The rig floor is called the RED ZONE now, and anyone caught treading into The Zone, who has not first notified the driller, signed the Permit to Work and the Task Based Risk Analysis (TBRA) gets canned. Deep water, where touchscreens and joysticks are the norm, the area is treated like a minefield.

Drillers and assistant drillers engage the equipment just like in times past, but before technology took over, unless ole Drill had a sudden tic and grabbed a lever by accident, the roughnecks weren’t at risk from a runaway tong.

I know of one occasion where the tera-dactal-bytes lost their collective minds and dropped a 100,000-pound, $10 million dollar top drive and traveling block onto the rig floor. Every red “Oh Crap!” button the driller could find to push didn’t stop that train wreck.

Another time, a computer tech sitting on his duff in Norway troubleshooting a software glitch managed to engage the drawworks and move 650,000 pounds of drilling assembly when we were making hole at 19,000’. That one was scary and begs to question what damage a hacker could reek because the rig was in the Gulf of Mexico.

I suppose the boys are lucky in some ways. Roughnecks dope pipe, pull slips and watch the equipment do most of the work. Oh, they still get dirty and sweaty and it takes as many men, more in some cases, than it did back when the work was done by hand.

When I worked floors, as we called the job in the olden days, I heard, “Get in there!”

Today, roughnecks hear, “Get out of there!”

Sometimes I get to feeling like I’m normal. Then, I remember I’m only 1 of 7 billion inhabitants on this fruitful orb. Of that number a little over a billion are Chinese. Another billion plus are Indians. India Indians not American Injuns (no offense.) Americans are a small fraction of the total.

Talk of Indians reminds me of the time I told my rig manager, an Indian, the India kind, when I was in India, that the rig had engine problems.

Something got lost in translation there.

Hindus revere cows as a source of food, but wouldn’t dare eat one. Though I know of one man, Raju by name and Hindu Caste by religion and lot, who ate a bite of fillet out of curiosity one night. He likes his medium-well now.

They believe in reincarnation, too. I don’t know exactly how all of that works, but what you come back as after you’re a human would bother me … was I to believe in such things. My luck I’d return as a dung beetle.

Some years ago the company decided I should attend a sales training course. Why someone who drills holes in the ground would need such an experience eluded me. My wife laughed when she heard. Anyway it turned out to be a fast and furious lesson in psychology and sociology—driving, amiable, analytical, and expressive human traits and government/family versus individualism/money.

I discovered I’m 90% driver plus a 10% mix of the other three, and I lean heavily to the money and individualism side of the chart. I believe our government should deliver the mail, defend the borders, not the boarders, and leave me and mine alone, period. Nothing more.

My learnings never explained why I found my Indian roughnecks, all three of them, in bed with my assistant driller one night. He was an Indian and a man. They were under the covers, curled up together, watching a Hindi musical … in a single bed. Arab men, Indian men and Filipino men hold hands in public. The latter I can stomach.

Or why one of my Sri Lankan roughnecks walked in my office one day with an armload of Cokes and offered me one. He’d just been informed about the birth of his first son, and he wanted to have a drink of soda and celebrate. I got to thinking and asked, “Haven’t you been in Saudi Arabia 2 years without a day off?” He stood proud and told me his brother went in for him.

Okay, I’m not normal, but who is?

Tomorrow morning, if you wake up disappointed because you have nothing to do, thank God. Most people wake up disappointed because they have nothing to eat.

What image do you see when you hear the word roughneck? Do you imagine a lanky, snuff-dipping, slow-walking, slow-thinking hillbilly village looking guy in filthy coveralls with the pant legs stuffed into the top of his steel-toed boots? Or maybe you think of a man with a PHD, a pair of Post Hole Diggers.

John worked as fast as he walked and talked, like a tortoise, but he was steady. He was six feet, one inch tall, chubby, slumped at the shoulders, and quiet as a titmouse. Rumor spread that the rig had lost the contract. I asked John about his future plans if he got laid off. He expressed serious reservations about the alternative to his current job, mopping the decks and painting every day, but said if he had to, he’d go back to his old position at SMU, as a professor of microbiology.

Brad was chubby, too, and old enough that I called him Sir. He was steady and rarely said anything related to his personal life. I worked with him a year before I found out he flew F-4 Phantoms in the skies of North Vietnam. He has a degree in aeronautics and can still, today, fly just about anything with wings.

Cade pulls slips and talks about surgeries. Six months ago he worked as an O.R. nurse.

