A Day at the Beach

htt While mudlogging for CORE Labs after graduating college with my degree in geology, I sat a well in south Texas that took about six weeks to drill. It was not that the well was that deep or the drilling that slow, but it was quite simply the well from hell.


Everything that could possibly go wrong did go wrong. The sand-shale sequence through which we were drilling was unconsolidated, the drilling fast and the hole soon crooked. Well bores are never truly vertical because the drill bit rotates causing the pipe to corkscrew. A dogleg sometimes occurs that results in the borehole changing direction abruptly. This was the case in our well and it created worlds of problems every time the crews made a bit trip.

My fellow mudloggers and I only worked when the well was actually turning to the right. Two drilling superintendents had already been relieved of duty because of problems on the well. The new superintendent decided to try to fix the drilling problem before he became number three.

When dealing with problems encountered miles below the earth’s surface, it is impossible to estimate the time it might take to correct the problem. Because of this, the company placed Jack, Art and me on stand-by. This was okay with us because the company paid us and we did not have to work for it.

The quick fix to the drilling problem did not occur and by the third day, the three of us were tired of hanging around Weslaco. We decided to take a field trip to South Padre Island for a little fun in the sun. After icing down several six packs of beer, we headed for the beach. By the time we reached sun and sand, we were all “two sheets to the wind,” as they say.

Jack was the senior man but he was only about thirty. What bad habits that Art and I did not already possess, we learned from Jack. Art and I worked on the beer while Jack had a bottle of Jack Daniel’s that he tippled straight from the bottle. Jack was smart enough to let Art drive while he sat in the front seat giving us directions from a tattered Texas road map.

South Padre Island is a barrier bar that parallels the Texas Gulf coast and stretches for miles and miles. We were looking for a beach with lots of gorgeous and scantily clad females but after miles of driving, we continued to see only bare sand. Art finally spotted some people sunning on the beach and frolicking in the surf.

“I don’t see a road,” he said.

“There are no trees or ditches,” Jack said. “Just cut cross country.”

This seemed like a perfectly good idea to both Art and me. It was not. Within fifty feet, we were stuck up to the hubs in sand and thirty minutes of effort beneath hot Texas sun failed to extricate us.

“Leave it here,” Jack said. “I’m hot as hell. Let’s take a swim.”

This also seemed like a good idea to Art and me. Following Jack to the beach, we proceeded to strip down to our boxer shorts and dive into the surf. In the manner of all good Texas oilmen, we were loud, boisterous, brazen and very drunk. Within minutes, the crowded beach cleared leaving only the three of us to frolic in the surf.

We had no towels, no umbrella and no swim trunks. Our cold beer in the trunk was a hundred yards away through ankle deep hot sand. After an hour in the humidity and beneath the south Texas sun, we had all begun sobering up. A good thing as we were able to free the car when we finally returned to it.

Down the road, we found a recreation area with a hotdog stand and many souvenir shops. Even though we had our clothes back on, the crowd reaction was pretty much the same. They all apparently saw us for what we were – “oil field trash.” We ate a few hotdogs, ogled ever girl in sight and then headed back to Weslaco.

I awoke the next morning with a pounding head, queasy stomach and painful sunburn. Worse, we learned the well was drilling again.

I wish I could say that I learned a valuable lesson from this experience. Well maybe I did. I realized that it is a bad idea to leave behind an ice chest loaded with beer even though you intend to go little more than a hundred yards away.

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Struck by Lightning

Big Billy had an Oklahoma oil company during the late 70s, early 80s oil boom. Like many others during that era, his went belly up when the economy flopped and oil prices collapsed. He moved to Texas and started a restaurant, visiting me years later in Oklahoma City after I ran into him in a dark Dallas bar. I had some leases in Noble County along with a geologic idea. I showed it to him and he bought it from me, intent on drilling a well.

The prospect was a reentry of a previously drilled well that had “shows” that were never tested. Big Billy had money but to say that he was cheap would be an understatement. Even though he could easily have afforded a Jaguar, he drove an old Chevy until the wheels practically fell off. Sometimes, when you are drilling, it doesn’t pay to go with the cheapest bid.

Big Billy somehow dug up an old drilling contractor with a cut-rate price and very old rig to drill our well. The wash-down that should have taken three days was only 250 feet deep after a week.

I told him what I thought. “The bit is out of the old hole. You’re drilling a new hole and with this piece of junk you are drilling with, it’ll take forever.”

Big Billy was stubborn but he wasn’t stupid. Taking my advice, he released the dilapidated old drilling rig while we scratched our heads about what to do. We soon decided to perforate a shallow zone already cased behind surface casing. Big Billy’s good luck hadn’t gone far away and we completed the zone for lots of natural gas.

The well turned out to be a prolific producer and spurred the drilling of another ten shallow wells offsetting it. There were numerous, potentially productive sands in the area and I finally talked him into drilling a well to test this possibility. We called it the Big Boy.

