A Driller's Life
The Day the Steam Cleaner Didn’t Start
Jim Beath recalls a year of writing about his life for The Driller.
It's been about a year since I started to write A Driller’s Life. I’ve had 12 stories published, and only two didn’t make it, not because they weren't good, but in my opinion because they were too good. They leaned a little too much to the right for BNP and had a little bit of sexual content in them. My goal when I started writing was, and still is to get enough stories together to make them into a book. If you're curious about the stories that didn’t get published, and other ones that won’t make it to the magazine, you can buy the book in a couple of years. Please. I’m writing this entry because I was asked by Brock Yordy to write about the year since I started writing A Driller’s Life. I think that I should go back a little further. Let me take it back to 2024, and a little more.
Anytime in 2024
2025, 24, 23, 22, 21, and 20 were drunken cocaine fueled blurs, with brief periods of sobriety to recuperate enough to look for a new job after getting fired from, or dragging up from the last one. From what I can’t remember about 2025 is that the only reason that I woke up to go to work in the mornings was the knowing that when the work was done I could start getting drunk. My hands shook all day, until my first beer, and in April I almost failed my D.O.T. physical. They only gave me one year on my medical card instead of the two years that they give to the healthy folks. My left hip had been removed and replaced in 2015, and the one on my Right was fractured bone rubbing on fractured bone. In 1999 I had a compound fracture in my left arm that was repaired by screwing steel plates to the bones. The screws were starting to come out and were pushing against my inner skin, causing me a ton of pain every time my arm got close to bumping into something. I was living in a twelve years old, forty foot long R.V. that I bought new in 2013. It was about worn out from being pulled back and forth between Florida and Texas several times, once from Florida to Morgantown W.V, and back, and then to Xenia Ohio, and back to Texas. I was, and still am on wife number four, also in twenty twenty four my rig dog, and best friend Randall had just died after twenty two years at my side. He lived with me, along with wives numbers two, three, and four, and number one would sometimes baby sit him for me. I was earning a couple grand a week, and couldn’t get my bank account balance up much higher than a thousand dollars. My life was hard, filled with self inflicted physical pain, and self inflicted humiliation.
January 2025
I had been working at Cascade Drilling for the Ocala Florida office since April. I was hired as a driller to drill monitor wells with a sonic rig. They were the smallest, and shallowest wells that I ever drilled. There was a lot of traveling, and a lot of drinking in hotel parking lots during the night. I would usually meet with the crew in the morning at the pick up around six, work until six pm, then drink until about eleven, and repeat until the job was done. That was usually anywhere from five to ten days, and then a few days off from work at home so that I could concentrate more on my day time drinking. Then one day at the shop I was getting ready to steam clean a track mounted rig. I got all PPE’d up, turned the key to start the steam cleaner, and it wouldn't start. I grabbed the pull start, gave it a hard yank with all of my body weight into it, and the damn thing pulled back breaking my wrist. They set my wrist at the walk-in clinic and put me on light duty for three weeks. Being on light duty meant no overtime, which also meant no more unlimited drinking, and what not money. So that's when I made the decision to stop drinking for a month. I couldn’t execute that decision, and drank again the next day. I knew what I had to do if I wanted to stop drinking for a month, and if I didn’t do it my only other alternative to stop would be death. So I did it. I walked into a room filled with people who I thought were nothing like myself, and said “ Hello, my name is Jim, and I’m an alcoholic.”
I went back there every day for a month, and stayed sober. My wrist healed, and I got sent to sit on a job in Texas. That is to just be there because I hold a Texas drilling license. I never worked with the Texas office before, and nobody knew about my drinking habits. It was a job that was going to last about five months, of ten day hitches, and four day breaks. I found that same room filled with the people who I thought were nothing like myself in Texas, and either they started to become more like me or me more like them, I don’t know which. My bank account started to grow, I got rid of my two thousand and three Nissan Titan with three hundred and twenty thousand miles on it, and bought a Black twenty twenty Jeep Gladiator. My wife’s immigration paperwork came through, and when she got her driver’s license I bought her a red twenty twenty four Gladiator. I wanted to buy her a Kia but she protested enough to get the Gladiator.
July 2025 to July 2026
The job in Texas was ending, and I was scheduled to take the exam for my North Carolina drilling license, at the Jubilee. The time came, and I passed the exam as I expected that I would. I was just finishing a break in between continued education workshops when I saw Brock Yordy sitting by himself. I knew who he was, but I never spoke to him before. I wanted to introduce myself, and start a conversation. I was a little nervous about it because he usually wears a sports jacket, and from my experiences guys who wear sports jackets a lot are usually douche bags who look down upon guys who don’t. Not the case here, we talked for more than an hour about my experiences and his. In the end he convinced me that it was a good idea for me to start writing A Driller’s Life. I also wrote an article called “Why I’m Certified”, entered it into the E.G.O award contest, and won! I claimed my award,”The Golden Hard Hat” trophy at Ground Water Week in New Orleans, and I wore a sports jacket when I did. I transferred from Ocala to Texas where nobody has ever seen me drunk, and got promoted from driller to field supervisor. I got my hip replaced, and all of the old hardware removed from my arm. I sold the R.V. that wife number three, and Randall both died in and bought a house on a hill outside of the city limits on an acre and a half with a pond. I had Randall taxidermied in Ocala, and he is now buried in the shade of a pear tree on my property in Texas.
From July 2025 to July 2026 have been two great half years. Writing my stories has allowed me to realize how my past was once a present day shaping my future. It's given me confidence that I've never had before. I’ve gotten control of my finances. Other people respect me, and I have a golden hard hat trophy on my desk. But I know that none of this is because of anything that I did myself. I owe it all to God, because none of this would have ever happened if that steam cleaner at the shop would have started when I turned the key in January twenty twenty five.
Thanks for taking the time to read this story, be it not much about drilling but more so about a driller’s life.
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