The Rig Part 1

An Introduction

Picture me at twenty-one years of age. In fact, don’t strain your imagination too hard. That’s me up above, in the only picture I have from that whole summer. Let me tell you something about that guy up there in the red-coveralls standing in the mud with two pairs of work gloves in each pocket. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s an absolute moron.

It’s not his fault that he’s dumb, necessarily, but it is his responsibility.

There’s a conflict in his heart about what kind of person he is supposed to be. Everything he knows about what it means to be a man involves a willingness to face danger and take risks, but he has always been bookish and had his head in the clouds. He’s wanted to be a writer for his whole life, and at the same time known that doing so would disappoint every single person in his life that he respects. Instead of facing that dilemma head on he’s run away to the desert to hide from his duty. He thinks what he is doing is respectable because it is painful. He thinks the physical toil itself will kill the indecision in his soul.

It won’t.

The only cure for pain is to feel it until it is grown over. Like most people, he’s willing to go to extraordinary lengths to avoid knowing that.

He’s surrounded by opportunities but all he can see is a very narrow band of options for what his future should bring. In his quiet way, he is intensely melodramatic and dichotomizes everything. He’s going to college, in part, on a scholarship from NASA. He beat out every other graduating student in his congressional district to win that honor. There are two women whose sole job is to help him and about forty other students find cool things to do. He’s never spoken to either of them. He’s got help confused in his head with begging and he’s too proud to beg.

That’s how stupid he is. I wasn’t joking.

He hates anyone who looks at him like he might need anything, and he’s too stubborn and foolish to see how weak that makes him. He’s angry at the universe for everything that has ever happened to him and the only person he can find his way to punish is himself. At the same time, he feels like he’s living the wrong kind of life and that he’s stolen it from someone else. He’s too blind to notice that enormity of that flaw. He didn’t even want to take the money for the scholarships until his grandmother told him he was being ridiculous.

When he graduated high school, a Nobel Laureate called him to ask about his plans but his older sister hung up the phone. He never picked up the phone to try to call back. He didn’t want to be a nuisance since he already took some of that man’s money. So he does the most childish thing possible and just feels guilty about it instead. He has an unpaid lab assistant job for the next school year, but he got that by asking good questions in class rather than any deliberate planning. Planning for stuff like that terrifies him because then he’d have to want something for himself, and that’s the biggest thing he doesn’t want to figure out. Better to go with the flow.

He understands work, he understands tasks, but he doesn’t understand people almost at all. Work is much easier than people. There are ruts in his mind so deep that he can’t even see the walls. It is this myopia that brings us to the day in question.

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It was the evening and I’d just arrived back at my mother’s house in New Mexico after the end of a grueling double shift. It was a rig move day, where all the crews got together to move all the machinery from one drilling location to another. On rig move day, you stayed until the work was done. I crawled out of the bed of a pickup truck where I’d been laying for the last three hours. I’d learned all kinds of tricks to sit comfortably even as the truck bounced along the dirt roads in the mesas, so I was still spry as I crawled out of the back with my mud-splattered coveralls held in a plastic grocery bag.

There was still a problem, though. That day, I couldn’t manage to beat the heat. My nose, in particular, suffered the worst. I’d tried to lay down with my hard hat over my face to block the sun but my intervention had come too late.

My nose is on f—king fire, sunburnt worse than anything. The pain had been building minute by minute on the long drive out of the mesas.

I wave goodbye to my driller, Cory, who was driving the truck. He took off without acknowledging the gesture. Cory was Navajo and didn’t like me very much for taking what he viewed as a Navajo job. Well, truthfully, he hated my guts. That was the real reason I had to ride in the bed of the truck, although he claimed it was because I smelled like a wet dog. He told me that I stank only a few minutes after he had told me that I looked like Shrek, which had happened only a few minutes after our first meeting. In whatever case, no ogres were allowed in the cab of his truck, even if the rest of the crew rode up there.

It was not the first time I’d been the only white guy on a job site, and assumed to be lazy and worthless for that reason. It was always the same story. You go through some hazing period where they try to drive you off. As long as you don’t bitch about it to the bosses and show some spine and did a good job then everyone always drops it after a while. Unfortunately, it would take the whole summer to get to that point.

Everyone was asleep in the house when I opened the door, so I slunk back to the bathroom in my mom’s garage where I’d been staying. The garage was a half-finished bedroom, a project her landlord started but never finished, so it wasn’t so bad as it sounds.

Like every day the first thing I did is wash my hands. Then I cupped my hands and gulped water straight from the faucet. I can’t make myself wait for a cup. I drink five gallons of water everyday while I’m working on site, but sometimes I go two days without having to take a piss. I know enough to know I need to drink until my pee is clear and I keep failing to do that despite trying. Some days when I take a shower, it’s like I can feel my skin drinking. For the first minute after drinking like that, it would always feel like my tongue doubled in size.

I accidentally stuck my nose in the water as I was slurping it up and it stung terribly. Some stings feel like you need them, though, and this felt like that kind of sting. I stuck my nose back into the water cupped in my hands once my belly was full and I breathed through my mouth with my eyes closed. I didn’t do anything else for something like ten minutes. Then I showered and irrigated my nose again after all the sweat-salt and other desert grime was off me.

