Desperate to control rising oil prices, the House passes restrictive trading measures.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20602099&sid=aKAOLTd34y4o&refer=energy

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Estimated oil reserves in the ground never actually equate to barrels per day.  If successful, by the Saudi’s own account, this field development will result in an extra 1.2 million barrels of oil per day by next June.

This addition to the world’s daily production will have little or no impact on the price of a barrel of oil because it’s not enough to offset increasing demand, or declining rates.  It is frightening that no other country on earth has the ability to increase the world’s daily production even by half this much.

Giant Saudi field is key to boosting oil output: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance.

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Dirty rice is a Cajun specialty.  Here is an authentic recipe for Dirty Rice Dressing from the French Acadian Cookbook published by the Louisiana Acadian Handicraft Museum, Inc. in 1955.  The recipe was contributed by Dr. W.E. Hunt of Lake Charles, Louisiana.

1 cup rice                                             1 clove chopped garlic

1 pound ground meat                            Salt, pepper and hot sauce to taste

1 pound ground giblets                          Pinch of thyme and sweet basil

   (from fowl or separate giblets)

1 cup chopped onion                            1 bunch green onions and tops chopped

½ cup chopped bell pepper                  1 tablespoon minced parsley

½ cup chopped celery

Cook rice in double boiler until fluffy, using enough salted water to 1 inch above rice.  Allow to cook unstirred until all water is gone.  In one skillet sauté ground meat and giblets in ¼ pound butter until brown; in another skillet sauté onions, pepper, celery and seasoning in ¼ pound butter.  Add other ingredients.  In large pan mix all above ingredients well, using natural gravy from fowl to moisten.

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Marilyn’s wind chimes are performing a chaotic symphony tonight because of an approaching storm.  Their resonance reminds me of an incident that happened in Vietnam, but not because of the weather.  I had the same eerie feeling - a warning from somewhere deep in the primitive portion of our brains that scientists never discuss, our animal brain that screams at us whenever something very bad is about to happen.

The mind plays tricks, even the animal part of our brains.  This is particularly true when your senses are robbed.  Such is the case after darkness falls in triple-canopy jungle.  I was a grunt in an infantry line company.  We were somewhere near the Cambodian border.  Hell! We were probably in Cambodia.

The area was hot (firefight hot) and our sister companies had all made contact with the NVA during the past days.  Earlier that night we had watched and heard a B-52 attack as the big planes carpet bombed a nearby patch of jungle, hoping to disrupt Charlie’s intricate system of trails that somehow managed to keep supplying arms and supplies to their soldiers in the south.

I sat in a damp hole in the ground, my senses disrupted and seeing nothing, not even an occasional flash of light.  It’s true that when you have no vision your hearing becomes more acute.  I was aware of the sounds of night.  A tiger stalked in the distance and I could track its progress through the jungle by the low growls it periodically emitted.  I could also hear elephants and horses – yes, horses.  Don’t ask me how or why they were there in the jungle but their sound is unmistakable.  I also heard other things.

We were supplied by helicopters every three days.  After cutting a landing zone in the jungle – a small LZ barely large enough for the choppers rotors – the birds would bring us food, water and fresh ammo.  They also brought us beer and pop and each of us got three beverages of our choice every three days.

You didn’t want to drink your beer immediately because everyone would beg a sip and there would be little or nothing left for you to drink when the can came back around.  Most soldiers savored theirs while pulling guard duty because it was about the only time you were ever truly alone while on patrol.  As I sat there, listening to the tiger, elephants and horses, I heard someone pop the top on a Black Label.  Then I heard something else – the low moan of a soldier, thinking of his wife or girl as he masturbated in the darkness.  I knew very well how he felt because I was thinking about doing the same thing myself.

Tension mounted as days went by without encountering Charlie.  As we cut our way slowly, single file through the jungle, a signal began being passed back to the rear.  The soldier in front of me pointed at a snake in the branches over our head.  I have no idea what it really was but we called it a three-step snake because that’s about how far you could go before dying if it bit you.  Not far from the snake I witnessed something as eerie as I have ever seen before, or since.

It was a thousand pound bomb lying flat on the ground amid broken jungle vegetation.  It was a relic of a B-52 attack, a monster bomb that had not detonated but still had the stark power to blow a forty-foot hole in the ground.  Everyone in the row of soldiers realized as much and to say that I was frightened would be lessening the aching fear throbbing in the pit of my gut.  The bomb was longer than I am tall and even lying flat it came up to my chest.  We snaked around it, no one touching it for fear that it was booby trapped by the NVA.

