by Bill Barich
At my motel, the air conditioners droned incessantly and dripped machine sweat down the stucco walls. They seemed to be the only forces working against inertia, little athletes of the ozone pushing the envelope of their Freon and their coils.
Slow-stepping maids trudged across a courtyard to feed their wages into a soda machine, trying to quench an unquenchable thirst. The man in the next room was a horrible white from avoiding the sun and could be glimpsed seated in his skivvies before a TV, not a sight for the faint of heart. He resembled a grub rousted from under a rock.
You don’t know me, but you don’t like me—maybe it was the nearness of Los Angeles, 109 miles away, or the talk of twisted relationships, but I felt that I was moving toward an archetype of California that any American would recognize.
Bakersfield was smaller than Fresno, but it felt larger. Crude desires were afoot. The city had a cadre of spiral-permed blondes and Yuppie wanna-bes trembling on the brink, wishing that they could be in Hollywood or in Malibu but afraid to take the leap. Those who had taken the leap and had failed were home again, smarter and wiser, big shots of the San Joaquin who demanded the best tables in restaurants and liked to tell about an exciting movie party they’d once attended, where Danny DeVito had been present.
The cotton money in the valley might be quiet, but the oil money was loud, screaming like a banshee. There were monster I-made-it houses in Bakersfield, scores of BMWs, Mercedes, and slick little Porsches. The many banks downtown were tall, glassy, and imperious. Registered Republicans ran neck and neck with registered Democrats, a retrograde quirk of politics that became more pronounced as you moved farther south in the state, as though you were sliding into Mississippi.
For all the city’s wealth, its black ghetto was as torn and as shabby as any place I’d seen in California. It looked every bit as bad as the photographs of Dust Bowl migrant camps, precisely that ravaged and inhuman sixty years down the line.
You don’t know me, but you don’t like me.…
One afternoon in Bakersfield, a redneck cop on a motorcycle roared from behind a billboard to write me a ticket for going thirty-seven in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. I fled to the countryside, where the farms were a triumph of agribusiness. The average holding in Kern County was a whopping 1,347 acres compared to 260 acres in Fresno County. Kern County had more than 300 million acres in farmland, almost double its closest rival in the state, but it was the paraphernalia of oil recovery that dominated the sagebrushy desert.
Out toward McKittrick, Buttonwillow, and Taft, the big petroleum companies had their compounds. Trucks motored about in a maze of pipes, steam generators, derricks, gas lines, capped wells, and storage tanks. Here, the San Joaquin was as brightly hallucinatory as Saudi Arabia. Any minute, I thought, Bedouins on camels will come riding over a ridge.
OIL WAS GOLD, too, our black gold. The substratum of southern California was layered with deposits that began around Coalinga and continued through the San Joaquin, oozing over to the coast at Santa Barbara and Long Beach and coalescing into rich pockets in the Los Angeles lowlands.
Indians of the region had depended on a tarry substance to caulk their boats. Mexicans and Spaniards had used the oil that they found in seeps as a roofing material for their adobes, but there was little commercial drilling for petroleum until the 1860s, largely because whales were still being slaughtered in great enough numbers to keep the oil lamps burning.
Geologists had also thrown people off the scent. They had investigated the asphalt, a sort of coal tar, in the state in the early 1860s and had judged it to be wanting as a source for providing illumination. It was inferior and clogged with carbon—so Josiah Whitney reported, relying on some tests that William Brewer had done for him.
Brewer was more enthusiastic, though less scientific, than his boss. In March of 1861, he rode west from Santa Barbara along the ocean, past cattle and sheep ranches, to view the asphalt bubbling out of rocks and solidifying in the sun.
“It occurs in immense quantities and will eventually be the source of considerable wealth,” he predicted, but the first big gusher to spout in California seemed to support Whitney’s conclusions. It blew in Ojai Valley in 1867. An exploratory drilling team trumpeted its merits, but the oil, which quit flowing in short order, was too crude to be processed at the primitive refineries then in operation.