Roy has a degree in English Lit. Jeff has a degree in History. Frank and Sam have degrees in economics and finance. Frank sold a Chrysler dealership and swore to never touch a briefcase or wear a suit and tie ever again.

If someone told me they knew the Pope. I’d say “So what, I know Karl,” a brilliant mind with 3 degrees in aeronautical space engineering. In fact, I relieved Karl one day, not long ago, on the rig floor.

I told my elderly mom I relieved a rocket scientist. The next morning at bingo, she told Ethel, “My son relieved a rocket scientist.”

Betty leaned in and asked Ethel what Mom said and Ethel whispered, “Polly’s son is a rocket scientist.”

Mona asked Betty to repeat what Ethel said and she whispered, “Polly’s son works for NASA.”

Ellie tapped Mona’s elbow and asked what all the whispering was about. Mona shrugged and said, “It’s nothing. Polly son works at the NAPA  store.”

Ellie said, “Good, maybe he can get me a deal on a set of windshield wipers for my car!”

If you didn’t know what drillers did for a living and happened to overhear two of them talking shop, you might wonder about the quality of the cheese stacked on their cracker.

They go to work, sometimes traveling halfway around the world to get there, to spend 12 hours a day, everyday, in a doghouse, work with worms and weevils, and handle snakes and spiders. They’ve grabbed a cat’s-ass, picked up gator tails, taken a mouse out of a mouse hole, seen a worm put a mouse in a rat hole, stuffed a rabbit in a joint of pipe, and fished in the middle of a desert where water is as rare as the tooth fairy … and caught a fish!

A rig has a crow’s foot and a crow’s nest but no crow, a pigtail but no pig, and yet, might have a pig with no tail. And a driller can work on a rank wildcat with a rank worm who smells like Old Spice cologne.

I have a shop full of woodworking tools and only two items, a crowbar and a cat’s paw, got their name because of their resemblance to an animal or bird. Both are used to pull nails or pry. I used to work for my father, an auto mechanic, and I cannot think of one tool named in a like manner. I’ve identified 79 pieces of drilling equipment where a noun—an animal, a bird or a reptile—is used as the adjective to describe the tools appearance, purpose, or ability to perform a task.

Names like Hedgehog brush, snake, rabbit, Piranha mill, monkey board and dog collar speaks volumes about the men who worked the early rigs. Immigrants, migrant farmers, the downtrodden and downhearted Great Depression era men looking for a new life in new industry, called it how they saw it. We still use the terms today.

Mama told me long ago I needed to straighten up or I’d find myself in the doghouse. Smart woman.

The country of Yemen has made the headlines several times of late—coups, wars, and rumors of wars. What started as a civil scrap among countrymen escalated into a regional conflict when Saudi Sunnis began bombing the Yemeni Shiites who are backed by Iran and also Shiites. Arabs fighting Arabs supported by Persians, all of them Muslims. Truth be told, there isn’t much difference between this current dustup and what’s happening in Libya and Syria, or the civil war in Lebanon in the 1980’s, or for that matter the Protestant/Catholic fighting in Ireland. One sect doesn’t like this sect who doesn’t like another sect, all because they all assume to know what God or Allah thinks. Some sore disappointment on the horizon for all of them I’m afraid.

My first trip anywhere was to Yemen, North Yemen at the time. Nothing like experiencing a culture firsthand. Actually, first and second hand, both hands, as in up, held over my head. Amazing how fast they go up when someone points an AK47 at you. A camo-clad Arab patted me down just after I walked off of a flight from London, into the terminal in Sana’a. You would think that’s the one time and place people are unarmed. Everyone in the building had a gun but me. I couldn’t read the Arabic written on the sign outside, but I would not have been surprised to learn it translated to The Terminal Terminal.

The taxi ride to the rig concerned me more than the frisking I’d received the evening before. Like sitting in a rollercoaster without a seatbelt. As the guy herded the old Chevy down an escarpment that looked like Wolf Creek Pass on steroids, he took pride in pointing out the numerous balls of twisted metal rusting away among the rocks and deep crevices. The hulks of cars, heavy trucks and a spattering of buses told a grizzly tale. Where they landed was where they stayed.

The oilfield was close to the ancient city of Ma’rib, right in the middle of the most desolate country on the planet. Mountainous sand dunes barren vegetation, animals, and birds, the summer days hot enough to pop corn on the stock. Bunch of malarkey about cold nights in the desert, too. Yes, the temperature dropped 40 degrees, but 140 – 40 is still 100. Find some cool in that and I’ll eat your hat.

