Wednesday, June 27, 2012
11:30
Roughly an hour ago we cleared the jetties to the port of
Brownsville, Texas. The mobile jackup
rig Noble Sam Noble is now headed south along the coast to Dos Bocas, Mexico,
where it will pin and await the drilling crew before moving on site and getting
to the business of drilling. Barring
weather problems, this move should go just like the last one, in the Tom
Jobe. That is to say, six to seven days
of being pulled slowly by three tugboats along the Mexican shelf. From Brownsville to Dos Bocas, by straight
line across the Bay of Campeche, is 900 km (485 nautical miles). Skirting the coastline about ten to twenty
miles out, the trip is 1200 km (660 nautical miles). We take the longer route in case bad weather
forces us to run for the shallows and jack up.
We’d been idling in the port of Brownsville for about two
weeks, during which time I went home and then came back again, because of some
tropical storms. First was Hurricane
Carlotta, which ran west across southern Mexico, and then was Tropical Storm
Debbie, which formed in the eastern Gulf, loitered about for the better part of
a week, and then drifted back east.
Generally speaking these storms are detectable systems 2-3 days before
they become dangerous storms, so there’s a certain amount of lead time, say for
a rig like this one, to escape to safer waters.
But oil companies, and more specifically their insurers, don’t play
games of chicken with rigs worth a hundred million dollars or more.
My only gripes so far are pretty minor, considering the
overall ease of this job (I’m on standby until the rig pins, and then I do a
sonar scan of the bottom). First is that
I still have colitis, though on the severity spectrum I’m very much on the mild
side. But I do take some maintenance
medication, to keep inflammation down and my immune system at bay. Due to the herky-jerk nature of my
home-and-back-again storm-related travel, one of my prescriptions could only be
filled after I’d returned to Texas. So
Kate dutifully got it filled and overnighted it to the port office down
here—and now my meds are languishing in an envelope, somewhere, ins somebody’s
office or possibly a distribution center.
Had there been more time before leaving port I would have gone to the
office myself and searched. I may never
find out where it went—it’s a little like the end of Raiders of the Lost
Ark. Second is, I got knocked out of my
bright, airy perch on top of the rig house, where I’d taken up station with my
computer. The rig mover and rig manager
both want the space now, so I ceded it.
That in itself means nothing, except that I do need at least some access
to sunlight while I work, otherwise I might really go Overlook Hotel out
here. So I’ve just moved into the office
that the mover and manager vacated…problem solved. Except that they took the coffee maker with
them.
Last remark for now.
The hardest part of the early school year at UNH was maintaining my
energy level, when I was commuting back and forth several times a week, on
short rest. But what’s become the most
difficult now is listening to my little girl Eva cry over the phone that she
misses me. It’s hard not to hear that
and curse every decision I’ve made that brought me to the point of working for
weeks at a time away from home. Kate and
I are adults, and I know that Kate works very hard to conceal her anxieties from
me when she sees the need. (Except for
when she admits to nearly driving off the road in tears after dropping me off
at the airport—so we won’t do that again.)
Eliot is just a baby and pretty much his entire world is his mother, so
he’s fine. But Eva is a child, and
children don’t understand. They’re not
supposed to understand. They shouldn’t
have to understand.
14:40
We’re still within sight of land, though more
distantly. As the afternoon goes on it
will drop below the horizon and we’ll be over the deeper part of the
continental shelf. It’s surprisingly
temperate out here, for being at 25ยบ latitude.
Of course, it’s always cooler on the water than on land, but I was
surprised at just how comfortable I was my last time out on deck.
To pass the time, I’m either practicing math (which I
absolutely must do), or indulging in a little reading. I like to challenge myself, and my current
challenge is William Blake. He was the
most enigmatic of the English Romantic poets, active in the late 1700’s and
early 1800’s. Blake distinguished himself—violently—from
his contemporaries in a number of ways.
He wasn’t content to simply write words on a page, and let a printer
typeset and publish them. Blake engraved
most of his poems into copper plates and printed them himself as illustrated,
or illuminated, volumes. Particularly
notable among his illustrated editions are the Songs of Innocence &
Experience, the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Milton, and Jerusalem. The latter two, along with Europe and
America, are among his prophetic works.
