Job 18

Summer 1978 - Winter 1978

Sarcee Drilling - Lease Hound, Roughneck

Ed was almost ecstatic. He had gone off with his friend, Gilbert, from Newfoundland, to seek work in Alberta's booming oilfields. In no time at all he had secured a position as a roughneck with Sarcee Drilling at an impressive $7.65 per hour. He called me to let me know they were in need of a "lease hound," and that, if interested, the job was mine ($7.05/hour).

All I had to do, he told me, was walk around the oil rig with a spray gun and clean off the mud.

Well, I always had a kind of an admiration of the men who toiled on the oil rigs - tough and rugged men of the oil patch. They were independent types, in some ways, to my mind, strongly akin to the cowboy image popularized in American movies.

Without a moment's thought, I jumped at the opportunity.

The rig, I was told, was located near Taber, Alberta. Without knowing where in the hell Taber was... without even a map... armed only with the knowledge that Taber was somewhere south of Calgary, I packed my stuff and left that very night. I had decided to hitch-hike down to Taber.

I recall the longest ride I had that night. I got picked up by a road enterpreneur... the guy had a ton of beer in his car and, though he did not charge me anything for the ride itself, he made a tidy little profit off me that night by selling me beers at a buck a bottle. By the time he dropped me off in ... god knows where ... I was in a really good mood - so was he - besides the money he made he matched me in consumption, bottle for bottle.

Somehow, despite the circumstances of my travel arrangements, I found my way to Taber. Within a very short time I was on the rig.

My experience on my very first oil rig turned out to be rather different than the rosy picture painted by my friend Ed. It turned out in fact, to make those labouring jobs with Patrick and Tilt-Up, look like a walk in the park.

True, I did spend a certain amount of time in that dry Alberta prairie walking around with a spray gun cleaning the mud off the rig. Also, as with the pipelaying job, I was always thirsty. I surprised myself by how I could down an entire bottle of C-Plus in one gulp. I had learned something from my days in the pipelaying business. I was finally bringing lots to drink with me.

There were, it turned out, several other tasks peripheral to the spraying job... like setting up and dismantling the rig after each three day hole. It was necessary to learn to lift objects with a weight beyond anything I had ever previously attempted. This while wearing green (woolen?) gloves saturated with slippery drilling mud. Getting a grip on a two hundred pound steel hose connector, itself covered in mud, was impossible. Instead, I had to tense every muscle in my body to form a type of cradle, that would enable me to move the damn thing.

The same applied to swinging a sledge hammer, a skill for which, on drilling rigs of those days, there were numerous applications. Again, due to the fact we were wearing mud soaked gloves (they didn't even really look like gloves - more like the feet of some duck-like creature come crawling out of some steaming slimehole, from a Japanese Sci-Fi flick of yore) the luxury of actually getting a grip on the sledge hammer was nothing more than a quaint notion.

Instead, it was necessary to separate the hands far beyond that distance which would ordinarilly be used by a dry-handed wielder. One hand would be almost snug against the head of the hammer itself while the other hand would be at the other end of the tool. One had to learn, not so much how to swing a hammer, but rather, how to swing the entire human body. Imagine a baseball player who holds the bat at it's extreme ends and hopes to hit a home run. Most of the time, we weren't actually hitting something with our sledges, we were bunting it. This was often done while balancing your body on some part of the rig by wrapping your legs around it and leaning out over a fourty-five degree angle.

Needless to say, many formerly underused muscles in the body got a supreme workout from this task.

Another, absolutely insane job, that I remember doing, involved tying the blocks into the derick while dissassembling the rig (rigging out). You were expected to climb up the derick, about ten or more meters and, while sitting on a beam, with nothing to hold onto... nothing, and no safety belt.... lean out to a point far beyond any sensible notion of your center of gravity (having had judo experience, mine is better than many), and yank this ton-like object back to where you were sitting so it could be tied to the derick.

Over the years, Ed and I lost contact... but I have to say this, despite his ignominous termination at Patrick Pipeline, he turned out to be quite masterful at this type of hazardous and back-breaking work. The time I was supposed to be helping him tie back those blocks I could not bring myself to do what the job required. Yet Ed, on the other hand, showed not only the guts to try this insane task.... but the uncommon skill to complete it, while avoiding the trauma normally associated with a serious fall.

Rig Terminology

Determining the origin of the names of the various parts of an oil rig would make an interesting study. Whoever made these names up must have had a real obsession with animals. Here is a list of rig parts/locations that I can remember:

• doghouse - basically, the rig control center
• cathead - a rotating wheel, looking something like a tire rim, around which a piece of rope is wrapped three (three) times and no more. The friction from the wheel on the rope is sufficient to hoist one to two thousand pounds of drillpipe to a spot where they can be run into the hole.
• catwalk - an elongated platform where drill pipe is temporarily stored prior to installation onto the drill stem.
• monkeyboard - place halfway or so up the derrick where the derrick-man works during a "trip".
• mousehole - tube installed in the floor of the rig. Used for temporary storage of individual drill pipes.
• rathole - place for temporary storage of the kelly while certain non-drilling operations are performed.
• dogcollar - a contraption used on drill collars to prevent them from slipping into the hole
• leasehound - the lowest job on the rig... involves a lot of walking around with a spraygun washing mud from the rig exterior.
• fuckstick - consists of the movable jaw from a pipewrench which has been welded to a long steel pole. This device is used to lock and unlock the blocks.

I don't know what particular form of insanity enabled me to brave this job out for the next six months.. I guess it was partly the money, and partly the week of vacation each month. By the time November rolled around the drop in temperature made me long for the nights spent warm and dry, driving a taxi back in Hamilton. I quit the rig job and flew back to Ontario.

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last modified:Monday,June 9, 2008 at 04:21