We drilled the Big Boy to a depth of about three-thousand feet. Ed G., a friend of mine since Cities Service days, and also a cracker jack well-site geologist, watched the well as it was drilling. Before reaching total depth, we had recorded “shows” of natural gas in two zones. Ed and I both recommended that Big Billy set pipe.

“Do either of these zones produce in offset wells?” he asked us.

I shook my head but explained, “They calculate productive on the electric logs and we had positive shows while drilling through them.”

Big Billy wasn’t convinced.

“I can’t let my investors set pipe on a wildcat zone.”

Ed was irate. “With that kind of logic, there would have never been a productive well ever drilled. Someone has to be the first.”

Argue as we might, Big Billy decided to plug the well. He did so with a temporary plug, thinking someone might come along later in the area and find production in the two zones. He didn’t have to worry about lease expiration because shallow production held them. Everything would have been hunky-dory, except for Old Mother Nature.

A year or so later, Big Billy got a late-night call from the Corporation Commission, Oklahoma’s oil and gas regulatory agency. The temporary plug he had set on the Big Boy was leaking natural gas to the surface. During a spring thunderstorm, lightning had struck the surface plug and set it on fire.

“Plug it or produce it,” the Commission ordered.

Big Billy grumbled, but complied with the Commission’s order by reentering the well and completing in the same shallow zone as all of his offsets, still overlooking the two untested deeper zones.

Natural gas prices languished for several years, during which time Big Billy bought out all of his partners. He called and told me that he intended to sell the little natural gas field, buy a sailboat and retire to Washington with Kathy, his significant other.

“You’re too young to retire,” I said.

Unable to convince him, Ed and I found a buyer for the property.

Because of depressed natural gas prices, Big Billy sold the wells for $100,000. Ed, still enamored with the prospect, bought ten percent of the producing property for ten grand. He shortly had a pleasant surprise.

The price of natural gas, like all commodities, is controlled by supply and demand. When the supply is high, the price is low. When it stays low for a lengthy period, gas operators stop drilling. Since all wells decline, the supply always, sooner or later, drops below the demand. If no new wells are drilled to take their place, a shortage occurs. This is what finally happened the month after Big Billy sold his gas properties, bought his sailboat and moved to Washington. After realizing the imbalance between the supply of available natural gas and the demand for it, marketers began bidding in earnest. The price suddenly soared, returning Ed’s investment in a single month.

Big Billy either didn’t care or else decided not to let it bother him. He and Kathy lived on their boat, docked near Seattle, for several years until they both became bored with retirement. The oil and natural gas boom was still going strong so they sold the boat and moved back to Texas. His luck was still good and he and Kathy managed to amass yet another fortune during the ensuing Texas land boom.

Stubborn to the end, he never acknowledged being wrong about not testing the two deeper zones in Noble County.

Eric'sWeb

Summer of Love

We experienced the “Summer of Love” in 1969, along with Woodstock and the first man on the moon. There was also Vietnam. I had just graduated from college and planned to marry in August. Before the marriage occurred, I sat my first oil well.

It was early July and I waited in Houston, Texas for my first assignment as a mudlogger with a company called Core Lab. My new mentor was a degreed geologist named Ed M. and we were soon on our way to Mississippi. The 60s in Mississippi were still racially charged and we had to peel off the Core Lab sticker from our company car before driving into the state.

Many in Mississippi thought of CORE as the Congress of Racial Equality, not an oil and gas service company. Being from Louisiana, I was somewhat used to racism, but not even close to what I encountered in Mississippi.

My first well was a 17,500’ wildcat, just outside of Laurel, Mississippi. Ed and I found a room at a local boarding house. Ed liked boarding houses – he had married the owner of the last boarding house where he had stayed in Monroe, Louisiana. I liked them too because I did not have a lot of extra money for the local Hilton.

The drilling rig was big and noisy, but I was not destined to see the well through its total depth. Instead, I drove to Weslaco, Texas to finish logging a well drilling there. I never finished that well either because Core Lab sent me to log yet another deep wildcat, this one near Talco in east Texas.

While young hippies were smoking dope, cavorting around with no clothes, and listening to rock music, I spent the “Summer of Love” on an assortment of noisy drilling rigs from Mississippi to Texas. My boss begged me to sit a wildcat for him in Nicaragua and put off my marriage until later. I thought about it, and the extra money he offered, but my bride-to-be would have none of it.

Five months later, I was married, drafted into the Army and training for a traumatic trip to Southeast Asia as a hired gun for Richard Nixon. Yes, I missed the wild and decadent parts of the “Summer of Love” but I tried making up for it during the “Disco 70s.” Maybe it is a good thing because I don’t think I could have survived both.


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Iceland, Jamaica, and the Afar Triangle

I am a fiction writer but I am blessed, or perhaps cursed by also being a scientist of the Earth. Years ago I visited a road cut in Arkansas near the tiny town of Caddo Gap. What I witnessed that day truly blew me away, both metaphorically and metaphysically.