William Blake is most popularly known for his Songs of
Innocence and Experience, and specifically, for two poems in them, two of the
most famous in the English language:
From Songs of
Innocence, The Lamb:
Little Lamb, who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee,
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee;
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For He calls Himself a Lamb
He is meek, and He is mild,
He became a little child.
I a child, and thou a lamb,
We are called by His name.
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
And from Songs of
Experience, The Tyger:
Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And, when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
* * *
Blake is less well known for his prophetic works. He saw himself as a prophet, a social outcast
laboring to show humanity how to live.
My best understanding of Blake’s
vision is to use a modern scientific analogue: the theory of the Big Bang. This theory holds, that before time began—and
time itself is about 10 billion years old—the entire universe was a singularity,
what we think of as a black hole. Only
there was no space around it, and everything we now know—all matter and all
energy—was contained in this singularity.
And then, bang. The singularity
exploded, producing space, energy, and matter.
Since then the universe has been expanding outward—like the expanding
cloud of an explosion—and gradually cooling.
Matter and energy remain constant—or, as Einstein would say, matter is
energy, so energy remains constant—but thermodynamics has taken over. Highly concentrated sources of energy are
dissipating and spreading out: the universe is running down, so to speak. All the fossil fuels we burn on Earth to
carry on our business are just stored forms of solar energy—partially decayed
plant matter--and the Sun is running down too.
So our human economy is no exception to this.
In Blake’s terms, the universe has fallen from its original,
singular state. When everything existed
all together, undifferentiated, not subject to analysis and study, the Universe
was pure and whole. But the bang—the fall—changed
all that, and now the Universe has many parts, all flying away from each other,
all cooling down, all subject to separate analysis by humans like us. So the human psychology is just the remnant
fragments of the original man—Albion in his poem Jerusalem—which must be
reunited into their singular, undifferentiated state for man to be
restored. Male and female are unnatural
subdivisions of the original man. Blake
identifies the rational faculty as Satan, itself not something to be shunned,
but rather folded back into the whole. In
man’s original state, religion, science and art are effortless acts of inspired
imagination. Love is spontaneous for all
things, not activated by sexual desire.
To rise from the fallen state is to see everything imaginatively as part
of and within yourself. This is why,
contrary to what’s normally supposed, the Songs of Innocence, talking about a
childlike imagination animating the entire world, actually detail a higher
consciousness than the Songs of Experience, which deal with the resigned state
of an unimaginative adult.
This much I’ve gleaned from commentaries, and from Blake
himself. But Blake surrounds these
central concepts with a swirling array of characters, allegories for human
psychology, historical periods and people, geographical locations, and
more. A few examples: the character Orc
is identified with the Freudian concept of the Id, or animalistic desire. Orc is by no means inherently evil: he’s more
of a relentless upsetter of order, and not at all evil. Urizen (“you risen”, get it? Clever) is the
rational faculty, the most evil component of the human makeup. Coban (the philosopher Francis Bacon, with
some letters mixed up), Hand and Hyle (Isaac Newton and philosopher John Locke)
are Urizen’s trustiest aides, shackling man to a rational reality. Los (“soul” backwards--isn’t Blake tricky?)
is the human soul, struggling to pacify all of his constituent parts in order
to restore man—Albion—to his unfallen state.
So Blake’s a mess, pretty much. That is to say, his prophetic works are
intentionally dense, full of variety and hard to penetrate, with many
references in many directions all at once.
In a sense time never passes, because all events might be taking place
simultaneously. There is no trace of a
clear chronology. Blake’s prophecies
bear more than a passing resemblance to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, really. You might go so far as to say that Finnegan
and Albion are the same. You might.
So this is my challenge!
Since it’s hard to stay motivated over a calculus book for several hours
a day, I have this other, even more difficult, thing to contend with. Besides, I love poetry.