Fifteen days passed without encountering the enemy and I still remember climbing the incline to the firebase hewn out of a Vietnamese mountain.  We were stopped at the perimeter and told the bad news that instead of our expected five day stand-down, we would be re-supplied where we stood and then sent back into the jungle for another fifteen day stint.

One of the men – a southern black man - heard his animal brain louder than the rest of us.  Pulling off his pack, he sat down and refused to move.  I remember our idiot Lieutenant holding a .45 to the man’s forehead and threatening to blow his brains out if he didn’t get up from where he sat.  The lieutenant’s threats fell on deaf ears and soon the military police from the firebase led him away at gunpoint to an inevitable stay in the Long Binh Jail.  As we watched them leave, all the rest of us wondered if he wasn’t the smart one in the bunch and perhaps doing the right thing.

We stayed on the perimeter of the firebase that night, not allowed to even sleep on the safer side of the razor wire.  Next morning we reentered the jungle for another fifteen days.  At this point, my mind numbs and my memories become blocked from the events that ensued.

Tonight, as wind whistles out my back door, distant thunder rattles the windows and lightning illuminates the western sky like a fiery B-52 attack, I get that same eerie feeling that I had so many years ago.  This time, even with the impending danger of a possible tornado, the sound is accompanied by hope of a better tomorrow, and not the creeping depression that plagued me for so many years.

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Yesterday’s comment about $150 oil has instant effect on the market.

Oil reaches $142 on view dollar will keep falling: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance.

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Here is a pic currently circulating by email between oily types.  It is supposedly a real picture of a Sandridge Energy drilling rig sitting directly in front of an approaching tornado.  I PhotoShopped the pic a little just for kicks.

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Natural gas may exceed $15 MCF sometime in July, one analyst predicts.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20602099&sid=anmIUiUi2fhA&refer=energy

http://www.EricWilder.com

Just when you thought -

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080626/oil_prices.html

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I was surveying some shallow gas wells near Billings, Oklahoma yesterday when I recalled the first well I ever got drilled in Noble County.  I briefly recounted the story to the three people in the vehicle with me but I omitted telling them about the pathos I felt at the time.

It was near the lowest financial ebb for Anne and I following the eighties oil bust.  We had a very large glass piggy bank that we had filled with coins over the years and we had agreed to wait until our most desperate moment before opening it and spending the coins.  The time finally arrived.

We were expecting thousands but there was only about two-hundred-sixty dollars in the glass pig.  The money tided us over for the moment but we got down to our last dollar on more than one occasion.  Somehow, every time our money became dangerously low I would somehow manage to sell a prospect or make a few bucks doing a little consulting job.

There were few real jobs available in the State at the time and there was a joke going around about a geologist that applied for a job flipping burgers at MacDonald’s only to be told, “Sorry, but all the geologists that work for us have Master’s Degrees.”  The story wasn’t far from the truth.

Before the “Bust” I had an ego as large as Texas.  Geologists must have a second sense to find oil many miles below the earth’s surface and the best are dubbed oil finders.  I knew that I was good and I also knew that I was also incredibly lucky.  One of the founders of Texas Oil & Gas once told me, “Eric, you have a gift.  You’re an oil finder.  There aren’t many around like you and if you can find oil and gas the world will beat a path to your door.”

It didn’t seem like anyone was searching very hard for me in 1989 as I remember going a year without selling a prospect.  Somehow Anne and I managed to eke out a living but my pocketbook and my ego had taken a huge pummeling.  I had lost my mojo and everything I touched seemed to turn to turkey poop.

My dreams, along with my ego, were severely bruised but not completely destroyed.  I continued working and had the idea for a drilling prospect in Noble County, a county I had never previously worked.  Unable to afford professional drafting I drew the map on a sheet of typing paper and colored it with a used set of thrift store colored pencils.  It took me a while to find someone that even wanted to look at it.

One weekend I read an ad in the Sunday Oklahoman classifieds.  It was posted by someone with a Dallas area code and they were looking for a geologic prospect.  I called the number before finishing my first cup of morning coffee.

