The rig moved in four days ago.
The drilling crew are cold and wet but crews run twenty four seven coming back out of the hole only to replace a broken or dull bit, or let a logger test a zone.
Despite what you read in the Washington Post, the Denver Post, the New York Times, the environmental impact of this rig is about as much as a fly on an elephant’s back.
Snow blew in yesterday and is falling earthward softly.
Big sloppy soft flakes hit a diesel power plant that runs all the rig lights and equipment, touch hot metal and turn to water on contact. Snow covers the roof of the mud logger’s SUV and dark mid west prairie mud is tracked inside the Geo-hut.
Near Benkleman, Nebraska, it takes us a couple of wrong turns before the new Caterpillar bladed road is found and we see a lit up oil derrick in the middle of a farmers corn field in a section of Nebraska farmland.
Oil is under our feet. When you drill in this area you have drilling history, some clues, some ” seismic ” data. Oil men are trying to reach layers of sand that have oil, permeability,and structure with enough pressure to push the black gold to the surface.
In old tycoon Texas days gushers exploded into the light of day and hardened drillers smiled and wiped black streams off their faces with oil soaked sleeves. There are still good finds to be made but the easy stuff has already been pumped out of the Earth.
In the Geo Hut, the guys look at samples, pour over maps with highs and lows of nearby wells marked and contour lines for the entire area surrounding this well.
Without money, as incentive, nobody in their right mind would do this.
By late tomorrow we will know whether we have anything, or not.
Most black gold is found in places people don’t live, can’t live, or don’t want to live.
Thom’s shop is full of heavy steel automobiles from the fifties and sixties, stripped down, in various stages of renovation.Paint and body tools are resting in the shop where they were used last,collecting dust on the hood of a Chevy Pickup or the roof of a Ford mustang.
Hanging on wire lines in the shop’s paint booth are a detached hood and car door, suspended from a cable running from one side of the room to the other. The painter can walk around the hood and car door, unobstructed, wearing his respirator , careful to keep the spray gun moving, not creating runs and catching all the nooks and crannies.
When the final coats of paint are done,my nephew Weston’s El Camino will be a beauty.
Collectors want their gems to sparkle.
When you put lots of time, thought, and energy into a project you want it to be worth doing.
This car is no longer a car. It is a piece of family history.
In high school, Weston started banging out its dents, measuring from A to B, searching the internet for alternators and chrome. In college, he was home for holidays and fashioned new panels to replace rusted steel and grinder smoothed the rough welded seams. This week, he is back in the garage, with his dad, getting the El Camino ready for its final paint job.
He hauled his project to Thom’s country paint and body shop last week on a flatbed.
” You guys did a great job on this, ” Thom says, running his hand over the metal curves of the car, lovingly. ” We don’t see much here we have to do, a couple of coats of primer, a little touch up and then two coats of paint. She will be a beauty…. ”
When you have spent hours and hours wearing respirators, paint dust all over your levi’s and buried in the creases of your shirt, it is good to hear compliments.
After the paint job, Weston and his dad will haul it home, put in the glass, the seats, attach the chrome and dashboard, hook up the electric and lights, start her up and take her for a victory lap around the block.
This 1960 El Camino will find her place in parades, car shows and Sunday afternoon drives.
These crowns are made from paper with printed jewels on the side. They adjust to fit all heads and there are plenty to go around. Customers can take them for free and kids are not the only ones that wear them.
Kings used to be in short supply, one to a country. In this age of mass merchandising, mass consumption, collective thought and identity politics, kings are no longer protected or worshiped. Now,with social justice warriors on the warpath, we must all be kings.
If you were King for a Day, what edict would you have your scribes put on a scroll and tack to telephone poles around town? Would you start a new holiday? Would you erase everyone’s debts? Would you let everyone out of prison? Would you throw a party? Would you ride the streets in a carriage and wave at your adoring subjects? Would you open your palace doors to the common folk?
Even with our lofty rhetoric, America is still run by royalty.
Congress will never take their crowns off and our President will never be allowed to put his on.
These days the only reality and royalty we follow lives in Beverly Hills.
Some photographs resonate.
This photo, hanging on a restaurant wall in an Albuquerque Olive Garden, resonates. It is a black, white, and gray ode to old age.
These three old men have seen history and are sitting on a bench watching life pass them by. Old men often have histories that are burnished and worn like rocks going through a rock shop tumbler. Their rough edges have been smoothed and now they lean on each other as they watch glorious young women flaunting the latest designer clothes, their trim bodies moving against skirts and blouses that can barely contain their curves.
These old men sit and their conversation moves from wars,to divorces,to children,to politics,to sex, to money.
Growing old is unavoidable but sitting on the right bench, in the right place, with the right people, is, in my mind, still a few years off for me.
Fooling myself,however, is something I have experience with.
This fountain stands in a plaza in Albuquerque’s Old Town and this morning, while Alan and I walk the square, local birds play and preen in its cool waters.
Birds enjoy showers and they don’t need soap, soap dishes, or towels.
From their songs, I don’t think they have a care in the world, and, at the moment, neither do we..
If I could sing like these birds, I would sing opera and clean up several times a day when it gets hot just because I could.
This morning, I enjoy the fountain, the birds and my brother’s company. I whistle ” Bye Bye Blackbird ” softly, and plan on coming back soon. Our family used to come to Old Town once a month to eat at La Placita and browse the shops around the square.
Life, I have heard people say, is ” for the birds.”
I don’t, for a moment, believe a word of it.
Sometime last night this homeless statistic rolled her shopping cart onto Ronald McDonald’s premises and parked it.
The Albuquerque homeless problem is ubiquitous even if un-employment is low and jobs are rumored to be everywhere. Most intersections in the better parts of town have panhandlers holding ” I’m Hungry ” signs right under City Hall notices that tell you not to give them a dime.
When McDonald’s opens at five this morning, Javier will come out and shoo this squatter off but she will be back tomorrow unless she finds a better place under a freeway overpass where homeless people’s cell phones, at night, look like bedroom night lights as they lean against overpass stanchions and surf the net.
This country has wealth but people are evenly divided on whether we should steal from the rich to take care of those who have and give nothing, or whether people are entitled to keep what they have worked for if they have broken no laws to earn it.
This cold morning, our squatter will come into McDonald’s and slump in a booth. We will buy him,her, or he/she a coffee and burrito. Even though we talk tough about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, we know bootstraps are not always handy.
Using band aids to treat cancer isn’t the best strategy but to leave a homeless hungry, with change in our pockets, would be criminal.
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