Bob Carnes

Description of Echoes of Ilium America seems to have a fascination with the oil industry, but our idea of it is formed by newspaper headlines and TV shows. This book doesn’t deny the existence of families like the one that populates the series Dallas, nor does it try to deny attention grabbing accidents like the Exxon Valdez or the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But it does make the point that all the people involved aren’t rich, spoiled money-grubbers who mindlessly despoil the planet. This is a book about the oilfield, the real oilfield, and the men who ply the dangerous and difficult trades required to enable us to power our cars and turn our lights on. A fourteen-year-old boy steps off a truck in Jal, New Mexico in 1942. He has no name and no memory of his origins. After the little boomtown takes him in and gives him a name, Buck Burnet goes to work on a drilling rig and something exceptional happens. Thus begins a career of exceptional happenings as he follows the oilfield from west to south Texas to south Louisiana and finally, to the Gulf of Mexico. By 1972 Buck Burnet is a toolpusher on a jack-up rig and has left a string of stories behind him so outside the norm that most people think him a myth. He has become an oilfield legend. Mike Brown is a freshly minted mechanical engineer who goes to work for Exxon and is assigned as the drilling engineer on Buck’s rig, the Hector. Mike has heard all the Buck Burnet stories but even they didn’t prepare him for the reality; a huge, movie star-looking man who seems every bit the hero the stories would have him. The adage goes that engineers and o-rings screwed up the oilfield, and that’s the mindset that Mike finds himself thrust into when he finds out he is the fifth engineer assigned to the rig in six months. Mike is stubborn, though, and not the typical young engineer. He is also curious about the Buck Burnett legend. He hangs on and finds out the truth about the stories and becomes a friend and partner to Buck. Enter Val Campbell, a schoolboy intern whose father is obviously someone very high in Exxon. Val comes to Hector in 1991. The rig hasn’t had any interns since Buck chased the last two off many years before. Buck is no fan of privilege, and Val is the very definition. Buck wants him off the rig and does everything possible to make life hell for the young man. Val is not all he seems either, and comes aboard with a knowledge of Buck Burnet no one else has. Mike and several of the other hands see things in Val that they like and think Buck is being unfair. The resulting conflict threatens to destabilize the Hector, a rig that has operated for nearly thirty trouble free years. The book gives a taste of the oilfield and offshore. The three protagonists are drawn in bold strokes but the minor characters and their interactions give one a true feel for the work and the people who do it.