Drillers working in the San Joaquin had better luck. They brought in significant wells around Maricopa and McKittrick, and there were similarly rewarding finds elsewhere in the area. Oil production throughout the state jumped from 40,000 barrels in 1880 to more than 1.2 million barrels in 1895. By 1900, a thousand or more wells dotted the land northwest of Los Angeles. Near Taft, not far from Bakersfield, the Midway and the Sunset oil fields were among the richest around, but the Lakeview Gusher, which blew in 1914, put all the other fields to shame.
There had never been anything like the Lakeview Gusher—not anywhere, not ever. It yielded 18,000 barrels during its first twenty-four hours, a record still unsurpassed. Photos of the period show a wood derrick coughing up a giant plume of smoke while awash in oil. The oil rolls out into the desert in slicks, like a body of water. Workers had to navigate it in skiffs. It kept overflowing and washing into camp, and families were evacuated. Everyone prayed that an idle smoker wouldn’t set it on fire with a match. For eighteen months the gusher pumped, yielding about 9 million barrels before it ran dry.
The Lakeview and the Midway-Sunset made the fields on the west side of Bakersfield famous around the world. In the early 1900s, the Midway was still producing 72,760 barrels a day, while all the wells in Texas combined were producing 28,800 barrels a day. One out of every three barrels of oil in the United States came from California. Visitors from abroad arrived to look into the situation, among them two gentlemen from the Nippon Oil Company of Japan.
In 1913, Fatty Arbuckle came to Taft to star in an oil-based romance, Opportunity. Fatty played a poor but exemplary youth who captained the Standard Oil baseball team and earned so much respect for his virtuous behavior that he rose to the station of mayor. Arbuckle reveled in the high life and enjoyed being on location in Taft, where the beer, sometimes trucked in from Saint Louis by Anheuser-Busch, flowed as freely as the oil.
As the supply of petroleum increased, so did its uses. In its crudest form, it was burned in boilers on ships and in factories, and it fueled the refineries in the valley where beets were turned into sugar. In the form of kerosene, it replaced coal as a source for heating homes and buildings, being cheaper and cleaner. The railroads ran on coal, too, but they switched after the Santa Fe tested a locomotive engine retooled to burn oil and saw that its operating costs had dropped by a quarter.
The most significant single demand for oil came from the burgeoning ranks of automobile owners. By 1910, there were already twenty thousand cars in Los Angeles County devouring gasoline. Ford City, north of Taft, was so named on account of all the Model T’s in town. Scarcely in need of any encouragement, the oil companies kept drilling, and the economic epicenter of California began to shift slowly from north to south, sucking the juice from San Francisco and delivering it to L.A.
IN BAKERSFIELD, oil was news that had stayed news. Along with a Gideon Bible, my motel room was stocked with a California Oil & Gas Telephone Directory that had been published in Forth Worth, Texas. It listed hundreds of geologists, petroleum engineers, and oil operators and producers, and ended with a listing for “Xmas Tree,” conjuring an image of roustabouts singing carols as they strung their derricks with blinking lights.
The Bakersfield Californian, a daily, carried a column about oilfield happenings that was so technical it made my eyes spin in their sockets.
“The low at DOE’s No. 934-29R is from three perforate intervals totaling 130 feet in the overall interval from 17,000 to 17,365 feet,” Bill Rintoul, the columnist, would write, and I would groan and feel stupid and stare at Rintoul’s mug shot—a kindly faced man, no shadow of the recondite—and think that ma
ybe I could understand something about the oil-and-gas game if he’d be willing to decipher it for me, which he graciously agreed to do.
Rintoul lived on a quiet, tree-lined block in town, where dogs were sleeping and insects hatched in heat-driven swoon. He was a Berkeley graduate and had met his wife, Frankie Jo, while working in the oil fields as a youth. In the flesh, he was a wiry, rugged man in his late sixties, who looked as though he could still put in a full shift on a drilling crew without bellyaching.
Rintoul wore a wide-brimmed straw hat to shield him from the sun. He told me how he had gone to Egypt once to do a story for a trade journal and how his hosts had apologized to him for the sweltering temperature.
“Well, it’s cooler than Bakersfield,” he’d said to them, and for the first time I heard the bake in Bakersfield and saw a red-hot cookie sheet fresh from the oven.
