I was now working full time on Mike's rig in the citrus groves. We were drilling freeze protection wells. In the 1980s the temperature sometimes dropped below 32 degrees for several hours in the nights and early mornings during the winters in Fort Pierce, and Vero Beach Florida. A citrus tree can be permanently damaged after as little as four hours of temperatures below freezing.

The whole country loved Florida orange juice and Indian River grapefruits. The crop was very valuable, and flooding the grove with water from 1000 to 1500 feet deep provided geothermal heat that protected the crop from freezing. We would drill a sixteen inch hole with mud to about 500 +- feet, after digging a twenty feet long, four feet wide and four feet deep earthen pit with an old case backhoe that had a stack of five gallon buckets for a seat. We'd line the pit with plastic,and fill it with water out of the canal. If it was a hot day we would cool off by striping down to our underwear and swimming in the pit before mixing mud in it. 

Sometimes, after we mixed mud, Billy Sr. would say to me and Jr. “I’ll give you boys twenty dollars if you can throw me in the pit.” We'd try but never succeed. I brought that memory up to Jr. when I ran into him last year. 

One day we were leaving the grove all three of us in the front seat of a flat bed truck. I was sitting in the middle shifting the gears, when an alligator about seven feet long appeared in the road heading for the canal. Billy put the truck between it and the canal. Sr. said to me “neutral” set the parking brake, and fast as lightning he was out of the truck. He grabbed a chain off the truck bed, tossed one end of it in the gator’s mouth as it hissed and showed us its teeth. It bit down on the chain and rolled with the chain in its mouth wrapping the chain around itself as Sr. gave it slack. Jr. already had the twentytwo marlin rifle that we carried behind our heads, in a  rack that I made for Mike in wood shop class, and gave to him for a fathers day present. We called it “the snake gun”, and used it to kill water moccasins if we had to go down to clean off the fresh water pump suction. He already had it pointed between the gators eyes when Sr. yelled “shootem! Shootem!” long before Troy Landrey ever did. We ate a lot of gator meat back then. I learned that the whole gator is good to eat, not just the tail. 

While we were drilling cleaning the pump suction was a full time job, the plastic would get sucked up to it and pieces of shell and clay would plug it up all day, we’d tie the hose to a shovel stuck in the sand or to the pump trailer to keep it up high in the pit but it would eventually end up plugged off on the bottom. Either me or Jr. would be at the suction basket with a flat shovel or a rake scraping on it all day long while his dad or Mike drilled the hole.

Mike would weld ears on the pipe, and while Sr. drilled the hole, me and Jr would dip the cuttings out of the pit with the backhoe, tend to the suction basket, and add water or mix mud when told to do so. Mike would leave the grove every day to go buy us all lunch at a store that sold all kinds of bar b que, fuel, work clothes, beer, and guns called Carter’s. 

The buses that the fruit pickers rode to work would stop there every morning so they could buy food and gloves, and after work they would stop there so they could cash the checks they earned daily, and give most of it back to Mr. Carter. I would usually ask for a chicken sandwich. It was a half chicken, bones and all in between two slices of white bread. I didn't mind eating the same thing every day, it never got old. I’ve been working in Pecos, Texas for the last ten days and I've eaten two whole rotisserie chickens in my hotel room so far. God knew what He was doing when He made chickens. 

If Raydar was working Mike would buy him a six pack of red can Budwiesers. While he was gone me and Jr. would sneak off one at a time to smoke half a joint each in between the rows of trees. Pot back then was different from the pot that they have today. Back then it was Mother Nature, there were only two kinds of pot, green, and brown and you could smoke it and still function mentally, and physically. I've tried today's pot, and I’ve also seen how it affects the young people who smoke it regularly. It is definitely not Mother Nature anymore. 

If we worked until it was dark we could have the hole drilled to about three hundred and fifty feet, and the drill pipes tripped out with only sixty feet of collars in the hole and one in the derrick. At first we used twenty foot long, three and a half inch O.D. drill pipe with milled flats, and six inch collars. A couple of years later we cut the derrick, flanged in another fifteen feet, and switched to four and a half inch internal flush drill pipe with six inch tool joints, and eight inch collars. We built a new kelly out of six inch square tubing and bought a six inch reverse air swivel. We were then able to set the casing in forty footers, and drill the open hole portion of the well using reverse circulation. The upgrades let us complete a well in about seven days.

On our second day of drilling, we would trip back in, T.D. the casing hole, trip out, set casing, and cement from a hole we dug in the ground, that was filled by a rinker truck loaded with ready mixed portland, and pump it directly into a header with a valve that was welded to the casing, and we would displace it by throwing the pump suction into the canal and pump it until Mike said to stop, and we’d shut the valve. No measured displacement tanks, or flow meter. He would order just enough cement to fill the annulus and leave a little shoe in the casing. He’d stop us when he saw returns. We would sometimes only drill out a couple of feet of cement the next day and other times a lot, because if there was a long clay formation it would usually sag in the hole making the annulus smaller.