I stood on the side of the road, staring for what must have been many minutes, or perhaps hours, at what could only be described as a visual slice of the Earth’s core. It called to me with its siren’s song as I stared in lust at its naked earthen breasts.

As a geologist I may never again experience such a visceral feeling as I did that day, but three destinations beckon to me and I hope to visit each one before I die. They are: Iceland, a land created by sea-floor spreading, dominated by geysers and ice floes; the Afar Triangle, a place in southern Africa that is the site of a triple juncture, a spot where three plates intersect and truly one of the rarest geologic places; Jamaica, an island I believe is Atlantis reborn – perhaps the most exotic geologic location on earth.

I’ve never visited any of these places. The closest I have come is Nassau in the Bahamas. I was there years ago with my deceased wife Anne and friends Ray and Kathy. We hailed a cab and had our cabbie, an islander name King, drive us around and show us the sights. King was quite the character – loud, direct, friendly and informative. He took us to a little café beneath a bridge where only the locals ate.

“Mon, you have to try the conch fritters,” he told us.

We tried them and they were wonderful. I have no recipe for conch fritters for you tonight but I wish I did. I guess my mind was somewhere else. While the Bahamas isn’t Jamaica I was in the Caribbean and the bowels of the earth were calling to me. And yes, it was nothing short of visceral!

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Change in the Weather

It’s still officially spring, not yet the end of May but it feels like summer here in central Oklahoma. Temperatures reached into the nineties today, humidity through the roof and my tee shirt soaked by the time I returned from my walk.

This change in the weather didn’t happen gradually. Just last week I was sticking my toe into the pool, wondering if would be warm enough to swim in by Memorial Day. After a long winter, complete with several snowstorms and a blizzard or two, my dogs seem ready for warm weather.

I took my computer outside by the pool. As I type this post, I am sitting outside with my two black pugs, Princess and Scooter. Scooter was intent at first on sitting on my lap. Now he and his big sister are lying by the pool, watching ripples in the water caused by a nice breeze.

It’s almost dark now, only citronella flames from my “Survivor” Tiki torches, a hazy moon partially cloaked by pregnant clouds and my computer screen providing illumination. I wore my flip flops tonight so I’ll soon test the pool water again, this time with more than my toe. It doesn’t really matter because I already know it’s going to be warm enough to swim in by Memorial Day.

Eric'sWeb

Both Sides of the River

My friend Ray grew up in Shreveport. I’m a Vivian boy from down the road. He sent me this story tonight and I don’t know where it came from. It is so funny that I couldn’t help but post it on my blog.

* * *
A guy meets a beautiful girl and decided he wanted to marry her right away, she said, "But we don't know anything about each other.”

He said, "That's all right, we'll learn about each other as we go along."

So she consented and they were married and went on a honeymoon to a very nice resort. One morning they were lying by the pool when he got off his towel, climbed up to the 10 Meter board and did a two and a half tuck gainer, followed by three rotations in a jackknife position, where he straightened out and cut the water like a knife. After a few more demonstrations, he came back and lay down on the towel. She said, "That was incredible!"

He said, “I used to be an Olympic diving champion. You see, I told you we'd learn about each other as we went along."

So she got up, jumped in the pool, and started doing laps. After about thirty laps, she climbed back out and lay down on her towel hardly out of breath.

He said, "That was incredible! Were you an Olympic endurance swimmer?"

"No." she said, "I was a hooker in Shreveport/Bossier, Louisiana, and I worked both sides of the river!"

Eric'sWeb

Why I Never Excelled in Sports

There is no reason that I should like men’s college basketball as much as I do, I just do. A few years back, I watched Oklahoma State and Texas battle through three overtimes until Mario Boggan of OSU finely outdid Texas’s freshman phenom Kevin Durant, icing the game when he sank a long, desperation shot with less than four seconds remaining on the clock. It was an exciting basketball game, and I have seen quite a few.

What makes my love for basketball so unlikely? As a kid, I was always the last person selected when Captains chose sides for baseball, football, etc. Well, unless my friend Rod was around.
I have an excuse, though. Near-sighted does not come close to explaining my vision. When I first got glasses in the fifth grade, I remember seeing the blackboard clearly for the first time in my life. Corrective lenses cured my vision problems but did nothing to enhance my depth perception, or should I say my lack of it.

Its hell standing in the outfield, tracking a baseball as it plummets from the sky toward you, hoping beyond hope that you will somehow snag it deftly with your trusty glove before it hits ten feet away. It’s even worse hell seeing the looks of derision on your teammate’s faces when you drop the ball and the winning scorer reaches home base, ending every chance of their pulling that elusive upset of the best team on the block. Hey, if you look up klutz in the dictionary, you will see my picture beside the definition.

I tried every sport: football, softball, basketball (when I tried out for the team in the fifth grade, the coach simply shook his head and frowned), track and field. Being a skinny kid, I was a good runner, but nothing special.

Why do I like basketball so much? My first three years at Northeast Louisiana the football team lost every game. My senior year, they tied a game. Basketball was different. When I was a freshman, the team went sixteen and three.

