“The Empty Quarter” is the direct translation. This is the most desolate place in the world. The more miserable a place is, the better the oil or does it just seem that way? Some of these wells make as much as 6,000 Bbl. of oil per day. Wouldn’t you like to have one of these in your back yard? Hot, yes it can get very hot. You know that temperature is graded in the shade, hence the shade temperature of X degrees. There ain’t no shade here. The temperatures at times rise to 135 to 140 degrees in the day but drop to around 90 degrees at night. You wear insulated coveralls because you are cold at 90 degrees. The contrast is what gets you. The sand hills are as much as 1000 ft. high, the only place in the world that has larger sand hills is Algeria, estimated at 1,410 ft. The Sebeka is 3 to 5 ft. below sea level. This is the flat hard surface under the sand. The dunes move across this vast waste land covering anything in its path. I knew a man named Wilbur that left a cement pump truck over night in the Shedgum Field during a huge sand storm. The cement pump truck wasn’t found for many years. I had a great Arab friend and pump truck driver that did not know for sure how old he was. His Mother only knew that he had been born between two famous sand storms. He chose his own birthday for a passport.
To drive a truck to Shaba took 7 days of hard driving across the desert. Shaba means “Old Wise One” in Arabic. If you were not old and wise, you should not go to this part of the desert. The trip via flying on Aramco’s Twin Otter or even the DC-3 was much better than driving. This is a magnificent flight over oceans and oceans of sand, a vastness of desert terrain never before imaginable. I have seen sand hills in White Sands, Crane and Monahans, but these Grand Daddy sandhills are simply unbelievable.
My assignment was to work two weeks in the “Rub’ Al Khali” then two weeks off, to do as I wished. I wished to go to Bahrain, Beirut and then on to Cairo to explore the pyramids. It was going to be OilFieldTrash gone wild, once again. I had not been out of Saudi Arabia for seven months. I was already a month past my normal vacation time. I worked six months straight without scheduled days off for $820.00 a month salary. The two weeks they gave us was not contractual. They didn’t have to give it to you. It was best to keep your mouth shut and just hope you got to go. We didn’t have any relief available in Abqaig. There were 31 drilling rigs and 4 workover rigs for 4 cement pump trucks to take care of. We were so busy, none had time to quit. I had to wait for my relief to return from his state side vacation. As it turned out, my relief got OilFieldTrash drunk in Gonzales, Texas and really did it up right celebrating his return to Saudi Arabia. When the judge gave this wise guy a week in jail, Jim said, “I can do a week standing on my head”. The judge immediately said to Jim, “Do a month then and see if you can get back on your feet.” I did Jim’s jail time in the desert. There was nobody to relieve me. I saw the Robert Redford movie “Jeremiah Johnson” twenty-nine nights straight in a row. The Arabs liked to see the snow, none of them had ever seen snow before in real life. The only outside contact we had was a single side band radio that crackled in the corner of the recreation room. We had the anti-venom for the Scorpions and for the Horned Sand Vipers in the refrigerator at camp. The rig was 4 or 5 minutes away from camp so if you were bitten by a sand viper at the rig, you would be dead by the time you got to the anti-venom. These little snakes burrow into the sand and wait on their prey, all that is visible are their little horns sticking out of the sand. The venom attacks your central nervous center and you just forget how to breathe or make your heart beat. These snakes are called cigarette snakes or sometimes two step snakes because you are dead after two steps. They are nasty little buggers.
We made our own entertainment. Jess Baxter the Drilling Superintendent for International Drilling Company (IDC) was visiting the rig and we swapped jokes for at least three hours one night after supper. My joke would remind him of one and then his would remind me of one. Anything to pass the time was welcome. Every time an airplane was coming I would get dressed in my going to town clothes and meet the plane hoping that Jim was going to be there. I sent letters to Abqaig for spare parts. Nothing came off of the planes for me. My equipment hadn’t been seen in five years. Halliburton had just left it down in the desert after the last exploration well. I had no cement mixing equipment. It wasn’t there. I called my boss Don and told him my trouble. Don said for me to start circling the cement unit. He told me that the Bedouins would pick something up that they thought they could use and would carry it for a little ways before dropping it. I circled the unit and found all my missing parts, spread over the desert. It took less than an hour.
