Over Sixty Years in the Making

My son, Michael, and I recently traveled to the Boulder CO Shelby Museum to see the Last of The King Cobras run. What a thrill!

No Stone Left Unturned: The Last Cobra

Since we didn’t have a schedule or any other passengers, I convinced Mike we should stop by Baggs, WY, which was kinda on the way home, to see where I came within a hair of being killed on an oil rig. A strange request, I know, but somehow that patch of nowhere has stayed in my mind all these years!

In the summer of ’65, my running buddy Ray Smith and I convinced ourselves we should go to Rock Springs, Wyoming, and become oil rig roughnecks (sounds cool), make lottsa money, and have great adventures. Through a mutual friend in Rock Springs, we found a crew that needed 2 new hands, if we were willing to move to Baggs, Wyoming. Baggs had a population of about 25 souls, is 2 ½ hours east and south of Rock Springs, and 1 hour north of Rifle, CO. We’d be working 12 hours a day, noon to midnight or midnight to noon, 7 days a week, with a place to stay. The money was OK, so we took it.

There were 2 crews and Ray went with one and I went with the other. My crew was headed by a guy named Beauford. The house we stayed in was directly across the unpaved street from the Western Hotel, where Butch Cassidy et. al. stayed after one of their train robberies. The scene where Butch (Paul Newman) is with a lady watching from a second story window as the posse rides through town actually took place at the Western.  The Western is the white building third from left.

The main boss was a guy named Calvin Ledges who worked for Exeter Drilling Company out of Denver. He was tough as nails and had seen it all. One night, we arrived and found there was a fishing tool rigged up on the derrick. Somehow the drill bit had gotten jammed on the end of the drill stem and Calvin and the “fisher,” a special guy with specialized tools, were trying to pull it up. The fisher and Calvin had been fighting it all day, and it was not cooperating.

In desperation, they rigged a “hammer,” which is a hydraulic valve you can pull on with the cables of the rig. It will trip at a preset pressure, then catch and hammer the pipe upward. The particular rig we had was designed to handle about 500,000 pounds of that kind of hammer pressure. After several attempts at full rated pressure, Calvin told the fisher to raise the pressure to 750,000 pounds. Man did that make a noise! Every joint and bolt was stressed to the max.  The night was cold and dark and windy, and money was being lost at a furious pace. Even in those days, leasing and operating a rig cost thousands of dollars per hour.   

Finally, they told us to get far away from the rig as they were going to raise the hammer to 1,000,000 pounds. No problem, we’re outta here! From across the sagebrush we could hear the rig screaming in the darkness as its lightbulbs danced and shattered in the wind. I’d never heard metal hitting metal that hard. Somehow nothing critical broke, and whatever was down there yielded and came up with the fishing tool. It turned out the drill bit had “cratered,” which means one or more of the interlocking diamond-studded wheels that grind their way into the earth had come loose and jammed against the side of the hole, stopping the drill cold.  Calvin swore to never use that brand of drill bit again.

A “work over” rig means we set up over an old well that needs revamping. Read the book THE DEEP HOT BIOSPHERE: The Myth of Fossil Fuels  by Thomas Gold. Get the real story on where oil and gas come from, and it ain’t dinosaurs.  Many old oil & gas wells refill with methane, the main component of oil and gas, after a few years, and become paying assets again. Methane is very common in our universe. There are whole planets made of it, and it all sure as hell didn’t come from rotting dinosaurs.

About a week later we arrived for our shift and found out we had hit the strata we were looking for and were coming out of the hole for the last time. Beauford (our leader) decided to re-rig the drill cable so it would run faster, and probably impress Calvin with his initiative.

We carefully laid the blocks, the big metal assembly that all the cables run through, on the drill floor. It’s about the size and weight of a small car. As Beauford backed the cable off the drum, the big metal end unhooked itself and slowly started to rise in the morning light. Every guy on the job started screaming RUN!! as loud as he could. Unfortunately, I was on the drill floor with Beauford. For some reason, I ran across the entire drill floor, with heavy cable falling through the air to a small operator platform where Beauford was standing.

As the cable end with its lead-filled steel hook rose into the sky (135 feet up and 135 feet down), it tore through the sheave wheels and started its way down.  Somehow–GUARDIAN ANGELS, or whatever–I was about 3 inches from Beauford as the 3-inch diameter metal weight passed between us, nicked my new hard hat, and destroyed Beauford’s right ankle.

Suddenly all was quiet. Cable was lying everywhere, and Beauford’s face turned pale. The ankle was starting to swell, so we carefully cut his laces and took his boot off. Someone went to Baggs to get Calvin, and someone else took Beauford to the hospital in Rock Springs. That’s the closest I ever came to getting killed while not driving a car.

Some people say there is a feeling, at times described as a “dark spirit” that inhabits places of tragedy. 9/11 comes to mind. There sure was that feeling when Mike and I stopped by the old drill site.  We didn’t spend more than 15 minutes there, but looking back, it felt like hours.

The “work over” must have been successful sixty years ago.  Maybe it has been refilled and reworked multiple times. The 2 metal tanks in the picture are typical of a producing gas well. When gas comes out from the underground pressure, a light, almost clear, fluid known as “drip gas” condenses and is pumped to one of the metal tanks, where a truck picks it up when it’s full. “Drip” is about 80 octane and you can run your car on it if it’s an older model, like my ’55 Ford. Convenient.

Over 60 years in the making … Thank You, whoever you were (are) for saving my butt.  God really does look out for little children, helpless drunks, and a few oil field workers.

I did the wood cut below when I got back to art school. It depicts the dull misery of oil field work. Cold, wet, exhausted, with ever present danger shown in their faces.  

Thanks for listening.