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Cannonpointer » Today, 9:33 pm » wrote: ↑

Today, 9:33 pm

I was working in the Louisiana bayous on a workover rig, tripping pipe all 12 hours of each tour. We were in producing sands and not producing. Our rig's job was to **** mother earth until she came, going in and out repetitively and using an assortment of caustic substances in the drilling fluids. Those were heady days for me. Whenever the engineers came to assess our mud (drilling fluids), I would drill them with questions. One thing they all agreed on is that there are veritable OCEANS of petroleum within this planet. They told me that somewhere very close to the same volume of oil exists as the volume of water.

I definitely preferred short hair on that job. I got a bunch of acid on the top of my boot, and it ate into my leg as I worked. A lot of guys were sicking out because of the nasty acid that was everywhere. My tool pusher came up to me at the end of a 12 hour tour and asked me to work another. I said okay. Then he asked if I was afraid of heights. I said yeah, why? He said I need ya to work the derrick. I told him okay, I would just take my fear of heights up there with me and tell it to enjoy the tour. And I did. 24 hours of work nonstop with caustic fluid on the top of my boot produced a third degree burn on my calf. I learned the miracle of silver from that. The clinic scrubbed my leg and gave me Silvadene Cream. It worked wonders. That damned burn was pretty much healed in a week. That was the last day of my hitch, so I had a week to heal up. 

I did more heroic **** on that rig and others than I would ever have believed possible. An oil rig will bring out the man in a mother ****, I had grown up on oilfield stories, and it simply never occurred to me to throw in the towel, ever. Most of the guys on my crews were the same way. You could just count on em. The guys that were sicking out on that workover rig weren't on my crew. We were all balls to the wall. 

And another thing about the oil patch. You will use EVERY MUSCLE IN YOUR BODY. Every last **** one of em. And you get this gorilla strength from it. It changes life. It makes you so strong that if you get in a tussle, you can actually FEEL the other guy just give up. Just have this moment where they understand that they've tied up with something they did not know existed and do not understand. That, and the confidence one gets from pushing farther and harder and more valiantly than most men are ever called upon to push - these things transform how a man carries himself and how he sees himself in the world. 

Funny story - I have always loved poetry, and when I encounter a poem that strikes my fancy, I commit it to memory. Anyway, every tour of duty starts with the crew lined up taking turns pumping diesel from the fuel truck into the massive generators that run the rig. I would jump up on the truck and start pumping every morning and tell the other guys to go get a smoke - I got this. And they would shake their heads admiringly, laugh, and go get a smoke before reporting to the floor. I'd fill the generators by myself, working my arms for strength. Everything about roughnecking produces strength. But what those guys never knew about me - what I would never have shared with them - was that to the rhythm of the pumping I was reciting poems by Robert Frost and Rudyard Kipling and Edwin Arlington Robinson and Jean de La Fontaine in my head the entire time. If they had been present to my internal recitations of Edgar Allen Poe's The Bells, they'd have **** themselves laughing.