It's all good so far

Well it appears that we lost the draft prepared on the previous flight this morning. The topic was my observations on the Bakken Boom. I am not sure that the earlier version had much in the way of original observation.

There are challenges one needs to overcome if one is going to succeed in a boom climate. Challenges include employment, food, transportation, and shelter. These are not new challenges. My grandfather faced similar challenges when he moved to Texas during the early boom just after the First World War.

We have pictures of him and his Model A Ford in front of a wooden oil derrick and on the back roads of West Texas. He met my grandmother in Mexia, during another boom in East Texas. Dad would have been born in Midland had there been a hospital. The Sinclair office was opened in San Angelo because of the availability of the hospital and office space. He spent the rest of his life working in each of he major plays in Texas and the Gulf Coast.

My father worked the next generation of development in the Permian Basin, raising the family in Abilene and then Midland as the work load required. He now can manage the business from his home town.

My brothers and I are all in various aspects of the business and we are all a stationed in Houston. I will be helping trading next generation who will be working out of Florida.

We are a much more mobile generation. This week, one brother and I were both spending the week on our own respective projects in North Dakota. We traded texts but scheduling did not work out for us to share dinner.

We are able to support projects here remotely. Like a large portion of the work force, we are fortunate to transient. We are not competing for long term housing where a former FEMA trailer rents for $1200 per month and an apartment is upwards of $3000 per month. We do crowd the restaurants, and fill the newly constructed hotels. We also filled the airplane this morning just like the flight in.

I am in awe of those younger folks that have packed up everything and moved up here. There are a lot of opportunities now. It must be an interesting gamble, fronting your startup expenses to get established and cover the essentials.

These booms are cyclic in nature, this is the second time for this area, and I can understand that the local government has to manage the stress put on the infrastructure. It is a gamble to see how much to fund betting that the tax base will grow to cover it.

The place buzzes. It is a much more diverse group this time. And the locals do like their ink. If I were a cultural anthropologist I could see a dissertation topic about tattoo styles across various geographic economies. Everyone I met was friendly. There is optimism up here on the Great Plains.

This entry was posted on July 27, 2013 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.