My dad was an oil well driller in western Pennsylvania. He owned three or four drilling rigs, which pounded down through the earth day and night in an elusive search for black gold, back on mountainsides and deep in the forests.
It would start with a bulldozer creating a track into the woods wide enough to drive on - raw dirt that was greasy and treacherous in bad weather - and the rig parts would be towed in and assembled in a small clearing. Once put together, the roar of the powerful engine would commence, and the big steel arm with a pulley at the end would go up and down, lifting and releasing a drill bit on a cable down a pipe-clad hole. BANG, BANG, it endlessly rose and fell, while the earth shook underfoot. I'll never forget the sound; it went on 24 hours a day until the well was done.
As a boy, I was fascinated. There was a forge to heat and sharpen drill bits. Strong men would pound the orange tips of the bits, each the thickness of a thigh and five feet long. Synchronized swings from two sides, CLANG, CLANG, with sparks flying from the red-hot metal until the tip was shaped just right and could go back down the hole.
Experienced drillers had a 'hand' for the business. You stood by the cable and gently let your gloved hand ride up and down on it as the drill bit rose and fell hundreds of feet below. The feel of the cable told them when it was time to pull up the bit and clean out the slurry that was created by the drilling.
A hollow tube with a gravity plug was lowered into the subterranean goop, filled up, pulled out and dumped. The slurry pond was stinky gray, a pool of primal ooz that would sink you to your waist if you stepped into it, much like quicksand.
Then there was the day when the slurry revealed oil, and the drilling stopped.
Now, everyone has seen old film reels of the Texas gushers, where oil just came up and spewed into the air when the drilling got to it. That's not what it was like in Pennsylvania; you had to go down and get it loose before it could come up.
That's when they called in the explosives expert.
He would chug up that primitive dirt track in his bright red truck ever so slowly, barely moving, until he got to the rig.
He was that careful and slow because he was carrying gallons of raw nitroglycerin in that truck, enough to vaporize the mountain, and also dynamite to set off the nitro.
When he reached the rig, everyone went off in the woods to watch, far enough away for an illusion of safety, but close enough to watch. How often, after all, do you get to see that much explosive in action?
This guy would lift each gallon of nitro carefully and slowly out of a padded well on the truck, and carry it into the now-silent rig. There, he would ever so slowly unscrew the cap on the can (almost any friction or movement can set off nitro - it is that unstable), and lift it over a shiny, empty tube suspended over the hole.
He would pour, slowly, the nitro into the tube, realizing that any spill on the outside of the tube would detonate the explosives as the tube was lowered if it grazed the wall of the pipe into which it descended.
The pouring took a very long time. Four or five containers, one at a time.
When the tube was full, the explosives guy took the controls of the rig, and s-l-o-w-l-y lowered that bomb on the cable 1,500 or more feet into the earth, and deposited it gently on the bottom.
When this was done, he walked out of the rig and lit a cigarette. Relaxed for a few minutes. One can only imagine what he told his wife every day when he left for work; "I'll be back tonight, maybe". Wouldn't want to be his wife, would you?
Then he went to his truck, and would beckon me over. "Time for the dynamite!", he would say.
Out came a small, three foot tube, with one end crimped and the other end open. His steady hands slid two sticks of dynamite into the tube. The third stick he punctured with his knife, then inserted a blasting cap into it with a fuse hanging out. Third stick into the tube, and sand poured around them to fill it up. Crimp the tube, leaving the fuse sticking out.
We would walk together back into the rig, he and I the only people close. He would look at me, and I at him, and he would take out his cigarette lighter and touch it to the fuse, which would sputter urgently into life.
He handed me the tube and pointed at the hole. I dropped the tube into the hole.
We walked, actually sauntered, out of the rig, feigned calmness the order of the day. I wanted to run as fast as I could, but I knew all eyes were on me, and I wanted to be brave.
The tube took some time to get down to the waiting nitroglycerin. Plenty of time, actually, to walk slowly away.
Then there would be a solid CRUMP!, and the ground would shudder. We waited. The tube would shudder and violently spout a mixture of slurry and oil, up, up, way over the rig tower, raining oily, stinky sludge and water and oil over everything.
When it stopped, the show was over. The rig would be dismantled and towed out, off to another location, and if we were lucky and oil was really there (not always the case!), a pump would be brought in to slowly pull it up out of the fractured shale where it pooled far below. A big engine with a big arm, nodding up and down for years, pumping it up and slowly filling a tank nearby.
You could drive through those parts of Pennsylvania for many years and see the pumps dotted everywhere, arms rising slowly up and down, sucking up all that oil.
Years later, far away from the oil fields of Pennsylvania, I learned as a therapist to find 'oil' from the detonations in life, the divorces, arguments, losses and challenges.
I learned that it often requires some nitro to the heart to loosen things up and allow us to get to the good stuff. Tragedies would walk in the door, masking the freedoms and new choices that were hidden under the stinky, smelly stuff.
Sometimes I had to stuff a little dynamite down the tube to set someone free. Carefully, gently.
The painful events of life often fracture the defenses we have built around our hearts, and that can be a good thing. It is not usually from our comfort that we grow, but from our discomfort.
We don't stretch into our new freedoms until we have to, and that is mighty alright.
- The Acolyte
