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

A Breath of Evil

Ed is a well site geologist that offices with me. We were discussing ghosts and he conveyed this ghost story to me. It happened in southwest Kansas.

There aren’t many cities in southwest Kansas and most of the towns small. Drilling wells are often located miles from the nearest town. The primary roads are blacktopped, but narrow. The side roads are often impassible when the weather turns bad.

Ed was sitting a well miles from the nearest town. Early winter snow had melted, leaving dirt roads that were all but impassible. After driving fifty miles for dinner, Ed and the tool pusher were returning to the rig, finding the road into the location too muddy to traverse in their truck. Parking on the blacktop, they began the quarter-mile hike to the location.

Ed and the tool pusher had a lone flashlight that cut a narrow swath of dim light through the misty darkness. About halfway to the rig, they both smelled something that Ed described as putrid and ugly. The temperature dropped, perhaps twenty degrees.

“Did you just feel something?” Ed asked.

“Yes, did you?”

“I think we just passed through something evil.”

“Amen to that,” the tool pusher said.

The experience unnerved both men. When Ed returned to his truck the next day, he felt the same sense of dread as he passed the spot where he and the tool pusher first sensed the presence of evil.

“It was so far from town, I couldn’t imagine what was haunting the hollow we crossed on the way to the rig. Maybe it was an Indian spirit. I don’t know. It was evil, whatever it was. That I know.”

Gondwana

Dust Ghost of Coldwater Kansas - a short story

It's great seeing all the new stories about the filming of the original movie The Exorcist. The film was a masterpiece from the beginning to the climactic final scene. I still get tingly when I hear the song Tubular Bells. In the 70s, I saw my own apparition in the badlands of southwest Kansas.

Kansas Dust Ghost

I was a new geologist for Cities Service Oil Company in 1973 when the movie The Exorcist came out. The film was adapted from the novel of the same name. Always an avid reader, I'd read it before the movie came out. It was one of the most riveting and suspenseful books I can remember. I couldn’t put it down and finished it in one sitting. Needless to say, I was anxious to see how the movie compared with the novel.

My first wife, Gail, and I saw the movie at the Shepherd Mall in Oklahoma City, and the theater was packed. The cinema both fascinated and repulsed the many theater-goers watching it. So intense were some of the scenes (at least compared to every other movie before 1973) that many of the patrons tossed their own cookies when Linda Blair’s head began rotating on her neck, and she began spitting green goo at the priest attempting to exorcise her demon.

I didn’t throw up, but the young man sitting beside me did – right on my shoe, I kid you not! The movie stopped briefly while unhappy attendants with mops and pails cleaned up the mess. I am not making this up! Anyway, I left Oklahoma City the following day to watch a drilling oil well in Coldwater, Kansas. Yes, there is a Coldwater, Kansas, and I’m not making that up, either.

Located in southwest Kansas, Coldwater was, and still is, a tiny town – only 792 people living there in 2000. I got a room in a four-room motel, stowed my suitcase, and drove to the Wildcat about twelve miles away.

Well-site work in Kansas is challenging. There are so many potentially productive formations up and down the hole that leaving the location for very long is impossible. We had a small company trailer on site, and five days passed before I finally returned to my motel room. When drilling ceased for a time to test a zone, I drove to Coldwater for a much anticipated and needed rest. Before the night ended, my anticipation had turned to dread.

That night, I showered, changed clothes, and then ate a steak at the local café. The motel’s little black-and-white reception was poor, so I turned in early. There are few trees in southwest Kansas. When the wind blows, it tends to howl. No sooner than I turned off the lights, the door and windows began to rattle, then expand and contract like a human lung. Bright lights and neon filtered in through the curtains and cracks around the door. It was almost as if a ghastly presence was joining me inside.

Only a few days after seeing The Exorcist, my imagination began working overtime, playing cruel tricks on a sleep-deprived geologist. I am a Vietnam veteran, so I was not really frightened. Well, okay, a little bit. Dust blew through cracks in the door, fouling the air conditioning and reminding me of an angry apparition swirling around the room. Whatever it was, it didn’t harm me, and I finally fell asleep, probably from exhaustion.

The flashing lights, moaning wind, and veils of dust in my room could have been a ghost, or perhaps just my imagination whetted by the very realistic film I had recently viewed. As events would have it, that was the last night I spent in the Coldwater Motel, not by design or the dust ghost, but because that is how the drilling worked out.

Years have passed since I saw The Exorcist at the Shepherd Mall, and I have not returned to Coldwater, Kansas. It doesn’t matter because I will never forget The Exorcist or the dust ghost I saw and heard that night in the Coldwater Motel.

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Born near Black Bayou in the little Louisiana town of Vivian, Eric Wilder grew up listening to his grandmother’s tales of politics, corruption, and ghosts that haunt the night. He now lives in Oklahoma, where he continues to pen mysteries and short stories with a southern accent. He authored the French Quarter Mystery Series set in New Orleans, the Paranormal Cowboy Series, and the Oyster Bay Mystery Series. Please check it out on his Amazon author page. You might also like checking out his Facebook page.