Return to Kaitlin by helen yeomans

Author:helen yeomans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: YA fiction
Publisher: Guards Publishing
Published: 2015-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Eleven

“This’ll be one of your jobs.” The motorhand motioned Ty to follow him over the frozen ground. “Load the pipe onto the catwalk and send it up to the rig, see there?”

Ty could see several lengths of pipe propped up against the rig.

“How heavy’s the pipe?”

The motorhand glanced at him. “Don’t have to do it by hand.” He went on, “Every time we make a connection we add a length of pipe. You send another one along to replace it.”

They had reached a stack of pipe lying on a trestle near the rig. The pipe was nearly five inches in diameter, thirty feet long. Each stack contained a thousand feet of pipe and there were ten stacks.

The rig floor was twenty feet above them and in the waning light Ty could see the day-shift roughnecks shooting the breeze. The pumps and motors sounded a background pulse for a structure that was driving pipe miles into the ground. Ultimately, the vertical depth of the bore would be some six thousand meters, twenty thousand feet. Paul, the motorhand, seemed to switch between imperial and metric measures without noticing.

“We’ve slowed down since Monday. Not making connections nearly as fast.” He glanced at Ty. “You missed all the fun.”

A catwalk ran alongside the trestles and up to the rig. “How do I get the pipe onto the catwalk?”

The motorhand gestured and Ty followed as he headed for a small hut next to the far end of the catwalk.

He’d arrived at the camp in the late morning, flying in with supplies from the town of Loon Water. He’d been given a room in one of the camp’s long trailers, issued coveralls and a hard hat and driven out to the rig site, twenty minutes away.

The motorhand had been delegated to show him around, to give him a crash orientation course, one he’d normally have had in Loon Water. Instead, he was on the job, on site, and he’d been shown the shale shaker, where used mud was processed, the mud pumps and the huge mud tank similar to the one he’d cleaned in Fort St John. All the while, the rig worked away, the derrick rising a hundred and twenty feet into the air, the pumps and motors circulating mud to cool the bit and drive it deeper and deeper into the ground. The rig sat in the center of a large clearing, encircled by scrub pines. They were in northern Saskatchewan and it was bitterly cold.

They reached the hut and walked up two steps and through a door. Inside was a small room with a panel at waist height. Ty saw a joystick on it and a button.

“My ten-year-old can do this,” said Paul, “so you should be okay.” He reached for the joy stick. “It’s all hydraulics, see? You ease the pipe onto the catwalk like so.” He moved the joystick. A length of pipe stirred itself as though by magic, separated from its fellows and rolled from the trestle onto the catwalk. “Then you press this button,” he did so, “and it moves up to the V-door.

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