Watching The Well

Fred was already in his fifties when I started work for Cities Service Oil Company. He taught me how to make contour maps, and pick formation tops from electric logs. More importantly, he instructed me on how to find oil and gas. Though important, they were not the only things I learned from him.

Fred was the senior Kansas geologist and no longer had to watch drilling wells. He still liked to go to the field occasionally, but more as an observer than anything else. “A vacation from the office,” he said.

For the first two or three wells that I watched, Dave, another junior Kansas geologist accompanied me, letting me do most of the work but correcting my errors as we went along. When the company finally trusted me enough to watch a well alone, I felt confident that I could do the job. A week had passed when Fred joined me on the well.

He picked me up at the well site the first morning, taking me to a nearby town to a favorite café he remembered for a breakfast of steak and eggs. After breakfast, we spent much of the day driving around the countryside, Fred pointing out wells he had drilled and explaining Cities’ politics, and the local history of every little town we drove through.

After dinner, we found a bar and pool hall where we drank pitcher after pitcher of beer and played game after game of pool. At midnight, when the tavern closed, he drove me back to the location and told me to catch up my samples and descriptions. He would see me in the morning.

The same routine continued for three days, eating, wandering, drinking beer and shooting pool until midnight, and then me burning the midnight oil to bring my well site work up to date, while Fred went to the motel in town. The fourth day, he found me with my head on the trailer’s desk, very much asleep.

“Hey,” he said. “I hope you haven’t missed any shows. We’ll have hell to pay if you did.”

“You kidding me? I’m so tired, I fell asleep staring into the binocular microscope. Both of my eyes are probably black. It would be a relief if you fired me. At least I could get a little rest.”

Fred wasn’t the type that laughed much, but he guffawed a time or two at my words. Patting me on the shoulder, he said, “Go into town and get some sleep. I’ll catch things up for you. You can come get me for dinner.”

I found out later from Dave that Fred had done the same thing to him. “He just wants to see what you are made of,” he said.

Next time Fred joined me on a well and suggested we shoot a game of pool, he actually laughed when I said, “Fine, but if we stay for more than one pitcher, then I’m going to the motel room, and you’ll have to watch the well tonight.”

Louisiana Mystery Writer