Two days later a man driving a Volkswagen with a large rubber roach attached to the roof drove into our driveway.  He had a small exterminating company in Dallas and he also drove a bus at the DFW Airport.  Before the crash he had worked in a phone room raising money.  He thought the time was right and that he could raise enough money on his own to drill a well.  He left Oklahoma City with my hand-drawn maps and left me and Anne with a check for $7000.00.  We were on Cloud Nine.

Two years passed and he hadn’t drilled the well.  He finally called and told me in his slow Texas drawl that he had decided not to drill the well.  “My engineer says even if we find what we’re looking for that it will be drained.”  I spent the next hour convincing him that his engineer was wrong.  Tom D was (is) a good man.  He could hear the neediness in my voice and knew that if he had been there in person that he would have seen me on my knees.

“All right,” he finally said.  “You talked me into drilling the well but I’m only doing it because I believe in you.  I hope you don’t let me down.”

I barely had any swagger left by this time in my life.  As he began drilling the well, I knew that this was his one and only shot at success.  If he drilled a dry hole he was on his way back to driving a bus at DFW.  I had pretty much badgered him into drilling the location, a well his engineer was still shaking his head about.  My ego was damaged, my mojo gone and now I had a ton of guilt on my shoulders to make matters worse.

All sorts of scenarios are possible from this point of the story.  We could have drilled a dry hole prompting Tom D to commit suicide, or something equally horrible.  It didn’t happen that way.  We nailed the zone, just as planned.  Anne and I had three percent of the well and it came on for one-hundred-forty-five barrels of oil and four-hundred-fifty MCFG.  The well made us lots of money over the years and it is still producing.

Hundreds of wells later my damaged mojo has never fully recovered and I don’t suppose that it ever will.  As I returned from Noble County yesterday I thought about Tom D and that first well.  I also thought about the good times Anne and I had during the bad times surrounding us and it made me sad that she isn’t alive to experience this new oil boom.

Times are tough these days and maybe my age and my own experiences qualify me as someone that can give a little honest advice.  It’s just this – Never quit believing in yourself no matter how bad things become.  You can’t really lose your mojo.  Just keep looking for it and sooner or later it will return on its own, better than ever.

http://www.EricWilder.com

A very interesting report on the Government’s latest energy predictions.

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080625/energy_outlook.html

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BTU enigma has gasoline purchasers over a barrel.  Read this very interesting article and find out why.

http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/oog/info/twip/twip.asp

Chicory is as old as history itself, being a primary ingredient in many Roman dishes.  The plant’s green leafs (radicchio) are often eaten as a salad in Europe and the root is used as a coffee substitute.  It is largely unknown in the United States except for in the south, mostly around New Orleans.

Here is a Cajun recipe you probably have never heard of but try it anyway.  I found it in the French Acadian Cook Book published in 1955 by the Louisiana Acadian Handicraft Museum, Inc.  The recipe was contributed by Mrs. F.A. McKague of Jennings, Louisiana.  Even if you aren’t familiar with the culinary qualities of chicory give this simple recipe a try it and I’ll bet that you’ll become a certified aficionado.

1 lb of onions                            3 lbs Irish potatoes

1 head of chicory                      1 lb of bacon

Hard cooked eggs

Boil and dice potatoes and eggs in separate dish.  Fry diced bacon and onions until brown.  Mix potatoes, eggs and chopped chicory in frying pan and cook for five minutes.  Serve hot.  Serves six.

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Here is a graph showing oil and natural gas consumption for the United States from 1965 through 2007.

http://www.EricWilder.com

I-40 bisects Oklahoma City into what are really two distinct towns, the north side and the south side.  Just south of I-40, on Agnew, is a retail neighborhood known locally as Stockyards.  Stockyards is home of Cattleman’s Steak House, the oldest continuously operated restaurant in Oklahoma City.  It opened its doors in 1910 three years after Oklahoma became a state.

The restaurant and Stockyards holds many bittersweet memories for me as I was banking at the now defunct Stockyards Bank when my little oil company, caught up in the eighties oil bust, went “belly up.”  Cattleman’s is still a fixture for oilies, cattle raisers and other risk takers, a fitting legacy as the owner won it in a game of dice.

Many luminaries including John Wayne and Ronald Reagan have graced Cattleman’s doors since 1910.  The restaurant serves stiff drinks and the best steaks in Oklahoma City (no kidding!) along with lamb fries and their signature Cattleman’s Salad.  The recipe for their famous house dressing is a secret, but it’s hard keeping a secret for ninety-eight years.  Try it and enjoy.

