Category Archives: oil fields

Drilling down on guilt

(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

I wear a 7½ shoe. No Sasquatch here. Still, the recent passage of significant climate-change legislation has me pondering the size of my carbon footprint.

The pandemic’s forced reduction of my automobile use the past two years has been a boon to a clearer conscience regarding any role I might have played in global warming. And no fairytale: I have a gas sipper — 38 to 48 miles to the gallon.

But it is past transgressions I’m lately thinking about. My half century as a journalist involved a fair amount of air travel — not helpful to a warming planet — and there is the matter of acknowledging that the fossil-fuel industry was central in setting me up for a comfortable life. My father was a midlevel executive for Humble Oil Co. (now ExxonMobil) which, when I was growing up, was the nation’s largest producer of petroleum.

Also, my three high school summers working in the oil fields basically paid my way through college. At $1.25 an hour for a 60-hour work week, that amounted to $300 a month. A princely sum for a teenage lad at the time.

Blood money? Of course, that was in the ’50s and ’60s, and global warming hardly was on anyone’s radar. So, am I off the hook? Is there a statute of limitations on potential guilt with respect to this sort of thing?

Upon us now is a cultural conundrum tied to the direct relationship between burning fossil fuels and greenhouse gases: How to kick the oil habit and transition to other energy sources without devastating vast portions of the economy and muddling individual futures.

I was reading recently about this puzzle in my long-ago homesteads. Kern County, in California’s San Joaquin Valley, is resisting state drilling restrictions because Kern’s oil and gas money is so embedded in local budgets, funding everything from elementary schools to firefighting to libraries to mosquito control. Bakersfield, the Kern County seat and my family’s home in the mid-1950s, when my father was superintendent in charge of the local oil field, has the oil business to blame for becoming America’s most polluted city.

Then there is Hobbs, New Mexico, site of my youthful oil-field roustabout gig. In the early ’60s, my father was transferred to Hobbs, just across the Texas border in the Permian Basin, which is home to almost 40% of the nation’s active drilling rigs and recently was declared by the Environmental Protection Agency to be on the verge of “nonattainment” status for acceptable air quality.

The sugar daddy of my youth, ExxonMobil, has continued to dramatically increase oil and gas production there — by 70% between 2019 and 2021, according to the company’s most recent figures. In the Permian Basin, there are more pumpjacks — sort of the unofficial state critter — than there are Friday night football lights.

Not such a healthy situation.

Meanwhile, though, in New Mexico oil has bankrolled free colleges for residents and expanded postpartum medical care up to a year for new mothers. And I considered my father’s vocation to have been a noble one, and labor under the assumption that, in the 21st century, he likely would have helped the company move to cleaner energy.

Having come through the Depression and the war, he was conditioned toward frugality. Turn out the lights when you’re not in the room. Don’t throw out that bar of soap until it literally disappears. Take shorter showers. Wear another layer of clothes if you’re cold.

He kept the family car for 10 years. For my high school transportation, while so many classmates were tooling around in automobiles, I was gifted a hand-me-down Cushman motor scooter. Nine horsepower. My rare appearances at the local service station resulted in a 25-cent fill-up and the attendant’s wise-guy offer to include a “cough in the tires.” Since then, every car I’ve owned maxed out at four cylinders with standard transmission. All trips from the Long Island suburbs into Gotham involve public transportation.

Should I feel remorse now that I can’t deny an awareness of my long-ago part in depleting the ozone layer? No John Muir here. But hindsight is an exact science. And since I’m a believer in science, I shall endeavor to put my foot down against societal and individual objections to being greener.

Water break

(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

Anyone here old enough to remember the song “Cool Water”? The tale of a parched man traveling a wasteland with his mule, tormented by mirages, it was written in 1936, first recorded in 1941 (still before my time), but revived occasionally, including during my youth in the 1950s.

The yearning refrain — “cool … clear … water” — pops into mind with what seems to be increasingly hot, humid weather, when I’m lucky enough to have plentiful access to transparent, tasteless, odorless H2O. The best liquid refreshment there is, really.

I was chatting by phone with my brother recently as he went about one of his typically physical labors amid the suffocating heat near his Texas home, when I recalled how my favorite part of the day — back when he and I worked in the West Texas oil fields during our high-school summers — was the water break.

“I kinda preferred quitting time,” he said.

Well, yes. It is certainly possible to overdo long hours of digging ditches, stringing pipeline, wrenching together various structures that — mysteriously to me — would deliver petroleum products to the public. My thoroughly informal title in that process was roustabout, defined as “an unskilled or semiskilled laborer, especially in an oil field or refinery.” I recently came across a survey by CareerCast, rating jobs based on environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress, that judged roustabout to be the absolute worst.

Still, that time is a pleasant recollection, for several reasons. First of all, that was before a climate-change awareness that the use of fossil fuels is wrecking the planet, so to have been a cog in that destruction is not something I had to struggle with.

The work was demanding enough — ever try to dig a trench in the sedimentary rock called caliche? — and hours in temperatures regularly near 100 degrees were long enough (10 a day, six days a week). There was, however, the favorable cost-benefit analysis that the gig would last a mere three months before high school classes resumed and the banked money would get me through college — thereby assuring a permanent farewell to oil field drudgery by the age of 18.

That’s the lesson, kiddos. Heavy toil isn’t so bad at that age; in fact, it reinforces a man-over-mouse self-worth so long as it solidifies the conviction that there are more fun ways to earn a living. In my case, a half century in journalism.

My boss then, the gang-pusher, was a 40-something gentleman of admirable work ethic, kindness and a sense of humor named Walter H. Cox. (“What’s the ‘H’ for?” we’d ask. “Hurry,” he always said, more a command than an answer.) Walter once told me how he had dropped out of high school to take an oil field job because of the good (comparatively) money available. He never expressly acknowledged regretting the decision, but all those years later the money hadn’t gotten much better and the work was just as physically demanding.

One summer, there were two older fellows on the crew — they seemed ancient; probably in their late 40s or early 50s — who occasionally wouldn’t show up Sunday mornings (our day off was Saturday). Walter guessed they might have relaxed from a long, sweaty week by spending too much of their pay on drinks (not water).

So, short on manpower one Sunday, Walter stopped the truck on the way to the oil patch and ducked into the local bar — this was at 5:30 in the morning — and fetched a young fellow lured by the promise of a quick single-day check. The lad lasted until about 1 p.m., then literally walked off the job, slowly disappearing over the flat horizon of barren mesquite and dust. I suppose he was able, after a mile or so to the nearest highway, to hitch a ride. Maybe right back to the bar.

The rest of us had just resumed duties after our usual half-hour lunch hour — which for me always included a quick 10-minute nap under the truck, the only place to find a little shade, after a hearty repast of four sandwiches and ice cream, kept cold in a small thermos. (God bless my mother.)

A few more chores and it was time for a break. And — no mirage — some cool, clear water.