Losing Your Mojo

I was surveying some shallow gas wells near Billings, when I recalled the first well I ever drilled in Noble County. I briefly recounted the story to the three people in the vehicle with me but I omitted telling them about the pathos I felt at the time.

It was near the lowest financial ebb for Anne and I following the eighties oil bust. We had a very large glass piggy bank that we had filled with coins over the years and we had agreed to wait until our most desperate moment before opening it and spending the coins. The time finally arrived.

We were expecting thousands but there was only about two-hundred-sixty dollars in the glass pig. The money tided us over for the moment but we got down to our last dollar on more than one occasion. Somehow, every time our money became dangerously low I would somehow manage to sell a prospect or make a few bucks doing a little consulting job.

There were few real jobs available in the State at the time and there was a joke going around about a geologist that applied for a job flipping burgers at MacDonald’s.

“Sorry,” the manager told him. All the geologists that work for us have Master’s Degrees.”

The story wasn’t far from the truth.

Before the “Bust”, I had an ego as large as Texas. Geologists must have a second sense to find oil many miles below the earth’s surface and the best are dubbed oil finders. I knew that I was good and I knew that I was also incredibly lucky.

One of the founders of Texas Oil & Gas once told me, “Eric, you have a gift. You’re an oil finder. There aren’t many around like you and if you can find oil and gas the world will beat a path to your door.”

It didn’t seem like anyone was searching very hard for me in 1989 as I remember going a year without selling a prospect. Somehow, Anne and I managed to eke out a living but my pocketbook and my ego had taken a huge pummeling. I had lost my mojo and everything I touched seemed to turn to turkey poop.

My dreams, along with my ego, took a severe bruising. I continued working and had the idea for a drilling prospect in Noble County, a county I had never previously worked. Unable to afford professional drafting I drew the map on a sheet of typing paper and colored it with a used set of thrift store colored pencils. It took me a while to find someone that even wanted to look at it.

One weekend I read an ad in the Sunday Oklahoman classifieds posted by someone with a Dallas area code. The tiny ad said they were looking for a geologic prospect. I called the number before finishing my first cup of morning coffee.

Two days later a man driving a Volkswagen with a large rubber roach attached to the roof drove into our driveway. He had a small exterminating company in Dallas and he drove a bus at the DFW Airport. Before the crash, he had worked in a phone room raising money. He thought the time was right and that he could raise enough money on his own to drill a well. He left Oklahoma City with my hand-drawn maps after giving Anne and me a check for $7000.00. We were on Cloud Nine.

Two years passed and he hadn’t drilled the well. He finally called and told me in his slow Texas drawl that he had decided not to drill it.

“My engineer says even if we find what we’re looking for that it will be drained.”

I spent the next hour convincing him that his engineer was wrong. Tom D was (is) a good man. He could hear the neediness in my voice and knew that if he had been there in person that he would have seen me on my knees.

“All right,” he finally said. “You talked me into drilling the well but I’m only doing it because I believe in you. I hope you don’t let me down.”

I barely had any swagger left by this time in my life. As he began drilling, I knew that this was his one and only shot at success. If he drilled a dry hole, he was on his back to driving a bus at DFW again. I had pretty much badgered him into drilling the location, a well about which some engineer was still shaking his head. With my ego damaged and mojo gone, I now had a ton of guilt on my shoulders to make matters worse.

All sorts of scenarios are possible from this point of the story. We could have drilled a dry hole prompting Tom D to commit suicide, or something equally horrible. It didn’t happen that way. We nailed the zone, just as planned. Anne and I had three percent of the well and it came on for one-hundred-forty-five barrels of oil and four-hundred-fifty MCFG. The well made us lots of money over the years and it is still producing.

Hundreds of wells later my damaged mojo has never fully recovered and I don’t suppose it ever will. As I returned from Noble County, I thought about Tom D and that first well. I also thought about the good times Anne and I had during the bad times and it made me sad that she isn’t alive.

Times are tough these days and maybe my age and my own experiences qualify me as someone that can give a little honest advice. It’s just this – Never quit believing in yourself no matter how bad things become. You can’t really lose your mojo, but sometimes you have to remain persistent to coax it out of hiding.

Gondwana Press