MEMOIRS OF AN ITINERANT PETROPHYSICIST
This history of my career and consulting practice concerns travel, figuratively and literally. My job has taken me all over the world to many uncomfortable places – the Arctic Islands at 55 below and the Arabian Desert at 130 above. My career has wandered through numerous winding paths, dead-ends, freefalls, and emotional highs and lows. This is a personal glimpse of the story of the journey that you won’t find in my resume.

The word petrophysicist will not be found in many dictionaries. My version is “petrophysicist: n. a person who studies the physical properties of rocks and their included fluids, with special regard to their economic potential in the petroleum, mineral, geothermal,  groundwater, and energy sectors”.

I started going blind nine months before I was born, with a genetic disease called retinitus pigmentosa, better known as "tunnel vision". The tunnel gets progressively smaller with age. I was walking into tables and falling over obstacles by age three. By age seven, I had broken an arm and a leg from stumbles on steps. Today, I go nowhere without a guide. The tunnel is now about the size of a silver dollar at reading distance (try it - you won't like it) and about 4 feet wide at 20 paces. As a result, reading is a tad slow and faces are just a blur of jig-saw puzzle pieces.

It made social life awkward as a youth (still is) but books and math were not difficult then. I read voraciously: science fiction, mysteries, adventure, histories. But I wasn't keen on politics or psychology, which would have done me a world of good. Today, it is audiobooks and old-time radio (OTR) plus the obligatory technical literature of my scientific trade.

Impending blindness is a hell of a motivator – get educated, get a job, see the world before it's too late. Every year had the same prognosis, “You’ll be blind in 5 years, so hurry, hurry!” So I hurried.

In The Beginning
It says Ottawa 1940 on my passport, but I have no memory of those early days of World War II. I do remember the move to Montreal in 1944, rationing books for meat, eggs, and other essentials, my grandfather's big black car, my brother's birthday in a massive November snowstorm.

Looking back on history, it is clear that we did not win this war. There were 30 million dead soldiers to remember and 41 million civilians killed. This was current events when I started school, not ancient, forgotten history.

True, the Americans, British, Canadians, Aussies, and a rag-tag of French resistance fighters liberated Western Europe. But the Russians won Eastern Europe and milked it dry for more than 40 years, until bad management and television brought about an anarchistic form of dependent independence to the satellites. All the US got was a lend-lease bill for a few trillion dollars and some economically worthless Pacific Island possessions, who would probably rather not be possessed.

The Canadians barely get a "thank-you", except from the Dutch, who rewarded us with tulip bulbs to decorate Ottawa's parkways.

My parents were strongly affected by the war, emotionally if not physically, as were most adults of the era, and it rubbed off on me. In high school, we all agonized over the Korean War, the Suez crisis, the Cold War, and other precursors to a possible World War 3. The names have changed, but the crises continue to evolve and control by fear is now normal in many, many countries - what would George Orwell write if he was still alive today?

In the following 17 years, l learned the 3-R’s plus science and engineering in Montreal. It was then, and still is, a beautiful, cosmopolitan city with great entertainment and 400 years of living culture. Growing up here was an education in its own right, and spurred an interest in the rest of the world that has never left me.

I entered Grade 1 before my 5th birthday, four months after VE Day and just 3 weeks after Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and VJ Day, The radio news told the story and even children were aware that something terrible had happened. The Bomb had been born and the world was forever changed.

This early entry to grade school made me the youngest and smallest kid in the class for the next 11 years. Grade school and high school were easy. My homework was usually done before class was over. Coming first or second in scholastic achievement, I received scholarships for books and fees for the four years of high school. As today, being a "brain", wearing glasses, and being poor at sports brought a lot of taunts from classmates - no violence, but I had to pick my route carefully. In Cote Des Neiges, I worked on a horse-drawn milk cart on the way to grade school to earn streetcar fare for the homeward journey. This got me past the scary part of the trip.

There were no school buses and no lunch rooms, so we all had  to  make  the  trip 4 times a day. The streetcar fare was 1-2/3 cents (3 tickets for a nickel) - inflation over the past 55 years has multiplied this fare by more than 150 (a 15,000% increase), so if you think your present salary will carry you into retirement, think again! We rode brand-new PCC cars on Route 29 that ran to within a block of home and the school..

Family outings in the early days were mostly by streetcar: the open-air "Gold" cars to Beaver Lake and the Lookout at the top of Mont-Royal, "White" cars to the end-of-line at Cartierville, "Green" cars to downtown for Christmas shopping, and Montreal and Southern Counties interurban cars to "see the country-side". These trips were cheap and could take all day, with a picnic lunch thrown in.

When gas rationing faded away, we toured the Montreal Harbour and all the train yards, giving rise to my permanent interest in transportation, especially model railways. Today, you can/t get within a mile of these places without a dozen security checks.

We had two weeks vacation each year at the family cottage at Constance Bay just west of Ottawa. The 200 mile  trip took all day on Highway 17 in the 1948 Austin A40. No heat, no power, no running water, and lots of Poison Ivy were easily overlooked. The beach was a great adventure, replete with bagpiper who brought all the kids home to their parents at sunset.