Thursday, June 28, 2012
13:20
This rig move—hard to call it a voyage—is reminding me of
two years ago, after I’d come home from the hospital, recovering from a severe
episode of colitis. I was unemployed
then, though in contact already with Entrix, for whom I would work across the
summer as an acoustician. Mostly,
though, I was hopped up to near-insanity on prednisone, a steroid which reduces
inflammation (the main goal), and also does other steroid-type things like make
a person more irritable, destroy the sex drive, and give a person unnatural
amounts of energy. From May through the
end of June, I think I averaged about 2 hours of sleep a night, if that. Every second or third night I simply wouldn’t
sleep at all. Usually I was coming up to
bed around 3:30, lying fitfully awake for 45 minutes or so, and then dropping
off until 4:30 or 5.
So I put the nighttime hours to the best use I could think
of : I read. And I picked the one writer
I felt guiltiest about not having read yet: Thoreau. Thoreau’s thinking is free of pity, full of
wonder, relying more on his own senses and imagination than anything he’d
read. His writing is a confirmation and
a challenge, as the best writing should be.
So I’m using this enforced confinement aboard the Noble Sam
Noble—no phone, no internet connection, nothing outside except the sea and the
sky—to do some reading I’ve put off for too long. William Blake is a very difficult poet to
wade into. People commonly divide his
lyrical works, like Songs of Innocence and Experience, from his prophecies, and
even somewhat to look on the prophecies as misguided and possibly unhealthy
aberrations of his later life. Even the
Songs of Experience are sometimes considered to be a sign of Blake’s descent
from his earlier celebration of innocence, of his steadily growing
disillusionment with life, and incipient depression bordering on madness. These opinions, however, are nothing but
laziness wrapped in ignorance. All of
Blake’s work forms an imaginative whole, founded on the primacy of
imagination. Innocence is simply a
higher imaginative state, more childlike and informed by the mind, than
experience, a weary resignation to the cruelty of existence. Both states can exist within the same mind,
but innocence, being more creative, is superior. The goal of all creative effort is to
reestablish the state of childlike imagination—though more sophisticated,
perhaps, in adulthood, but really no different.
I’m finding this more cathartic even than my reading of
Thoreau a few years ago. 2012 was the
year of my twentieth reunion at Dartmouth (which I avoided). I’m largely ashamed of how I became a drunk,
accomplished nothing, and made no lasting close friends there. These past few years, while hardly at all able
to economically support my own family, this humiliation in me has burned all
the hotter. And as I look in rage and
fear at the largely successful efforts of a few very wealthy people to paralyze
and murder this democracy known as the United States, I fear not only for my
own family but for the world in general.
I fear for the world even more than when I was an adolescent terrified
of nuclear war during the Reagan years.
Blake lived and wrote during the times of the American and
French Revolutions. Two of his major
prophecies—America and Europe—were inspired by and devoted to them. He also watched the French Revolution devolve
into a horrible bath of blood resulting in tyranny worse than before. When I look at the disenfranchisement, economic
misery and cruel austerities of people and nations today, I see anxiety and
pain not unlike what drove people to revolution almost two hundred fifty years
ago. So, I thought, I’ll turn to
Blake. His work was at once intensely
psychological—perhaps answering my own internal wars—and occupied with the
cruelty of society.
I’ve found a gateway into my own memories (“spectres”, forms
of man’s fallen state, in Blake’s world).
And this is a good thing because in Blake, as the soul must draw its
spectres into itself in order to become complete, so my task is to understand
my choices of twenty-two and twenty-three years ago, and harmonize them with
the person I am now. In Blake’s terms, I
am to welcome that spectre back into myself and be healed.
Nearly sleepless nights this winter and spring, as I thought
bitterly about teachers I had and friends I alienated, I learned nothing so
much as just how deep and strong this current of feeling was in me, and
therefore I could come to suspect how much this bitterness had been affecting
my judgment even up till now. Counseling
following my mother’s death taught me that old trauma has large effects on
daily life later. The anger I was
directing toward colleagues at the time was due to the grief over my father’s
death, nearly ten years prior. And the
disdain and suspicion which has become such a natural part of my manner now, I
felt was the result of what I’d done decades ago. Disgust with and distrust in myself led to my
projecting them onto others. I was
unable to make friends.
The emotional question is larger than “I coulda been an
actor” or some other such silly thought.
