It was a busy day yesterday…

By Ricky Ray for VT

It was a busy day yesterday.

My brother Randy’s 1/2 brother on the other side called and he needed to go out of town to pick up a big semi-diesel truck he bought and have someone drive his car back to town.

So I agreed to help him and we drove southeast to Rawlins going uphill toward the continental divide.

It’s an interesting but treacherous highway with super high 80 mph wind with gusts that turn over big 18-wheelers.

And the basin has unpredictable weather so you can be in a sudden whiteout storm that can turn to an easy foot of snowfall as I’ve experienced out there.

We had yesterday as a window no snow to get his semi-truck and beat incoming storms.

It’s a historic drive too.

Going out of Casper, you’re 30 miles to a big lake with two high elevation dams on the North Platte River. So it’s a big recreation area for locals. And tons of fishermen go there to catch rainbow trout and walleye and perch.

I’d go there with my grandpa up past the lake up the river towards the lower elevation dam Kortes. We’d go fishing there on weekends.

That to me beat going to church with grandma on Sunday.

Then past the lake to road curves and more south into the unpredictable zone.

At 52 miles out you’re at a rest stop at the old Independence Rock the rest stop for countless wagon trains of people migrating west to Utah as Mormons did or to California and the gold rush.

It sets by the highland Sweetwater River that has clean water year-round plus lots of flocks of wild antelope and deer and elk and back then, wild buffalo.

So there was water and meat for the weary travelers west. From there, going southwest is a small mountain range the Sweetwater flows through. The highland oil basin is called Baroil. A famous area with drilling rigs and working oil pumps everywhere. This is where a lot of the so-called “emergency reserves” are at that Biden turned on to stop OPEC price-gouging Amerika.

What American citizens don’t know is we have the largest inland oil reserves in the world out west, and never needed to import oil from the sand niggers in OPEC.

It was Reaganomics that shut down mines and oilfields out west in the 80s; and the USA was forced to buy oil import from OPEC, paying import taxes and whatever prices they gouge Amerika for.

From Independence Rock, it’s another 75 miles to Rawlins which sits on Interstate 80 that goes east/west. And you’re still going uphill into the 80-100 mph winds. And unpredictable whiteouts in winter.

Like once in my corvette traveling there it was a cold grey day but clear. Once I got past Independence Rock, the whiteout hit, and within the 75 miles when I got to Riverton, over a foot of fresh snow freezing on the highways to be black ice. And almost zero visibility past a car length.

That’s a terrifying nightmare and you can’t stop lest you get stranded out there and risk hypothermia freezing to death.

That with ultra-high winds where 18-wheelers get blown over.

I worked on rigs out at Baroil and know where the so-called “emergency reserves” are all over in Wyoming, Utah, Montana, the Dakotas, Colorado, etc. Man, wintertime out in those areas is easy -40 below some days and nights.

Oil rig work is brutally hard physical work in every area.

And oilfield workers go like 1-2 weeks nonstop around the clock; then 2-4 days off where they’ll go to towns and usually party getting drunk or high on dope like meth… and they use meth to stay awake out there in the oilfields.

It used to be prescription speed until the dirty meth epidemic in the 80s.

Back in the days before Reaganomics oilfield workers and truckers were fuelled on white cross tops or black beauties prescription speed pills.

That was the time of the popular hit country hit about truckers on CD radio “Convoy” by an imaginary country singer CW McCall

The Outlaw country music people did write about the dark side of USA truckers with women at every pit stop town they had adulterous affairs with, and booze and drugs… as well as drug trafficking from the 60’s Vietnam era through the ’80s… but Reaganomics and War on Drugs shut that down…

Truckers moving tons of oilfield oil to American oil refineries in huge convoys before Reaganomics… it was a helluva sight to see back in the day.

So the trip was a flood of memories yesterday as we drove to Rawlins where the big state prison is besides being a portal truck stop town on I-80.

It was a windy MF yesterday getting there colder than a good digger’s ass.

We got in and stopped by a trailer diner to have a bite to eat; Johnny’s been a trucker his whole adult life. So we had a lot of memories of the badass dangerous old days…

We got to the place where he bought the truck from an 18-wheeler repair shop, where tons of truckers for decades have to go for repairs to get back on the roads because I-80 there is treacherous year-round.

They were working on it and it took until dark for them to get done. Man, I did not want to drive out there on that highway after dark…

And it’s a bitch to drive a car type you’ve never driven before to boot. This time it was Johnny’s new 2021 little SUV by Kia.

We got on the road and hauled about 80 to get back to Casper. It was more savage winds and the road was packed with cars and mostly 18-wheelers trying to beat the snowstorm coming.

That Kia was uncomfortable with every complex new electronic gadget in there besides.

That 75-mile treacherous zone was insane winds with idiots on a 2-lane with brights on they wouldn’t shut down… and off a huge 18-wheeler, those lights are blinding even on a big 4-lane Interstate.

Fortunately, I got amber lens sunglasses for driving nights that diffuse bright lights to see sharp details.

I saw Baroil with lights on lighting the night sky with rigs and pumps all over going with trucks turning in to get crude oil from “emergency reserves” bullshit hoax which was Biden telling OPEC to fuck off in essence; where Trump and GOP REPULSIVE motherfuckers taking corporate bribes suck Arab princess sand nigger dicks and OPEC oil is their fuckin’ sex lube.