Every home game, sixteen-hundred or so fans and students would crowd into our painfully tiny gymnasium, and go crazy when five-foot-nine basketball legend Tommy Enloe started dunking balls. We never lost a home game and for about two hours, we basked in the team’s success and felt (pardon the cliché) like kings of the world.

After watching first-year head Coach Sean Sutton almost faint after a particularly stressful play (I’m not kidding) I remembered that feeling. As Boggin’s winning basket swished through the net, it intensified even further. Hey, I am old, I am fat and blind as a bat, but at that moment, I was once again King of the World.

Eric'sWeb

Lost on Route 66

Step-daughter Katelyn and I edited a new book titled Lost on Route 66, Tales from the Mother Road, published by Gondwana Press of Edmond, Oklahoma. The book is a compendium of short stories, essays and poems about Route 66. I was amazed at the quality of writing. Author r. r. bryan, in the forward, urges the readers to take a look at this book.

Contributors came from many states and three different countries. Almost all of the authors in the book have previous publication credits. Many teach writing. All of the writing was wonderful. Some of it was stupendous.

Lost on Route 66 is presently available only at GondwanaPress.com but can soon be found at Amazon and Barnes andNoble.com. Take r. r. bryan’s advice and get lost on Route 66.

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Eric'sWeb

Midnight Fox

It’s almost a full moon tonight and my Maine Coon Rouge is sitting on the porch, staring out at the front yard where her cat bowl lies. Every night for the last week or so, a fox has appeared to eat the left-over cat food. I always know because my two big dogs, Patch and Velvet, begin an incensed interlude of energized barking.

The fox is a beautiful creature. He, or she, is a slender animal with russet hair, a big bushy tail and movement as fast and stealthy as a midnight ghost. He, or she, sees me when I approach the open front door. We have a glass storm door. The fox’s eyes seem to scan every direction as it delicately samples the chicken-flavored morsels my finicky cats left behind.

Rouge and Fang watch the alert animal, seemingly unafraid of its presence. He, or she, pays no attention to them, intent only in feasting on the tasty kitty food left in their bowls. Spooked by my presence, it runs away, but returns in moments to finish its meal.

It is almost a full moon tonight. Finally sated, the beautiful fox licks its lips and disappears, once again, into central Oklahoma darkness. I smile, knowing it will return tomorrow night.

Eric'sWeb

Days of Disco - a short story

During the 70s, I worked for an oil company named Texas Oil & Gas in downtown Oklahoma City. Though the 80s oil boom had yet to begin, TXO was drilling more oil wells than any company in the Country. The Oklahoma City office of TXO was drilling the most oil wells of any of its branches, and most of the wells we were drilling were generated by me. I know. In the Green New Universe, drilling oil wells is no longer copasetic. We were ignorant in the 80s and knew little about Climate Change.

My Dad was a carpenter and pipefitter. He was a good man and a good provider. Though my parents never had much money, we never missed any meals. Things changed when I went to work for TXO.

I had an expense account and a company car. I was apprehensive when my boss called me into his office to discuss my expense account.

"Shut the door, Eric," he said. "We need to discuss your expense account."

Larry smiled and held up a palm when I said. "I've been watching what I spend."

"That's the problem," he said. "You're making everyone in Geology look bad. From now on, I want you to spend at least four grand a month on your expense account."

"How will I do that?" I asked.

"Take three or four secretaries to lunch every day. Use your expense account for everything. Got it?"

"Yes, sir," I said.

Complying with my boss's request was more complicated than it sounded because all the major service companies were vying for TXO's business. One of the companies took all the geologists and all the secretaries to a disco in Oklahoma City called Clementine's every Friday after work. Every Friday, Clementine's had 3 for 1 mixed drinks. It didn't take long to become inebriated, even if you paid for the drinks. We didn't.

I somehow survived the two years I worked for TXO. Barely! Here is one of the stories from my whiskey-soaked life in 1977.

DAYS OF DISCO

In 1977, I was freshly divorced and working in a high-stress job as a geologist—"A new drilling prospect every week or you’re fired!" Nights would find me in a disco called Clementine’s, located in the basement of Oklahoma City’s Penn Square Mall. The place was dark, the music loud, the drinks and women loose. I was usually inebriated or well on my way to getting there.

Yes, it was in the post-Vietnam, pre-AIDS era. Practically every night, I would spend many hours line dancing to the anthems of Gloria Gaynor, Donna Summer, KC, and the Sunshine Band. Nineteen-seventy-seven was the year I first saw the movie Saturday Night Fever and fell in love with the music of the BeeGees.

There were two ways to enter Clementine’s. You could walk down a narrow flight of stairs or slide down a chute. Either way, you’d wind up in a vast open room that was illuminated only by a rotating disco ball, colored strobe lights that warped your reality even if you weren’t drunk or stoned, and a few discreetly placed floor lamps that provided little more than a dim haze. Most of all, there was a pressing multitude of warm bodies and disco sounds, belting the message of freedom, expression, and free love.

