It's all good so far

It is a quiet Saturday morning, I am not in an airport terminal or on a plane headed to or coming back from a shale play. We are waiting out the rain over our chosen course of caffeine. The wife is in full blown Napaticipation, viewing websites and plotting the details of our upcoming vacation.
I am still unwinding from the last trip, trying to both listen with enthusiasm while capturing though from the previous week.

More experiences to chalk up. Getting back and forth to Vernal, Utah which required the use of some regional airlines planes that are older than I am. I could envision the Flying Tigers going over ” the Hump” (the Himalayas) as we boarded the Beechcraft turboprop to fly from Denver over the Rockies into Vernal.

Although I realize that the pilots have a vested interested in a safe plane trip, it doesn’t prevent me from inwardly chanting my flight mantra -“Lord, keep us safe” with eyes tightly shut and arm rests gripped firmly from the moment we start down the taxiway until we are at cruising altitude.

While I have now invested in some old school magazine reading to keep my mind occupied/ imagination held in check, I have found that I don’t focus we’ll during a steep banked curve in early ascent, and am back to the inward ( I hope) chanting.

Then we get leveled off, and I can relax, and read or write. I don’t know if the adrenaline fused imagination helps or hinders the writing process. Fortunately there have not been that many life flashing before my eyes situations while airborne.

This flight banned the use of all electronics. I would be willing to swear that everytime the guy across the aisle did something on his blackberry, the engines revved and we had to a quick change in altitude. So I spent some quality time thinking.

Vernal was an neat place to visit. It is an older town set in a valley about 3 hours from Salt Lake and 3 hours from Grand Junction. There is the Dinosaur Museum, a couple of brew pubs, coffee bars, and sporting goods stores. The downtown has flower boxes everywhere. There is even a small Episcopal Church, St. Paul’s , that is over 100 years old.

We did have time to drive out of town and up to the Flaming Gorge Park. The roadside geology was fantastic. Formations and contacts were recognizable out the car window. It would have been a fantastic field camp area, however, the degree of difficulty identifying and mapping was probably too low for the University of Texas Geology Department.

Beautiful, voted one of the best small towns in America. Possible retirement spot? Well, there is that white stuff that falls from the sky and accumulates in fatal doses. And there is a lot of construction underway. Did not get to see much of the residential section of town, so probably not.

It does have me thinking about life after work. Although the current physique doesn’t show it, I have enjoyed the high adventure activities. I have been climbing, caving, diving, and flying. It needs to be an active retirement. Dad has been to China and Azerbaijan in his late seventies. There are plenty of places still to explore.

Thought I had another in flight draft started. It must be on the other machine and therefore confined to lost draft space where the fleeting ideas and works started with insufficient time or poorly defined topics languish.

As the next birthday approaches, my 55th, one would think that I would be thinking deep a meaningful thoughts and imparting wisdom. While a friend of mine, just a few years older contemplates returning to school and getting a PhD in contemplation, I do not have as noble ambitions.

It is what it is. And I will still try to capture the occasional report/record/time stamp of where I am. I do still believe in the central thesis. 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.

Enjoying a third cup while Sandra is out calling the inlaws. We have enjoyed another Saturday breakfast and have been searching Yelp to determine our dining plans for our anniversary trip to Napa. (Suggestions welcome).

The Michelin star filter does not seem to work well with the Yelp search engine. There are still a lot of reviews to wade through after you eliminate tire stores.

The French Laundry is booked on our anniversary so we have opted for Bouchon as the alternative. We have four more nights to plan and have to consider two dinners will be after winery tours.

While this is a blow the stops out once in a lifetime, where we plan to scorch Amex points, accumulated mileage reimbursement, and bonus residuum, I am also contemplating if one can find similar, local, and fiscally sustainable experiences.

I am halfway through my fifties, the Hill Country beckons.