Most of us, within limits of our ability, can be anything. During my senior year at high school, I went
to a one-day theater seminar at Hanover, held in Dartmouth’s Hopkins
Center. We saw a play, toured the
center, and had a question-and-answer session with a professional actor. I came away enthralled, convinced I’d found
my career. I told my parents so over
dinner.
Silence.
“Well, Michael…” my mother answered, “…if you want to throw
your education away and do something like that, go ahead, but don’t expect any
help from us.”
My father remained silent, and looked at me.
I never mentioned it again.
Even when my creative writing teacher told me, after I’d spent the
spring writing a play, that I should do everything I could to get it produced
at Dartmouth, I was already shrinking in fear.
I went to Dartmouth convinced that I was the least intelligent, least
talented person there. I had probably
already made up my mind to simply follow the path of least resistance, like
water moving downhill.
That path led me to Rome, on the archeological foreign study
program. I didn’t care much for Roman
archeology, but I was invited to come back as the TA two years later. Had I known myself better, I would have
refused, for the TAship interested me even less than the program itself
had. Had I had more courage, I would
have begun then to find my own way without advice.
Instead, I agreed.
When I returned to campus that winter, I arranged my semester schedule
to allow for my senior fall to be free of classes. And since I’d missed the fall on campus, with
the new freshmen and all my own classmates there, I panicked. “Where will I find friends?” I asked myself. With my entire college career seemingly
decided for me by a professor, having been too timid to earnestly follow any of
my own interests, and feeling friendless, my heart broke and I gave up. I joined a fraternity and proceeded to
shuffle through two and a half more years of agony.
By joining the fraternity I turned my back on all of the things
I considered important: compassion, introspection, love, and honesty. Instead, I tried to learn the ways of the
house. It’s not surprising I was a complete failure as a fraternity brother, a
bitter drunk with no sense of proportion in how I acted or dealt with people. I had shut off my higher faculties and relied
only on the lowest.
In short, I betrayed myself.
I think it’s necessary for a person to indulge his or her
self-destructive tendencies.
Self-knowledge does not come without great pain. My main regrets of college are making few
friends, and learning nothing useful while I was there (except how to split
wood and light a fire, I suppose).
I had a few romantic hearbreaks along the way, but they were
largely of the puppy-love sort, where I hadn’t actually been in a relationship
long, or at all, with the woman. The
heartbreak of my sophomore year did not involve a woman, it only involved my
hope. It was so deep and so quiet—my
last remaining bit of nerve, which had been shaven away to nearly nothing by
two years of cowardice--that I wasn’t aware of any symptoms until years later,
and only now have I diagnosed it. I had
a few mild heartbreaks over women, of course.
There were girls I was interested in at Dartmouth, and after, whom I
think back on wistfully. And while I
thought I was in love once or twice, I never found out much about it.
Kate is the one woman I know I’ve deeply loved. From the very beginning—and at this point,
I’m not too sure I’ll get back to that Pup & Ben series—from the beginning,
my affection for her was of a very different sort from what I’d felt for other
women. It wasn’t a loud, half-desperate
infatuation. This attraction was much
quieter, and might simply show itself in how glad I was to see her again, and
how sad to leave. (This hasn’t changed,
with me heading out to sea for a few weeks at a time for work.) And since then, the love between us has not
changed or diminished one bit—we’ve simply gained more knowledge of each other. (Like, she knows I like for her to wear
boots.)
“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” is one
of the Proverbs of Hell in Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell. (Let’s just say for right now, that Blake had
an unconventional cosmology. Heaven and
Hell aren’t quite what they’re described to be in church.) In my case, the excess has been twenty-two
years of psychological self-abuse.
What this means for
my life now, I don’t know. I still have
a wife and two children, and the world is still a dangerous place. I still work in ocean engineering (and an oil
rig isn’t really the calmest of places).
But I do know that the spectre is within me now—I comprehend the
memory--and I sense that the nerve which withered away and snapped years ago
has grown back whole.
Friday, June 29, 2012
06:00
I don’t have to get up with the crew for tour (pronounced
“tower”—it means shift) at 6 AM. The
medic is the same way—he and I are outside hires, independent contractors, not
required to be on the rig crew’s schedule.
