BEAUMONT — Bear with me here while I explain to you my strange connection to Spindletop.

Here’s the background:

My first visit to Spindletop came a couple of years back, en route home to Lafayette, Louisiana from a weekend at my brother’s new home north of Houston.

In Lafayette, I’d covered the Louisiana energy industry for Gannett newspapers. While writing a story in Louisiana, I’d met a Lamar-trained engineer, retired from Weatherford, who suggested I should visit Spindletop.

Spindletop, he suggested, would help me understand the oil industry.

Now if you’ve ever covered energy you know that understanding the industry is something akin to the story of the three blind men and the elephant. The blind men each touch one portion of the creature and think they know its essence. The reality is, they’ve touched three different and unrelated parts, none of which explain the whole. Because they are blind, they cannot know this.

Five years of covering oil and gas convinced me no one knew the whole creature, that the energy industry is so vast, so diverse, its reach so long, that no one could understand it all. Oil touches history and international affairs, national defense and the stock market, engineering and environment and global economics — it’s so big that no one could know it all. They simply held a trunk or a tail or a leg of the energy industry story.

In Louisiana, I mostly covered the offshore drilling and service companies that operated there — just a portion of the industry.

But Spindletop is different. It can point you to the essence of the energy industry. There’s the derrick and the tools and the town. There’s the primitive nature of coaxing the massive gusher. But there’s more and it speaks to the whole industry.

Start with the people, the adamant local dreamer Pattillo Higgins of Beaumont who against all odds knew there was oil under the hill. Add Anthony Lucas, European born and university trained, who takes up the cause with Higgins-like belief. Add the Hamill brothers, the drillers, who lend expertise but sometimes make it up as they go along. Don’t forget the investors and the naysayers and wildcatters that follow.

The story of Spindletop, beautifully told in “Giant Under the Hill” by Judith Walker Linsley, Ellen Walker Rienstra and Jo Ann Stiles, reminds us that oil is about more than rock, sand and soil. It’s about people who believe and toil and fail until they succeed. That may be the essence of the energy story.

It’s about more than geology and engineering. It’s about dreams and determination. You can’t talk about oil without acknowledging the people.

Last Wednesday, on the 117^th anniversary of the Spindletop gusher, I sat in the Log Cabin Saloon at Spindletop Gladys City Boomtown Museum with museum director Troy Gray and talked about what happened a stone’s throw from the Neches River, about a mile from where the museum rests.

I was there because it was 10:30 a.m. on Jan. 10, the time and date when the Spindletop oil gusher woke up the world in 1901. I was there, too, because I was born on Jan. 10, at 10:30 a.m. CST, in 1954, on the gusher’s 53^rd anniversary. That is my Spindletop connection. I’ve been reading “Giant Under the Hill” and felt drawn to drive to Beaumont on the gusher anniversary.

Gray, who was preparing for last Saturday’s annual anniversary event (complete with a watery gusher), was hoping for 500 people to visit Spindletop on Saturday. I hoped they would visit if it wasn’t cold and windy and gray, like it was on Jan. 10, 1901.

The museum is hardly booming with tourists these days but visits have gained some steam. In Fiscal Year 2017, Gray said, Spindletop drew about 15,000 visitors, about a 50 percent increase over the previous year.

Gray’s hoping for break-even visitor numbers this year — Hurricane and Tropical Storm Harvey’s impact have undermined local tourism —but he says Spindletop visitors are passionate about the stories the museum tells.

They include visitors from Europe and the Middle East. They include retired oil workers and folks who want to know more about the decades of the Spindletop era. They include people who gaze in wonder at the old tools on display, the period town exhibited at the museum, and more.

You never know who might walk in to visit, Gray said.

They love the gusher story. Everyone loves the gusher story.

Gray told me last Saturday’s “gusher” displays — at 10:30 and 4:15 — would last about two minutes each, not the nine days the real gusher spilled oil over the Jefferson County landscape.

But folks would get the idea. They’d see precious liquid soar skyward, and know that someone’s dream had come true.

Ken Stickney is editor of the Port Arthur News.