8 oz. cream cheese                               ½ pint sour cream

Egg Beater = 1 egg                               1 Tsp salt

1 Tsp garlic powder                              ¼ cup Wesson Oil

¾ cup water

Blend in bowl larger than 2.5 quarts with electric mixer for about 3 minutes.  Add 1/4 cup of Wesson Oil and blend until smooth and well mixed.  Add ¾ cup of water and blend until smooth and well mixed.

Makes a bunch and you may wish to share a portion or two with your friends.

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What’s driving the market, rumor or lack of suppy?

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20602099&sid=agWVpHWQL5_I&refer=energy

http://www.EricWilder.com

Oh the games we play.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20602099&sid=aPuqUuwWGsmM&refer=energy

http://www.EricWilder.com

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20602099&sid=aiTpDklG14Es&refer=energy

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The crude oil summit has begun in Saudi Arabia.

Jeddah starts oil price dialogue, but no quick fix - Yahoo! News.

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Bodman speaks on eve of Saudi energy summit.

US energy chief: Low oil production drives price: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance.

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Summer Solstice occurs on the year’s longest day.  It is the beginning of summer and has become an occasion for celebration since ancient times.  Long before the advent of organized religion, pagans gathered during Summer Solstice for feasting and the exchange of legend and lore.

Revels began on Solstice Eve with the lighting of a giant bonfire.  Remaining awake all night, revelers celebrated by chanting, dancing, and playing percussion instruments as they awaited first light of Summer Solstice’s dawn.

Ancient pagans believed in magic and felt the two yearly solstices provided portals to a magical realm.  Because of their beliefs in magic, Summer Solstice became a time for offering gifts to the spirits and exchanging presents with each other.  It was considered a highly mystical date when the prospect of physical and mental rebirth was high.

Voodoo is the New World result of the complex melding of African religion and European Catholicism.  Marie Laveau, the most famous voodoo priestesses in New Orleans, led frenzied revels on the banks of St. Johns Bayou on St. John’s Eve, a date that celebrates St. John the Baptist and loosely coincides with the Summer Solstice.

In Panther Stalking, my novel in progress, protagonist Buck McDivit investigates a pagan commune inhabited only by females.  Buck becomes enamored with Rima, the commune’s beautiful high priestess.  A pivotal moment in the plot occurs when he joins Rima and the inhabitants of the commune in a mystical and almost unbelievable Solstice’s Eve celebration.

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During the years following the eighties oil bust there was a saying in Oklahoma.  “Last one to leave the State turn out the lights.”  The words were anything but hyperbole.  Oil dominated the state’s industry in the eighties and the oil bust all but wiped it out.

Before the bust, I remember stopping on the side of the road one night in Garfield County and counting seventeen drilling rigs.  Seventeen-hundred rigs were drilling onshore and offshore United States.  The increased drilling activity managed to stem the steep decline in crude oil and natural gas, at least for a few years.

Oil wasn’t the only industry to suffer during the eighties bust.  Banking, precipitated by the downfall of Penn Square Bank, suffered dearly.  For a while, a bank a day was closed in Oklahoma.  I personally banked at five different banks that all went under.  The FDIC had hundreds of employees in the State.  They not only managed to single-handedly decimate Oklahoma’s banking industry, they also had a large hand in crushing the local real estate industry.  As so often happens, Government intervention exacerbated the problem instead of alleviating it.

When the price of oil dropped to less than $10 a barrel, rig owners began selling their rigs for scrap.  Stripper wells, wells that produce less than 10 BOPD, were plugged because it cost more to operate them than they made every month.  Countless thousands of stripper wells, all still capable of producing oil and gas, were plugged and the production pipe shot off, pulled and sold for scrap – a valuable United States resource lost forever.

Oklahoma survived because it turned to other things such as computers, electronics and technology.  Today, the worst economy during the eighties is now the best economy of 2008.  Oklahoma sucked in its over inflated gut, re-cinched its belt and learned how to survive.

The economy of oil and gas has again returned to Oklahoma, fueled by $13 MCF natural gas and $130 oil.  The state receives a gross production tax from every MCF and BO, a tax not levied on any other industry – a tax they continued to levy even when oil was $10 a barrel.