Have you ever been sand surfing? You know how water scooters or wave runners pull the surfers into the big waves. My friend Jess and I borrowed, or stole, depending on how you look at it, the Aramco Company Man’s Dodge Ram Power Wagon. There was no stopping us once I explained my plan to Jess. We wanted to drive up on top of the sandhill behind the rig. My plan was to drive up and surf down. Jess would return in the Power Wagon. Our journey to the top became quite a problem. The Dodge Power Wagon would go just about anywhere except straight up. The fuel pump would not pick the fuel up out of the fuel tank when we were nearly straight up. The motor stalled and we were dead in the water, so to speak. There were no seat belts in this old dog. While sliding back down the mountain of sand, my feet were on the floor and my head pinned to the ceiling. Holding on for dear life, knowing the wreckage would be found soon. Sliding down this very tall sandhill was getting more and more exciting by the second. I knew that we going to turn this thing over and roll all the way to the bottom of the hill and that was a long ways. This was really going to hurt. Maybe we should have made a better plan. Luckily, the front end of the Power Wagon was the heaviest and slide into the down position. Jess clutched it, put it in gear and the motor started and we both figured that we were going to live after all. The entire rig personnel were watching all of this go on. We dared not go back to the rig, there was no chance for us get the Power Wagon back, ever. Bob Gouch the Aramco man was also watching with the rig personnel. Gooch liked us both. Maybe we wouldn’t be in too much trouble if Jess didn’t wreck his truck. We made four or five runs at it before making it to the top, without crashing and burning in Gouch’s company truck. Bob would have been in real trouble for allowing Jess Baxter and I to steal/borrowing this Power Wagon and wrecking it.
Sand surfing was about to be introduced to Saudi Arabia. I had found large wooden shipping create. I took it apart and found myself a good piece of wood for making the sand surf board. I shaped it just like a water surf board only about 4 ft. long, rounded on the ends with the sides rounded up. I took my time building this board and really did make it nice. I gathered all required materials from the rig. I used rubber floor matting to cover the top of the board so that my feet would not slip. I used the same Gulf Paraffin Bars to wax the bottom of the board that we had in West Texas. The wax on bottom helped the board slid better over the sand, the slicker, the better.
The slip face of this sandhill was about 160 ft. tall. The monkey boards on IDC Rig 31 are about 95 ft. with a 25 ft. substructure. From the crown to the ground, probably 150 ft. but this is just an estimate. The rig is backed up within 300 ft. from the huge slipface.
You stick the sand surf board in the sand with the front facing down the slipface at an angle. Don’t go straight down. The Sebeka is real hard and to hit bottom with any speed at all, just might leave a mark. You put one foot sideways on the board at the back. All it takes to go is to take the other foot on the front of the board and lean forward. It is best to pray before stepping on the front of the board, you are not going to have the time for that now. You keep your knees bent to cushion the shock, just like skiing.
Charlie Collins from Crane, Texas was drilling daylights on this rig. All work stopped as I started my descent. The surfboard was really a good one. Slick and smooth, faster and faster, I was cutting across the slipface as if it was water or snow. The crowd was cheering and I kept going faster and faster. I had no time to take a bow, I was really getting going by now. I was told that the surf board made a “Rooster Tail” in the sand, just like a ski makes in water. The Sebeka was getting closer rapidly. After a flawless and very rapid descent, my dismount left something to be desired. I left the board about 50 ft. before hitting bottom, tumbling head over heels. The sand broke my fall and I slowed up enough that it didn’t kill me when I did hit the bottom. Nobody ever played in the desert the way we did in Crane, Texas.
Charlie and I ended up in “The Stork Bar” in Beirut, but that’s another “Nearly True Story ”. Gouch has since retired from Aramco to his farm in Oklahoma. The last time I saw Jess, he was in Midland buying rigs for Santa Fe and living in California. I was waiting for a plane late one night in Midland when I noticed a man wandering around the airport just like I was. I spoke and we started a conversation and found that we had both been in Saudi. I ask what he did and he said that he was the Drilling Superintendent for International Drilling Company in Abqaiq. I said Jess Baxter was the Drilling Superintendent and he said, “I am Jess Baxter.” There had been a lot of miles since introducing sand surfing to Saudi Arabia.