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I went to Barnhart for one day before hearing about a job at Harris Rat Hole Service in Midland. Mama drove me to Midland where we bought a paper and found a room for me to live. When I say a room, I mean a room. The building appeared to have been an old garage in the back of their house which had a bathroom installed in the center of the building and two rooms on either side of it. I swear that the entire room was no more than 12 by 12 foot. The landladies were identical old maid twins in their 60's or 70's who had these two rooms in their backyard. Their other boarder was an elderly gentleman, Mr. Rawlings, who had no visible means of support. The room was $30 a month and they provided everything but my clothes. The bathroom was right between the two rooms and was shared by both of us. The landladies clucked over Mr. Rawlings all of the time and tried to get me to eat supper with them. I felt completely out of place but ate with them once. The meal was pretty good but the conversation wasn't. Working for Mr. Harris was the hardest job I ever had. Not that he was a bad boss, for Junior Harris was a good one. No, it was the manual labor that was hard. I had to get up at 0400 every morning and my driller (boss) would pick me up by 0430 to drive out to the site. He would drive the rig and I would drive the backup truck. We would go to a site where an oilrig was going to drill and we would dig the rathole, the mousehole, and the surface well. The rathole is where the next pipe would rest until it was used. The mousehole is where the drilling collar would stay when the rig made a trip. And the surface well is where the drilling would actually take place. A trip is when all of the pipes would be pulled out of the hole usually to replace the drill bit. Anyway, I stayed working seven days a week and rarely had anytime to do anything else but sleep and work. I knew a lot of people in Midland but I never actually got a chance to talk with them at all. I was really happy when the summer ended and I got to move to Dallas to attend school.
Next section Taken from the manuscript "Out of the Deep", by Robert L. Goehring. Published 1995, 1998.
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