A Different Drummer: My days in the oil fields

In the summer of 1977 I left State College, Pennsylvania on a Greyhound bus bound for Oklahoma City to work my junior-year summer as an oilfield roughneck. I was excited and looking forward to the money and the rough and tumble hardtack scramble of running a live western oil rig, slinging heavy equipment, getting dirty, muddy, sore, and happy. It would be a welcome break from my bookworming ways of late. My long library-bound spring semester was loaded with literary essays and research projects. I was chomping to be free.
Each summer of college, I worked a different odd job. After freshman year I trimmed pines to a point on a Christmas tree farm supervising small boys. They clipped around the bottoms. I was the tall guy, the point man. After sophomore year I worked in Wildwood, New Jersey as day clerk for a resort hotel. My, oh, my, the things we saw and did. There’s a story.
Being an oilfield roughneck appealed to me. My mother’s side of the family was all Okie, and many worked in the oil industry. Several of my uncles began as roughnecks and advanced. Several of my cousins were drilling off-shore. My Uncle Bill invited me to come out that summer, live with him and Maxine, and he’d find me rig work. Uncle Bill was a tool pusher, king of the rig, director of operations.
My bus arrived in Blanchard, Oklahoma with much fanfare. My aunts, uncles, and cousins all came to see me, or we drove to see them. I spent a week just doing fine how-do-you-dos. Uncle Bill assured me a job was in the works. Then he got called off on another emergency. He was managing several rigs in the area. A helicopter landed in his backyard and whisked him away to a rig with a bit stuck two miles underground.
Maxine and I had long morning chats around the kitchen table. She was keeping me entertained while Uncle Bill found that job. Max took me to the grocery store sometimes to pick out food I liked. I watched a lot of television, and the clock, and read a picture book on the Revolutionary War.
Uncle Bill would come home at nights, usually late. He’d eat, make some calls, promise me again he was close on my job, and go to bed. It was near the end of week two. Summer was ticking by.
I began hanging out in a diner near the house. A local guy was hanging out there as well, about my age. We were both eating ice cream and hamburgers and he noticed that I talked funny. I was a Yankee. We became friends. He was Chris. He had a car and offered to drive me out to the rigs and find me a job. He shook his head and laughed when I told him I’d been waiting two weeks.
“Shoot, man. The rigs are always looking for somebody.”
We hopped in his car that afternoon and drove out into the oil fields for 36 miles and came upon a rig. Chris pulled into their make-shift parking lot and stopped the car. He pointed to the Dog House, the name for the main building on a rig. “Go on up the stairs and ask whoever you see if they’re looking for help.”
I climbed the metal stairs amid the roar of twin diesel engines at full throttle. Two guys looked at me. I was only three feet away but I had to yell to be heard. “Are you looking for help?”
“Yes. Can you start now?”
Whoa. I was taken aback. “Eh.” I was wearing street clothes, jeans and t-shirt. I also had no transportation. However, I couldn’t say no, not after all my complaining.
“Yes,” I yelled. “But I don’t have any work clothes.”
“We have jumpsuits and gloves,” the driller yelled back. He pointed to jumpsuits hanging off hooks on the wall and a whole barrel of used gloves.
“I don’t know if I have a ride home. I’ll have to ask my friend.”
He waved me off to go find out. I turned and raced down the stairs and across the lot to Chris’s driver window. “Holy crap! They said yes. They gave me a job.”
Chris laughed. “I told you it was easy. When do you start?”
“Eh, now. Do you think you could come back for me in the morning?”
“Ah. Graveyard shift. Makes sense. You’re a worm. Yeah, sure, I’ll come get you at eight.” With that, Chris drove off and left me standing alone in the Oklahoma desert, about to begin working as a roughneck without a clue what the hell I’m doing. Back up the stairs I climbed. The driller pulled the doors shut so we could hear each other.
“OK. I gotta warn ya. If you take this job, it runs seven days a week, 365 days a year, with no days off, no vacations, no sick leave. If your shift ends and someone is missing from the next crew, as the worm, you gotta pull a 16-hour day. If you miss a day of work, we won’t fire you, but if someone else comes along, they’ll get your job. Understand? Are you in?”
I looked around. My ride was gone. This was it. “I’m in.”
(To be continued…)