The Animal Dialogues by Craig Childs

Author:Craig Childs [CHILDS, CRAIG]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: NAT001000
ISBN: 9780316024334
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2007-12-11T13:00:00+00:00

PRONGHORN ANTELOPE

The pay for the work was seven hundred dollars. It didn’t include film or gas or food. Because I was sixteen years old, it was much more money than I had expected. Seven hundred dollars to walk across a barren space in Wyoming, find an oil rig, and photograph it.

The oil company that hired me also employed my mother. It was her connection: at a meeting of geologists and management, someone said that the annual report could use a nice photograph, and she said that her son would be in Wyoming and that he had a camera. “Does he know how to use it?” management asked. “He’s had it since he was little,” she told them. So I came to Wyoming with a camera, driving a dirt road longer than any I had ever driven. Near the town of Lonetree, close to Robertson. Uinta County, the badlands of Wyoming, clay hills shaded with pastels. Lavender buttes and mauve washes. Southwest Wyoming.

The oil rig was in the open. It was white and red, towers and pipes and two mobile homes. Holding pools lined with black plastic. Parked trucks with Wyoming plates, streaks of mud up to the windows and stains of dog urine on the tires. At night steel banged on steel. It was the switching of joints, men in one-piece work suits slinging chain, hoisting pipes into position. There were spotlight beams that made the drill platform glow like a stage. Drilling mud exploded and hit the men in their faces. Their expressions did not change, jaws set, all their weight going into the machine. The machine groaned and spun its needle into the ground. Mud hurled in all directions as chains uncoupled. Grunts and commands were issued, no time even to wipe away mud or sweat. I dove between the men, taking pictures, keeping clear of the chain.

The driller, hands on the lever, was named Bobby B. Blanchard.

“You know what the B stands for?” he barked.

I looked dumb.

“Bastard!”

By the age of twenty-seven most drill workers are off the payroll. Hands go to the chains. Arms are taken down with drill bits. Burst metal robs people of their eyes. They all had stories, told later as they rubbed their necks and wriggled out of their suits. Drilling stories. The woman who lost a finger and said nothing until the chain was set. The man who got his head too close to the drill. They joked with me and showed me rope tricks, old drillers’ magic tricks with nails and pieces of twine.

I walked into the dark clay hills, away from the rig. Tripod on the shoulder, bought at Kmart from the seven hundred dollars. I planted it in the loose, dry soil and photographed the Christmas tree tower of light. It was the only light anywhere. An island of light, and above were the stars. Coyotes howled in the restless sprawl of washes. A dark breeze. The muffled rumble of the oil rig half a mile away. The sound was alien.

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