Sleepwalkin' on a Fortune

 

 

 A fellow in Pennsylvania got a wild hair one day. Seein' some oily slicks on the ground, he decided to play earthworm with a fancy steam-powered prod. Drilled down, down, down like a mole on a Red Bull bender, until – whoosh! Black gold erupts, nearly drownin' our intrepid excavator. Well, you can imagine the commotion! The whole area turned into an anthill faster than you can say "boomtown." Thousands swarmed in, engines huffin' and puffin' like winded bulldogs. Barrels of oil piled up faster than you could count 'em, all ready to be shipped out and turned into who-knows-what. Speculators with dollar signs in their eyes stampeded in, and thirsty consumers gobbled up the oil like locusts at a picnic.

Turns out, folks in Virginia, New York, and Ohio had been sleepwalkin' on a fortune! For years, they'd been coughin' up cash for whale oil from the Pacific, all the while sittin' on a bigger stash than a pirate's treasure chest, just 300 feet underground. Geologists, bless their pointy-headed ways, kept mum on the whole thing. Maybe they were too busy ponderin' rocks to notice the liquid gold beneath their feet.

Here's the real knee-slapper: apparently, these oil reserves were just chillin' out, waitin' for their big break. Nature, that sly dog, squirreled them away for millennia, just in case humanity needed a refill. Whales stopped spoutin'? No problem! Mother Earth steps up, bellowing "Oil's on me!" in Pennsylvania. 

Now, fancy that! Meanwhile, New Bedford's down by the docks, feelin' a bit like a jilted prom date. Those whale hunters must be missin' the good ol' days of "thar she blows!" – except now it's all about "here she blows" and "there she blows" in Pennsylvania. Guess you could say the party moved on, leavin' New Bedford with a bucket of empty promises and a whole lotta whale blubber blues.