It was 1977. I was standing in the Dog House with the driller on an Oklahoma oil rig, about to start working as a roughneck, a job I knew nothing about. It was summer work during my junior year at Penn State. My ride, Chris, a guy I just met that morning, had driven me out here 36 miles from town and promised to come back the next morning to take me home. And he did. That about sums up last week’s start to this story.
The head driller pointed to a changing room. “Find a jumpsuit that fits, grab some gloves, and come out to the platform. I’ll show you your job.” I nodded and he opened the back door. The intense roar of the twin diesel engines rushed into the room like a wind and swirled about.
Finding a grimy XL jumpsuit wasn’t hard. Most of them were my size. Oklahoma grows some big fellas. Finding gloves that didn’t have a finger poked in backwards was hard. So many poked in glove fingers, hmm. Then I recalled that the driller when he pointed was missing the end of his right ring finger. Come to think of it, my Uncle Bill was missing the end of his right index finger.
I had a frozen-time moment there alone with that muffled engine roar. What’s happening? Thoughts were swirling. Missing fingers. And they’re experienced. I’m inexperienced. College boy. Writing major. Yankee. Typing on a handicap keyboard. Run, Yankee, run, run out the Dog House, down the stairs, into the unforgiving desert for 36 miles home and grocery shopping with Maxine. Then it passed.
On the drilling platform, the drill pipe was spinning and the roughnecks were sitting near their stations. Everyone was in repose. The boss yelled, “Wait for the next connection.” Whatever that meant.
Two hours later we were all still just sitting, watching the drill spin. It was too loud for conversation. Then around three a.m. it came time to add another 40-foot section of pipe.
A traveling block attached by cables at the derrick top descended and hoisted the pipeline up out of the ground until a seam was reached. Blocks were placed into the floor to prevent the pipe from falling back into the earth. Two guys grabbed two giant 700-pound clamps hanging from counterweight cables and swung them to life.
The boss jabbed me and pointed with his face, as in ‘That’s your new job.”
One guy grabbed the top of the joint and slammed his clamp shut. The other guy grabbed the bottom pipe. Winches tugged the clamps in opposite directions and broke the seal. The ends unscrewed and mud flew. An extension pipe was lifted into place.
The driller nudged me again. “You’ll be slinging chain. Watch carefully.”
A roughneck picked up one end of a long chain attached to a winch. He swung his end of the chain like a lasso hard against the pipe, causing it to wrap around it five or six times. He stepped in quick, using both hands, with all ten fingers, to hold the chain bands tight to the pipe as a winch spun it around and screwed in the pipe.
“OH, boy. OK. Sure. I can do that,” I was telling the driller and myself.
“OK,” said the boss. “You can add the next piece of pipe.”
“I’ll be ready. How long before the next connection?”
He grinned. “Tomorrow night. We’re done.”
So that was life on the graveyard shift. Drillers don’t want to do anything dangerous or complicated in the middle of the night, so the big work usually took place during the day shift.
I would come to work at 11 p.m., sit around for four hours, add one piece of pipe, and be done for the night. Even then, the work tore the skin from my hands, giving me eight bloody blisters, one at the base of each finger. I didn’t get the blisters at night. On those dreaded Trip Days, days when all two miles of pipe in 40-foot pieces must come out so they can put on a new drill bit, day crew employees tend to get sick and miss work. That’s when they call on the newest worm to pull a sixteen.
In my first week I had to pull three 16-hour days. My hands were bloody and bandaged.
How did I get to work? Aunt Maxine and my friend Chris gave me rides the first five days until I got my first check. It was enough to pay cash for a Honda 360 motorcycle. The remainder of my summer was spent cruising across the desert on my bike, and drilling for oil.
Three weeks in, we struck oil. We put in casing pipe and tore down the derrick to move to a new drill site. The drilling rig went down like a carnival ride. It got loaded onto trucks and drove off. The next site was 100 miles away. I could join them if I wanted. Setting up a rig meant big money.
So I joined them and crashed my motorcycle at 70 mph driving to the new location. I wound up in the hospital with my bike mangled, and returned to Penn State broke with a broken wrist and ringing in my ears from the diesel engines. I gave Chris my motorcycle. I gave the rest of my oil money to my aunt and uncle for letting me stay there.
Back at college, we were writing fiction.

Steve Gibbs is a retired Benicia High School teacher who has written a column for The Herald since 1985.

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