Our family moved west to Notre Dame de Grace in 1950. King George VI died in 1952 and Queen Elizabeth II became Canada's reigning monarch. One channel of black-and-white television arrived in Montreal that year, but our first set didn't arrive until 1954. Montreal West High School (now privately run Royal West Academy to avoid Quebec's draconian language law) was a healthy walk 4 times a day until our move into the new house in Montreal West itself. 

I still remember some of the teachers: Miss Matthews in Grade 8 (she wanted me to walk home to get dry clothes after arriving wet - it was still raining), Mr. Cummings (he kept a half-size model of a Guillotine in the room to intimidate troublemakers), Mr. Mann (a great and caring PT instructor), and Mr. Wolf (who thought we should be able to recognize any piece of music by merely listening to him tap out the rhythm with a pencil). Mr Parsons, the Principal, was the stereotypical pompous-ass. If you have ever heard "our Miss Brooks' on old-time radio, you know what these people were like.

In grade 8, all of us were given IQ and aptitude tests. My aptitude was to be a farmer or a clerk. I knew better – I was going to be an engineer. I did become an engineer and still practice engineering in the oil and gas industry.  But circumstances also made me a farmer and a clerk. I built a cattle ranch out of the bush at age 40 by choice and was forced to become a clerk to satisfy the tax collector.

My parents were great travelers. My brother and I had seen all the Canadian provinces and all the US states east of the
Mississippi by the time I was 16. The Trans-Canada Highway was just a dream and the US Interstate network was mostly disconnected chunks of pavement in the middle of farmer’s fields. I loved those wide open spaces - there was no doubt that I would continue traveling.

During my high school years, I worked after school and summers at Montreal West Hardware to earn pocket money. Here, I learned how to repair almost anything - there were no throw-away gadgets in that era - and how to sell Christmas trees, lawn mowers, and small appliances.

I had wanted to go to the University of New Brunswick and take Forestry. The outdoor life appealed but the eyesight problem and financial constraints made such a choice impractical. The most obvious choice was McGill, and so it was done.

The reddening of the Maple leaves signaled the start of the school year and the long streetcar ride downtown to the McGill campus. It also meant the end of the summer job as Trainee Engineer at  Bell Telephone, where the job, the people, and the freedom were far more interesting. So it was a bit of a melancholy moment to change from employee back to student, until the pressure of homework squeezed out all such thoughts.

On my last summer before graduation, I took a weeks vacation to visit family friends in Florida. Eastern Airlines ran DC-6's at about 7000 feet, following the highways to aid navigation. I'm not sure what they did on rainy days. Since that first trip, I have flown well over a million miles. 

Thanks to the financial and moral support of my parents, I graduated as an Electrical Engineer in 1962 from McGill University. I was merely 16 years old on entering and barely 21 when I graduated from the 5-year degree.

I am quite ambivalent about my education at McGill. Transistors were invented in 1955, IBM and UNIVAC computers existed, and Sputnik was launched in 1957, but we learned nothing of these. The lab gear was turn-of-the-century (19th century, that is). It all seemed so primitive.

I did learn advanced-math, physics, chemistry, mechanics, and thermodynamics, and these served me well in my later career in the oil industry. But electronics and power engineering were pretty weak - and that was the degree I was seeking. I remember very little of the instructors. They were a cheerless lot with little interaction with individual students.

Swimming at lunch hour was my escape while others went to the pubs on Peel and McTavish Streest - still too young to be legal, although that didn't always stop me from joining in.  

Job offers were plentiful – pulp mills, transformer design, power line design, telephone and cable television – the world was being wired in 1962. So I chose well logging.

“What is well logging?” my mother asked. “I have no idea.” I replied. “Where is it done?” she asked. I told her. She cried. Western Canada was uncivilized territory, at least in her opinion.

Considering that the FLQ had begun bombing mailboxes in Montreal in 1962, in support of Quebec separation, it was hard to say which place was less civilized. Yes Virginia, there really was home-grown terrorism in Canada, long before the current hysteria promoted by a certain hysterical U.S. President.

Terrorism has probably been around since homo sapiens started to walk upright. I grew up hearing about the Mau-Mau in Kenya in the 1950's, which led in time to the removal of Colonial powers from much of Africa, followed of course by a serious leadership vacuum, followed by even worse violence that continues today (Uganda, Ruanda, Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, Nigeria, ....). The beheadings of the aristocracy during the French Revolution, the Spanish Inquisition, the American Civil War, the Boston Tea Party, the purges of Stalin, - all have very modern counterparts. The current "War on Terror" is simply Orwellian double-speak to allow war against anyone at any time, for any reason.

PHOTO MEMORIES OF MONTREAL circa 1950 - 1960

Learning The Trade - Schlumberger
I bought my father’s Austin A50, filled it with prized possessions, and ended up in Red Deer, Alberta. For the next 11 years, I learned the oil business on the job in western Canada, from Schlumberger, Geophysical Services, Dome Petroleum, J. C. Sproule, and Digitech.

I lived in 13 different small towns and ran well logs for Schlumberger from southwest Manitoba to Peel Plateau in the Yukon. I learned to work “on-call”, learned to drink on “days-off”, and drove 80,000 miles a year just to get to work.

During one of the 3-day "days-off", I drove from Red Deer to Seattle over the Rogers Pass and return in the Austin to see the 1962 World's Fair. This was the year the Trans-Canada Highway was finally finished with real pavement. A piston blew at the top of the Rockies on the way home, leaving no choice but to continue homeward engulfed in a cloud of blue smoke maintained by five gallons of 80 weight gear lube "borrowed" from a construction site.

