigerators happening to cycle on in the same minute, the beat sags by a hair, and a governor on a turbine a hundred miles away feels the sag and lets in more gas, and the beat comes back. Nobody at the power plant is watching the game. The power plant is watching you watch it.
Back on the channel, meanwhile, it is night shift.
There is a break room in every unit, and there is a television in every break room, and on this one Sunday it is on. The rules about that are whatever the rules are; I will not pretend to know them for any particular plant. What I know is that nobody watches it sitting down. You stand in the doorway with a coffee. You catch the play and go. Somebody has the game on a phone in a shirt pocket, sound off, and checks it at the top of the stairs. The board operator in the control room cannot see it at all, and does not ask, and gets the score shouted down the hallway every so often like weather.
The night-shift operator on the tower — the same composite man who turns up in all of these essays, never any one person — says the thing about working the big game is that you feel the country from the outside. Everybody is looking one direction. You are looking the other. You are up on a deck at the top of a unit, with the wind coming off the bay, and you can see the town spread out to the west of you, and every window is the same blue flicker at the same moment. Then a play happens and you hear it. Not from any one house, but from all of them, a low sound that comes across the water a half second after the flicker changes, the whole town shouting at once. He says it is the only night of the year the town sounds like one animal.
And under him, the whole time, the unit is running. Feed in, product out, the pumps doing what they were doing an hour ago and will be doing an hour from now. The flare is doing its small steady work. Somewhere out on the grid a turbine is spinning at sixty times a second and a magnet is passing a wire and the lamps over a field a thousand miles away are burning at full, and none of that would be true, not one lamp, if there were not people standing on decks in the dark, on a Sunday, making sure it stayed true.
The ones on the couch do not see that, and it is not a complaint. It is the arrangement. The country gets to sit down together because some of it does not. The spectacle is a thing that floats on top of a great deal of quiet work, and the quiet work is the deal this town made a long time ago, back when the derricks stood out in the creek and the refinery was new. Somebody keeps the fire, and everybody gets the light.
Halftime. In the houses the tables get restocked. On the unit the operator finishes his round, checks a gauge he has checked ten thousand times, writes the number down, and stands for a minute at the rail. The bay is black. The town to the west is a field of small blue windows. Out past the bridge, in the direction the gas came from and the direction the ships go, there is nothing but dark water and the lights of a tanker sitting at anchor, waiting for the tide.
Then the flicker changes all at once, and the sound comes across the water, and he goes back inside.