Actually, that was highly amusing to see…

But it was scary and 1 truck ate it turned over on the side of the road in a ditch just sitting there. Fortunately, no one got hurt. And highway patrol gave the stranded truckers a ride to Rawlins to do whatever. This goes on all the time out there on the basin…

We got to a rest stop at Independence Rock with lots of 18-wheelers parked to crash to take a piss and split. Coffee… you gotta piss…

Man that last 52 miles was wild and deer bolting across the highway by the lake area… you gotta slow down so you don’t tag one at high speed…

In the night that’s when it’s dangerous… they don’t come around by day.

But to see the lake under the night sky was a relief.

We got into town and dropped the truck off at a diesel mechanic’s place and I was happy to let Johnny drive that insane Kia.

We stopped by a Chinese buffet restaurant but late at night around 8 the food was stale and nasty…

I got home and Johnny flipped me $150 bucks for doing him a favor which was nice.

I crashed and now early morning it’s windy as hell outside and I gotta run errands in a few…

As I hit needed REM sleep I dreamed of a little angel out of my past, an old sweetheart I probably should have married…

And a dream of my last night working oilfields out at Baroil… memory from my past…

We were out on a rig working and repairing some things while drilling…

Suddenly the H2S alarm went off… the drill hit a pocket of hydrogen sulfide/H2S gas and it was coming up fast out of the hole and it was red alert meaning fatally dangerous concentration.

H2S is that odor like a nasty shitty outhouse you smell coming off oil refineries. That’s nasty and carcinogenic but not fatal.

When H2S is on red alert it won’t have an odor until it thins out in the open air… but it will instantly suffocate people near it and they die.

So that night in the vicious whiteout on the rig we got an H2S red alert…

And everyone had to clear out of there as far as they could get outside in the open air in the high winds whiteout bad visibility…

So men had to drop everything and get out of there plus panic; with a bunch of men likely on speed to stay awake around 2 AM… fuckin’ insane and deadly…

So we were all on the outside perimeter waiting until it dissipated and the alarm shut off meaning no H2S on the sensors.

So we gathered and did a headcount to make sure everyone got away safe, and damn it one man was not there.

So we went back to the rig and buildings around it looking for the missing man.

And I found him.

It was the restroom and he was sitting on the toilet on the shitter dead from instant suffocation slumped over.

So he was taking a dump when the alarm went off but didn’t get up to run.

In his dead hand was a joint. And he had a prescription pill bottle with joints in it, and another with black beauties speed…

What is it?

Trade names for amphetamines are Benzedrine Sulphate, Dexedrine, and Methedrine; these drugs have familiarly been referred to as “bennies” or “black beauties.”

This was prescription trucker speed back then…

No one wanted to come near the death scene.

So I lifted him off the toilet, laid him on the floor to pull his pants up, and zip his coveralls.

I didn’t dare leave his dope for the highway patrol to see on a dead man and complicate shit with Reagan’s paranoia War on Drugs and have men on the rig shaken down for drugs.

So I put his joints and pills in my pockets with his joint unlit in his dead hand.

Everyone was scared shitless so I had to lift him over my shoulder and took him to the break room and laid him out on a table with his hands folded like a dead man in a coffin; then called 911 in Rawlins.

This was not the first time I’d seen a man killed in the oilfield…

But fuck this, it was the last…

After I called 911, I told the crew I’m outta here and walked out of Baroil on foot to the same windy highway which has truckers in 18-wheelers on it 27/7.

Out on the highway in the whiteout, a trucker saw me who was headed to Casper and gave me a lift.

He asked me what happened and I told him. He asked me if I still had the joints…

So I said “yeah” and I took out the joint in the dude’s dead hand and we lit up smoking a goodbye to the dead man… a tribute as it were on a cold night in the whiteout…

When we got to the lake there was a truck that had just turned over and a married couple of truckers stranded… so we gave them a ride to Casper and we finished the joint and smoked another one.. it was good old Columbian weed… so the old boy had good taste in weed.

The trucker dropped the couple off at a local hotel by the cathouse on the Sand Bar, and I off at my place, and I split the jar of black beauties with him.
WTF… but I kept the joints in the pill bottle…

See, that’s the dark side of the oilfield no one talks about… motherfucker… it’s 6:06 AM with the wind howling outside… I admit a Jack Daniels and Coke double shot sounds damn good here in the dark…

Yeah, fuck Reaganomics and Reagan and Bush Sr… I hope they’re enjoying Hell as I write.

Well, I better get up and go do this…

Later bud;

I think Americans need to know where the “emergency reserves” of oil are really at out west since it’s in the news all the time with political nuts shills and corrupt politicians preaching panic fear porn.

Hell, we got more oil out here in the western United States than the whole damned Middle East if the truth were told. And we never needed to offshore drill or frack to get it out here.

For us who worked real USA western oilfields and mines, we knew all the 1980s Reaganomics propaganda to shut off drilling and take working wells down out west here, that we only had “limited reserves” and had to buy OPEC oil from now on was straight BULLSHIT.

They took down rigs and working pumps and capped countless holes from Montana at the Canadian border south to Texas by 1983’s end.

No joke. I worked at an oil firm that had a huge map of the United States with coloured pins all over the west showing ALL the exploration rigs, actual crude oil drilling rigs, and working wells with pumps.

And by end of 83 from August 1981 when Reaganomics was signed into effect “Tax Act”, all the pins were pulled and marked showing capped holes where they put steel caps on the casing pipes.

And oil with mining and the energy industry effectively died in the 80s under a pack of lies, that’s persisted for decades under total falsehood and coverups of our western oil and mineral resources.

We don’t need foreign OPEC oil nor Russian oil from Putin in America. We got more oil out west than both of those assholes. Straight Up as God is my witness.