We flew in Beavers and single Otters, cruised the treetops in Bell 204’s and G-4’s, slogged through swamps and snow drifts on Nodwells and Bombardier Sno-Cats, forded rivers and played daisy-chain at the end of D-8 Cats in the company car. Sometimes we even got to drive on pavement.

Each station manager treated me well: Al Chase, Al Dorin, Bill Anderson, Mel Grey, Bob Wilson, Ian Norquay would all have connections to my career later on. Log analysis was charts and nomographs, or pencil and sliderule. There were no calculators, no spreadsheets,  no personal computers.

Training was intensive, constant, and judged by exams. The Houston training session was serious stuff. The day I arrived it snowed and froze – the Canadians were not forgiven. I drove there and back as part of my vacation time, seeing a bunch of the Western states for the first, but not the last, time. On the way home, I followed snowplows from Farmington to Durango, where I spent a week watching the weather channel (it had great background music) studying for my field engineer exam. Barry McVicar was my examiner and he still tells tall tales about the event.

I was assigned a series of company cars with crapped-out steering and soggy suspensions, finally receiving a new Plymouth Fury in 1964. A company car was home - bedroom, kitchen, living room, and office while at the well sites. I drove over 80,000 miles in 1964, just to get to work.

Dave Dudley's "Six Days On The Road" was our theme song. Many nights on the road were spent listening to distant radio stations: country music on WSM Nashville, Studs Turkle telling stories on WGN Chicago, and a good variety of music on KFBK Sacramento. KFBK is now right-wing shock-jock-talk - what a waste of bandwidth. Local stations in that era went off the air at 11 or midnight and didn't reappear until 6 or 7 AM. I have been a fan of old-time radio (OTR) shows ever since and have a large collection.

During my second year, I was “young and single and stupid”, so I did the relief engineer slot – 3 days on each truck in Oxbow, Weyburn, and Swift Current, then 4 months in Lanigan, Saskatchewan.  

There is nothing, I mean Nothing!, to do in Lanigan, so I did original research, in my spare time, on log analysis in the Saskatchewan potash beds. I was invited to visit the underground mine at Esterhazy to see how the real rocks compared to real logs Seeing geology from the "inside" sharpened my appreciation for the variability of nature.

My first computer program was written in 1964 to calculate potash analysis from well log data. It ran on the IBM 1620 with 60K memory in Regina. This machine read the program and data from punched cards and printed results on a chain printer. There were no disk drives on this machine, although such things did exist - they were 2 feet in diameter and held 1 Megabyte, with access times that could reach 1 second per retrieval.

Passenger planes still had propellers and a mobile phone set weighed in at 50 pounds. My, how times have changed.

The results of this research were presented at the CIM convention in Quebec City. Al Gorrell, of J. C. Sproule and Associates, listened to my practice presentation and taught me how to project to a small  audience in a large room. The conference was held at the Chateau Frontenac, amidst gobs of gilt and masses of mahogany, the tell-tale signs of the grand-chateau style Canadian Pacific Railway hotel chain, this one built to last back in 1893 (now owned by Fairmont Hotels, in turn owned by an Arab investment group).

My independent research surprised Schlumberger and they awarded me a “Salesman of the Year” scroll, even though I wasn’t a salesman. Because I was “a little too interested” in logging potash wells, I was transferred to Valleyview in 1964, then Slave Lake, my final posting. From here, we coverd a huge territory with few paved roads, stretching from Fort McMurray and Calling Lake to the East, Swan Hills and House Mountain t the South, Rainbow Lake and Zama to the North, and Fort St. John and Monkman Pass to the West.

On one job near Calling Lake, we drove into a Hudson's Bay Company Trading Post. A little blond girl ran from us, screaming "Mommy, Mommy, White Men!" We were Strangers in a Strange Land.

In 1962, the Cuban missile crisis brought all of us closer to nuclear Armageddon than anyone ever wanted. Fortunately, President Kennedy used the magnanimous carrot and parsimonious stick approach to foreign affairs that led to arms limitation treaties instead of escalating tensions with rhetoric of an "Evil Empire" or "Axis of Evil". The Soviet Union did crumble under its own weight and is no longer the super-power it once appeared to be.

Kennedy had a little over 1000 military "advisors" in Viet Nam in 1963. President Johnson upped the ante by using a false report of a second attack on a US destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin as an excuse to raise the troop complement to over 550,000 within a few years, shaping the geopolitics of the planet for years to come. The US lost the war with 58,000 US soldiers dead and 153,000 wounded, not counting 4.5 million Vietnamese, mostly civilians, who died in the conflict.

President Bush (Gee-Dub-Ya) did much the same in Iraq and is trying it against Iran - why can't politicians learn something from these recent historical disasters? So far (Dec 2007), he has only killed about 4000 soldiers, injured another 45,000, caused the deaths of about 300,000 Iragi's, and displaced a mere 2 million to Syria. Not bad for a beginner. The cost to date is about $500 Trillion. Image what this money could have done for schools, universities, and health care! Contrasted with the 30,000 US citizens murdered by other US citizens every year, I suppose 9/11 and Iraq are irrelevant.

I digress. Sorry. On with the story.

