As I walk along the Red Dirt Road on my morning walk, the sky is painted in bright colors as the sun begins to rise, I can smell the fresh cut hey (achoo)
I am reminded that this is the very best part about working in Oklahoma. The fact that I can leave location without putting on pounds of Arctic gear and having to get an escort so as not to get eaten by polar bears. I can walk for miles out here in the beautiful morning sunrise listening to the birds chirping and not have to worry about getting eaten. I can drive to town! There is even a town to drive too.
But this just reminds me of the different places I’ve worked. When working on the ice in Alaska you get to do amazing things but the drawback is you don’t get to walk away from location whenever you want.
When you work in Alaska everything is done inside. You are always inside and you never get to go outside for very long. even the gym is inside just stuck on a treadmill for miles and some jobs you don’t even get a treadmill so it’s hard to find a way to exercise. I remember one job in particular.
Once a year they would send out three rigs to go work on the ice and they would build special ice roads across ponds and lakes. They would set up camp, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere. Nothing in sight and they would fly people in and land on a frozen lake on this tiny airplane and everything you had to do was by bus. Bused from the camp to the rig and bused from the rig to camp. Hot lunches where brought out to the rig assuming the weather was good in the bus could get through. We always had enough food to last for a couple days in case the bus couldn’t get through. I remember one winter we needed it.
We were stuck on the rig for 36 hours because of a blizzard! It was life or death situation for anyone caught outside, so we were not working but we were also stuck on location. We couldn’t get back to Camp because the bus driver couldn’t get through. We used ropes and the buddy system to cross the drill site (known as the pad). The storm blew in right about the time it got dark the rig is normally lit up with lots of lights but with the blowing snow it was almost impossible to see. That far North it has to warm up to snow so most of the snow is just blown from one side of the artic to the other.
So, with the temperature dropping and the snow blowing every one that was stuck huddled together in the one man camp that was on the pad. Where we watched the snow blow and eat all the food and tried to sleep. About 5 in the morning things started to clear up. There was still snow everywhere and it took all day for the plows to dig out the roads and everyone who got stuck on the road. Defiantly one of the night few nights that I thought we might die. One of the many adventures on the ice. I’ll try to add a few more latter. But now I have miles to walk!
