It’s 1984—December’s stark light.
A long cold started to blow in, the wind
passing through the tall rig hummed like
telephone wires, warning of a storm—
it reminded me of something brave Odysseus
might have faced.

Talk about topography flat as a platter
to the horizon, I thought Nebraska was flat,
but on the high plains of Oklahoma summer ends
in a sudden fall crucified by waves of winter
kicking over everything.

Out there you’re exposed to the bare elements.
Come summer there’d be thick red dust storms
to manage, and tornadoes—but that’s another story

Soon after we started making the new hole
the generators broke down from the cold
and the mud pits began to freeze over.
All was married in mud, though at least
there’d be no snow… not this time.

Flashlights blazed all hands, orders.
A wide-track dozer pulled a pickup
through the muck until it also got stuck.
With mud up to the waist we couldn’t do much,
and hoped for a little more freeze for the traction.

That night I gazed on in the dark of my trailer window
that’s been a geologist’s home for a month
since before Thanksgiving and would be for yet
another month—until I went back to Oklahoma City
sporting a 102 fever—and got the newborn sick.
In an era before flu vaccines, I thought I would die
out there in the middle of nowhere several times.

Come morning no sound was heard but the calls
of rig hands standing around. The generators
were still out, at least the air was clear and didn’t
reek of half-spent diesel. And silence, otherwise
there was the constant roar of the generators
and screech of the rig’s metal on mental that sounded
like a herd of raptors charging through 24/7.

One more stubborn hole to follow that took me into
the new year, and I acutely knew it’d be dry too.
The shows just weren’t there. I used a satellite phone
to try to convince management to back off
but was told “No can do, too late, all the companies
have committed. Chalk one up for the sales team.
Cheers!”

No matter how stupid it wasn’t my money,
a farm-out… my company had split the risk.
I was brought on because I knew the geology down
to the Ordovician like the back of my hand.
And was good at isolating promising zones
while drilling, and could use a microscope.

Sometimes it’s good to look back.
It’s been an overdue preoccupation lately,
whether anecdote or knowing—what, exactly?
Even now it doesn’t seem real to me.

What to make of this cold barren location
mired in mud and memory—
had I expected the beautiful or the wise?
Perhaps just the naked truth: the churning years
lie thick, we live beneath them.

Stephen Cipot
Garden City Park