We got into Rintoul’s car and automatically committed the first maneuver in any Bakersfield journey undertaken in August by turning on the air conditioning and carefully adjusting the little vents and plastic blades. There was probably a special technique to the vectoring that I had yet to master, but soon a miniature breeze was blowing, and we were off.
We drove up Panoramic Drive to a spot above the city, so that Rintoul could point out three historic oil fields through the haze—Kern River, Elk Hills, and Midway-Sunset. They had all yielded a billion or more barrels of oil. Another field in the vicinity, South Belridge, was hidden by hills, and it, too, was capable of yielding a billion barrels. Only twelve other oil fields in the entire United States had ever matched that feat, Rintoul said. A note of civic pride crept into his voice, but he was dismayed by the miasmic air we were breathing.
“What good is it going to do if everybody gets rich, and we all die gasping?” he asked, with a laugh.
The Kern River Discovery Well was nearby, hand-dug to a depth of forty-three feet—very shallow for such an important find. Rintoul had me imagine what the field was like in 1899 when dozens of bare-chested men were hammering together derricks from wood. He was a boxing fan and told me that Jim Jeffries, the future heavyweight champ, had labored there as a boilermaker, building tanks for the oil. The derricks were gone now, turned to sawdust and splinters by termites and windstorms, or simply torn down because they were outmoded.
People did earn lots of money in oil and gas, of course, and Rintoul took me to meet a pair of them. Rod Nahama and Frank Weigant were petroleum geologists who’d left their jobs with big firms to work as consultants. After a few years on their own, they’d quit consulting and had formed Nahama & Weigant Energy Company. They had done handsomely enough over the next decade to take the company public in 1971, a feat that many independents aspire to but don’t always achieve.
Nahama and Weigant were unpretentious fellows. Over coffee, they explained to me how they had got started. They were short of ready cash in the beginning, so they had to search for investors to buy into their projects and share the risk in exchange for a share of the profits. John Hancock had underwritten many of their efforts, but they were also funded by much smaller concerns.
Once the funding was in place, Nahama and Weigant would target some likely land that showed good potential for oil or natural gas recovery and lease it. Sometimes they went after land that other firms had already picked over, aiming for deposits that had been missed. Farmers were more than glad to be paid twice for the same parcel.
In the early days, Nahama and Weigant often concentrated on the Sacramento Valley, where natural gas was plentiful and the mineral rights were not generally tied up by the oil conglomerates, as they were in the San Joaquin. They had their first major strike at Conway Ranch in the Putah Sink, near Sacramento, where they located sixteen gas wells. Now they had fifteen employees and kept busy whether the market was bull or bear, surviving even in the most difficult periods.
They were an unusual company, Weigant said, in that they netted more money from gas than from oil—although other companies were regrouping in a similar way due to the lowered profitability of the petroleum industry. Natural gas was cleaner and cheaper to produce, preferable from an environmental standpoint, and the price didn’t fluctuate as much, so they had no trouble selling every molecule that they found.
Nobody had done much oil exploration recently, Nahama added, but the ground still held lots of oil. Of the 6 million barrels extracted in the state every day, 600,000 of them came out of Kern County.
Petroleum was easier to find than investors, both partners agreed. These days investors shied away from the chanciness of exploring and the high attrition rate of independent companies. Nahama and Weigant had been talking lately to some Japanese investors about potential joint ventures, but they weren’t satisfied that they had made much progress. “The Japanese want to invest and earn a return on their investment,” Weigant said, shrugging. “They just don’t want to take any risks.”
ELK HILLS and the U.S. Naval Petroleum Reserve were in the Saudi Arabia west of Bakersfield. The hills were bare and ugly, but thousands of tule elk, pale-skinned little creatures, used to roam them. The last of the elks had a preserve on the East Side Canal, sharing it with egrets and great blue herons.
The U.S. Naval Petroleum Reserve dated from World War I, when the federal government had set aside some 46,000 acres of oil-drenched land to guard against any wartime shortages. Edward Doheny, who’d made a fortune on oil in Los Angeles, did the initial drilling in 1923 after cutting a suspicious deal with an old pal of his, Albert B. Fall, the secretary of the interior.