Yesterday, by his own admission, he slept until 11. (I slept till 8.) But I’d rather get up early. It makes me feel a bit better about myself,
that I’m not just loafing. Things don’t
get busy or noisy around here, since there are fewer than 20 of us (and the rig
could accommodate perhaps 80 or 100) for this move. And even when there are more guys, quiet and
courtesy to the ones sleeping is stressed—i.e, don’t yell, run or slam doors. (Besides, one tour lasts 12 hours—6 to 6,
generally—so most guys awake are out on the drilling floor working. Or, if Ken the rig manager is to be believed,
quietly playing poker somewhere off tour.)
Ken stopped by my new commandeered office—the drilling
office, I think, because I can see some BOP (blowout preventer) controls in the
corner—and we talked a bit last night.
Ken is a softspoken guy, barrel-chested, balding with a horseshoe of
hair, and a dainty set of reading glasses perched either on his nose or sitting
up on his skull. He stopped at the
office door last night and asked me about what all the math I was doing was for
(practicing for next year’s comprehensive exam), and then we talked about work
in the 80’s, after the Iran revolution led to major conservation efforts around
the world. (This was to change with the
advent of the SUV in the 90’s.)
The recession during the Reagan years was much milder than
now—we are in a borderline depression—and, as an aside, the bank crash then was
a scratch on the cheek compared to the mortal wound of now. But there was a downturn, and in the 80’s Ken
turned to carpentry, traveling to different states with his father for work,
and leaving his family at home for weeks or over a month at a time. That’s easily comparable to work at sea,
because of the indefinite nature of work periods. Oil rig employees are generally on a
rotation—7 days on, 7 days off, or 14 and 14, or 28 and 28 (offshore it’s
generally 28 and 28)—and it doesn’t change much—the most that might happen is
they evacuate for a hurricane. Blokes
like me who work on boats are subject primarily to the weather, and as we’ve
all seen this week, it can change quickly and hold things up indefinitely.
I like Ken. In an
unfamiliar environment like a drilling rig (one I don’t wish to get all that
familiar with, frankly), what I ask for primarily in the folks I deal with is
that they be straightforward. So far,
all three rig managers I’ve known have been just that: low-key, earnest men. On the whole, I like the people I’ve found
out here (with a few easily overlooked exceptions). Even Ronnie the cook is a very nice guy—I
just can’t understand 75% of what he says.
Much like that unintelligible bounty hunter in Samurai Jack (the obvious
comedy of the thing).
 |
| The man. |
 |
| The pig. (And friends--sorry for such a blurry picture) |
Not to stray too far off the path here, since this is a
family blog, but of course, conversation on a rig frequently turns to sex—and
it isn’t respectful or thoughtful, either.
I’m threatened by none of it. I’m
a man too, after all. But one of the
more amusing aspects of life is how we see characters—whether people we’ve
known, or even fictional—whom we’ve seen and heard before, appear again in
front of us. I’d think most everyone
(among the millions! Ha. Maybe half a
dozen? Maybe) who read this blog has
known this to happen as well: you meet someone who physically, and even in
demeanor, resembles someone you’ve already known. Like certain physiques and habits of posture
lend themselves to particular ways of speaking or acting. You meet the person
and right away, at a glance, feel you know them already. In this case, it’s a fictional reference
again (like the bounty hunter pig). One
of the cooks on this rig sounds almost exactly—in pitch and intonation—like the
evil cow on “Aqua Teen Hunger Force”.
You are forgiven for having no idea what that show is. It’s one of the more inane late-night
cartoons I used to watch. The main
characters are a floating box of French fries named Frylock, who can shoot
lightning from his eyes (and does so every once in a while); a vanilla shake
named Shake (a selfish and mean-spirited jerk); the meatball Meatwad (childish,
harmless and stupid); and their fat, ugly and libido-driven neighbor Carl. The whole show has a hip-hop musical setting,
and their adventures are roughly as dumb as you might expect. (I like it a lot, and one day I’ll break down
and buy the DVDs.)
 |
| Carl. |
One of their nemeses is Sir Loin, an evil cow condemned to hell, who
occasionally whips up a scheme that messes them all up. This cow speaks—screams, really—with a
high-pitched, angry, black voice. And it
just so happens that one of the cooks sounds just like him. Heck, I close my eyes, and it might be the
cow speaking, including the subject matter (though no longer PG). The cook last night was the one doing most of
the talking about sex.
