138 Degrees in the Shade, Part 2

138 Degrees in the Shade, Part two

August 15^th 1965, the Red Desert of Libya.

            Of course, Bill and I know everybody in Norphlet so we spend a few hours a day just talking about folks back home. Two Norphlet High School graduates in charge of drilling a multi-million dollar well for Exxon. It’s pretty unbelievable, but after a few days it just hot and work, work, work, and thoughts of home pass.

            Yes, things are pretty grim and unbelievably hot, but the food is a real plus. The rig is a French rig, and they have a French chef. At lunch today the chef told us he has just received his supplies, and it included what he called a French delicacy; squid. Well, Vertis and I had fried squid when we spent a week in Athens and those small calamari were very tasty.

            It’s almost seven and we have just sat down to have dinner, and after an appetizer of whipped cream and onions, the chef brings out the main course. I’m looking for a pile of fried calamari, but instead the chef dips up a whole 18 inch squid and plops it on my plate. Then he takes a ladle and splashes a black sauce on top of the squid, and he says, “Squid in its own sauce.”

            It really looks gross, and I can smell a very fishy smell to go with it, but I know I have to try it.

            No, no, I can’t eat the squid, that bite has stuck in my throat. I check Bill, and he has just laid his fork down. Yes, the chef is muttering something;

            “Want hamburgers?”

            Wow, he just spit that out, but you would have had to hogtie me to eat that squid, so I’m quietly muttering “Yes” as the French crew gobbles up the squid. Yes, I do feel like an ugly American, but I don’t think many Americans would eat that squid, head and all, like the French crew did.

            It’s a few days later when one of the Libyans came back with a small gazelle that he managed to chase down with a Land Rover. Well, I really don’t approve of hunting with a Land Rover, but he dressed the gazelle and took it to the French chef to prepare.

            My gosh, I’ve just had maybe the best meal in my life. Of course, we’re making over how good it was to the chef, he’s beaming, and he rewards our compliments with a French cheesecake.                                                                   

            I’ve been waiting for the new bit that was put on at 8500 feet to get dull, which will give me about eight hours free while the crew pulls drill string and changes the bit. I’ve heard about rock carving made by pre-historic desert people on some cliff walls north of the rig, and I want to see the carvings, which are actually called petroglyphs. As I walk out of the dining hall, I see the drill pipe coming out of the hole, and I’m heading for my Land Rover.

            I’ve been driving for about an hour due north, and then, when I see a ridge over to the west, I turn and drive toward it. Thirty minutes later and I’m pulling up beside some impressive outcrops of sandstone where I notice something under the overhanging sandstone ledge. Then, on the sandstone wall under the ledge I see a carving. I can make out a stick figure and an animal, which is pretty fat. An elephant?

            That’s when I see a military looking vehicle heading my way with its light flashing. What? Algerian Border Patrol flashes through my mind, and after I yell, “Oh my God! I’m in Algeria!” I take off driving east, but they’re coming after me with lights flashing! I’m driving across the flat desert as fast as my Land Rover will take me, but they are gaining. That’s when I hear what might be a gunshot or the Land Rover backfiring, which makes me hunker down and stomp the accelerator to the floor. A dirty, hot Algerian jail comes to mind. Another noise and then another, and they are about to catch me, but as I dip into a dry stream bed, I turn and roar down over a rocky bottom for a few hundred yards, and up the other side I see them slowing down because there are some good size rocks in that dry stream bed, and now I’m gaining on them, and after another ten minutes they turn back. I guess I’m back in Libya.                                                                    

            My hands are shaking as I drive up to the rig. The last joint of pipe has just gone in the hole from a trip to change bit, and the driller has started back to drilling when I hear the rig brake start squealing as the driller eases off of the brake. That means the bit is penetrating rocks that are very porous, and are easy to drill.

            I walk out of the trailer, get the attention of the driller on the rig and give him a circle sign over my head, which means to stop drilling and circulate while we wait on the samples to come to the surface. From the depth we are drilling it will take about 20 minutes. I note the drilling mud looks a little frothy, and I yell to the driller, “Pierre! Gas cut mud! Get ready to close the rams, if it kicks.” The first samples are coming to the surface now, and as I reach out to get a handful of cuttings, I can smell oil. I take a quick whiff of the sample and nod, good oil odor. I stick my tongue to the samples, no salt taste..good.

            I’m heading down to the mudlog trailer with a bag of cutting to examine under the microscope Fifteen minutes later and I’ve examined the samples. They have good oil odor, fluorescence, oil staining, and I could see porosity in the sample. Well, another DST.  I walk up to the rig where Bill Sandifer is standing.

            “Good show, Bill. We’re going to test it. Set the packer at eight-thousand and eighty-five feet, fifteen minute open, and two hour final. If you flow oil, reverse it out.”

            “You got, Richard, but you’re gonna hear that bunch of roughnecks scream, when I tell them they are going to pull the pipe again and DST. Hell, they’ve been working all day making a trip, and they are about to have another eight hours of the same thing in this heat.”

            “Yeah, Bill, I know, but with a show like I just logged, the office would have my hide if I didn’t test it.”

            “Oh, I know it, Richard, but this crew has been drilling over in Algeria on field wells,

and they never test any of those wells.”

            “I think I’ll check things out at my trailer, while you tell the driller to come out of the hole for a test.”