Everyone old enough to remember knows exactly where they were when President Kennedy was shot in November 1963. I was on the side of a lease road, in a company car,  filling out a service order near Hazlet, Saskatchewan. Patsy Cline and Hawkshaw Hawkins died earlier the same year in a plane crash. Ernest Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe had both committed suicide the previous year. Icons were disappearing quickly and it was a lonely period for a single man in a small town.

My first job in northern Alberta was out of Swan Hills. I had driven from Oxbow in southeast Saskatchewan (about 700 miles) to find a map to the wellsite taped to the shop door. I was used to the square grid of township roads in the south and the map looked pretty square. But there are no grid-line roads in Swan Hills - I spent about three hours going in circles, finding my self back at the same confusing intersection in the middle of the wilderness. The route least traveled turned out to be the trail to the rig.

The marriage license said Slave Lake married Red Deer in Teepee Creek – how much more Western Canadian could you get? Mother cried again. We honeymooned in Hawaii – it was a long way from Wabasca, Fort Nelson, and Fort McKay, the Purgatories of the day - and a whole lot warmer. The plane was a CP Air Super Constellation (still 4 propellers, no jets).

We drank Mai-Tai's on the catamaran cruise, circled the Island in a passionate-pink jeep, and dined at the Royal Hawaiian. It was pink, too. I had been listening to "Hawaii Calls" on the radio every Sunday night for years - it was like coming home!

My wife insisted on seeing a wireline logging job at a drilling rig, so we went out to a Big Indian rig, drilling post-holes near Calling Lake. The camp was atrocious and the cook had an oozing knife slash across his left eye. We declined breakfast and my wife slept in the car. She didn’t ask to go out again.

There were some exciting trips. On the way to Peel Plateau in the Yukon, we boarded the Canadian Pacific Airlines DC-3 passenger flight to Dawson City from Edmonton. The plane was painted Bright Orange, the stewardess (no one had heard of flight attendants in that era) was dressed in a gorgeous blue uniform, nylons, and high heels. Knowing we would soon be in mud-heaven, we were in our best grubbies. Our logging tools were tied to the floor in the aisle. Coffee, sandwiches, and cookies were served while carefully perched on the sonic log sonde. The stew later admitted she had been assigned to this flight because she had done something “bad”, but declined to specify exactly what this might have been.

Next day we transshipped everything to a Beaver and set off to find our skid unit at the rig. A Beaver can’t climb much with a full load, so my photos (now lost to posterity) show mountainsides only a few hundred yards from the cockpit window. It was summer but it snowed throughout the job. There were not enough bunks so I slept on a spare bed with no mattress in the meat locker – cold but quiet and no cigarette smoke.

On the way out, we had a two day layover in Dawson waiting for the orange bird – the geologist played the washboard and one-string laundry tub in the bar that night, although it never got dark, of course. During the day, we explored Robert Services/s cabin, open and untended, but full of furniture and books. The hospital, abandoned since the Klondike Gold Rush, was collecting museum artifacts - railway locomotives, mining machinery, old cars.

On a spring breakup job in Red Earth, we got stuck in the mud on the way out after the job and ran out of fuel and food and water. We were out of radio contact too. Someone claimed they sent a chopper to find us after we went missing, but we never saw it. On the second night the rig’s fuel truck showed up inbound on the frost and filled us up. We drove out, two days late and suffering dehydration from drinking swamp water. We got a lecture from the boss, who was wearing a sport jacket and slacks at the time. We were less attractive.

Many trips were fly-ins, especially during spring and summer. This meant driving to an airport, or more likely a staging area beside a bush airstrip. Loading tools into an Otter or slinging them in nets under a Bell 204-B was hazardous. The usual problems of weather, icing, navigation, mud, and weariness made it all a little surreal.

What made the stress worse was the need to strip all the equipment and connecting cables from your logging truck, keep them dry, and reconnect everything inside the skid unit at the rig. One missing cable or tool and the job could be delayed for hours, even days. On return, you had to strip it all out and reconnect back in the logging tuck before you could have a bath or go to the bar. You don't have to go to war to experience battle fatigue.

Somewhere along the way, I purchased a 1948 MG-TD, rewired it with armoured logging cable, and used it as my personal car. No heater and no sidescreens made it useless for about 8 months of the year, but it was fun.

Wives don’t thrive in isolated oil field towns. There was a strong push to get a “real” job, in the city, in the office. And lo, it was so.

Schlumberger is still the recognized leader in well logging, but competition is more capable than in my logging days. Ironically, I now teach Schlumberger stimulation engineers all about logging several times a year at Tulsa University. They are so young, so keen, so naive - just like I was once upon a time.
 

Learning The Trade – Geophysical Services
Geophysical Services Inc had been acquired by Texas Instruments and was bragging about their new-fangled TIAC "automatic computer" for processing seismic data acquired on digital magnetic tape. Sounded intriguing. Applied, hired, moved to Calgary in a week in June 1966. My wife smiled all the way there

I bought a used Austin A95 station wagon to survive the first winter and traded it for a nearly new MGC-GT hatchback in gleaming white - a very rare car. The MG-TD continued as the summer car. I put a down-payment on a house in Brentwood in Calgary, on the western edge of the city. Yuppiedom was looming.