I love it when characters appear in front of me. Even when it’s a malevolent talking cow.
  |
| The evil Sir Loin. Fear the fries. |
Anyhow, dawn is finally approaching, at quarter to seven
AM. That is still the hardest thing to
get used to, down here in the tropical zone (as I’m pretty sure we now are
below 23ยบ 30’ latitude): the days don’t get very long. Length of day varies more as you travel
toward the poles, and less as you travel toward the equator. I’m now more than ¾ of the way toward the
equator from the north pole, so the length of day doesn’t vary all that much
from summer to winter. Heck, the sun is
still close to its northward limit—we’re barely a week past the solstice--so
it’s practically overhead right now.
As the sun comes up, the sky turns from black to deep blue
to azure, and the highest rainclouds reflect the rosy morning light, while the
ones lower down are still blue-gray.
It’s a pretty stupendous view, except for the jackup legs and drilling
derrick.
20:46
Another day past.
They seem to both stretch out and be compressed as they add up. Seven consecutive days in this metal box with
occasional sunlight—either through a window or when I go out on deck for a few
minutes—and very little communication.
Given all of the horrendous news from Washington DC this week, it’s not
altogether bad that I don’t see any, but the confinement is oppressive. To read attentively, I need to break it up
every now and then with some conversation or something active. There are some good guys aboard this rig but
I might be the only one here with a college education.
The rig itself is making good enough time. We’re almost halfway to our destination, Dos
Bocas. Our rough coordinates around
17:00 today were 21ยบ 15’ N, 96ยบ 35’ W.
Three more full days. The Noble
Sam Noble rides harder than the Noble Tom Jobe did. Smaller waves—right now, surf is running
3-5’—make the rig rock slightly, groan and yank on the tugboat cables. The tugs themselves don’t seem to be having
as easy a time of it as on the last move.
With the Tom Jobe, the three tugs remained evenly spaced, perhaps 60 or
70 yards apart from each other, and maybe 250 yards ahead. Pulling the Sam Noble, however, the center
and portside (left, when facing forward) tugs seem to frequently edge close
together, while the starboard tug remains spilt farther off to the right.
I’m not sure if the starboard tug is just less powerful than
the other two, or one of the captains is steering lazily (which I doubt), or,
most likely, the whole rig is crabbing a little bit. (“Crabbing” is a term used by surveyors, and
possibly other maritime folks. It refers
to a current coming athwart the boat’s intended track, and forcing the boat to
move diagonally—to move somewhat sideways, like a crab. It’s a common feature of surveying in harbors
where tides are active.) I suspect
there’s a current, possibly the wind too, forcing the rig out of line and
making us all crab a bit. Before we left
port I did a little online searching for information on surface currents in the
Bay of Campeche, but there’s very little.
NOAA doesn’t work much in Mexican waters.
Now that the light is almost gone from the sky, the tugs out
front can be seen by their running lights.
When towing anything, a vessel has to run a vertical series of red-white-red
lights, to warn other vessels to give it a very wide berth. Of course, in this case, the tow is not a
submerged sonar fish but a gigantic lighted drilling rig 40 times the size of
the boats. But even so, it’s wise to
warn others that there’s a tow cable there.
We passed through a small storm system last night, and
skirted another this morning, but we seem to be heading into another mild
system now. As the sun descended the sea
ahead was foggy, and I could feel the warm dampness on my skin. Now that it’s dark, the waxing moon is obscured
by scalelike clouds and the tug lights are obscured by swirling mist and
spray. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear
thunder tonight.
I took the evening off of reading and math—I was more or
less fried—and wandered down to the TV room to see if anyone was watching a
movie. They were about 20 minutes into
My Cousin Vinnie. Four things I was
reminded of by watching that film: (1) I really like it; (2) Marisa Tomei is
one of my favorite actresses (I’m almost completely ignorant of the stars of
the last six or seven years or so); (3) Joe Pesci is really funny when he’s not
playing a murderous antihero, like in Goodfellas or Casino; and (4) Ralph
Macchio is a wuss. His acting career had
less impact than Matthew Broderick’s, and at least Broderick had an “I-can-briefly-fake-being-a-good-actor”-type
role in Glory. Ralph? Nada.
