Another Log on the Fire

December proved to be the coldest yearend Oklahoma has experienced in many years. Now, with 2009 barely gone, a new blue norther is bearing down on Oklahoma. It is beginning to precipitate as I take my two pugs for a walk in the backyard. Tomorrow morning’s low is predicted with a wind chill of minus fifteen. It reminds me of a winter I experienced some thirty years ago. As a young geologist for Cities Service Oil Company, I spent almost two years watching wildcat wells as they drilled. The state was Kansas but sometimes seemed like total chaos.

I was sitting a well near Anthony, Kansas when a giant snowstorm blew in. The storm lasted two days. When the snow finally quit falling, it had left fourteen foot drifts on the sides of the road. In the days before cell phones I had to drive to the nearest payphone and give my morning report to the powers-that-be in Oklahoma City before eight in the morning.

I left the rig before seven, heading for a service station about fifteen miles away. Growing up in Louisiana, I had never seen much snowfall. I did get a little taste of it when I attended graduate school at the University of Arkansas, but nothing like I experienced that day in Kansas.

It was snowing so hard, that I experienced a total whiteout. How I stayed on the road I will never know. I never made it to the payphone and will also never know how I made it back to the rig without going in the ditch. I remained on location until it finally stopped snowing before driving to town to file a report. What I saw on the way there was as surreal as a scene from a Kafka novel.

Snowplows had cleared the highway, moving the massive amounts of snow to the side of the road. The drilling well was in the country, cattle ranching comprising the primary source of revenue for the locals. In flat central Kansas there are few trees to break the wind and rows of cattle lay dead, frozen to death, all along the fence line.

When the weather finally went back over the freezing mark, the snow began to melt, turning the location into a mud hole. Long before the days when the EPA began requiring portable toilets on all the drilling rigs, your only option if you had to relieve yourself was to seek whatever cover you could find (hard to do on the barren plains of central Kansas) and just go. I remember stepping out the backdoor of the logging trailer and sinking up to my thighs in mud.

The wildcat well was a dry hole and I got very sick, my throat so sore I could barely swallow. When I returned to Oklahoma City, I hung up my Louisiana jacket for good and ordered a goose down coat from the North Face – a coat I still own.

A blue norther approaches as I keyboard this story but I’m not worrying about it. I don’t have to drive twenty miles tomorrow morning to call in a morning report so I think I’ll just finish this story, mix a little whiskey and water, and then put another log on the fire.

Eric'sWeb