            Bill laughs and I’m walking toward my trailer when I hear a string of what I think are French cuss words. The only word I can make out is “American!”

To be continued

PYour Grandchildren's World

               Your  Grandchildren’s World

   You had better skip this column, because I’m going to put a big guilt trip on you. Still reading? Well, here goes: It is without saying that you can have all the money in the world, but if you don’t have your health, what good is money? But you might say, “Well, I have my health.” Okay, but would it matter to you if your significant other didn’t have his or her health, or what if some of your off-spring didn’t have their health? Would you care? How about your great grandchildren? Well, of course you would care. But let’s stretch it a bit. What if a child, whose Moro Bay mother ate a lot of mercury contaminated fish, which means that child would likely live a sub-quality, lower I. Q. life instead of having a professional careers? Would you care? I hope you would.

             I could go on and on, but you get the point. If we really care about our Earth and its people, it directly effects how we and the rest of mankind treat our environment, because we are interconnected, and that child from Moro Bay is a child of the Earth, and it could easily be your grandchild or great grandchild.

            The idea, that for a short-term economic gain, we would doom an innocent child to a sub-par life is about as Un-American as anything I can imagine, but we are doing it daily, and those who can make a difference, such as our pregnant Attorney General, who is actively trying to block environmental rules (The Clean Power Plan) that would reduce the mercury emitted from Arkansas’ coal fired plants. That’s the mercury, which ends up in fish, and if a woman consumes a certain amount, during her early months of pregnancy, the child will probably have a reduced I. Q.  That’s not me pulling it out of thin air; that’s a proven scientific fact.

             I feel very strongly that by exposing individuals to environmental hazards just to make money, by evading existing environmental laws, or to oppose rules in place, is criminal. Yes, to reduce the quality of life of an individual just to make a buck isn’t criminal, what is? Of course, if by congressional action or presidential decree, the existing environmental laws are relaxed resulting in the loss of life or the degrading of life for a people, then that’s also criminal in my book, and to encourage using dirty coal as a fuel rather than nonpolluting alternatives, that, in my book, is also a crime.

            There are so many environment problems that will harm our grandchildren I could list, but I think one of the biggest environmental dangers is allowing our planet to warm until in years to come several billion people will suffer and numerous coastal cities will become uninhabitable. Here in the good old USA, the present Administration is denying global warming, just to curry coal mining votes in West Virginia, etc. and to allow mining of coal in the National forests, and on top of that they are extending lifelines to uneconomical, dirty coal fuel electrical generating plants to keep them going. By doing that our country is setting a horrible example to the rest of the world. Yes, global warming is a certainty, and any open minded person with a 6th grade education knows that. Of the 196 countries in the world, we are the only one whose leadership denies global warming. Even Syria has signed the pact. But what is worse than not signing the agreement are the folks who are denying global warming, knowing they are wrong, and their greed to make money is causing them to perpetrate a crime against humanity.

 Of course, the head of the EPA, who should be leading the way in protecting the environment, is leading the way all right, but he’s leading the way to dismantle as many environmental laws as he can, while having a $43,000 soundproof booth built in his office. Have we totally lost our moral compass? Have let the greed to make money dominate our lives? Corporate profits are at an all-time high and we have full employment, so why have we become so greedy that we will do anything to make a dollar? We should use this time of unequaled prosperity to strengthen our environmental laws.

       But dirty coal just the tip of the environmental iceberg because we are ignoring hundreds of other horrible problems such as the mountains of plastic, which are fowling the earth’s environment to the point where huge masses of plastic float out in the open water of the Pacific. One of these masses weighs 7 million tons, it’s twice the size of Texas, and up to 9 feet deep. Those plastic rafts in our oceans contaminate the oceans and create an ongoing hazard to animal life. Eight billion tons of plastic trash are dumped into the oceans each year, but hey “That’s way out in the Pacific”, you may say. I guess that is what you’re saying when you toss that plastic water bottle out the car window. Actually, around the World 1,000,000 plastic water bottles are used every minute, and only about 9% are recycled. I’m saying this, “There will not be another plastic water bottle allowed in my house.”                 

        Yes, we’re all guilty, and the solution in not to just say, “You’re right, Richard.” but to do your part in cleaning up and protecting our Earth. Everyone who has the intelligence to read this column knows how they can help, but are you going to wait until an environmental disaster is in your face?

           Let me give you an example: When I was a P. C. & E Commissioner there was a problem with a major chicken processing company disposing of waste chicken parts in an open mining pit. One of the individuals who lived in the area came before the Commission to protest was an elderly lady. I was impressed that at her age she would be so environmentally active, and I asked her, “When did you become so concerned about the environment?” She answered, “When the flies got so thick on my screen door that I couldn’t see out.”  And then she hesitated...”and the smell was so bad....” I was stunned with her reply, because I’m a visual person who grew up around barn waste with plenty of flies, but when that little lady said “...Flies were so thick on my screen door I couldn’t see out” I could imagine not only the flies, but the smell. I guess the question is for you, the readers of this column, to answer, “Are you going to wait until you can’t see out the screen door for the flies to be active in trying to improve our environment? “

            Yes, I have had a number of people say, “Richard, why waste your time!” I guess, I may be, but if I live long enough to see my great grandchildren have to live in an environmentally degraded world, and they ask me why did you let it happen, at least I can say, “I tried!” Will you be able to say the same thing?

Sweet Summer Rain