Oklahoma is doing fine but, like all the other states, facing an insidious problem.  There isn’t enough crude oil left to supply the world’s ever growing demand.  Unlike the eighties we can’t just turn the oil tap to a higher notch.  It is already wide open.  This is affecting the economy and there are no simple solutions to the problem.

The place to start is energy conservation which we are actively doing by dramatically cutting back on our driving habits.  We consume about twenty-six million barrels of oil every day in the U.S., half of that amount in the form of gasoline.  Yes we are cutting back on our consumption but unfortunately many rapidly developing nations like China, India and Pakistan are sucking up what we don’t use.

It was once common to hear our politicians say that we have an endless supply of natural gas in this country.  This is yet another lie.  While the energy industry is presently stemming the tide of decline by developing shale gas such as the Barnett, Woodford and Haynesville, we are still only twenty years away from where we are now with respect to domestic oil production.

There is presently a dramatic price differential between crude oil and natural gas when comparing BTU to BTU.  If they were equal, natural gas would be trading for around $20 per MCF instead of $13 per MCF, the present market value.  The U.S. should take advantage of this price discrepancy by immediately converting all government vehicles to run on natural gas.  This could easily cut our dependence on foreign oil by several million barrels a day.  Then, until demand catches up with supply, the result would be lower oil (and thus gasoline) prices.

This is a short term fix but it would give us a little breathing room to develop alternative forms of energy.  My opinion, as horrible as it sounds, is to begin building more nuclear reactors for our primary energy needs and develop electrical or hydrogen powered vehicles that are infinitely more energy efficient than our present fleet.

Is it true that gross ignorance in the eighties is at least partially responsible for today’s very frightening energy crisis?  Yes!  I don’t often get on my soapbox but the country is today in a dire energy crisis and unlike the seventies this one is very real.  We all must quit pointing the finger of blame and act responsibly to correct the situation because the alternative is very dark indeed.

http://www.EricWilder.com

One of the largest international seaports, New Orleans has always been a melting pot of many nationalities. The most recent groups to migrate to New Orleans are the Vietnamese. Like the Spanish, Germans and Irish immigrants before them, the Vietnamese have made New Orleans their own, adopting both its culture and cuisine.

 Johnny Do is a cop in the novel Big Easy. He loves Cajun and Creole cooking and has adapted many local recipes to reflect the style of his Asian homeland. Vietnamese Jambalaya is one of Johnny’s favorite dishes.

8 ounces Asian pork sausage
1 pound raw shrimp, peeled and de-veined
1 pound sea scallops
3 tablespoons dry sherry, divided
3 tablespoons soy sauce, divided
1 whole chicken breast, skinned, boned and cut into bit-size pieces

5 tablespoons peanut oil
1 onion, finely diced
2 garlic cloves, very finely chopped
2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger
2 pinches powdered saffron
2 cups basmati rice
½ bunch fresh Thai basil, finely chopped 3 stalks lemon grass, very finely chopped
1 red bell pepper, coarsely diced

5 small banana peppers with ends removed
2 dozen mussels, cleaned, beards removed
½ cup bean sprouts

5 cups seafood stock

Cut sausage into 1/4-inch slices. Saute over medium-high heat until lightly seared and fat has been rendered. Remove sausage and place it on a paper towel to drain.

In a small bowl, toss shrimp and scallops with 2 tablespoons of the soy sauce and 2 tablespoons of the sherry. In another small bowl, toss chicken with remaining 1 tablespoon each soy sauce and sherry.

In a large wok, heat oil over medium-high heat. Add onion; saute until just translucent.  Add garlic, ginger and saffron, then add rice and stir to coat well with onion mixture, about 2 to 3 minutes. Add lemon grass.

While stirring, gradually add stock. Turn heat to high; allow stock to come to a boil, then reduce to a medium simmer. Add basil. Cook for 5 minutes. Add sausage, chicken and peppers. Cover and simmer 15 minutes.

Add shrimp, scallops and mussels, arranging on top of rice mixture. Sprinkle bean sprouts on top of seafood. Cook 5 to 8 minutes until shrimp and scallops are done and mussels have opened.

Remove from heat and let stand for 5 minutes. Remove any unopened mussels. Gently toss seafood and sprouts with rice and serve.

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Here is a pic of a shallow well (>900’) flowing back its load after it was acidized.

