I’ve spent quite a bit of time learning
my wife’s intonations and reading them, most of the time fairly accurately.
This one has a mixture of fear, excitement, challenge, desire, and courage. She
can see through the binocs as well as I can that the men up on that floor are
totally occupied, almost like robots handling large steel objects very rapidly,
wrapping chains around pipes, chains that snake over the rig floor, repeatedly,
with never a gesture that’s not related to the immediate task at hand, which is
to get several miles of pipe out of a hole, a hundred and twenty feet at a
time, change a bit, and send that same pipe several miles back down the hole,
in an environment of massive machinery, most of it moving, diesel smoke, noise,
mud-slicked metal plates, vibration, and dirt.
“This one is destined for hydraulic
fracturing,” says Albright, simply, as if she’d reminded us this was Wednesday.
What she’s actually said is that in addition to the swinging machinery and tons
of pipe stacked on end like a box of straws where four men are working
constantly, after the well is completed there will be high pressure lines
forcing a specialized mixture of fluids, sand, and salts through that pipe at
the end. The pressure will be somewhere around five thousand pounds per square
inch, enough to dismember a human being, or a cow, standing near a ruptured pipe.
“One of these wells had a broken line a couple of months ago,” she says, again,
as if she were giving us the time of day. “One dead; scalded and crushed. Two
others hospitalized.” The Burkholder pause. “Don’t remember whether they both
lived or not.”
We watch for a few more minutes. It’s a
mesmerizing show. I’m surprised the derrick doesn’t tip over as a result of
pipe weight, or that the whole stack of pipe, about two hundred tons of it so
far, doesn’t simply go crashing through the rig floor.
“Ready?” asks Albright. She leans
forward, reaches inside her light jacket, pulls out her handgun and puts it in
the glove box. “You both clean?”
“Mine’s in my purse; I’ll leave it in
the car,” says Mykala.
“Mine’s in my truck back at the motel in
Oklahoma City,” I add.
Albright looks at me as if I were some
kind of an idiot.
“Nice place for it to be if you ever
need it,” says our host and driver.
“I have a wife who can put forty shots
into a paper target’s head.”
Albright smiles.
“Keep her close,” she advises. “And put
on your ID badges.”
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