This is Not A Drill

by This Is Not a Drill- Just Another Glorious Day in the Oilfield (retail) (epub)

  The guys at the coalface I looked up to are still around, mind you, but not for much longer. They’re all hitting their sixties, leaving the rigs and taking with them that wonderful old-school oilfield headspace. The one I listened to so carefully as a boy. But still, I find myself in the oilfield . . .

  The Russian rig was always going to be fun. It was real frontier bullshit, with genuine old-school oilfield bad boys and guys who are so far gone all they know is drilling and that’s it. They don’t give a shit about anything but the rig and God help anyone who can’t fit in.

  I was thankful Erwin was there. He’s our most senior offshore operator, a big man with broad shoulders and a hard, level gaze. Now in his mid-fifties, he is the most experienced and easily the best operator I have seen. Erwin has done it all; run every kind of pipe, on every kind of rig, on three continents, in more than a dozen countries. The first time I went offshore, wet behind the ears and totally ignorant of rig life, I met Erwin and instantly liked him. A few years later, after rig-hopping around South-east Asia, I landed a spot on his crew. I was lucky—his reputation is well-deserved, though he never brags about it. He taught me with a combination of patience and good humour, and guided me through my first five years in the oilfield.

  Without trying, Erwin always retains a presence of authority and calm even when the worst is happening all around him. He’s the guy with the light around him, the one that looks like he’s got a weapons-grade temper but in fact doesn’t.

  Erwin’s presence instantly lifted my mood, and within a few days of his arrival we were all joking and laughing about the operation. You know, ‘Gee whiz, we all nearly drowned yesterday’, that kind of thing.

  My crew on this gig were all from Azerbaijan and finished every sentence with ‘fargin’. They’d walk up to me and say, ‘Paul, when we go to town drink vodka fargin?’, ‘I don’t like Russia rig . . . food no good fargin’. And so on.

  On the rig, I was sharing a room with three blokes: ‘Sick Boy’, who didn’t talk much and snored like a pit bull being hot-waxed; a very nice Canadian named Dave Nordli who everyone called ‘The Seal Basher’; and a habitual alcoholic called ‘Vodka Bob’, who had the DTs—the shakes—so bad he couldn’t fill out his daily report.

  Vodka Bob drinks Guinness for breakfast when he’s not on the rig. Sometimes he chases it with Smirnoff neat. His prefabricated concrete flat is cheaply furnished and sits in a run-down housing estate in Moscow, but it’s better stocked with liquor than your average supermarket. He’s been working offshore for fifteen years—the same as me, only Bob has not been as lucky.

  Bob got up around six. I watched his ritual every morning. As he took long drags on a Texas Five, he’d put on his gear, slipping his fingers into leather gloves creased and moulded from the cast of his hard, thick hands. He’s thirty-six, the same age as me, his body strong—not toned like you see reflected in overpriced gym mirrors in Sydney, but powerful from years of heavy work. It’s work that’s kept Bob alive, because if it were not for his regular abstinence enforced by the no-alcohol rule offshore, Bob would have drank himself to death years ago. Vodka Bob performed this routine each morning in meditative silence, under the watchful eyes of 1998’s Playmate of the Month, who was taped to the wall by the shelf above his bunk. She was vaguely reflected in the tattoo descending Vodka Bob’s back. He’d pull a comb through his long hair and have a last drag on his smoke. He was ready for work.

  I think Bob had a better sense of himself by the end of his hitch offshore, his body winning a war of attrition against his will to drink. If only he could find the strength to avoid the bottles lining his flat.

  Sick Boy was one of the assistant drillers. He’s big, covered in tattoos, lives in Thailand and roars around the rig with a broad Scottish accent and a never-ending ability to make you laugh. He was fun to be around, and the drill floor was always organised when Sick Boy and the other AD, Scott, were around. Sick Boy got his name for all sorts of reasons. Besides knowing how to bleed and butcher a human, he is a skilled storyteller and exponent of the cling-wrapped toilet bowl. If it’s done right, you just don’t see the plastic stretched across the bowl until you stand up and wonder why your poo is levitating.