The well inspector from the Saint Johns Water Management District was a man named Frank Foxworth, we were supposed to wait for him to be there before we pumped cement, and we couldn't always do that, but we could always make sure that he left with a bottle of Crown Royal and he was fine with that. He was in his sixties then so I’m sure he's dead by now. When I applied to take the test for my Florida State Water Well Contractor License he helped me out a lot with study material, and got me approved to take the exam. I was twentyone years old then and he said I was the youngest licensed driller in the Saint Johns district. That means, it's totally possible that one day I'll have the oldest license in that district if I live long enough. 

The next day we would lay the derrick down, and move off the hole just a few feet, dig down about four feet deep around the casing, and dig a trench to the canal. The wells were always right next to a canal because the wells would fill the canals, and the water level would rise to a point where there were eight inch pipes that connected the canal to the furrows. Furrows are shallow swales between the rows of trees. I would help the welders and Mike build a tee out of the well casing using templates,and torches. They would weld a flange on the top of the casing at ground level. 

At the canal we’d bolt on a twelve inch butterfly valve, and when the well was completed put a blind flange on the top. They would also weld two couplings to the canal discharge and we would build a three inch stand pipe to fill the spray trailers that the tractors pull, and we would put a tee on the two inch for valves with cam lock fittings. The welders, Sr, and Jr. would drink beers when the job came close to being finished, sometimes Mike would too. 

When I was seventeen I drank my first three beers on a day that we welded up the tee. Sr. handed me the first one, I took it, looked at Mike, and he said “If your mom finds out I didn’t Know about it”. I drank two more and I was drunk for the first time. 

From that day on every time I drank I wanted to get drunk. Sometimes we would finish the tee and all go to a bar on the beach called The Saint Lucie Inn where the shut down welders and pipe fitter from the nuclear power plant would drink after work. My age was never an issue. I went in with a crew of drillers and welders. I was one of them so it was assumed that I was old enough. The drinking age was nineteen at the time and I was seventeen, so I was pretty close and they always bought pitchers of beer and gave me a mug. We'd all sit at a table so I didn't have to actually interact with the bartender.

The next day we would trip back in the hole, drill out the shoe using water from the canal, and discharging back into the canal. We would put a one inch P.V.C. airline a couple hundred feet  into the well between the drill pipe and the casing to help air lift the cuttings out, and when we got down to about eight hundred feet the well would start to flow. We would drill until the well flowed a full pipe or got to twenty two hundred parts per million T.D.S. usually about fifteen hundred feet deep. The open hole section took the longest time because the deeper we drilled, the longer it took to clean the hole for connections, and trip up into the casing at night. From start to finish the well took about two and a half weeks.

In the Spring of that year, my mom told my real dad, had become a recovered, Christian alcoholic. He was still living in California and I was sent to visit him for two weeks. We decided that I should join the Army, so I took the ASVAB test, and because I was a high school drop out without a GED, my score only allowed me to join the reserves. I went to Fort Leonardwood Missouri for basic training, and A.I.T. My M.O.S. was a 62B heavy equipment mechanic. 

While I was gone doing that for four months my mom and driller Mike broke up, and California Mike moved in with my mom, brothers, and sister in Florida. California Mike had his family back, and when I came back from basic training and A.I.T. I didn’t live with them, I lived in driller Mike’s new house, with Billy Sr., Jr. and whoever else would come and go. Mike didn’t live there. He already moved in with another waitress.

I'll talk more in the next episode about some of the things that happened in that house and other places at that time. I’ll tell you now that it gets pretty crazy in the next couple of episodes. 

I think back now about the day me and driller Mike climbed to the top of the derrick together. We sat there and talked, he told me that if I worked hard I could have anything that I wanted. I believed him then, and although I’ve always worked hard, and never had anything to speak of, I believe him now. I’ve never had anything because all I ever wanted was to travel and make holes, and that's what I got. I’ll be 58 years old soon, and I’m buying my first house. 

I've been married to my fourth wife for five years now, it's longer than I was married to the other three, and I'm not thinking about a divorce nor have I in those five years. I’ll be working at Cascade drilling for two years soon, and I’m not thinking about quitting. I wanted to be a writer before I ever knew what well drilling was. I worked hard making a lot of holes, and now I’m writing about it! He was right - hard work will get you everything you want. I'm thankful for him in my life and the path he set me on, and I don’t regret a minute of it. 

Thanks for taking the time to read this story, I hope you enjoyed it, and until next time, work hard for what you want, and if you don't know what you want just work hard. 

What you want will eventually find you.