"My father was a petroleum geologist. A lot of my childhood, he was gone, away on oil rigs in the Powder River Basin and remote parts of Wyoming, living in man camps long before cellphones. We had to wait days to talk to him. When he went into the nearest town to shower, he'd find a payphone and call us. I was always breathless with news."
"Every morning, while my sister and I curled our hair and set it in a cloud of hairspray, my dad made us toast and drove us to school. At a traffic light he named "New Word Light," he taught us a new vocabulary word every day and asked us to use it three times that day. I still remember some of them: troglodyte, ennui, pernicious."
"My sister and I waited on the sidewalk when we knew he was coming home. We jumped up and down to greet him. He always smelled of gasoline and grease, and I carefully helped him carry his tools, the UV box and offset logs into the house. He brought me things he found on prairie walks: rocks, arrowheads, antlers and once, a piece of china from a long-abandoned homestead, optimistically decorated with a sprig of roses."
A father worked as a petroleum geologist and spent long stretches on oil rigs in remote Wyoming, calling home from payphones and returning with prairie finds like arrowheads and a piece of rose-decorated china. Children eagerly greeted him, helped carry his tools, and treasured his gifts. After an energy bust the father became more present, making breakfast, driving the children to school, teaching a daily vocabulary word at a traffic light called "New Word Light," and answering big questions at a "Question Corner." He offered a cosmic perspective that compressing Earth's history into 24 hours places humans in the last few seconds before midnight.
Read at High Country News
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]