  Kamran was one of my guys. He’s a monster really, six foot eight inches tall, three hundred pounds, with a neck the same circumference as my thigh. His hands are so big I can’t shake them properly. And he’s a true walking penis; all he talks about is chasing women. I think he’s been on the rig for far too long; he should be sent home next week.

  The Americans on board got on very well with the Russians, there was a sense of mutual respect that hovered around their interactions. And modern Russia was alive and well, you could tell from all the vodka that somehow found its way on board one day. Its presence instantly lifted our comrades’ moods, smoothed out any dramas and turned them into toilet humour, in a Boris Yeltsin kind of way.

  Most of the American guys on the rig were from Louisiana; they’re all Coonasses (Cajuns), you know. Considering they had just lost twenty-two rigs in one hit and most of New Orleans to Hurricane Katrina, they were in relatively good spirits. It was us guys out there manning dodgy rigs in the Russian sea who were taking a chance. The seas there are notoriously wild. The choppers were older than me and could only fly by line of sight; they regularly had to turn back because of the weather. That got interesting when they were past their PNR (point of no return). With half their fuel gone, they were committed to finding the rig in fog thicker than a ‘Big Brother’ housemate. So if anyone was going to get hurt, it was meant to be us. Not the boys drilling a couple of miles offshore from Bourbon Street.

  Only a few days after the abandon-rig alarm, the weather turned nasty. We had a fire and H2S drill on the same morning, with wild seas, a listing rig and the wind blowing at sixty-five knots. Hard-hats were flying all over the place and the drill was a complete shambles. The tool pusher—the rig name for the drilling manager—was so angry he wanted to keep doing the drill until we got it right, but the weather was too bad to do it safely. He wouldn’t give the muster list and radio to the company man so he could shut it down, and I eventually had to talk the radio out of his hand; he was like a retired greyhound with a stuffed rabbit. There was a massive hurricane tracking up towards us and all reports suggested it was bad. We were thinking we might have to evacuate to the ‘Asylum’, a former Soviet mental institution that now houses offshore personnel en route to the rig and the closest thing to a hotel for hundreds of miles. I’d stayed there before. It was creepy and still a dump, but with vodka now . . . super.

  The H2S is a bastard drill to do in bad weather, but you’ve got to do it. It’s called a ‘sour well’ when we encounter H2S, or hydrogen sulphide gas. H2S can hide in the formation and slowly migrate to the surface; it’s heavier than air, completely odourless and deadly. Just one hundred parts per million will kill a man in a few seconds. It’s very similar to potassium sulphide, the gas once used to put criminals to death in America’s judicial gas chambers.

  The worst case of H2S happened a few years ago on an offshore rig. Everyone except the derrickman was killed. He was working at the top of the derrick and was therefore well above the deadly invisible cloud that engulfed the rig. All he could do was watch as one after another the crew just dropped to their death.

  With no warning because the gas has no smell, you don’t even know that you’ve breathed it in, you just suddenly asphyxiate. On a brighter note, we have gas detectors that go off like a howitzer if someone so much as farts, so no-one was going to drop dead on my watch!

  There was a Spanish ‘mud logger’ on the rig called Miguel. Miguel made the drilling fluid we pump down the well. He spent his days in the mud pits, basically a big dark steamy room located deep in the bowels of the rig with huge vats of thick, slimy drilling mud. He wore what looked like a badly made 1960s sci-fi spacesuit, which in turn made him walk like the monster from Young Frankenstein and sound like a Spanish Darth Vader. He had to
wear it because he was mixing the kind of nasty chemicals that would rot your head off, disfigure the next five generations of your offspring and make you internally combust if you got too close. It’s a lonely job but Miguel seemed to enjoy it. I think on some level the suit gave him power, like when grown men think, just for a second, that their power drill is actually a machine gun.

  When we were out here last year Miguel was very upset that we didn’t have any movies to watch. ‘Dis eez fakin sheet,’ he protested, his accent so thick he would have a UN interpreter squinting in desperate concentration. But this year Miguel came prepared with more than two hundred DVDs, and was soon the most popular mud logger in history. For a while there everyone was banging on his cabin door twenty-four hours a day as they all have laptops and very short attention spans.

