Bunnels Run, Oil and Gas-1975

The leaves have all fallen so it is possible to see a ways into the woods now, and it’s not rifle season for deer yet, so I take a walk up the hill across the road from us. The two guys that pump the wells up and down the road on Saturdays have just finished shutting them all down so it is finally quiet. It is a beautiful fall day to take my sketchpad and park myself up from the well to draw it. Photographs cannot capture the details and feel of the place. You can barely see it from anywhere because everything metal is so rusty and all the wood is weathered grey and blends in with the tree bark.

When we first moved onto Bunnels Run, all we could smell was oil and gas, everywhere, all the time. It permeated the air, the soil, even the water. Now, after six months, we have gotten used to it and hardly notice the smell anymore. We are still breathing it though and I wonder if maybe it isn’t what’s making us so lazy and wanting to sit rocking all the time. It’s kind of hard to get anything done when you are rocking, kicking back on the porch, just watching things go by. We did get our garden planted and we weed it every morning while waiting for the mailman to come. Mail is darn right exciting when you don’t have a phone. Gives you something to look forward to. We get the  Mother Earth News, Organic Gardening, the Market bulletin and the local paper out of Harrisville so we have something to read. Plus seed catalogs, lots of seed catalogs, like Burpees, R.H. Shumways, lots of others. The Sears catalog is even entertaining and the non glossy pages will do in a pinch if you run out of toilet paper in the outhouse. You have to crumple them up and rub them between your hands first though, to make them more absorbent.

Although we have eighty acres, only five of it is flat bottomland, and it is situated right along the graveled county road. Everything we do down in the bottom is visible to folks going by on the road until the weeds get tall enough to screen us in late summer. We let the Joe Pye (Eupatorium purpureum) and Iron Weed (Vernonia) and Helianthus grow up along the creek so we have privacy down in the creek where we take out baths. The weeds grow way over our heads and the creek has five foot banks so we are well hidden down there. We use Dr Bronners Peppermint soap and rinse off using a bucket up on land in an attempt not to pollute the water too much. Someday maybe we’ll have a bathtub inside. It’s getting a little cold to be taking creek baths these days so we have started to heat water up in a bucket instead.  We pour cupfuls over us standing behind the shack on a rock and at the end dump the last over our heads. That last bit is the best part of a bucket bath.

It is kind of weird to be so far out from everything while at the same time being right on the road. When we get our house on the hill done it will be way different. It’s a long hard climb up there and I don’t expect we’ll get hardly any visitors. We had a new road cut by a guy using a D-5 Cat, but you first have to get across the creek, through a swampy bit on the far bottom, and then  about a half mile up a  really steep, turning road that gets real slick when it rains. We aren’t figuring on coming down much once we finally get up there. At the rate we’re going it will be awhile yet.

For now, we are busy hauling logs down one at a time with our pony, getting the square sills made at the sawmill, stockpiling rough cut lumber, and collecting windows and doors, an old iron bathtub and such.

And then we’ll be rocking awhile on the porch. And once in a while making the long, fifty mile trek to Marietta, Ohio to get better beer. The beer they sell in West Virginia is “near beer”, only three point two percent alcohol and tastes like water. Stroh’s -fire brewed, is the best we’ve got here and it is barely drinkable. Then there’s the visiting we have to do, while we are out that way, which takes the whole rest of the day, and then we get home late for milking and the goats are upset. And then it gets dark so early and all we have is kerosene light so we usually go to bed about two hours after dark. In the morning there is chores, milking, feeding and watering the goats and chickens, heating up water to wash the milk buckets, jars and breakfast dishes. Everything takes so much time, especially laundry. Haul water from the creek, heat it  up on the stove, haul it out to the washtubs, scrub the dirt out on the washboard, squeeze out the soap, rinse them in the other tub, wring out the water, shake the wrinkles out, hang and pin it all on the line, bring it back in before it rains. I don’t really get much time to sketch, or rock, or read, for that matter.

So, now I am sitting here looking down at the oil well. It surely smells stronger up here right by the well head. There is the thirty foot tall metal pole with all the guy wires holding it steady. I think it was originally used when they drilled the hole and now probably only needed if they have to pull something out for repairs. The most interesting part is the twelve foot wooden walking wheel, with the foot wide canvas belt going around it, connecting it to the pumping jack on one end, and the one cylinder natural gas engine on the other.

There is a thirty or forty foot long, dilapidated wooden shed with a tin roof over everything but the jack and a huge metal tank that the oil and water get pumped into. When they pump they don’t get oil at first. They pull up nothing but hot salty water for hours before oil starts coming up with it. It all gets stored together in the big tank and after awhile the oil rises up and the water settles down and then gets drained off. Eventually the tank will get full enough with oil for them to drain it into a truck down on the road. The wells around here don’t produce very much oil.  Nobody is getting much in the way of royalties, but the free gas is appreciated by everybody. We don’t own the Mineral Rights to our land, they were kept by some previous landowner, but we get free gas just the same. If there is a well on your land or within a hundred feet of your property line you get free gas and there are wells everywhere. When they are pumping, as they do every Saturday, you can hear all the old wooden wheels creaking and groaning with a long, slow rhythm and then you hear the huge one cylinder natural gas engines popping, loudly and slightly off beat, missing occasionally. There aren’t too many guys left who know how to maintain these dinosaurs and they are slowly being replaced with boring Briggs and Stratton gasoline engines. I like these old ones that put out a staccato beat resonating all down the holler that you can actually dance to. When there are five or more going at once it is awesome. Not quiet, like now.

My new little tri- color collie pup is sitting with me as I sketch. He is so

little that when he stands by the chickens they look bigger than he does. Even a pint jar looks big next to him. We named him Ranza from a name we saw on a mailbox and he is a good boy. He has been teaching himself to herd the goats and chickens and is doing pretty well at it. Climbing up here to the well has tuckered him all out and he is asleep next to me in the leaves. I put away my sketchbook and lean back looking up through the branches. Life is good.

©Wendy lee Maddox, Edgewisewoods.com, March 31^st, 2014