“All of this country has been deep under water several times during the last few million years,” he would explain patiently. “In fact, most of the center of the North American continent has been submerged at one time or another. When the Four Corners region was a sea bottom back in the Carboniferous era, untold generations of marine plants and animals died in the water and sank to the bottom.
“As the ages passed, those life forms were buried by mud and silt brought down from surrounding mountains by the raging rivers of those days. The weight of the silt caused it to turn into sandstone or limestone layers hundreds of feet thick. This pressure generated a great deal of heat. Geologists think that pressure and heat compressed the dead marine creatures into particles of oil and gas.
“Every time the land rose to the surface and sank again, another layer or stratum of dead fish and plants would form. All this heaving and twisting of the earth formed traps or domes, called anticlines, into which the oil and gas moved. That’s why we find oil today at different depths beneath the surface.”
“I understand that water and gas pressure keeps pushing oil toward the surface,” Sandy said on one occasion, “but then why doesn’t it escape?”
“Usually it gets caught under anticlines where the rock is too thick and hard for it to move any farther,” Quiz cut in, eager to show off his new knowledge of geology. “But it does escape in some places, Sandy. You’ve heard of oil springs. George Washington owned one of them. And the Indians used to sop crude petroleum from such springs with their blankets and use it as a medicine or to waterproof their canoes. Sometimes the springs catch fire. Some of those still exist in parts of Iran. I read an article once which said that Jason really was looking for a cargo of oil when he sailed the Argo to the Caucasus Mountains in search of the Golden Fleece. The fleece was just a flowery Greek term for a burning spring, maybe.”
“Maybe,” Donovan agreed as he stoked his pipe and sent clouds of smoke billowing through the laboratory. “There’s also a theory that Job was an oilman. The Bible has him saying that ‘the rock poured me forth rivers of oil,’ you remember. If you read the Book of Job carefully, it almost sounds as if the poor fellow’s troubles started when his oil field caught fire. However that may be, we know that the Greeks of Jason’s time used quite a bit of oil. The Arabs even refined petroleum and lighted the streets of their cities with something resembling kerosene almost a thousand years ago.”
“Golly,” said Sandy. “It’s all too deep for me—several thousand feet too deep. I think I’ll go help Chao get dinner ready! I do know how to cook.”
The one job around the derrick that the boys never got a chance to handle was that of Peter Sanchez, the platform man who worked on their shift, or “tower.” Whenever the time came to replace a bit, Peter would climb to his perch halfway up the rig, snap on a safety belt, and guide the upper ends of the ninety-foot stands of pipe into their rack. There they would stand upright in a slimy black bunch until it was time to return them to the well.
Peter, who boasted that he had been an oilman for a quarter of a century, worked effortlessly. He never lost his footing on the narrow platform, even when the strongest wind blew. Platform men on the other shifts were equally sure-footed—and very proud of their ability to “walk” strings of pipe weighing several tons. And they took things easy whenever they climbed down from their dizzy perches.
Peter, in particular, was fond of amusing the other crew members by telling them stories about the oil fields in the “good old days.” His favorite character was a driller named Gib Morgan. Gib, he said, had come down originally from the Pennsylvania regions when the first big strikes were being made in Texas and Oklahoma, around 1900.