Never seen so many flies in my life. You won’t see a fly hit the windshield, but stop the pickup and they’ll cover you up within seconds. It’s like the grains of sand morph into a black, ravenous plague just to torment humans. Eyes, nose, mouth, ears, any source of moisture draws their unrelenting attention. The whole Middle East is fly invested.

When I think of arrowheads, I think of feathers, tomahawks and war paint—the American Indian. To my surprise Yemen is a great source for Stone Age arrowheads. I found many on top of dunes over 1000 feet tall. And I mean there was zero, zilch, nothing but sand for mile after mile. Kick around a bit and poof, an arrowhead. After the wind blew the same dune would yield another point or two as the gusts uncovered them. I often wonder about the men of that time period. What did they hunt and what took them to them a top a dune? Maybe the sea covered where I had stood and men fished with the bow and arrow from a dugout boat. God only knows.

One day a friend and I went looking for arrowheads. We found a few points, but none of them very impressive. I steered the pickup down a dry watercourse called a wadi, toward another area we’d had success at. We talked as men do, consumed in the conversation instead of our surroundings. My friend looked at me and suddenly his eyes bugged out, his mouth flew open and he ducked. I looked left into the muzzle of an AK and barely clamped my mouth shut in time to keep my heart from leaping out the window. The kid holding the weapon in my face rode in another vehicle that matched our speed and wasn’t 2 feet from us. He wasn’t 10 or 11 years old. The little rascal and his 15-year-old brother siphoned the gas out of our pickup at gunpoint.

A queen named Bilqis ruled Yemen back in King Solomon’s day. The area was known as Saba back then. You may know her as the Queen of Sheba. She’s the gal who loaded her camels with gold, frankincense, myrrh and other gifts and toted the lot across the Arabian Peninsula to Jerusalem just to see if the wise King was all he was rumored to be. That’s the Biblical story, according to I Kings, chapter 10. The Koran has another interesting account of their meeting that describes jinns (genies,) hairy legs and devils. I’ll leave my thoughts on the source and subject of the above three where they originate. If the queen could return to her old stomping grounds today, I doubt she would be surprised at what she saw. The only thing that’s changed is their mode of transportation and the weapons they use to kill each other with.

One of these days I’m going to ask God how come there’s no oil in Maui.

The thought of writing anything, period, never crossed my mind the first 42 years of my life. Looking back, I don’t remember what possessed me to start. It was the summer of 98, and I was living and working in Saudi Arabia, deep in the desert, so maybe I suffered from a mild case of heat exhaustion or had an allergic reaction to a swig of curdled camel’s milk. Some who know me might think I tripped over a lamp, dusted it off and “POOF” received 3 wishes.

I don’t remember my first story either. The piece wasn’t long because I typed it into the body of an email. I do recall receiving rave reviews … from my mother. Instead of “Oh, honey, that was so good,” she should have said, “Boy, you really did waste 12 years of schooling, didn’t you?”

If writing is as natural to you as walking, I’m jealous. I wish I had the gift. Yes, education or the lack of aside, I believe it is a gift from God, just like a singer’s voice, a musician’s ear and a surgeon’s hands, to name only a few. I pray you haven’t wasted the talent.

If you’re like I am and your God-given abilities don’t include perfect prose, engaging dialogue, nail-biting tension and page-turning hooks, that doesn’t mean you can’t learn to write and write well. I have some advice I learned the hard way, if you’re inclined to pick up a pen for the first time and wonder about your skills.

1. Write! No child ever walked without taking a first step. There’s no time like the present to pen the first paragraph.
2. Join a critique group. (Your mom is supposed to like your writing.) Their advice is invaluable. Remember not everyone accepts criticism well and not everyone knows how to give it gracefully. Put your feelings in the desk drawer before reading their comments. Consider all advice, but in the end it’s your story, written in your voice. It’s your decision.
3. The dictionary is full of words. Don’t fall in love with a handful and get bogged down. Throw them out and go find some more.
4. Acquire “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk. The English language is complicated. This text makes sentence construction easier.
5. Show. Don’t tell.
6. This one is my opinion. I think there’s a reason for bedroom doors and mirrors. Leave the sex scenes behind the former and you’ll be more able to meet the eyes staring back at you in the latter.

To me, writing was a rare discovery–a gem, a gold nugget, a true love–and totally unexpected. Get your muse on. Then, when someone tells you how much they enjoyed your story, you’ll have another reason to meet the reflection in the mirror with your head up.