The sweat salt from that summer was biblically terrible. I had to be careful about what I wore out there because of the salt stains. If you sweat long enough, it’s like your body starts wringing sea water from out of your muscles.

My nose still hurt terribly, so I dug through the medicine cabinet and found a tube of A&D ointment, which must have been several years old at that point from back when my siblings were in diapers. I smeared it all over my nose and some other parts of my face then did my best to fall asleep.

I made sure to hate myself before falling asleep. Hating myself helped to avoid thinking about what I wanted and the responsibilities I would bear for wanting whatever I decided. To arrive at that moment, I’d walked by all kinds of offers of assistance. Helpful hints and long glances when professors mentioned work-study jobs. Or when would-be friends talked about waiting tables or doing some kind of customer service job and there being an opening, wink wink. It wasn’t that I was completely oblivious to the offers. It was that for a variety of convoluted reasons, I genuinely convinced myself that working on a drilling rig would be preferable.

The problem was that the mill had shutdown, I told myself. The prior two summers, I’d been able to make enough at the mill that when combined with my scholarships I had been able to pay cash for my whole education. I found the idea of taking out a loan totally abhorrent, for reasons you can probably understand. I had never worked with anything other than my hands and by the sweat of my brow. My identity was wrapped up in it, my male pride, and the good opinion of my dead grandfather. I wasn’t at peace with who I was, so I was clinging to other things to provide stability. I didn’t come from a people who waited tables. Therefore, I wasn’t a person who could wait tables. My people swung hammers. Therefore, I had to swing a hammer. I came from a line of Atom Movers. I wanted to move atoms. Terms like “wordcel” or “shape rotater” didn’t exist yet, but my twenty-one year old brain still couldn’t think of any job involving anything like that as honest work.

The next day when I woke up my nose was bright red, like a clown nose. And dry, too, like my nose had somehow ingested the ointment as I slept. When I washed my face, I once again had the curious sensation that my skin was drinking. The pain was still bad but now my whole body felt desiccated. My eyes were dry, which meant I hadn’t had enough water before falling asleep. I drank another few liters and then I smeared my nose with ointment again.

Ever the scientist, I sometimes took my weight before and after work. My all time record was an eleven pound difference. That’s despite drinking as much water out there as I possibly could. I’m a big guy but that’s still ludicrous.

I did the nose care routine again a few hours later, when it seemed like my bright red nose had drunk up all the lotion for the second time. And again after that. And again that night. The pain was constant, an itch that made me want to rip off my own face to get rid of it. I would have done anything to make it go away. It was the most self discipline ever exerted in my life to keep my hands away from my nose.

I don’t know what I would have done if I’d had to go back to work immediately, but thankfully this was the start of three days off. So for three days I tended to my nose, submerging it in water and smearing it with lotion. Every lotion on the internet found its way onto my nose. The pain was constant. It hurt to eat, because chewing deformed the tissue in my face, which deformed the tissue in my nose. It hurt to sleep, because I’d turn over onto my nose in the middle of the night and the pain of it would explode and wake me up. Eventually, due to my ministrations my entire nose turned a dark brown the color of dirt. You would have thought I’d dipped my face in chocolate.

On the third night, I lost the entire outer layer of skin on my nose. It just sloughed off in the shower like the skin of a snake. I gasped as it fell to the floor of the shower and slid down the drain. I felt like I’d lost a limb. When I grabbed a mirror to inspect the damage, a character from a horror movie stared back, oozing blood red flesh and gristle exposed to the whole world. I looked like the Red Skull partway through tearing off his flesh mask.

The older man destined to grow from out of this younger one would have immediately taken this as a sign to find another job. I mean, who wouldn’t? My fucking nose fell off and escaped down a shower drain! The author of this piece that you’re reading right now would go out and establish a network of friends and colleagues and find some difficult but not physically torturous task that needed doing and then go out and do it. If the compensation wasn’t high enough, the man you’re reading right now would temporarily take on additional work to subsidize his income, up-skill, then get a better job until his financial goals were met. The guy whose substack you subscribed to has had years of therapy and leadership training. I’ve got a wife and two kids who need me to behave responsibility and orient myself toward positive action. I’ve got the knowledge that this whole situation is going to get way, way worse.

This kid I’m remembering as I write these words didn’t have any of that in his back pocket. All he had was a crazy mom, a dumb dad, and a dead grandfather.

The tenacious, stubborn mule who shares my body and my memory still went to work a few hours after his nose fell off. A twenty-one year old me just gritted his teeth and covered his nose with some zinc he had bought at the pharmacy and wrapped his head in a sweatshirt on the way out there and back. It was hot as hell but better than the sun burning him up again.

Another day of intense heat and salt sweat. Another day of high elevation and thin air. A day spent hoping none of his coworkers would throw away his little sandwich bag full of ointments the way they’d thrown away all of his books and all of his lunches.

I wouldn’t let myself quit, although sometimes I wanted to. I wasn’t at peace with who and what I was. I was angry that I didn’t fit in anywhere. Like I said, I was stupid. My pride was wrapped up in it. I wanted to hurt myself, so I did.

What’s it to you? It was no skin off your nose.