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he greeted their sheepish apologies with a stare and then rushed us through breakfast. Dad ran a tight ship, the tightest of any of the fifteen or so drillers on the job.
    No later than a quarter to six, we hit the road, out the other side of town. We rode four-wide across the bench seat of the Supercab; the rear of the cab was generally full of tools or maps or work clothes. I sat wedged between Jerry and Dad, who drove, and Toby perched on the outside. When I fell asleep, and that was nearly every morning, my heavy head ping-ponged between Dad’s right shoulder and Jerry’s left.
    The Ely Highway ran between sandy desert buttes and sage, and although we ventured only twenty-five or thirty miles from town, the drive seemed endless, coming and going. It was as if the same scene unfolded in front of us, mile after mile, and just when I started to think, again, that we would never reach the end, Dad turned off on some dirt road and headed into the backcountry.
     
     
    Rather than haul equipment back and forth from Milford, Dad ended each day by parking at the site of next day’s first dig. I loved that first sight of the rig each morning. Something about it represented renewal, at least to me. Another day, another chance to lay down eight, ten, a dozen exploratory wells. Another chance to please Dad. Another day to be caught in the crosshairs of his wrath.
    Neither Jerry nor Toby found our daily arrivals so invigorating. That’s when their work began in earnest. Jerry’s first job was to shimmy underneath the truck—an International Harvester Paystar 5000 mounted with a Mayhew rig—and grease it up. First, he would walk the perimeter, giving each wheel well a hard kick. In the late afternoons, after we shut down, rattlesnakes were known to climb into the insides of the wheel wells and stretch out. The last place Jerry wanted to be when he came face-to-face with a surprised rattler was on his back. Better to give the snake plenty of notice and let him crawl away on his own.
    Toby did the same under the water truck, a brown Ford with a three-thousand-gallon tank. He also had the task of fetching the explosives Dad would need on the first hole and making sure the shovels and other tools were ready. Once the mast came up, Dad didn’t tarry.
    The actual digging never failed to enchant me. It was like a crude ballet, with my father playing the role of the maestro. He would drive pipe into the ground segment by segment, controlling the speed and the addition of new pipe with a series of levers, while Jerry did the heavy lifting opposite him. Once a segment was down as far as it could go, Jerry would slap something that looked like a big steel hand around the pipe; then Dad would gun the rig’s engine, unhinging the driver from the pipe. Jerry would then take a spring-loaded contraption connected to a cable and jam it into the open end of a new pipe. With levers above his head, Dad manipulated the cable, lifting the pipe and pulling it toward Jerry, who hung off the edge of the rig, ready to catch it. The new pipe was connected to the previous segment, then was pushed down again. Each segment of pipe measured twenty feet, and it took anywhere from eight to twelve of them to finish each well. Pulling them out was the same process in reverse, with Jerry attaching the clutcher to the pipe, which was pulled up and detached, then thrown down a chute—all the while, Dad guiding it with his levers—where it would topple into a transport bay. Toby, the designated number-two hand, handled the shoveling and the other grunt work.
    The brittle earth proved a complication in the country we were in. It was the worst kind of drilling, as far as Dad was concerned. He had to tote around a huge steel box with a hole in one end, called a pit. He positioned the open end over the drill site, and into the pit the crew poured water and powdered mud. The mud went down the hole and, propelled by the spinning pipe, clung fast to the earthen walls,