West Texas is part of the "Oil Patch" where a good bit of American domestic production of crude comes out of the ground. (I know you have heard things about Texans, but I'm talking about crude oil here.) As I was taking back roads from Austin to Albuquerque I came upon an amazing site demonstrating how energy production is changing technology, but not necessarily geographic location.As I was riding through one of the many rainstorms of the day heading northwest toward Lubbock I saw off to the southwest of the highway a mesa, a flat-topped geologic formation left when the land around it was washed or blown away, studded with a forest of windmills. These aren't the windmills of western movie fame, wooden towers topped with a multi-bladed fan, but steel towers topped with three bladed propellers. The mesas were probably 300 feet higher than the surrounding area, and the towers were another 100 feet high. The mesa stretched for 10 miles along the highway with rows of windmills every 200 or so yards. I don't know how far the rows extended to the south, but that wind farm was impressive.
The title for this entry was provoked by the sight of oil pump jacks operating at the base of the mesa. Had it not been raining I would have stopped to get a photo of the windmills as a backdrop for the pump jacks, but I didn't think I could get a shot that would have shown the windmills against the clouds and rain. At least that was what I told myself was the reason for not standing beside the road in the rain to take the photo.
As I was riding along thinking how to compose a piece about the juxtaposition of these two types of energy production it crossed my mind that some folks might not know what a pump jack was. With roots in Oklahoma and New Mexico, I think I have always known what an oilfield pump, a pump jack, looked like. They look like the perpetual motion woodpecker toys that used to be popular among children. You'd put the toy bird on the rim of a glass of water, tap the head of the bird to get it to lean into the glass, and the thing would bob up and down for hours. If I ever knew how it did that, I don't remember now.
I took several photos of a pump jack, but without anything to show scale, the picture could be of an object two feet or 200 feet high. To remedy the problem, I offer a photo of the pump jack with the bike in the foreground. The seat of the bike is about 33 inches high. How tall is the pump jack?
The sound of the pump working is a combination of creaks, groans and grinds. There is an alternating grinding of the metal gears working and the hollow groan and creak as if someone were saying something at the bottom of a barrel. I can imagine that on a dark night in the middle of the high plains someone stumbling on an oilfied without knowing what was there might assume it was a torture chamber.
It isn't hard to figure out the price of crude oil is up. All the pump jacks I saw, and I saw hundreds, were pumping, and a drill rig was being set up in the field near where I took the photo above. I also paid $3.49 per gallon for gasoline. My next bike might be a hybrid. Thankfully I'm getting 40 miles to the gallon.
When I left Columbia I had all of my cold weather gear stashed in a dry bag. A dry bag is used by kayakers and rafters to keep their gear dry, and I am happy to report that it does the same on a motorcycle. With the liner to my riding suit and my electric jacket in the bag the bag is almost three feet long even after it has been compressed and all of the air has been forced out. By the time I got to Albuquerque the bag look like a small lunch pail because I was wearing all of that gear.
East of Albuquerque lie the Sandia Mountains. From the east there is a gradual uplift to the land, but on the west side the mountain drops several thousand feet rapidly into the Rio Grande valley. As I was riding in on I-40, in the middle of May, the clouds above me looked like snow clouds. I had my electric grips on and my electric jacket on high. Since the waterproofing spray I put on the outer jacket doesn't seem to be working I was wondering if I could get electrocuted by 12 volt current running through a wet jacket. Apparently not as I got to Albuquerque.