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Futures touched $13.271 today, the highest since $14.385 on Dec. 22, 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, and have gained 77 percent this year.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20602099&sid=af74YBgS5L2Y&refer=energy

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It doesn’t take much to change oil prices, either up or down.

Crude Dips on Rising Supply - TheStreet.com.

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Rice wasn’t introduced as a Louisiana staple until after the Civil War. Today it is an integral part of New Orleans cuisine. My Mother tells a story of a distant cousin that married a man from south Louisiana and was soon divorced because she couldn’t properly prepare a pan of rice. While I don’t know if the story is true, I do know that rice is an important addition to almost every south Louisiana dish.

Most rice grown in the United States is the long grain white variety. The kind used by many New Orleans cooks is long grain white rice that is regular milled. This means the milling process has removed hulls, germ and outer bran layer producing distinct and fluffy grains when properly cooked. For those of you contemplating marriage to someone from New Orleans, here are simple instructions for preparing perfect rice every time.

Do not wash the rice before cooking or rinse it after cooking. Doing so will only wash away nutrients on the grains. Many cooks in New Orleans always use the same brand of rice. This is because the most important step in cooking perfect rice is using the correct amount of water and this may vary slightly from miller to miller. Too much water makes the cooked rice soggy and too little water leaves it dry. As a rule of thumb, use 2 1/4 cups of water for every cup of long grain rice. One cup of rice serves about four people.

The volume of rice triples in size so it is important to use a pan that is large enough to accommodate the desired final amount. Bring water to a boil on the stove top then stir in the rice, salt (about ½ teaspoon per cup of rice) and butter (about 2 teaspoons per cup of rice). Cover tightly and simmer for twenty minutes. Finally, remove the pan from the heat and uncover until the rice soaks up the remaining water. This usually takes about five minutes.

Once you cover the rice, don’t open the lid until you are ready to take it off the heat. Peeking is a definite no no. Doing so lets the steam escape and lowers the temperature. Don’t stir the rice after it comes to a boil. If you stir it, you’re going to have gummy rice - also a no no. Finally, don’t let the rice stay in the pan that you cooked it in for more than five to ten minutes. Doing so will cause the grains to pack. Got all that? If you do, your marriage is safe. Well, at least from the rice cooking aspect.

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George Bush has this one exactly right.

Bush to Congress: Embrace energy exploration now: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance.

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This is one of the oldest and most famous restaurants in the southwest.  It is located in a historic portion of Oklahoma City known as Stockyards.  The area holds many bittersweet memories for me as I was banking at now defunct Stockyard’s Bank when my oil company went “belly up” at the end of the last oil boom.

Stockyards City - Cattlemen's Steakhouse.

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I was on Amazon last night and decided to download the new Eagles’ album Long Road out of Eden.  It was late when I finished the download but I listened to a few of the tracks and remembered why I had always liked the group so much.  One of the songs reminded me of the 1975 song Lyin’ Eyes, and a time in my life when I felt a great empathy with the lyrics of that song.

I had sat a well just outside of Falls City, Nebraska during my last year at Cities Service Oil Company.  The little town is the place where the real events of the movie Boys Don’t Cry occurred.  It was, at first glance, a sleepy little village but after fourteen days I learned differently.

In1975 I was twenty-nine and still a year away from ending my waning marriage with first wife Gail.  Falls City is the county seat of Richardson County, the southeastern-most county in Nebraska.  The town is just across the border from Kansas.  I don’t know if Kansas is still a dry state, but it was then.  Because of this, Kansans young and old crossed the border to drink and raise the roof.

I was training a new geologist named Gary.  The engineer overseeing the well was a young man also named Gary.  The three of us soon learned the place was a little different, not quite a Sodom and Gomorrah but racier than anyplace I had ever lived.  Everyone seemed to have a boyfriend or girlfriend that wasn’t their husband or wife, and everyone in town soon knew who we were.

The two Garys and I drove over to the nearby town of Rulo one night to have dinner at a highly recommended catfish restaurant on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River.  When we finished eating, we stopped into the local bar for a couple of beers.  A very loud band was playing in the bar housed in the lower level of an old three-story brick office building.  The lights were low, music loud, along with the cacophony of a hundred male and female revelers.  We entered the darkened double doors with rapt anticipation.

After pushing through the raucous crowd, we shoe-horned our way onto a long bench at a tabl