Hands

Having owned a well serving company before, I can relate to this photograph, big time. If you give a roughneck a company truck he'll run the tires right off the son of a bitch, never check the oil and eventually fall asleep from being wore ass out and roll it over into a bar ditch somewhere. It is the inherent nature of a hand to tear shit up, as Bum Gibbins found out when this pickup was towed to the junkyard and he went to look at it the next morning. You reckon he was pissed when he saw this?

There's an old oilfield expression that if you give a hand an iron, digging bar he'll either bend it, break it, or lose it.

I am reminded of the story Coots Matthews told me about getting fired from Halliburton a few months before he went to work for Myron Kinley. He'd wrecked four red pickups in 1955 and the Liberty camp manager finally had enough and ran Coots off. I asked Coots how he could wreck four trucks in one year and his answer was, "'cause, Pods, I could never figure out how to drive them sumbitches while I was sleeping. Hali use to work me 24 hours a day for weeks straight; so I wrecked a few of their pickups, big fucking deal. They shouldn't a fired me over a piss-ant thing like that!"

I had a brain fart (one of many in my long life) about drilling rigs one year long ago and actually owned one of those damn things too. Gawd almighty; to this day I don't know what on earth I was thinking. I could hear that rig break 100 miles away, at home, in the middle of a deep sleep. I'd bolt upright in bed with my hair standing on end and know the telephone call was just minutes away.

I got rid of the workover rigs, and the drilling rig, before they killed me, and to this day take some satisfaction in imagining they were melted down into molten steel and eventually made into a couple of Hyundai's, or that the steel support beams in some dentist office in Des Moines was once my drilling rig. Just the possibility of that pleases me to no end.