  After a couple of days Miguel got pissed off with this and said he would ration the movies to one per day, of his choosing, to be screened at 7 p.m. So one night all the guys on day shift settled down in the big TV room to wait for Miguel. He walked in, striding confidently down the centre aisle. ‘I hab a super mobie por cho guys,’ he said, smiling. When Miguel smiled, you smiled back, not out of politeness, but because he’s so scary. Apart from being a big man, Miguel has a face that looks like it’s been set on fire a couple of times and put out with a cricket bat.

  Miguel held out the disc in his big, weird hand—years of chemical burns had turned it into leather from a mad cow—pressed the open button on the player and dropped the disc into its cradle. Little lights flickered to life on the display. Miguel turned back to face the packed TV room and proudly announced, ‘Di Cunt of Monte Christo.’

  After that, he didn’t share with anyone. People were paging him on the rig’s PA system, ‘Can the Cunt of Monte Christo pick up line one please?’ The ‘Monte Christo mud pits’, as the sign read, was not a place to venture alone, as the ‘Cunt’ himself was a force to be feared and in that spacesuit he cut a fearsome profile.

  I went down one day and found Miguel skulking about with a sack of caustic soda that weighs more than I do casually balanced over his huge right arm. ‘Hi Miguel,’ I said, looking him directly in the eye—literally, as he only has one—and smiled. ‘Brought you a coffee, mate.’ I handed the mug over. He knew we were shut down waiting for a chopper to arrive. Work has to stop for half an hour as the crane cannot operate if a helicopter is on final approach. We sat down on some big sacks of Christ-knows-what and had a good bullshit; he was laughing by the time I pulled on my gloves and stepped out through the hatch.

  Later that afternoon Miguel brushed past me in the hall and shoved something in my top pocket. I looked down, a little confused, and pulled out a Vequeros Colorado Maduro cigar. These are easily one of the best Cuban cigars, but also one of the hardest to find because they don’t have propylene glycol in them, an additive used in the humidification process. Without it, export outside Cuba is ‘impossible’ unless you happen to find yourself in a Russian mud pit talking to a Spanish one-eyed mud logger.

  I’m not kidding about Miguel’s eye—he got some acid in it years ago on some God-awful rig in Brazil and lost it. His favourite party trick is to pop out his false eye and quietly drop it in your beer. Then just as you’re finishing off your pint you pull focus on an eyeball rolling through the foam towards your open mouth. Without his prosthetic eye, which at best resembles an old marble because of too many drunken episodes that ended with it rolling about on some bar room floor, Miguel looks like he should be put down—or perhaps just left in his spacesuit to creep around in the mud pits.

  Miguel rides a Harley Dyna Wide Glide and is a card-carrying member of the ‘Sons of Bitches’, a motorcycle club of which Erwin and I are also members, although by law in his country you can’t ride a bike with only one eye. Miguel dropped it a few years back when some housewife pulled out in front of his bike on a suburban road. The impact was minimal but contained just enough force to pop out his eye. He picked himself up to confront a tearful middle-aged lady, who fainted when Miguel casually retrieved the eye that was rattling about in his helmet and stuck it back in his head.

  Weeks slowly rolled by as temperatures plummeted. The weather regularly pummelled us with blizzards, and on the drill floor the work was hard. The rig was not winterised; there was very little protection from the constant wind and snow. Every few hours the rig’s vibration would shake free giant clumps of ice from the cross members of the derrick above us, sending frozen missiles down to shatter on the cold steel floor. Choppers were few and far between, and guys started to miss their crew-change dates, unable to get off the rig. Even the supply boats could not get in for days on end. It all took its toll on the crew, and eventually we started to run out of food, with the offerings up in the galley starting to look less like a decent meal and more like something you’d throw in the dog’s bowl. Tempers frayed. I tried to keep my boys in good humour, but sometimes jokes aren’t enough, and sometimes morale degenerates to the point where a fight kicks off. Usually explosive and short, fights on a rig tend to be vicious as no-one is prepared to back down, so they fight harder. The resulting ‘What happened?’ questions are almost unanimously answered in the same way, with the standard ‘He fell’. Or the most popular and timeless ‘I walked into a door’.

  It happened so much that the company put up signs in a vain attempt to stop the boys from scrapping—or maybe it was to encourage a more creative line of excuses. It was a little hard to believe that anyone could reasonably walk into a door on the rig when every single door had a huge yellow triangular sign on it depicting the universal black toilet man walking straight into one.