A vast bar extended across the front of the room, where three bartenders served drinks as fast as they could pour them. The dance floor of diamond-shaped black and white tiles was rarely empty; the occasional cooling fingers of vapor rising from grids in the floor made the swaying dancers seem like uninhibited creatures from Hell’s nether regions.

The dance floor was like hypnosis, insanity, and blasting sound. Bodies crushed together amid the beat of drums as ancient as Africa. Once, across the crowded dance floor, I saw a beautiful young woman staring at me. Our eyes locked. We danced toward each other. She passed me a note with her phone number and invited me for spaghetti at her apartment when I called her the next day. I showed up with flowers and a bottle of wine.

Marti was her name. A single mother, she had a five-year-old son named Chris. We ate our spaghetti and drank wine by candlelight. When we finished, I helped her with the dishes, and then she put Chris to bed. Afterward, we made love in her bedroom.

"I want to thank you so much," was her unexpected reply as we lay beside each other in her little bed.

"My pleasure," I said.

"You don’t understand," she explained, sensing the flippant tone of my voice. "I’m in remission from cervical cancer. You are the first man I’ve slept with. I’ve been so worried that I would never have the feelings of a woman ever again. Thank you, you proved to me tonight that I’m okay."

Confused and too young or stupid to understand Marti’s feelings, I contributed little more than small talk before saying goodbye and disappearing into the night. I never saw her again, and I don’t think she needed me to.

Those were the days of disco, my days of disco, for whatever that means. Some people have even suggested that disco isn’t fantastic and people who liked it were less intelligent. I don’t think so. We were all as young, human, and vulnerable as anyone today.

And I do know this. Whenever I hear Gloria Gaynor, Donna Summer, or the BeeGees, I find myself back on that same dark dance floor with wisps of vapor cooling the sweat dripping down my neck and forehead as I pulsate to a hypnotic beat and message of love and coming together. And when I do, it makes me feel young again.

###

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.

Getting No Place Fast

It’s late afternoon and as I glance out the back window at the thermometer I see it is almost eighty degrees. This has been a strange year in central Oklahoma because we had snow on the ground less than a month ago.

Marilyn likes winter and having a fire in the fireplace. This past winter we burned nearly seven ricks of wood, not really for the heat but because a crackling flame warms the emotions and puts you in a mellow frame of mind.

Flowers have bloomed here since the last snow and today the irises, perhaps the last perennial of spring, began blooming. Since Marilyn feeds the birds, our backyard looks like an aviary. The wild ducks that lived here well into the summer last year have not returned. This is the first time in three years but I can hear ducks when I go outside so perhaps they are staying down the block.

The hummingbird vines and clematises are almost ready to bloom, the clematises cloaked in royal blue and the hummingbird vines in bursts of hundreds of trumpet-shaped flowers. This is a signal that it won’t be long before our hummingbirds reappear.

Last night, I sat out by the pool with my two pugs, Princess and Scooter. It was dark and I only had the faint glow of a fluorescent lamp for light. We weren’t alone. An ephemeral light danced across the surface the entire time we sat there. I could pass my hand through the light but I couldn’t touch it or make it disappear. When I went back to the house, I kept hearing a mechanical noise coming from the living room.

I decided that the dancing light was a spirit enjoying spring, rebirth, and the glorious warm night with me and the pugs. The mechanical whir is a different story. I finally dug out Princesses’ favorite motorized rat from beneath her blanket. Marilyn had turned it on earlier and that’s where it ended up. It was still running, but like me sometimes - getting no place fast.

Eric'sWeb

Life's Lessons

It's likely true that the lessons you learn as a teenager do as much to cement the real values in your life as anything else. That said, I spent many of my teenage years attending college in Monroe, Louisiana.

Majoring in geology, I took many science courses but I also dabbled in English and the arts. Probably the most important course that I took at Northeast Louisiana was a lesson in life - a lesson in how to cope in a world filled with no family and mostly strangers.

When I attended Northeast, a gallon of gas cost thirty cents, or less. A Coke was a nickel and you could buy a pitcher of beer for a dollar. My favorite watering hole, along with that of most of the male population of the college was the Trianon. I wrote about the Trianon in my short story A Talk with Henry. Henry was a real person and I took much of the dialogue for the story from actual conversations.

I started college during summer school, at the tender age of seventeen. My Brother Jack and close friend Elwin also attended summer school the same year. The year was 1964. There was an air show at the airport that summer and a local pilot offered plane rides in his Beechcraft Bonanza for a penny a pound. Jack, Elwin and I all took our first ride in an airplane for a cost of less than five dollars.

There is a Bayou that runs through the campus of what is now the University of Louisiana at Monroe. During summer, Bayou DeSiard is a hot spot for students. While not quite Florida, sun bathing students line the beach and it was, and is, a great place to meet members of the opposite sex. Jack, Elwin and I went swimming every day that semester and even light-skinned Eric had a tan before the end of summer.

