Waiting for the Last Gasp – Adam Overland

After a great week of visiting Joel in San Antonio, I drove 600 miles north today to visit my sister, her husband, and my niece and nephew on their farm near Tonkawa, Oklahoma. She’s lived here for I think about 15 years, but it’s my first visit. Years ago, when I was little, I remember our whole family driving her to college for PT school in Oklahoma City, and that was a big adventure for me since we rarely traveled outside of South Dakota. 

Pulling into the farm I am greeted by two dogs and several cats and 15 chickens. One chicken is named Barb, after my mom (the kids’ grandma. They had a rooster that was named Dave, after my dad, but he was aggressive and they had to kill him, which actually sounds a lot like my dad.

The dogs and cats live outside here. They have a Great Pyrenees whose job is to stay up all night and scare coyotes away, and as I get ready for bed he seems to love it and is hard at it, barking away. He sleeps most of the day away and punches in again after sunset.

The farm is sprawling, with 400 head of cattle and oil pump-jacks dotting the landscape, dragging up crude and natural gas. My sister’s husband tried explaining how the payouts work, with the family taking 20% of a well’s sales, but then that amount is divided up among several families, and dependent on the well, the mineral rights contract, etc., so that so-and-so gets 5% of 1/16th of this well, but I couldn’t follow it. 

He said that in a pump-jack’s first few years, it might drag up 70-80 barrels a day, but after 8 years or so, that might drop to 7 or 8 barrels, and eventually nothing. Big oil companies will sell the pumps to smaller companies as they begin to produce less, and those companies will sell them to yet smaller companies when they produce even less, so that in the end the poorest guy owns a well he can’t afford to cap and remove by the time it runs out. There are as many or more wind turbines all over the area as well (not on their farm), which makes for an obvious juxtaposition. 

They gave me a tour of the farm and I sat inside what I want to say was a combine but that’s because that’s the only farm equipment term I know. When you see those from the highway, working a field, you can tell they’re big, but up close, the tires were taller than me, and the driver’s seat must be 15 feet high. 

Later we played Monopoly, the card game version, and I was reminded that I have some kind of mild phobia of board games and similar. This is probably something I should talk to a therapist about, because a) that’s weird and b) there’s probably more to it. But then it’s also probably an issue best left undisturbed. To be clear, I can play board games, but I don’t really enjoy them and have a heightened level of anxiety most of the time I’m playing. I don’t think I’ve ever said this out loud. 

Driving north throughout the day, the temps fell from the 70s in Texas to the mid-50s in Oklahoma. The rivers are a muddy orange here, the ground a beautiful, bright reddish clay that colors the water. In a kind of rewind of spring, as I moved north from Texas, the trees became more barren, not from just having lost their leaves, but because they are just beginning to bud in northern Oklahoma. So spring faded with the miles, but it’s driving its way north as well, and if I could hook it to my truck and tow it after me faster, I would. But soon it will arrive in Minnesota, not long after I return to Minneapolis this weekend. 

I passed through many construction zones on the way, and a recurring sign on the interstate in Oklahoma warned “Don’t hit our workers – Avoid a $10,000 fine.” That seems like a relatively light punishment for hitting a construction worker at 60 mph with an 8,000 pound vehicle, but since it was Sunday and no workers were around, I wasn’t able to take advantage of it.