Doheny agreed to pump the oil and store it in tanks. The land was leased to him for free, and he got to keep a share of any profits. In return for such favors, Doheny enlisted his son to serve as a bagman and bring Fall $100,000 in cash to help him buy a cattle ranch—just a loan, Doheny claimed later, but he and Fall were swept up in the Teapot Dome scandal of 1924, and Fall was sent to prison.
Doheny beat a bribery rap and suffered less damage than his attorney, William Gibbs McAdoo, who was presumed to be guilty by association. When McAdoo ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1924, he heard shouts of, “Oil! Oil! Oil!” every time his name was put forth.
Bill Rintoul had a friend at Elk Hills, Ken Schultz, an employee of the navy, who was in charge of the drilling program. He was crew-cut and had the spine of a military man. Rintoul bragged about him and let me know that he had drilled about 1,200 wells on the reserve, among them the deepest well in California at 24,426 feet. Schultz seemed in awe of his own feat. After all, he had worked his way through college by toiling in a muffler shop.
“If you’d’ve told me I was going to do that when I was a young man graduating from USC in 1947,” he said, in wonder, “I’d have asked you what you were smoking.”
Schultz wanted to show us a well that he was currently drilling, one that was targeted for 17,000 feet. It was hard to think about such a hole. Wouldn’t it lead you straight to China? We were given hard hats to protect our innocent heads. Objects sometimes fell from an oil rig, hurtling toward bystanders from on high. A wrench, a lugnut, a lunchpail—brainbusters were everywhere just waiting to happen.
There were about two thousand wells at Elk Hills, and about half of them were active. The Department of Energy had Chevron as a partner now instead of Doheny and granted the oil giant 20 percent of the take.
Schultz’s rig was visible from a long way off. It was a towering assemblage of girders, cables, ladders, and steps. Tiered platforms rose in a pyramidal shape some seventy or eighty feet into the sky. The rig was centered over the well, and the drill pipe had some small, industrial-grade diamonds imbedded in a hard matrix.
“It took more than twenty trucks to bring that rig in,” Schultz said appreciatively.
A subcontractor, Parker Drilling Company from Tulsa, Oklahoma, owned the rig. Mr. Parker was supposed to be so patriotic that he wore red, white, and blue underwear. An American flag was flying by the rig near a sign that said, 77 days without an accident—not l
ong enough for me. The rig operated on a three thousand horsepower motor, cost about $250 an hour to run, and would remain up for about a month.
I liked the look of the rig. It had a structural integrity from all the tensed and braided metal. A wily artist might have pawned it off as a sculpture. The derrick stamped it inalterably as an oil rig, but at the same time the platforms, the busy workers, and the billowy flag suggested a ship that had somehow gotten stranded in the desert.
A drilling crew of five men was scurrying about—three roughnecks as all-purpose floorhands, a derrick man, and a driller to push the buttons. The driller was the top dog, followed by the derrick man. The roughnecks did dirty, dangerous, back-breaking work for a pittance. They made about nine dollars an hour, while the lowly roustabouts who laid pipe, set pumping units, and handled the mopping up earned just six bucks an hour.
Still, a job at Elk Hills was considered a good one, Rintoul said. The men were guaranteed steady work and had a certain degree of security. They could live at home or rent a trailer in a trailer court. Other crews were much more mobile. If you happened to be out drilling shallow development wells, for instance, you had to move with the rig every three or four days. Sometimes you ended up sleeping in your car or pickup and subsisting on burgers and grease for weeks at a time.
In some ways, Rintoul observed, the oil business had gotten worse, not better, over the years. The technology had improved, but the profits had dropped, and the big oil companies had suffered losses and were constantly cutting corners. They were laying off more and more workers, and the men still working were pushed harder. When a rig was up and running, it ran around the clock in twelve-hour shifts. A man would work a forty-hour day shift and then rotate to a forty-hour night shift. Going from shift to shift screwed up the workers’ body chemistry and their internal clocks. Sometimes they drank to come down, an oil-field tradition.