A few crash courses in geophysics and I was a geophysical engineer, working for Carl Hickman, setting up data processing runs. My logging experience made me an instant “expert” so logging, then geology and reservoir engineering, courses were suddenly part of the job, plus market research, data acquisition and logistics planning for Dan Brennan. I certainly learned more preparing the courses than my co-workers did from my presentations.

In 1967, I wrote a seismic inversion program for the TIAC to generate a synthetic sonic log from deconvolved seismic traces. It didn’t work, of course, or I would be world famous. I didn’t understand the need for low frequency data – data that wasn’t in the seismic signal. Roy Lindseth solved the problem a couple of years later and is world famous.

On vacation, we drove to Montreal in the MGC to visit Expo 67, the celebration of Canada's 100th Birthday. Similar to the World's Fair, it highlighted achievements of many countries, not just Canada's, which were somewhat overshadowed by the US and Russian pavilions.

The Calgary Tower was built during 1967-68 to a height of 190 meters (630 feet) providing a rotating restaurant and a spectacular view of the Rocky Mountains. No longer the tallest building in Calgary, it still acts as the focal point of downtown Calgary.

Meetings in Dallas and assignments in Midland taught me what hot weather was really like - kind of a Purgatory I was told. I’ll take Alberta winter any day. On a side trip from an SEG convention in Houston, we took a long weekend in Montego Bay, Jamaica. The Appletonn Express, then a Budd RDC rail diesel car, took us to the interior  of the island and a tour of the Appleton Rum Distillery. The 80 mile return trip takes all day and certainly gets into the hills to see local sights. Out of service for many years, the railway has been revitalized as a tourist train in recent years.

I did a little PR-style marketing in Edmonton, Regina, and Quebec City. En route to Quebec, I was bumped to First Class and sat with a Toronto lawyer, sipping free brandy for several hours. This was when Air Canada's First Class was actually first-class. Conversation turned to pastimes and wives. He said his wife was a pianist. I said "My wife plays the piano, too." He replied "I said she was a pianist, she does not 'play piano' ". The conversation ended there. But the brandy was pretty good.

The original GSI left Canada many years ago. Texas Instruments sold the company to Halliburton in 1989, who tried to merge it with GeoSource (ex-Petty-Ray Geophysical) but this failed due to personality conflicts. Halliburton sold its seismic assets in 1994 to Western Atlas. Baker Hughes bought Western Atlas in 1998. Western Atlas was merged into Western Geco in 2000, a 70-30 joint venture between Schlumberger and Baker Hughes. Not a single GSI employee survived this corporate struggle. Although I was not involved in any of this, it is an interesting insight into the precarious nature of employment in the oil and gas industry.

One individual survived the mergers until 1994 when he purchased the rights to the GSI name and the non-exclusive seismic database. He might have acquired the first non-exclusive data set that I set up for GSI in 1967. So the GSI name lives on today, in Calgary and Houston.
 

Learning The Trade – Dome Petroleum
A headhunter found me buried in his files and convinced me to move to Dome Petroleum as a reservoir engineer in early 1968. With well logging, seismic processing, and a tiny bit of geology training, I was far from a reservoir engineer. I knew it but Dome didn’t. So I read Craft and Hawkins, wrote down a dozen equations so I could talk sense about material balance and pressure buildup, and learned the rest on the job. I was slightly computer literate because of the GSI training, so soon I was adapting IBM 1130 programs for Dome’s use. The 1130 also read punched cards but had removable, multi-layer disks, about the size of a huge birthday cake.

Guess who taught log analysis to the engineers and geologists?

Martin Luther King and Presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy were both assassinated in 1968 - more icons gone.

Inside of a year, this job was leading nowhere. Even though I had adapted the IBM 1130 reservoir engineering programs for Dome's use, no-one actually wanted to use them, preferring instead pencil, paper, and sliderule.  

I resigned and my wife and I drove the MGC to Ottawa in a little under 48 hours to see the 1968 Grey Cup game. Calgary Stampeders lost 21-24 to Ottawa Rough Riders, but it was a great game. No job, no prospects, no problem. Father was concerned – he had worked all his life for Bell Telephone – here I was looking for my fourth job in 7 years.

This was long before Dome grew to be the biggest bankruptcy in Canadian history, after blowing eight billion of Other People’s Money on worthless assets and Arctic gas that no one could deliver to market. Dome Petroleum is long gone and most of its assets wound up at Amoco Canada. "Smlin' Jack" Gallagher and Charlie Dunkley ran a tight ship in the early days - too bad they didn't keep a tighter rein on the debt later on.

Dome became a major client of mine in later years, when Jim Hamilton, one of my mentors at Dome (and an ex-Schlumberger engineer like me), acquired three of our desktop log analysis systems, and offloaded a significant amout of consulting work to us as well..


Learning The Trade – Sproule and Associates
I had finished an industry course on Petroleum Economics given by Tony Edgington of J. C. Sproule and Associates Ltd, so I phoned him to see if he knew anyone looking for someone with logging, geophysics, and reservoir engineering skills. He did. He was. Cam Sproule introduced himself on day one. Noel Cleland and Blake Marshall became my mentors, taught me how to “leave footprints in the snow” so anyone could pick up my projects and update them without re-doing them. This was the most valuable lesson I ever learned on the job.

