In which an Oilman’s daughter laments

My first pet of my own as a child was a black tomcat my father named Claymore; not in tribute to the two handed sword wielded by the Highlanders in whose country we were living, but for the offshore drilling rig that pulled oil from the North Sea.

Oil permeated every aspect of my life from birth until I got married. When I was small my father worked out of Aberdeen on the SEDCO Thorax. Two weeks off, two weeks on, creating two distinct lives. The one in which my brother and I crawled into my mother’s bed in the early morning hours and we ate noodles mixed with butter and canned tomatoes and watched cartoons, and the one when my father was home and the rules were more strict and every meal consisted of meat, potatoes, and veg, but there was every chance of an adventure.

Reminders of the thing that put food on the table were everywhere. Piles of coveralls liberally smeared with pipe dope next to the back door were the indicator that my father was home. My baby dolls lived in a SEDCO duffle bag. We played Crazy 8’s with cards whose backs featured polar bears on icebergs alongside the 706 off the coast of Newfoundland. Slides of drilling platforms were interspersed with the family pictures that were shown on our annual trips back to the States – my father lingering on these as if they were equal to any architectural masterpiece, excitedly pointing out spider decks, mud pumps and meaningless formations with familiar names, even as he breezed past pictures of people until my mother reminded him to slow down. I spent untold amounts of time, when I should have been doing homework, playing with a paperweight that sat on the desk next to the tape dispenser – a two inch cube of glass encapsulating a teardrop bubble which contained, according to the etched message on the outside, “2 cc of North Sea Oil.” The first camping trip I remember was a sand pit in West Texas near a pump jack. My dresser was topped with souvenirs that my father brought home from countless trips to South Africa, Korea, the United Arab Emirates, and Singapore… trips that once prompted my mother to count the amount of time he had actually spent at home during their married life. Every move, and there were many, was for oil. Vacations were cancelled because of oil. There were picnics of fish and chips or take away Chinese in harbors looking at rigs. There were hours spent sitting in stuffy cars waiting while my father did one quick thing before a family outing. Everything was labeled by some oil company, from the pencils I used to practice cursive, to the countless hats in my parent’s closet - even the fingernail clippers I use today slip into a leather case from an oilfield supply company.

And I was proud. My father was my hero. He worked hard, and his work was important and exciting and dangerous. He had broken his back and cut off two fingers and people counted on him. In my young world those things mattered. There are songs about drilling rigs. There weren’t songs for people whose fathers were lawyers or CPA’s.

It was because of oil that I learned that my mother was brave. When I was four and my brother was 7 months old she made a transatlantic flight alone with two small children to join my father in a place where we didn’t have anything but our clothes. She was unflappable in the face of the blizzard that snowed us in without electricity for a week while my father was in Africa – cooking meals of toast and tinned soup next to the grate of a propane space heater. She made meals out of nothing when my father left SEDCO to help start up a new company and there were months when they didn’t even know if they would get paid. She had married a farmer from Williamsfield, OH, thinking she would spend her life in the bosom of her family, and instead she lived for 30 some odd years waiting for the phone call that announced it was time to pack up again.

Oil paid for me to go to school. It paid for the clothes on my back and the piano lessons I took and my first car. But beyond those things it meant that I don’t have a “home” like other people do. There will never be a place that I will know like the back of my hand, or people I will have known all my life. Instead I have my family –my parents, my brothers, my sister – the people who, because of our shared experience, are my home and my strength, and my people.

My own children have spent the entirety of their tender young lives in a single town. They are surrounded by cousins and aunts and uncles. They have never been the new kid in school. They have friends they have known from birth. When we go to the grocery store or the park or out to eat we see people we know. We attend the community events every year. Their lives are foreign to me. They have what I have never had. They belong to this place. And in some ways, it makes me sad.

They have no curiosity about their father’s work because it doesn’t affect their lives. They’ve never been transferred, they’ve never had to combine his environment with a picnic, there are no songs about high voltage power supply creators. To them the rest of the world is a far off place. The only sea they have ever put their toes in is the grey, greasy, Gulf of Mexico. They don’t need each other because they have their own people. To them siblings aren’t comrades in arms, but roommates – the kind who eat the food off of your shelf in the refrigerator.

They will grow up, and even if they leave this burg, they will come back and still know 20 back-ways to everywhere. If anything breaks they will have gone to school with someone who can fix it at cost. They might marry a high school sweetheart. In short they will have the same life that my husband and his friends had. They will have a life without oil. I wonder which bits of me they will take with them, and if, as I longed for a “hometown,” they will yearn for travel, or if they will become institutions in the place where they belong.