  During this time of domestic unrest, we had a very special visitor on board. It was only a brief visit as he was on his way to Africa via Asia where he would find another rig to rest on. He likes rigs because it’s in his nature to claim the highest point on the horizon. And once claimed he will defend it with his life. He is a falcon, a fearsome predator.

  In his first week, he killed an owl who dropped in—I presume because it got lost, having been blown offshore in a storm that came through one night—as well as a crow and half a dozen sparrows. The owl was minding its own business on the heli-deck, probably wondering what the big ‘H’ stands for, when our guest just leaned forward off the railing of the crown block at the top of the derrick and plummeted straight down two hundred feet, whistling past our derrickman’s head, wings swept back to reduce drag and increase speed—speed he needed as the owl was much bigger than him. At what seemed like inches from impact into the drill floor, he shot horizontally straight out of our level ‘V’ door, just a blur, a weightless arrow, down the catwalk and across the heli-deck in seconds. The noise of the rig covered his lightning approach. In the last few feet he threw his legs forward, extended his wings and buried his talons deep into the unsuspecting owl’s back. An explosion of feathers erupted as the owl fought back but to no avail, he was already too seriously wounded from the first strike. Our assassin made a meal of the owl and returned to his throne on the crown block. What remained of the owl was given a burial at sea; he never knew what hit him.

  At 3 a.m. one morning I was talking to the tool pusher in the ‘dog house’, the room where the driller stands on the drill floor, when our guest came down from the derrick, flew straight in, and perched himself on a cable in the corner not three feet from my head and went to sleep. Not afraid or even curious, he just got too cold up there, as the wind and rain had been lashing the derrick for several hours now. All week we had been steadily sliding past freezing point, and the temperature would continue to fall past minus fifty as we headed into winter. And after all, it’s his rig isn’t it? So get the fuck out of the way, I’m coming in.

  The tool pusher ran off to the galley to get him some bacon. I ran off to get my camera. I was impressed and named him ‘Blitzkrieg’. He was equally impressed with me, and shat on my hard-hat twice that morning.

  In the migratory season all kinds of birds come through. When
the weather suddenly turned foul a huge swarm of tiny finches, too many to count, diverted to our heli-deck and huddled together against the wind, the horizontal rain buffeting them into one big circle of tiny feathers. Then the sun came out for ten minutes and they started to hop up and down and chirp. But, as if God himself was fucking with them in much the same way we did when trying to run cockroaches to death in the galley at two in the morning by flicking the light switch on and off, it started raining again. The third time the rain and wind disappeared and the sun popped out the finches all went apeshit, hopping about on the heli-deck until one of them lifted off above the rest, his tiny wings flapping like fuck. ‘DO WE STAY, DO WE GO . . . OR WHAT?!’ he chirped to the others. They launched themselves in complete unison back into the sky and in a few seconds they were just a brown cloud trailing the horizon.

  Little sparrows buzzed about down on the main deck, jostling for space around the garbage bins. They regularly got bullied by a crow that arrived from nowhere. His reign over the bins was short-lived, though, as one day he strayed too close to the derrick—that’s Blitzkrieg’s turf. Once again death from above came hurtling down silent and fast. All that remained were a few black feathers and some blood on the floor by the bins.

  Blitzkrieg picked off the odd sparrow, snatching it straight out of the air and devouring it mid-flight. He made endless circles around the derrick, occasionally shouting out a warning to everyone above the blaring rig’s white noise. ‘Come too close and you’re a dead motherfucker,’ as the tool pusher translated for me.

  I liked Blitzkrieg, he kept it simple. When he’s rested up and there’s a break in the weather he moves on, making the next leg of his long journey, rig-hopping down the coast past Japan and Korea all the way to Africa. He makes the trip every year, playing ‘beat the clock’ with the elements, returning to the same rigs again and again. He’s warmly received on every drilling derrick from Russia to Sudan. Accepting whatever name they give him, he knows every local custom, speaks a dozen languages. He blends in, disappears into the steel and kills anything that comes too close to his rig. If there was a symbol for our industry, it’s him.