Sabatical 1

July 1979 - October 1979

Sabbatical

Having done so much work in pursuit of my career goals I decided it was time to take a much needed vacation. I spent most of the summer trying to drink beer, play chess, goof around and meet women in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I had enormous success in all but the last of these endeavours.

By the time September rolled around a small group of four of us were still hanging around the beach. There was Ed and I, from Hamilton; the other two were from Detroit. One of the guys from Detroit, John, owned a Chevy Malibu with a blown transmission. After we had been booted out of Lakewood campground for drinking and consorting with females it was necessary to find temporary accomodation in a motel. A motel employee had expressed some interest in purchasing John's car for $50.

No deal was arrived at so John just left the vehicle parked in the motel parking lot with a note attached to the window. Addressed to the employee it stated simply that if he wanted to buy the car he should send $50 c/o general delivery to John in Houston, Texas. John removed the license plates and kept them. These came in handy later on. Oh, and when we got to Houston he never did bother to check general delivery to see if the $50 had arrived.

Hurricane David came blowing in around labour day and pretty much forced us to finally leave town.

We headed south for some brief sojourns in New Orleans and Houston.

Initially the four of us had decided we would rent a house in Houston and live there for a while. We even paid $50 to one of those companies that said they would find rental accomodation for you. The first place they sent us was in the middle of what appeared to be the black section of Houston. When we pulled up in front of the available house we noticed about ten black guys sitting on the porch of the house next door, drinking beer and looking at us as if we were insane. We decided to look somewhere else.

Neither of us Canadians had a work visa but we decided we would try to obtain work anyway.

September 1979

Some Oil Rig near El Campo, Texas - roughneck

Someone spotted an ad in the classifieds looking for rig workers in a place called El Campo, Texas. Ed and I decided we would pretend to be American citizens from Detroit so we drove on down to El Campo and found the rig. This was where John's Michigan plates came in handy. We screwed them on top of my Ontario plates and drove on up to the rig.

What a decrepit piece of crap that rig turned out to be. The fourty year old Alberta rigs I had worked on previously looked like sparkling marvels of modernity compared to this cranking, creaking collection of (caliginous junk?) burping away in a mosquito infested swamp. Wow, I'd finally found a place to work which was worse than the Alberta oil patch.

We persisted with our little ruse. Ed and I sought out the toolpusher (rig boss) and applied for the two available jobs. He seemed to buy our bullshit about being from Detroit and (after asking us where we saw ourselves in five years) hired us on the spot.

We agreed to go back to El Campo to purchase safety boots and return to the rig at about 10:00 pm to begin the night shift.

I guess the sight of that rig got us both thinking about whether we really wanted to work in that environment. On the drive back to town the subject of conversation turned to ethical and practical considerations of working as illegal aliens. After about five seconds of pondering these weighty issues there was unanimous agreement that we would, in fact, not return to that rig.

This phase in my career thus had the distinction of being the one job with a duration of absolutely zero hours, minutes or seconds.

When most of our money was almost gone the two guys from Detroit flew home. Ed and I jumped into my '69 Pontiac and headed north... back to Alberta.

The next few days involved driving north through Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and finally, Alberta.

The car gave us a lot of trouble all the way home. The tread came off one of the tires so we installed the spare and tossed the old one into a ditch at the side of the road. Then the rad hose blew - in the middle of nowhere. We were delayed here for about 5 hours while Ed walked several miles to a farmhouse visible in the distance to obtain a jug of water.

The hose blew again some time later. This time, there was no source of water anywhere. We decided to employ the one liquid we always seemed to have an abundant supply of... beer. This worked for about another fifty miles before the hose blew up again. This time we were lucky because it happened right next to a river.

In Pierre, South Dakota, we were almost arrested. Actually, we came close to getting shot.. these cops were as afraid of us as we were of them. Fortunately, it all resulted from a misunderstanding about a certain expensive camera lense Ed had tried to pawn off. Once the misunderstanding had been resolved we became brief friends with the cops. They were actually very helpful in giving us directions... out of town.

We arrived in Taber, Alberta on 22 September, 1979.

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Joe Schlockenblock explains, How find a job and Get off Welfare.

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