Gas/Oil Rig Stories?

(repost) winter in oilfield, wyoming ... on a workover rig: the kind where the derrick telescopes up and down to roughly 80 feet but first you have to tilt it up with a big hydraulic ram under a hell of a lot of pressure.

mid way through this operation, a hose burst and our driller was in position on the throttle alongside where this thing was about to come crashing down onto the headache rack. luckily the rupture was limited such that the impact wasn't devastating but there were several seconds of high anxiety on the part of the whole crew.

quite a bit of oil had been discharged in the form of a fine mist so everything on that side of the location was shiny. we were all assembled in a little group, knees shaking and generally decompressing from the drama when i spotted what looked like an out of place white agate gleaming in front of me.

our habit was to look for arrowheads when we had the chance, and i thought i had the drop on the other guys regarding this curious find, so i slowly removed my glove, bent over and gently plucked the specimen from the ground.

turns out one of the guys had hocked a big loogy, and there i was dancing a little jig involving a lot of hand flapping trying to get the thing off my fingers.

the whole crew found this to be quite a break in the tension and over the next few days i was taunted with offers along the lines of: "hey hooblie! ... haucck, ptuuwey"

i loved my couple of years on a workover rig, as a derrick hand, doing completions out of rock springs. from echo canyon to muddy gap, pinedale to baggs, even flying into nw colo, landing off airport to get within an hour of wild four wheeling to the rig.

pretty awesome having such a remote location invaded at dawn by an army of roaring diesels pounding 10,00 throbbing lbs of pressure down hole to fracture the formation. then the call to break it all down, we were abandoned and left to tend a flare through the night.

i used to forego the trip to town to spend per diem on a motel. got a kick out of listening for the crew truck to cross a cattle guard seven miles away, at just the measured number of minutes after their departure from location. fourteen hours of bliss till the return of the surliest bunch of lowbrows you could ever want to get exhausted, greased up and aggro with. if it hadn't been so physically satisfying...

on one location at the head of a draw, where from the crow's nest
(ok, rod basket, but there's something about crossing wide open wyoming at sunrise that can bring out my inner mariner,)
the whole of the wind rivers was layed out to the east. i spotted an eagle working the intervening ridge.

when he turned our way for a sled ride down the ravine, i hollered to the floor.
WHAT?... CHECK OUT THE EAGLE!... WHAT...? the driller shut down the rig, just in time.

eagle coasts by at eye level, that whistling airfoil is the sound of my heart in wistful pursuit.

but latching pipe at breakneck speed seemed to have been the elixir that "kept my mind from wandering,"
and served as proper penance for so exuberantly abusing my happy circumstance
positioned right at the pinnacle of the inevitably, oh so short, petroleum era.

southwest wyoming, '80-'82, latching pipe in the derrick, six 10 hour days/week plus 3hrs/day travel out to the rig. loved my job, couldn't miss a day. literally. 80 hours a week with the same roughneck crew got old though. some people belly up to the bar to find a kindred spirit. in my case, my bros were finishing up the season guiding in the tetons. hitchhiking served as something of a social enterprise so daybreak sunday morning i bellied up to the dashboard of whatever rig i might hail while sashaying up the road to GTNP, traveling lite in short sleeves and a cowboy hat.

great day on the hill took a turn for even better when my climbing partner, with whom i'd done a fair bit of damage in the beartooths, pulled up alongside me south of pinedale as i marched homeward with a thumb in the air. he was finishing up a season of geology fieldwork in the wind's and i was invited to join his outfit for steaks and a slideshow up at the ranch. couldn't pass it up.

afterword, he delivered me to farson. just an intersection with a blinking light and little else in those days. traffic went from slow to nil as midnite passed, chilly too. i sure regretted not taking things into my own hands when a bigrig pulling a lowboy rolled down off south pass, crept thru the intersection and steamed off into the 40 miles of black that separated me from my bed in rock springs. my crew would be honking for me in about 4 hours, and the rig doesn't pull much pipe out of the hole without a derrick hand.

the sound of another diesel signaled a second chance, so i hunkered in the shadows till the tractor passed, then ran out to intercept the tanker he was pulling, which offered a big spare tire, suspended a couple feet below the belly. there was an instant to decide or spend the night and miss work. so there i sat, and it was up thru the gears as i stuffed my hat under the lid of my daysack.

positively no one could have seen me, and there was no reason i could fathom why we should be slowing down on this empty stretch of open road. i couldn't see forward at all but the fence posts were being swept by unsettling red flashes, we were creeping up to a very isolated hotbed of emergency vehicles, passing slowly by cops 10 feet away, visible from the ribs down, swinging red flares. finally a rolled sedan and a wrecker scrolled by and to my great relief we were grabbing gears again.

as we rumbled into rock springs those big old wheels that had been screaming in my ears revealed themselves in the city lights. they had an authoritative presence as i pictured my departure from this beast. i was hoping for a full stop, low stress affair, but it was not to be. the driver had timed a green arrow onto the westbound I-80 and i was facing a shanghai to possibly salt lake if i didn't launch NOW. i reached out and put a death grip on a pipe that ran alongside the flank of this thing and as expected my economy class seat fell irretrievably away. i hung there in front of those dually's and ran in place till i was sure of my footing, then simply let go and continued on over to the shoulder, just partway up the ramp and two blocks from beddy-bye. piece of cake. tucked myself in feeling snug and smug.

though i never saw my hat again