We can never know for sure why people
do things. We can know what they say about their actions, and we can analyze
the rationale behind their acts, but their innermost thoughts about what
they’ve just done cannot be recovered, nor can we know what goes through the
minds of those most deeply affected by decisions carried out. And so it is with
John and Bernice in 1952. My mother was silent; she never talked about her
husband’s relinquishment of a good career with an established company or about
the consequences of that act a couple of years later. In a very small and
symbolic way, my parents were re-playing the great historical migrations in
which human beings left the certainty of a particular social and economic realm
and set forth upon an adventure with unpredictable results and at a particularly
vulnerable time in their lives. It’s great bar talk to speculate whether this
same kind of unrest is hard wired into members of the genus Homo, thus, perhaps, fueling the
original migrations out of sub-Saharan Africa two million years ago. My father
would do it again within twenty four months, this time taking even more of a
gamble, with his children’s futures even more vulnerable to disruption, and at
a time when global events—especially the development of Middle Eastern
petroleum resources following World War II—virtually assured his failure.
After leaving Tidewater, he took a
position with a smaller company owned by a man named Laurence Youngblood, a
very successful independent developer of oil properties. Compared to the
Tidewater offices in the Hales Building—now demolished—Youngblood’s suite in
the First National Bank building was luxurious. I visited his office there once
and the memory is of dark wood, carpeted floors, and leather-covered chairs. A
woman came in to the room where John was drawing one of his elegant maps. She
had some papers in her hand and asked him a question about them, in the process
putting her knee up on a chair and revealing a long length of very nice leg,
quite possibly on purpose. I was sitting down in a chair next to this leg, so I
don’t remember her face. Now, after working in offices for nearly fifty years,
I can easily wonder whether those papers were simply an excuse to be in the
room. That would not surprise me; my father could be a very interesting and
patient man, qualities that evidently—if the fate of Enron Corporation is any
indication—are becoming increasingly rare in the corporate world, especially
that portion of it involved in the commercial development of fossil energy
resources.
But over the next year or so after
leaving Tidewater, it must have become obvious to both Bernice and John that
something was wrong; as in the case of Tidewater, I sensed that my mother
contributed significantly to her husband’s decisions. Youngblood was not a
correct match, either, or else they saw no future in the company, but then
again it could just as easily have been the winter in North Dakota that made my
father resign from Youngblood and set out on his own as a consulting geologist.
The year was 1953, and in late November he was sent to “sit” on a well
somewhere near Bismarck. This phrase—“sit on a well”—was a familiar part of our
family conversation; it meant go out to the rig, collect, wash, and examine the
tailings (“samples”), call in Halliburton to run an electric log if necessary,
perhaps call for a core, all preliminary to declaring the well ready for
casing, perforation, and production, or, of course, a dry hole.
If it happened to be the right
time of year, I’d sometimes get to go for a couple of days, maybe sleeping in
the back seat of a company car or eating Vienna sausages and crackers in a
cheap motel room while my father napped, waiting for a 3:00AM encounter with
some candidate oil sand. Well drilling and sitting are 24/7 jobs; nobody can
declare that the target formation will be reached a mile under the ground
always at 10:00AM right after coffee and a leisurely donut. But I would not be
going on the well sit near Bismarck in November; the overnights would turn into
a month, maybe two, and Bernice and John both knew it. The Bismarck trip was
only the latest of lessons in which I learned that certain professions required
duty well beyond 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, and indeed the life of any professional
could easily be a 24/7/365 commitment to one’s “job.”
Before he left, my father bought
us a television set, upon which I then watched the Joseph McCarthy hearings.
When he returned in February, he handed me a salted porcupine skin bought from
“an Indian woman” who subsequent to skinning it, had eaten the animal. Now, more
than half a century after the fact, I detect my father’s thoughts about his
son—‘Johnny would like that skin; I’ll just buy it.’ The porcupine skin
survived in our garage for several years; I still have some of the quills from
it. He also returned with heavy army surplus clothing—40s period Arctic
gear—that I still have and use sometimes in Nebraska. Whenever I don this long
parka, it occurs to me that whatever clothing allowed Cro-Magnon people to
survive the Ice Ages in Europe would probably also allow me to fire up the snow
blower and clear a suburban sidewalk on the North Central American Great Plains
during some February of the Third Millennium.
The porcupine skin was an artifact
straight out of the 19th Century, symbolic of Little Big Horn,
Wounded Knee, and the destruction of culture as a fact of human existence. The
surrogate father television set with Joseph McCarthy leering through its lens,
polluting an Oklahoma City living room with his hatred and disdain, was an
artifact of modernism. Thus it was not the machine itself that turned out to be
an unforeseen product of Hiroshima, but what it expressed, namely, a fear of
communism, symbolized by the giant Soviet Union, and the manifestation of that
fear—a United States Senator from Wisconsin. This same technology could,
however, with the passage of a few hours, evolve quietly into confirmation that
the American family had a bumbling titular husband, a feisty-mouthed red-headed
wife, and conspiratorial neighbors. All was well; Lucille Ball cancelled out
Joseph McCarthy—at least in our minds. Except in Bernice Locke’s mind that is.
The McCarthy hearings were real; I Love
Lucy was not; and never, ever, would Bernice’s children be allowed to
forget the distinction.
The only other obvious and
immediate multicultural result of my father’s winter in Bismarck was some
vocabulary, for example, “head bolt heater,” a term that he used with a certain
amount of amazement, perhaps more for the idea than for the resulting
technology. A head bolt heater was a cylinder head bolt designed as a heating
element and plugged into a wall socket in your garage; an automobile engine
thus warmed would start when it was minus 30oF outside. The fact
that its name entered our family lexicon was not deemed strange in any way. We
learned the language of men looking for oil by listening to John’s long
distance phone calls. All of the oil field words and grammar, all of the
language of petroleum geologists discussing, late at night over a long distance
connection, what to do about a hole into which money is draining at an alarming
rate, and all the catch phrases involved in negotiating a lease also came into
our home by way of my father’s work.
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