At night, Jack, Elwin and I would haunt the Trianon. There were gambling machines, the walls black, lighting dim and music loud. We chugged lots of beer and discussed every important world issue there was. At summer's end, Jack and Elwin both flunked out, unable to return the next semester because of poor grades. I made it, passing, but barely.

Today, I can't remember a single course that I took that summer. Grade-wise I almost flunked my first semester in college, but now it doesn't seem so important. Looking back, I think that I probably aced the part of my life that was most significant at the time.

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Wrestling the Devil

I was both single and debt free when I left Texas Oil and Gas in 1978 to pursue a life as an independent geologist. I left a good salary, cushy expense account and company car, hoping to strike it rich as an Oklahoma oil baron. After ninety days had passed, I was wondering if I should go and beg for my job back.

I had no car or house payment, but I had no house, my 1966 Triumph Tr4, a car not known for its reliability. I also had a Triumph 750 Bonneville motorcycle that was also less than reliable. I did have two girlfriends at the time and one of them, Carol, lent me a thousand dollars. That and the thousand I borrowed against my motorcycle were about all I had at the time.

I managed to eke out a living as a consultant, making a few bucks by testifying at the Corporation Commission and writing geological reports. Still, my life was stark compared with the relatively lush existence I had experienced at TXO. As summer approached, I was working at the geological library everyday, trying to develop prospects. Developing prospects was no problem, finding someone to buy them was.

A fellow geologist and his wife asked my girlfriend Gayle and I to spend the weekend with them at their cabin on Lake Murray. After a false start on my motorcycle (Gayle was so frightened of the bike that she remained constantly rigid, trying to stay upright even when I leaned into a curve. Realizing we were both having a stressful trip, I turned around before reaching the city limits and traded the bike for the two-seater.

The Tr4 was unreliable but a dream to drive. With the top down and the wind in your hair, the growl of the little four-banger engine made you feel like an Italian road racer. Gayle and I both had giant smiles on our faces when we pulled into the rest stop just inside the Lake Murray gates.

Coming out of the little geologist’s room, I witnessed an attack. A young man and woman were in a Chevy, the windows up. A very angry young man was kicking in the door and driver’s window with his foot. The attack didn’t last long as park rangers showed up and quickly interceded.
As I stood watching with my mouth agape, one of the rangers asked me if I had witnessed the altercation. He took my name, number and address. A lawsuit resulted and a while later, I got a subpoena to appear as a witness for the defense.

The trial was to take place in the middle of the week. I showed up at the Murray County Courthouse, a scenic and historic old building, and presented myself to the court clerk. I could tell you that an epic court battle ensued, complete with wonderful country lawyers such as Spenser Tracy and Frederic March in Inherit the Wind. It didn’t happen.

The two sides, instead, settled out of court. I got a thank you, was patted on the shoulder and sent on my way. A few week’s later, I received a small witness fee—thirty bucks, as I remember. It wasn’t much but it turned out to be the only money I made that month. About that time, I felt a bit like a schmuck. I was quickly beginning to realize I didn’t have all the answers to life.

The second six months of my independence, all hell broke loose. It was the beginning of the early eighties oil boom, Oklahoma City soon transformed into a boomtown, drunk from the money pouring in from all directions. I cleared almost $400,000 my second six months and it only got better, at least for awhile.

As a young man, I was unaware of the cycles of boom or bust in the oil patch. A wizened veteran now, I have experienced more than my share of both. Would I trade it for what could have been a stable existence, working for a company with wonderful benefits and a good salary? Nah!

Living your life in “Happy Town” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It is, in fact, boring. For me, life is only worth living when you are out there swinging, taking existence by the throat, wrestling with the devil and taking your chances. Whether you are living the good life on top of cloud nine, or waiting for a handout in the welfare line, its better when you don’t know all the answers. Even if you did, they would probably only scare you.

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Camera Freak

Glancing through my closet just now, I noticed a box I had brought from my parent’s house during my last visit there. When I opened it, I found it contained a Kodak Brownie, circa 1950s, in pristine condition. Best as I remember, it was the first camera I ever owned. My Mom and Dad had bought it for me. It wouldn’t be my last.

Last month, I purchased a fixed-lens Nikon L100. I already have a Nikon S210 that I love, but I wanted something with a longer lens and faster shutter so that I can capture birds and butterflies in flight. The L100 has a 15 x optical zoom but, as yet, I have been unsuccessful in my attempts. The L100, by all counts, is my ninth digital camera.

Which is the best? They were all good but I really like my Nikon S210. It is compact and versatile and I keep it with me wherever I go. I know, it’s been replaced by a newer, faster model, but I’m too poor to upgrade every six months.

Before going digital, I owned more 35 mm cameras than I can count. My first was a Yashica, my last a Canon. I loved them all but none could match the ease and sophistication of digital. I spent much of my tour of duty in Vietnam without a camera but did have a half-frame the size of a cigarette case toward the end of my time there. I can’t remember the make, but it took exceptional pictures, many of which I still have. Maybe it was a Minolta.