Four ladies actually ran Sproule: the tea-lady, the librarian, the geological secretary, and the engineering secretary ran everything, and very well indeed, thank you. Although this is a bit of an exaggeration, it never paid to forget their power. Today, of course, there are no tea-ladies or secretaries, just executive assistants.

The reservoir engineering tasks were interesting and the cash flow was purposely conservative. The banks loved it and it suited the Canadian psyche of the era.

Early on, I wrote a log analysis program that ran on the CDC 3300. Computrex could digitize short chunks of logs and put them out on punch cards. There was only one building in Calgary with a floor strong enough to carry the weight of the rotating drum memory. It was an old grain mill. We used the program only rarely – many jobs were done with pencil and paper and a sliderule, just like we did it at Dome Petroleum.

Then, in the spring of 1969, came King Resources. They wanted to explore for sulphur on Melville Island in the Canadian Arctic. This would involve seismic, gravity, magnetics, strat hole drilling, surface geology, ocean and ice surveys – you name it, it was on the list. Sproule was the Arctic expert. I was assigned to create a logging system for slim hole sulphur exploration. Out came the catalogs and shortly a helicopter portable mini-logging unit was a reality. Someone had to run it. Me.

My wife objected. We were trying to build a new house in Bragg Creek. I went anyway. This was the summer that Apollo 11 landed on the Moon with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. We heard about it from Voice of Russia, which came in well on my portable radio. Most of the crew at Caribou Lake on Melville Island felt that we had landed there too. Pretty barren, pretty cold, and our life-line was long and tenuous.

Nothing happened on the house – there was no one in charge. At Caribou Lake nothing was happening either. Someone had forgotten to assign a project manager. I radioed back, explained that every team was waiting on orders. Sproule assigned a project manager. Me, with help from Stan Harding who had years of experience in the Arctic.

So we surveyed the well locations, got the drills to work; laid out some seismic lines on a map, got the seismic underway. Others saw action, so on their own, they started to work. I did the initial well location surveys with sun shots and an almanac, just like David Thompson a 170 years earlier. Later we used a Tellurometer that didn’t like cold weather and computed the data with a Monroe comptometer, assisted by 7-figure trigonometry tables. People would sneak in to make the machine divide 1.0 by 3.0 and watch it run forever, but it never died on us. Surveying was hampered by the fact that one of the Canadian government benchmarks wasn’t located where it was supposed to be.

I logged the wells too, but spent most of my time on logistics: food, fuel, accommodation, camp staff, drilling supplies, land and air transport, radio communications, marital counseling, daily reports, planning, and more planning.

I had to fire the helicopter pilot because he scared the rig hands (that takes a bit of doing) and he refused to stop buzzing rigs and camps. The nearest replacement pilot was in Montreal. We got him, bur it took nearly ten days for him to arrive. In the meantime, crews slept at the rigs while the sky-jock was “sick”. He probably was sick, burnt-out and unbalanced from too many hours on traffic patrol for a Toronto TV station.

This was my first management post and I still don’t like telling a person that his services are no longer required, regardless of how dire the circumstances.

King Resources was a high-flyer. They brought a plane load of Directors and investors to camp and expected meals and beds. John Glenn, the first US astronaut to circle the globe in a spacecraft (Feb 1962), was among them, as was John King himself. The nearest spare beds were at Resolute Bay. They weren’t available so we hot-sheeted for three days until the illuminati got tired of the primitive facilities.

Native sulphur lay on the surface in several locations. All the brass went home with a bag of loose sulphur, probably all the native sulphur to be had on the island. We didn’t find any more than a trace in the drill holes.

We did find oil at the edge of one of the gypsum domes, but no one was interested. Dome drilled it’s Drake Point blowout that summer, about 5 miles west of our camp. The ice cone formed here could be seen on satellite photos for many years.

Another disaster in the making involved wildlife. King Resources had agreed to let Al Oeming, owner of a game farm/zoo in Edmonton, to use our camp while catching, with permits, three caribou. We had no spare beds for the 4 men and little spare food, with our bi-monthly supply flight still a long time off. After 10 days without catching a caribou, I assigned the chopper and two rig hands with nets to assist. In no time they bulldogged the critters, wrapped them in nets ready to travel. Even tranked, they were not happy campers.

It was time for my rotation back to Calgary so I got the chance to ride with two of the trussed up caribou in the twin engine Dornier to Resolute Bay. Our French speaking pilot said a few unkind words that sounded like “merde” as various body fluids seeped into the cable channel that went to the tail rudder. It wasn’t hard to remember that everything freezes at 10,000 feet. The caribou and I caught the Pacific Western scheduled flight to Edmonton. I arrived safely, but I can’t speak for the caribou.

On my next trip out, the pilot and I both fell asleep on the way to Res Bay – the autopilot worked beautifully until we ran out of fuel. The silence woke us both up and after flipping to auxiliary tanks, the engines caught and we stayed aloft, and awake, for the rest of the journey. After one more rotations, the job was packed up, and I returned to the office. Our house was finally built that winter – there was someone in charge again. I did the wiring, insulation, inside paneling, and roofing in my spare time.

King Resources went bankrupt shortly after. John King was charged with fraud in regard to some investments by a mutual fund in his properties that "went missing". I had loaned them my photos for inclusion in their annual report. None appeared in print and the photos were never returned.

Intel invented the first microchip CPU and the precursor to the Internet (ARPANET) appeared - few of us noticed these world-changing events in 1969.