Sunday, July 1, 2012
08:24
Our current rough position 18ยบ 54’ N, 94ยบ 33’ W. Our destination is approximately 19ยบ N, 93ยบ
13’ W. So we basically have 1ยบ 20’ to
traverse, or 148 km (80 nm). At 5.5
knots—the speed we’ve more or less maintained throughout this trip—we’ll reach
our destination, Dos Bocas, Mexico, in about 15 hours, or sometime near
midnight.
It’s a fine morning, with a stiff warm breeze out of the
east-northeast of what feels 10-15 kts.
There are plenty of waves rocking the rig, some out of the east with the
wind, the larger, longer swells decidedly more from the north. I think the swells are the remains of
tropical storm Debbie. But the weather
report also predicts rising winds throughout today and tonight, topping out
around 20 kts. I wonder if I’ll be
dropping my gear in the wee hours of the morning. I guess I wouldn’t be surprised.
Today is national election day in Mexico, so the immigration
and customs officials won’t be dropping in via helicopter. This rig doesn’t have any candy on it that
I’ve seen, so unless there’s a stash specifically for the Mexican officials
somewhere, they won’t be getting any.
Just as well, too, that they won’t be trying to land a chopper on the
pad with the rig moving like this. These
things are about as sluggish as you might expect in the water, though the hull
is very much designed for transport.
The whole hull is basically in the shape of an arrowhead,
with the weight distributed reasonably evenly (the helipad extending so far out
beyond the bow helps offset the massive weight of the drilling apparatus in the
stern). Though the overall design is
quite clever, worthy of the creativity people in the oil industry have shown
over the years, it’s still not the smoothest of rides when waves get up. The whole hull shudders and lurches and booms
as water slaps the steel and swirls turbulently on all wides. As I’ve stood on deck watching the blue water
slide by the hull, I’ve often wondered what one of those cables would do if it
snapped. If it snapped closer to the
rig, it would hurt the tug more; if it snapped closer to the tug, it’d hurt the
rig more, likely slicing through a few decks and some of the quarters. Pleasant thoughts while under tow at sea.
15:00
The wind has increased and the seas are building, so the
tugs have cut their speed somewhat and our ETA at Dos Bocas is now 06:00
instead of midnight. It’s unclear
whether the rig will be staying at the port for more outfitting, or will be
moving immediately out to the drilling location, in which case I’ll be staying
aboard for the last leg. It’s now my
ninth day aboard the Sam Noble, and I’m very eager to leave. Walking outside along the rails for a few
minutes is not enough to offset being in the office reading or practicing math
all day, and I’d really enjoy some conversation and companionship. I guess this counts as my “Get me off this
damn boat!” entry.
18:35
ETA Dos Bocas is still first light. It’s clear that we’re drawing closer to land
because there’s an increased amount of flotsam in the water—driftwood and weeds
(I’m not sure what kind of plant) ripped up from the shore or seafloor and
rafted along on the current. I’ve gotten
extremely impatient of confinement aboard this rig. The regular crew is upset as well, since
their hitches have all been extended by a week or two, but without double-time
pay because of a clause in the contract: since the rig has moved into another
country’s waters—Mexico—the clock has reset on their double-time counter. The poor guys are being worked 15-18 hours a
day, and no one’s complaining too loudly (at least in my hearing), but the lack
of morale is pretty obvious.
One grim thing I do find amusing is a part of the daily
safety meetings (twice daily, once before the start of each tour, at 05:30 and
17:30). That is the stern
preacherly/sheeplike congregational dynamic of the Safety Updates. The rig manager for that tour goes through a
list of the particular tasks or aspects of scheduling for this rig (such as
tonight, when Gary told the night tour guys about the 1-2 week stay), and reiterates
a few platitudes (be careful about footing, don’t work alone). And then he, or someone else, will read the
company-wide daily safety bulletin, detailing reported mishaps from anywhere
around the globe.
