It was July, not just any July, it was an oilfield July, and the Western Kansas wheat stubble made the sun 20 degrees hotter. The humidity, stifling. It was 1977, near the Petersilie lease (no, you can’t make this up), south of Ness City. I was riding shotgun in the cab of an unairconditioned gin pole truck. A gin pole truck is a beefy pickup truck with an A-frame set of poles mounted to the bed, which could be cantilevered off the back of the truck. It used a pulley system driven by the power-takeoff to operate it like a wench truck. We used it to lift pipe and heavy scrap metal, and to lift and change electric motors on pumping units.
This was my first summer to work in the oilfields and in any industrial setting ever. My hands were toughening, with calluses forming beneath my cheap extra-large gloves over my extra-small hands. The superintendent drove fast over the oil-soaked dirt roads. We were cruising through the oilfields when all of a sudden, he slammed on the brakes in the middle of nowhere as if he was approaching a road-ending cliff. He looked over at me and said, “You drive for a while!” I looked at him with my sad college eyes and said, “I can’t!” He looked at me all crazy and asked, “Why not?” I said, “I don’t know how to drive a stick!” Then he said, “Then get out!” I got out and stood there on the side of the dry brush and washboard dirt of the one-lane lease road, and he drove off, out of sight. I just stood there. Then he came back the same way he left. He stopped and got out. He said, “Get behind the wheel! You are going to learn how to drive this rig today!”
I got in and followed his lead as he walked me through the process. I ground all of the gears like cheap drugstore coffee until, after a while, I could drive it without scaring the snakes. Starting on hills was still a work in progress, but for the most part, I could do it. Then he showed me how to put it in park and to engage the power-takeoff lever that ran the winch. He showed me how to rig up the gin poles and to lift items using the gin poles. I was short and small, weighing well under 150 pounds, so everything was harder for me.
One day, he removed the exhaust pipe from a punping unit engine that was running on wellhead natural gas and threw it onto the ground. He told me to put it in the back of the truck. So, I reached down and grabbed it with my gloved hand. If I had not been wearing a glove, that pipe would still be welded to my skin today. I burned my hand pretty badly, but I never said a word. You didn’t show any weakness back in those days. I needed that job.
Another day, he told me to wade across the water that had filled a small swale in the road from a storm the night before. He told me to change the fuses in the three-phase box on a pole on the next hill that had been knocked out by the storm. In my ignorance, I touched the top side of the fuse box and got hit with somewhere between 220 and a million volts of unfiltered electricity. It knocked me to the ground. Had I held onto the box, it would have killed me. I could not form a complete sentence in English the rest of the day. Funny what involuntary electroshock therapy will do to you.
I entered that summer soft-handed and naive, floating on the American dream on a full college scholarship, double major, law school bound, Top 10 Freshman status, with straight A’s. My life was mapped and trenched. All I had to do was execute. It was also the summer that my college girlfriend got pregnant. I got married, let go of my law school dreams, found a new place to live, found a way to stay in college, changed my major to a discipline that made sense, but I never wanted, and had grown up in ways that had nothing todo with birthdays, and all in 90 days. There is a reason all of that had to happen. Someday I will understand it better. But today I appreciate hard work, determination, and ingenuity more than I would have otherwise. Sometimes it is like a “Four on the Floor” stick shift. You have to “grind it till you find it!” What are you grinding on today? “Week Minded, 52 Reflections on Leading and Living.” Find it on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0bSFjOI4. As of today, it is in the top 1% of management books on Amazon.
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