INSIDE JOB

I just looked at weather.com and learned it should hit 103 degrees today and 102 tomorrow. That kinda got me thinking.

The road in front of my childhood home was constructed of a dirt and crude oil mix that was packed into a hard surface. We didn't have a thermometer, but during the summer it would get so hot that the oil in the road would boil to the surface as an iridescent film.

As we never wore shoes in the summers, the steaming roads became a navigation issue. I can remember running on the road a piece, then jumping onto a roadside tuft of grass to let my fiery feet cool. Then back down the road to the next oasis of balming weeds. (That memory is a incredible to me given that now days I can step barefoot on a piece of lint on the floor and near founder?)

As a teen, I would haul hay from the fields and stack it in barns. These ancient structures had no ventilation and were likely near the limits of human endurance in terms of ambient air temperature.

After high school I worked in the East Texas oil field on work-over units. Leases in the North Kilgore field were "flowing" wells. This meant there was sufficient gas pressure in the wells to push the oil out of the ground without need for mechanical pumping.

Now imagine you are working on a concrete floor under a steel 80 foot tall derrick in the middle of a pasture. You are next to a gargantuan steel "pulling unit" that is radiating enough heat to boil water. In addition, there is a large engine on the rig that is blasting its exhaust while creating combustion heat. The crowning touch is that the wells invariably began to "flow" while working on them, which meant you would stand under a two inch shower of crude oil all day.

My point: For the most part of the last 38 years I have had the ability to at least periodically retreat to a heated or air conditioned space to survive whatever outside weather occurred. Many is the time that I have listened to a co-worker complain and sincerely replied, "At least we have an inside job".