Bad Timing: Wake Up, The Ironing Board’s On Fire!
This is a true story from the early fall of 1985, when I was 25 years old. I originally posted it in January 2021 in a short story challenge, based on the prompt, “freedom.” Required word count: 1200 words.
I’m not sure if it was the smoke alarm or the banging on the door that interrupted my sleep. Before I knew it, I had scooped up Leo the cat and was following my neighbors down the outside steps from my second-floor condo. Their ironing board had been lit aflame by – if I remember correctly – the pilot light of their hot water heater. It hadn’t occurred to me to store anything in my hot water heater closet, although I was more concerned about water damage than fire.
The fire was out by the time the firemen arrived, and their examination revealed no evidence of damage to my condo. What a relief, as bank representatives were coming in the morning to do an inspection.
I had closed on the condo somewhere between five and six months prior to the night of the fire – on April 30, 1985 to be exact. My job was going well; I’d just received a 14% raise and a letter of commendation from the company vice-president. My mapping of undeveloped natural gas reserves in wells where the company had a stake (“behind-pipe pay” in oil patch lingo) had added value to the company. Left unmentioned was that the company was on the brink of being sold.
By all easily Googled accounts in early 2021, Oklahoma City had gone bust by the time I’d moved there in late 1983. What the end of the oil boom hadn’t taken down, the failure of Penn Square Bank in July 1982 had. But compared to where I moved from – Hobbs, New Mexico – it didn’t seem dead to me. I wore nice clothes and worked in my own 14-foot by 14-foot office with a window instead of wearing overalls and a hard-hat, working out of a pick-up truck or one-room shed (aka “doghouse”) in the middle of a flat, dusty oilfield. A bad day was when the copy machine was broken or the secretary called in sick, instead of having to sneak around a tarantula or rattlesnake to power down an oil pumpjack before the tank to which it was connected overflowed. Lunch was in trendy cafes or pubs instead of eating out of a paper bag while playing dominoes on a filmy steel table.
The articles I read now say all the young people left OKC for better prospects in 1981 and 1982, but I had plenty of friends. I reconnected with a fellow college alumnus who still worked for Exxon along with a former Tulsa co-worker who lived with the principal of a one-man oil exploration company. I joined the Association for Women Geoscientists, played in a just-for-fun women’s soccer league, and became a front-row regular at Jazzercise. Friends gathered often for brunch, pizza, happy hour or games of Trivia Pursuit. Oklahoma City seemed to have more apartments than people, so young adults moved every six months for lease-signing bonuses like televisions and airline tickets. For at least part of the time, a gallon of gas cost less than a dollar. Perhaps I should have thought harder about those last two things.
My company had been founded by a man who owned a chainsaw patent and a famous bridge he’d moved from London to Arizona. The business had changed hands and the current ownership’s portfolio included Simplicity, the sewing pattern company. Headquarters was in Houston with another office in Los Angeles. My mentor, Steve, was the only other geologist in the Oklahoma City office and was about five years ahead of me in experience. We reported to a petroleum engineer and worked with a leasing agent (aka “landman”), a draftsperson (because we still had to make maps by hand back then) and various clerical staff.
In my job as a petroleum geologist, I was paid to solve puzzles. My puzzle board was a 12-square-mile portion of the 50,000-square-mile Anadarko Basin. Home to several significant oil and gas fields, the Anadarko Basin holds a thick deposit of sedimentary rocks. In my map area, the deepest part, the rock sequence is about 40,000 feet thick. In other words, the bottom of it is farther below the ground than most airplanes fly above the ground. The difference is the view is blocked by all that rock.
The puzzle consists of connecting the dots between drilled wells to figure out how the rock layers and hydrocarbon deposits no one will ever actually see fit together. The records of those wells are the puzzle pieces. The geologist’s job is to decipher the records taken at each site and map the below-ground area between wells.
It was exciting to me that my map area included 1974’s Lone Star Bertha Rogers #1, at one time the deepest well in the world. Drilling had ended after 504 days at 31,441 feet below ground, where the temperature was 475°F and liquid sulfur was found. Industry old-timers spoke of barbecues and a festival-like atmosphere at the wellsite. Everyone wanted to say they’d been there.
My company wasn’t in a position to drill such deep wells, but we had partners who could and who would solicit our participation. It was my job to recommend “yes” or “no,” based on how my puzzle looked at the proposed location.
Heady stuff for a 25-year-old. After my raise and letter of praise, I heeded those purveyors of the dogma that it’s better to build equity rather than throw money away on rent. The end date of the loan – April 30, 2015 – didn’t look real to me. Did I really picture myself still in OKC at 55 years old? I honestly don’t remember what I thought, but I can tell you what I didn’t think. I didn’t think I would return to the office after the 10 am closing and a celebratory lunch to find the top executives from Houston bearing news of the company’s being sold, our office being closed and my being out of work. It was neither the first, nor the only, time in my life that the universe took a wrecking ball to my future, but at the time it was the most dramatic.
If OKC hadn’t died in 1981-82, it seemed to be on its last legs in the summer of 1985. With no job prospects there, I accepted an offer in New York. With no hope of selling my condo, I transferred it to the lender in a process called “deed in lieu of foreclosure.” The inspection the day after the ironing board fire was the final step before signing the papers.
A few weeks later, Leo and I were bound for New York, free from booms and busts and the price of gas determining my employment status. Goodbye to tornado alley. No more sharing the roads with bumper stickers imploring “Lord, please grant me one more oil boom, I promise not to piss it away!”
Little did I know, at the same time in that city with pumpjacks on its Capitol grounds, a landman about my age named Aubrey had already formed a partnership that would – 25 years later – grow into a force that would fuel another boom, a boom which would reach all the way to New York and dominate the last few years of my career.