Trippin' Through the Oil Patch: A Boy Remembers His Dad

I didn't want to forget Dad. The day he died, in all my clenched anguish, I swore I would remember him. I would remember how he looked, how he smelled when he came in from the oil rig, how he drawled when he told a story. I'd remember his grin and his laughter. I'd remember the bright flame of his personality that drew us ruffians to him. Even back then, when I was just twelve, I knew the only way I could keep Dad alive was by remembering his stories.
When Dad reared back his chair against the aluminum wall of our trailer and pushed into a story, the ears of all the kids and adults within earshot perked up. His stories were better than The Lone Ranger on the radio. His stories were better than Superman comic books. He was way better than the classics Mom read to me from Journeys through Bookland, the book set she bought from a traveling salesman. Buying those books gave Mom a weapon to battle the pagan life of the oil patch. Reading them aloud to me was her way of bartering for a better future than an eight-by-twenty-seven-foot trailer hauled from one desolate Wyoming oil camp to another. With those books, along with the small-town county libraries, the piano she made room for in our tiny living space, and the school spelling tests, she tried to hold up to me a better way of life than the one where her husband gambled life and limb every day for enough money to take care of us and send home to the old folks, a gamble he finally lost.
Dad's stories showed me—and all the other kids and adults who listened—how to take on the world with humor and generosity, how to rebound from life's punches, how to, in baseball vernacular, charge them worm burners when a grounder flies straight at your knees. His stories showed us how to reach out one hand to the past and forge a human link to the future. It was the stories that anchored me in uncharted waters when, two years after Dad died, Mom died, too. It's the stories I pass on to my own grandkids now, so they'll know who they are as they move on.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Forward
Prologue
Coyote Spotting
Busted Skulls
Hole-in-the-Wall
Trailer House Fire
Blindman's Bluff
Cinnamon Gang
Little Boxes
Who You Is
Odd Man Out
Blood Brothers
Gaps and Gullies
Junk Yard Lace
Jade Shooter
Long Long Change
Man from Zuron
Rut Runnin'
Wing Man