Bill Anderson, one of my bosses from my Schlumberger days, took over my position at Sproule when I went to Australia for Digitech. Later, Bill was responsible for starting my independent consulting career. Sproule and Associates is still considered the pre-eminent resource evaluation consulting company in Canada.


Learning The Trade - Digitech
I would have been happy to stay at Sproule for the rest of my career. But the headhunter who got me to Dome phoned to see if I wanted to go to Australia. Maybe. Probably. Yes!

After a short orientation at Digitech’s Calgary facility, we were whisked off to Sydney to help get the Australian operation up and running. This was to be a modern geophysical data processing business serving Australia and southeast Asia. I was to be Managing Director. So we sold the MG’s, packed the dishes, rented the Bragg Creek house, and set off for further adventures.

I arranged to finish a 3 year Business Development Certificate, started 2 and a half years earlier at University of Calgary, by correspondence. I passed but the non-standard final exam, designed just for me, took nearly three weeks to write – 20 essays on 20 business topics. The exam would have taken two hours had I stayed in Calgary.

Digitech in Sydney was exciting and hard work – new computers, new people, new work ethic. The computers were an EMR 6050 with and EMR 6130 to read tapes and drive the plotters. EMR was a subsidiary of Schlumberger - you just can't get away from those guys. We used a motor-generator set to convert the 50 Hz current to 60 Hz.

Business went well during the first year. Dave Robson was a great mentor and Sydney was a great city to live in.  I traveled to the capital cities; Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Darwin, Brisbane, Canberra  – each had its own list of oil company and government contacts. New Plymouth, Auckland, Wellington, Queenstown, even the top of Mount Cook, the highest peak in New Zealand.  Jakarta, and Singapore were also on the tour. These still had open, running sewers on both sides of most streets – crossing these at night on narrow cement planks was no fun at all.

In Jakarta, we did pig-out on an authentic Dutch East Indies ristaffle with about 10 courses in an early colonial mansion. On another trip, we ate at a restaurant on stilts about a mile from shore, returning in pitch-black to a waiting rickshaw. In Singapore, the night-out was spent with business associates at the bars of Boogie Street – not a good place for good boys at night.

My early trips to Jakarta in 1970 were just as the Russian influence in the area was declining. Suharto replaced Sukarno as President in a military coup in 1967, murdering thousands of Communists and possibly a million ethnic Chinese. There were many abandoned construction projects, all blamed on the pull-out of Russian contractors. The streets were a riot of rickshaws, taxis, mud, and water. People defecated into, and then washed themselves and their clothes, in the open sewers. After a monsoon rain, this seemed practiacal, but after a dry spell, I was astounded to see the habit continuing.

On more recent trips in 2001 and 2002, everything is paved, there are no open sewers, and the freeways and hotels look like Houston. It’s amazing what oil money can buy, at least close to the seat of power. The Shangri-La is the place to stay today. However, political unrest, student demonstrations, murders of ethnic Chinese, and terrorist bombings continue. Visitors are warned to keep a low profile.

Back in Australia, John Boyd came in as second-in-command later in 1970 and was instrumental in raising the quality of our staff and our processing. Rick Bogehold kept the software in shape. Dave Pratt ran the mineral exploration side of the business. All three went on to run their own independent processing centers in later years, John in Calgary, Rick in Denver, and Dave in Sydney.

Then came the Australian Federal election. The new Labour government ran the foreign oil companies out of town and made it difficult for local firms to raise capital. Seismic crew activity dropped to near zero. The rig count dropped to less than a dozen. Digitech hadn’t the resources to carry on in Sydney. I tried to raise capital in Australia but realistic forecasts made the outcome pretty obvious. I finally had to lay everyone off and oversee the auction of all the assets.

Sydney had been Paradise. We were regaled by fabulous weather, gorgeous beaches, fine food, and a cosmopolitan atmosphere that Calgary lacked. We saw the tall ships come in from the sea for the bicentennial of Captain Cook’s discovery of Australia. We watched the fireworks over the Sydney Harbour Bridge. We partied on the beaches and enjoyed a very active social life. Just watching the sailboats on the Harbour was a thrill to the eye, not to mention the bare beginning of the topless bathing craze.

There was a bit of trouble in Paradise, too. The Viet Nam War was slowly building toward its debacle and the Aussie men were tired of the US troops snagging their girls while on R&R. Australian troops were also in-country and it all made for some ugly demonstrations and newspaper rhetoric. We weren’t directly affected except when we were mistaken for Americans while shopping or at a bar. A Maple Leaf on the lapel helped, but it wasn’t the universal symbol of sanity that it is today.

Although I initially had a company car in Sydney, I abandoned it for a 1947 MG-TC, wire wheels and all. It cost $800 and could be used all year in the NSW climate. I sold it before I returned for $900. How dumb can you be? It was worth 10 times its cost here in Canada had I thought to ship it home.

I returned with the other Canadians to work in the Calgary office as VP Operations. I had the task of overseeing all programming and computer center operations – about 35 people in all. I hired the first female computer operator in Calgary and the first female computer programmer in Digitech. There was shock and horror but they worked out just fine. This was pre-Gloria Steinem. We also got new computers - a Univac 1108 replaced the EMR 6050.

