Ollie the Oilfield Worker's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Ollie counted his savings twice on the tailgate of his truck. The number came out the same both times, and it was not enough to guess wrong. He was a tall, lean man who had spent fifteen years working other men's rigs. Now he wanted his own strike. Somewhere under these foothills sat the biggest untapped oil in the county. Ollie meant to find it and get rich. But he had no idea where to point a drill, and one blind hole would empty his bank account for nothing. He drove past the big oil field on the way into town. Rigs clustered together there like a metal forest, pipes and pumps rising over one another. Other men had struck it there years ago. Ollie slowed the truck and stared. Those men had known something he didn't. They hadn't gambled. They had looked at the land first. That thought carried him to the county land office. It was a square stone building with tall columns and a heavy front door. Inside, the air smelled of paper and dust. A clerk waved him toward the records room without looking up. Ollie asked for old oil surveys. The clerk pulled a thick binder and dropped it on the counter. "Nobody reads these," she said. "Most folks just drill and hope." Ollie opened the binder. The pages held survey maps from decades back. Crews had tested the foothills long ago and marked what they found. Dry holes filled most of the sheets. He turned page after page, hunting for a mark that meant more. He found it near the bottom of the stack. One old survey showed a narrow stretch along the eastern slope. A hand had written a note beside it: strong oil signs, drilling stopped, funds ran out. The crew had quit before they finished. They had left the ground untouched. Ollie's pulse jumped. He copied the map lines onto his own paper. He wrote down the slope, the ridge, the creek that ran below it. This was no guess. This was a spot other men had reached and abandoned. His savings could buy one careful hole, and now he knew exactly where to sink it. He asked the clerk who owned that land now. She flipped to a second ledger and ran her finger down the column. Her finger stopped. "That parcel's already claimed," she said. "Someone filed a lease on it three weeks ago." Ollie stood still. He had found the one stretch of foothills worth drilling. He also no longer had the right to touch it. The map in his hand pointed straight at oil that belonged to somebody else.