My first fixed-lens single lens reflex was a Kowa (I know, I don’t think they make them anymore). My first interchangeable lens single lens reflex was a Minolta SRT101. It took gorgeous photos. How many cameras have I owned? I’d say easily a hundred. Will I own more before I die? Yes, unless I die tomorrow, and I have my fingers crossed that that won’t happen.

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Old Friends

I opened an email the other day, surprised to hear from a person I hadn’t seen or talked to in more than forty years. The message was from my old friend John T, a person I had started the first grade with and had known through high school.

I remember John T in the first grade - I know, I’m old butnot senile just yet. Even at the age of five or six we were both mesmerized by cars. I remember manipulating a shrub growing in the schoolyard into a seat and stick-shift. We argued who would be the driver.

In the fifth grade, John and I were appointed SP’s - hall monitors. We wore white plastic belts that crossed over our shoulders and made us look like dorks. We had virtually no authority and the other kids simply laughed at us when we directed them to slow down, or issued any other inane order.

John and I lived about a mile apart. We both liked Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. John, like practically everyone else in Vivian, including myself, lived close to the railroad tracks. I was a geologist at heart even then. I remember walking the tracks with him once, looking for rocks. I was off the berm, he was on the tracks, walking towards me. A train was bearing down on him, its whistle blowing. I yelled at the top of my lungs but he didn’t seem to hear me. He disappeared from view and I had to watch the long freight train pass before I learned his fate.

I expected to see his body parts strewn on the tracks. Instead, he came smiling out of the underbrush on the other side, apparently happy that he had scared the hell out of me.

Our parents both had ’59 Chevy’s the exact same color of blue and white. In the days of muscle cars, both of our Chevy’s were grossly underpowered; my parent’s station wagon was a small V-8, John’s parent’s an anemic six cylinder. There was a patch of gravel on the street beside my house. John loved to stop there and floor it, the sensation of slinging a few rocks his only answer to not being able to burn rubber. My parent’s car was no better.

John left for Louisiana Tech in Ruston after graduation. I went to Northeast in Monroe. I saw him briefly in 1968 when I was working in New Orleans for the summer, but not since. I haven’t, in fact, seen or heard from him until the recent email note.

Well, it’s good to reconnect. Old friends are your best friends but sometimes you never realize as much until you are as old as I.

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Spring in Oklahoma

The first day of spring was Saturday, coinciding with the vernal equinox, the day when the hours of darkness roughly equal the hours of daylight. The weather was snowy Saturday but mild here now, warm during the day and chilly at night.

All the trees are abloom, as are the perennial flowers. The robins, cardinals and blue jays have returned but not my three ducks from past seasons. The squirrels never left, but they are already out in force, doing their best to eat all the seeds Marilyn puts out every day for the birds.

The season reminds me of a quote from the great Charles Dickens. I don’t know if he ever spent time in Oklahoma and it is hard for me to believe that it if he did, that it did not come from days spent near what is now the historic course of Route 66.

“It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold, when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.”

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Cruising the OKC Concourse

In writing about life in downtown Oklahoma City during the last oil boom, I mentioned the Concourse. The Concourse was a tunnel system connecting all the major buildings in downtown OKC, originally created to provide workers with a way of avoiding the city’s weather that is often inclement. It grew into much more than just an underground pathway.

During the oil boom, the city leaders decided there was room for retail development underground. Texas Oil and Gas, the company I worked for, had offices in the Midland Center and you could enter the Concourse from a stairway on the ground floor there.

The tunnel system was simply a dimly lit concrete pathway with a colorful carpet on the floor. The system of tunnels snaked in all directions and it was easy to lose your bearings – especially if you had just visited one of the many clubs and partaken of their liquor-by-the-wink. Purchasing alcohol, at the time, was illegal anywhere except a liquor store.

Retail clothing establishments, a jewelry store, a fast food kiosk, two barbershops and other businesses soon began to thrive. Several combination restaurants occupied space in the Concourse, among them the Bull and the Bear, the Brigadoon, and the most notorious underground establishment of them all, the Depot.

The Depot was a dark saloon masquerading as a restaurant and it is true that the place sold as much booze as it did chicken fries. Its main draw was the gorgeous and friendly waitresses dressed in skimpy outfits. The drinks were strong and at any time of the day or night, half the downtown Oklahoma City oil industry congregated there.

My former business partner, John and I had an engineer. Those days preceded the age of cell phones and we began noticing music and noise in the background when Nick called in a report. We soon realized that he was reporting from his “office” in the Depot rather than one of our oil wells out in the sticks.

The Depot was dark and loud and if I told you that I had witnessed a sex act performed on an adjacent table, I would be lying. I actually saw more than one, and I imagine they were a common occurrence in some of the back corner booths.

During the oil boom of the eighties, Oklahoma City emulated the wildest of any past boomtown, and the Oklahoma City Concourse the very epicenter of wildness.