Today’s bulletin featured two items, one a lost-time
accident and the other a potential accident.
The room takes on a particular hush, and the reader assumes an
especially grave and monitory tone reading out the day’s reported
incidents. The first occurred on a rig
in the Mideast, where a tool (an instrument or pipe-maintenance tool) got stuck
in the drilling pipe. The rig manager
had lost patience, come out of the office, grabbed a hammer and started wailing away at the top of the tool. It promptly came unstuck and flew out of the
pipe, bruising his head and breaking his femur.
The rig manager, on top of being seriously injured, was summarily
dismissed.
Now that’s not a funny story. It’s emblematic of the real physical danger
involved in drilling through rock to find pressurized gas and oil. Read through a history of the oilfield and
you’re likely to come across several anecdotes of field supervisors taking a
similarly hands-on approach to a problem, successfully solving the problem and
later being celebrated for it. There’s a
certain culture of machismo out here, though much less now, I suspect, than in
days before. (But ignorant machismo
seems to have figured largely in such disasters as the 2008 financial crash and
the Deepwater Horizon explosion.)
In the safety meeting, however, stories like that are
received with an even deeper religious sense than “there but for the grace of
God go I.” Every man on the rig knows
that some kind of small problem could suddenly become a major accident, where
his own first instincts could be the perfectly wrong response. Nobody is fully on their guard at all
times—it’s impossible, and unsafe, to be in such a hairtrigger state for very
long. A certain amount of relaxation is
essential for working in a crowded, dirty, noisy environment like this. But the men who hear these safety updates
take them in with an almost childlike simplicity. Now these are reasonably rough men, who drop
plenty of F-bombs and whose entire senses of humor focus on sex. But they’re also men accustomed to being told
what to do, so warnings like these bulletins have a noticeable effect on their
demeanors. “Be careful or you’ll lose your leg and lose your job.” A sound enough warning on a drill rig, to be
sure, but also the kind of fear-based authority you’d expect in place like
this.
Monday, July 02, 2012
10:15
We arrived at the interim pin location off of Dos Bocas,
Mexico, at 06:00. I’d already begun
setting up the sonar, and at 07:30 we dropped it in the water (using one of the
big cranes—that certainly made things easier), did the scan—all clear—and now
here we sit, waiting for customs and immigration, waiting to hear from Noble
about the next steps, waiting for anything.
I don’t know if other nations, or even American exploration companies,
are this sluggish and disorganized. I
noticed the Noble Tom Jobe, the rig I was on last, still pinned and doing
nothing here in the bay, from over two weeks ago. My client tells me that I’m to stay on board
because we’ll be moving out to the drill site later today, while the rig
manager is making plans for the rig to be here at least until Wednesday. There’s nothing for me to do but wait, and
not grow overly frustrated.
It’d be easier if phone calls from here to the US weren’t so
expensive.
16:45
Perhaps working on an oil rig, even as a standby sonar
operator, isn’t the best line of work for me.
The frustration of being cooped up and of plans remaining vague brings
out a very strong vein of profanity in my personality. (For the record, I didn’t swear much at all
until I enlisted in the Naval Reserves in 1999.) Version 1 of the plan, per my client at 8
this morning, was that the rig would immediately move out to the drill site,
where I’d do another scan and then be done.
Version 2 of the plan, per the
rig manager at 8 this morning, was that the rig would stay near the coast, I’d
get off, and then the exploration company would send aboard its own sonar
equipment and staff. Without any way to
reconcile the different versions, I could only wait, as the wind slowly picks
up and the waves steadily grow.
I’m not saying, Do away with holidays, or the Fourth of
July. But I think that a time of fear
and unrest like now requires a rededication of mind and will. Instead of a continent filled with trees,
wild animals, and sometimes antagonistic natives, we look out at a world to a
large extent made by us—with roads, industry, pollution, colliding races, and omnipotent
money—as a challenge. We see societies suffering
from the results of their own labor. We
need to accept the challenges of our own time.
(“What happened to the American Dream?” asked the darkly antiheroic
Comedian in Watchmen. “It came true. We’re in it.”) We need a new dream. The old one is over.
