My father (right) as a young roughneck in the oil fields of southwestern Wyoming, mid-1950's, just after his service in the Marine Corps.  (Lawrence family photo)

I was born in the sweat and dust of the western oilfields, derricks dotting the sagebrush.  

My father, and my father's father, labored in those fields to put canned peas and Wonder Bread on the table, got up on cold mornings forty below and unplugged the pickup truck, warmed it up for an hour before going out to check the leases, then come back and wash the grease and grime off with Lava soap.

Roughnecks came straight out of school to do a man's work, tough work, dangerous work, work that paid more than a lot of places, but in a lonely place, a desolate place, cash to be had, a paycheck, maybe a family to raise, maybe a place to be for a while, make some money, move on, maybe stay and make a life.

That corner of North America had some of the greatest oil and natural gas reserves anywhere hidden just below the surface, boom and bust over the decades, drill and pump, then cap, then go again, still lots there, but the community would shrink and grow in response, while cattlemen made their lives alongside, tending the land, the stock.

Oil and gas was our lifeblood.  It's what put a roof over our head, paid our bills, kept us alive, and gave us an education we wouldn't have had otherwise. We had the richest school district in Wyoming at the time in the least populated county in the least populated state out of the pockets of the petroleum industry instead of the taxpayers.

Dad was a superintendent of a small independent oil company most of my childhood, a road travelled from young roughneck.  He checked the wells every day, drove out to the leases, charted, reported, never a day off ever unless he could get someone to cover for him and then we'd take off for Arizona or California in the station wagon, but otherwise he was permanently tethered even in the coldest of weather when only a snowmobile would make the trip twenty miles out, twenty miles over, another twenty miles back, then doing paperwork in the office the rest of the day with a slide rule, graph paper and pinups.  

It was dangerous enough.  I remember as a child watching them drill.  Dad lost some finger into a glove once, drove in the cold to the doctor to get it sewn back on.  Another time there was a bad fire, and  Red Adair came barreling across the sagebrush in a big fancy car to the rescue.  Sometimes I'd go out with Dad to check the leases or hang out at the quonset hut near one of the wells.

Years after Dad was gone I flew out west to Salt Lake City from my home half a country away in Wisconsin, rented a car and drove my husband and a young granddaughter a few hours away to the place where the oil wells were south of Big Piney, Wyoming.  I knew the place, though the derrick was gone, and stopped our rented white Cadillac in the middle of the sagebrush, when an Enron truck came speeding out of the big nowhere like a scene from The Twilight Zone.

We hightailed it out of there ahead of the speeding truck.  It was a different world now.  This was serious.   

When Dad died the company went on a few  years but not forever, eventually got bought up by bigger oil, and still bigger.  Long before then he thought about moving on elsewhere, and looked at jobs with Halliburton and Schlumberger, even considered going to the Middle East.  If things had been different he might have been in a different corner of the planet, in the North Sea, in Saudi Arabia, in the Gulf of Mexico, on a platform, maybe even a platform like Deepwater Horizon that went down.  When I was still in high school he talked about moving to Texas or the Middle East, and I feared the prospect of living in a foreign country, a completely different culture, learning a different language, a different way of life. 

I am here today because of the oil and gas industry.  They provided my home, my medical care, my food, my education.  They kept my mother in a company home with four of her six young children for a year after my dad died without asking anything in return.

Do they do bad things?  Of course.  Are there mistakes made?  Absolutely.  Could the catastrophe in the Gulf have been avoided?  Probably.  Can we look at big oil as the bogeyman?  Yes, from time to time.

Everything needs to change--our dependence on oil, our dependence on foreign oil, our responsibility for the resource, our responsibility for the environment, our regulation of the industry, our stewardship of the planet. 

Everything needs to change.  But I will always be an oilman's daughter. 

Big Piney Oil and Gas Company derrick, now a landmark on Highway 189 in the town of Big Piney, on the route from Salt Lake City to Jackson Hole, placed there as a memorial to the petroleum industry by the Green River Valley Museum.  (photo: Kathy Riordan)