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Graveyard Tour<\/strong><\/p>\n The drilling rig stood in the dark middle of the night in the center of North Dakota, its strings of bright bulbs the only light for fifty miles.\u00a0 Two large-cab pickups were parked in front of the freight container that served as an office and changing room.<\/p>\n The rig rumbled and shook; the crew was tripping the pipe, which means they were pulling a couple thousand feet of pipe, with a drill bit on the end, out of the hole, one thirty-foot section at a time.<\/p>\n The youngest of the roughnecks who were pulling pipe out of the hole, disconnecting and standing the sections to the side, leaned too far in over the travelling block and the next fast rising stand of pipe caught him just under his left eyebrow.\u00a0 Blood went everywhere on the drilling platform.\u00a0 The young man shook it off and gestured to the driller that he was all right.<\/p>\n The young roughneck wiped the blood away from his eyes with his muddy glove, and kept on working.\u00a0 The driller winked at him and smiled.\u00a0 Finally, the driller threw the big red switch, the diesel engine slowed and stopped, and the lights dimmed briefly.<\/p>\n The older roughneck who worked the other breakout wrench alongside the young roughneck went over to the office and came back quickly with the first-aid kit.\u00a0 He washed the wound, declared it to be minor, bandaged it, and handed the young roughneck his helmet.<\/p>\n The driller waited until the older man and the younger one had picked up their huge cable-driven tongs and clamped them back onto the pipe coming out of the kelly.\u00a0 He threw the switch again and the massive machinery started up with a loud diesel roar.\u00a0 They labored, then, until the last section of pipe was out of the hole and the worn bit lay exposed on the floor.<\/p>\n At dawn, they watched the morning crew drive up, go in the container and change, and come up the steps to the drilling floor, clean and dry.\u00a0 After some hellos, they changed places, one clean worker for each muddy, bloody, and exhausted one. The new arrivals took over the job of replacing the thousand feet of jointed pipe with its new bit fastened at the bottom.<\/p>\n Each of young roughneck\u2019s crew clapped him on the back as they went down the steel steps to change into street clothes.<\/p>\n \u201cThat was as tough a tour as I\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d the derrickman said a moment later.<\/p>\n He was the last one down from his harness atop the tower and the last into the changing room.\u00a0 From his perch up there, he would have seen everything.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Charles D. Tarlton<\/strong> retired from teaching in 2006 and turned to writing poetry and short form prose.\u00a0 He published a number of poems in such e-magazines as Shampoo, Review Americana, Tipton, Barnwood, Haibun Today, Ink, Sweat, and Tears, Atlas Poetica, Blue and Yellow Dog, Shot Glass, Six Minute Magazine, Cricket Online Review,<\/em> plus an e-chapbook in the 2River<\/em> series, entitled, \u201cLa Vida de Piedra y de Palabra,\u201d \u00a0\u201cFive Episodes in the Navajo Degradation\u201d in Lacuna, \u00a0\u201cThe Turn of Art,\u201d in Fiction International<\/em>, and three recent stories in, Fifty-Word Stories, Out of the Gutte<\/em>r, and Thick Jam. \u00a0Muse-Pie Press<\/em> nominated three of his poems from Shot Glass<\/em> for the Pushcart Prize.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Graveyard Tour The drilling rig stood in the dark middle of the night in the center of North Dakota, its strings of bright bulbs the only light for fifty miles.\u00a0 Two large-cab pickups were parked in front of the freight container that served as an office and changing room. The rig rumbled […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4991"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4993,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4991\/revisions\/4993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}