This past oil boom saw none of the excesses of the eighties oil boom and there was no place, at least to my knowledge, as wild and crazy as the Depot. I am glad that I experienced the boom and all its excesses while it existed, but most of all I am glad that I survived the experience.

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Kareoke Nights

Not long ago, I watched the movie Duets with Gwyneth Paltrow and Huey Lewis. The movie is about a man that undergoes extreme changes in his life while singing on the karaoke circuit. Yes, there is a karaoke circuit. I learned as much many years ago.

Anne and I were NTN Trivia addicts and met many people during our years of participation. One person we met was Dave, an itinerant never-do-well when he lived in Oklahoma. He moved to Iowa before Anne died and I didn’t talk to him again until several years later after Anne had passed away.

Dave stayed with me a time or two while visiting from Iowa and I accompanied him on the Oklahoma City karaoke circuit. He had, it seems, become a karaoke DJ since moving back to Iowa. He had a pleasant but gravely voice and everyone seemed to know him no matter which club we went to.

Different clubs in town would have karaoke nights during different days of the week, often giving away prize money, usually fifty or a hundred dollars. What amazed me was that everyone knew everyone else and we encountered the same singers wherever we went. The best singers earned the prize money but it seemed only enough to support their drinking budgets in the karaoke bars.

As in the movie Duets, many of the singers were very good. Most had physical flaws. None of these singers was grotesque; they just were neither very handsome nor pretty. One girl with a diva’s voice was a hundred pounds overweight.

Dave visited a couple of times and then disappeared back to Iowa. This ended my research on the karaoke circuit but did introduce me to the national phenomenon highlighted in Duets. Since I can’t sing a lick, I never got hooked.

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Holdin' Five Aces

In Oklahoma, there is no rule for naming an oil well. Many companies use the name of the mineral owner but there is no law that says you have to. Because of this, the well name is whatever the operator wants to give it and this has resulted in some whimsical monikers through the years.

Toward the end of the last oil boom there was a Kansas operator named Wild Boys Land Cattle and Oil Company, and they were often more whimsical than most companies when it came to naming their wells. Here are some of their well’s names:

Face the Fire #2
Rock Salt Blues #1
Nose to the Wind #1
Slapping Leather #1
Muddy Streets and Dollar Baths #1
Against a Crooked Sky #1
Rawhide #1
Out on Bail #1
It’s Just Crude #1
Saddle Sores #1
Shotgun Rider #1
Fistful of Dollars #1
Shootout in Lake City #2
Having a Few Beers #1
On the Rocks #8-C
Riding Thunder #1
Whiskey Hills #1
Snake Bite #1
Riding into Hell and Back Again #1
Hell Ain’t Ready for Us Yet 2-2
Eatin’ Dust and Drinkin’ Whiskey #1

And my own personal favorite:

Holdin’ Five Aces #1

Oil drillers are generally a superstitious lot and some say it is bad luck to use any name other than the mineral owner. There may be some truth to this superstition as many of the above wells were completed as dry holes.

Maybe, but what I’ve always heard and believe to be true is never, ever name a well after your wife, your mother, your daughter or your girlfriend. Why? I haven’t a clue.

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Kevin's Excellent Adventure

Years ago, when my wife Anne and I had a little oil company, we drilled quite a few wells in Garfield County, Oklahoma with another little oil company from Norman. They had a geologist named Kevin and he was a wild man. We learned as much on a Monday after completing a well the previous Friday.

When a well reaches total depth, most oil companies run an electrical survey into the open hole. The survey records a “picture” of the zones intersected and gives a mathematical portrait of the productive potential of each zone penetrated. That Friday, the log indicated we had found a highly productive zone that could make us all wealthy.

Logging, for some unknown reason, rarely takes place during daylight. This well was no exception and it was ten at night when the last log popped out of the hole and we began celebrating. Kevin had an override in the well, a carried interest, and was in line to make lots of money.

Kevin and Bruce, one of our employees that also had an override, had brought along a cooler filled with ice and beer. Already lubricated, they started in on a bottle of Jack Daniel’s after seeing the log. Anne and I went home to Oklahoma City to celebrate in private. Kevin and Bruce headed for the mean streets of Oklahoma City.

Bruce somehow managed to straggle home before dawn. Not so Kevin. He took a taxi to Will Rogers Airport and bought a ticket for Acapulco in Mexico. He arrived the next morning, beginning to sober up and already feeling much like warmed over death. He only wanted to get a room and sleep for twenty-four hours. It was not to be.

Some dignitary, the Queen of England or some such, was also visiting Mexico and there wasn’t a single empty room in the entire resort. He spent the night at the airport, catching a plane back to Oklahoma City where his anxious wife was waiting for him.

No, Kevin didn’t get a divorce. He did get an earful, though. The well came in like gangbusters and we were all happy, and somewhat assuaging his wife’s ire. The next time we logged a well, she accompanied him to the well and didn’t let him out of her sight.

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