During an expansion in 1972, Digitech took prime tenancy in a new building. I was assigned to oversee the special facilities needed for the computers, and nearly died while doing it. For weeks, I had been walking up to the second floor to inspect progress. The stairs were unlighted and the second floor had no windows. One day, I headed for the stairs, but felt a draft and stopped. The stairs weren’t there! I nearly walked off into empty space. It turned out the stairs failed a fire inspection and had been jack-hammered away – no barricade was put up. Just one of the hazards of poor vision.

Shortly after, we moved all the computers out the windows of the old building with a crane, trucked them to the new building, and craned them up to a hatch in the second floor wall. The second floor location was a security measure - there had been several bombings of computer centers in the USA and one in Canada. There are Ludites everywhere.

Thirty-six hours later, we were up and running. We also took control of Computer Data Processors Ltd and moved all their equipment to the new building. CDP was Roy Lindseth’s first major business venture and there had been tremendous rivalry between Digitech and CDP. Roy went on to an illustrious consulting career and is still active today.

We also installed the first remote job entry terminal outside the computer center. I can’t claim much credit for this as Univac and Texaco were the prime instigators. However, the negotiations with the telephone company to get a full duplex, uninterruptible line that was clean enough to carry 300 bits per second for at least one mile was the daunting task assigned to me.

My wife left her para-legal job and me for a career in interior decorating in Vancouver in 1972. She did very well at it. At Digitech, I was unpromotable – I was one of 3 VP’s and the Pres was not going to croak any time soon. I left Digitech in 1973 to travel some more.

Digitech went bankrupt in 1979, but the name carried on for a few years under new owners. Ben Berg went on to develop a business to scan pre-digital seismic sections and maps – scanning was a new and emerging technology in 1974,

Dave Robson took over R. Cruz and Associates, changed the name to Veritas, and grew it into a world class giant in seismic acquisition and processing. After Dave retired from Veritas in 2004, he formed a private equity business. Shortly after, Veritas merged with CGG, the result now known as CGG-Veritas. (CGG was born in 1931 by Schlumberger, with a number of small French firms and banks, combining their various geophysical methods and licenses into a single independent company - Schlumberger sold its interest in CGG in the early 1950's.)
 

Flying On My Own – Crain and Associates
Bill Anderson, mentioned in dispatches earlier in this narrative, was flying to the Arctic for Sproule to supervise logging operations for PanArctic Oils. In 1973, Bill wanted out from this to spend more time with a growing family. His decision led me to my consulting career, as I took over the job, working under my own name.

This work expanded quickly and other clients came on board, so E. R. Crain and Associates Ltd was born. Bob Meneley and Diego Henao were easy to work for, and even Charlie Hetherington showed a grudging respect for what we did to keep the loggers honest and on time.

Upon leaving Digitech, I had bought a brand-new 1973 Mustang II hatchback in silver and black with red leather interior - very macho looking, but a little bit gutless even with a V-6. It was the first "new" car I ever purchased with my own money. I put 250,000 miles on this car before it rusted off its frame. I also picked up another MG-TD, over-priced and needing some TLC. I later sold it to a fellow  petrophysicist, Case Struyk, who stripped it to its last nut and bolt and has nearly finished the restoration, 20 years after acquiring it.

You might wonder why all these side trips into automobiles. You have to appreciate that I was going blind, slowly but surely. When would it be bad enough to terminate the privilege of driving? Well the answer was "soon". I quit driving at night in 1979 and quit driving altogether in 1985. One of the greatest feelings of loss is not the loss of vision, but the loss of independence when you give up driving yourself when and where you want.

One of the first non-PanArctic jobs in my consulting career was, believe it or not, for Digitech. Before I left Digitech, I had put together a proposal for a seismic processing center in Beijing for the Chinese government. When it came time to present the proposal, I was invited to join Don Simpson and two others from Control Data. Route: fly to Hong Kong, train to Canton, walk across the border, train to Shanghai, plane to Beijing. This last was a Russian equivalent to the DC–8, but it had six motors instead of four – the Russian metallurgy was heavier than the Western version, so they needed more power to lift the load.

This was a few months after President  Nixon “opened China to the West”. Nixon later resigned after impeachment proceedings were begun due to his lies and evasions about the Watergate burglaries.

We were shown all the tourist sites before tourists were allowed into the country. We saw the Forbidden City, Winter Palace, Ming Tombs, Tien-en-men Square, the Great Wall, and the diplomats’ department store, all with our personal guide and translator. Fancy-dress dinners were toasted with a potent brew called Mao-Tai, downed straight in one gulp to the cry of "Gombye", equivalent to "Skoll" or "Cheers".

We could walk anywhere we wanted but accidentally found Chairman Mao’s compound. We were politely shooed away. It was February, it was cold, and the smog from a million soft coal space heaters was more than most throats could bear.

Our presentation went well but we wondered how our hosts knew when to get the right people gathered for each phase of the process, without asking. We realized the rooms had to be bugged so we started doing our planning sessions while out walking. Suddenly the pictures in each of our rooms were changed and they started asking us what would be presented next. No one lost face.

The French and Germans were our competition. The Canadian government was not prepared to offer sufficient guarantees for the project. The French company CGG got the job. The French had learned years ago that politics and business are intimately intertwined. Canada hasn't figured that out even today.

Just before we left, we met a fellow who was training Chinese technicians on maintenance of Boeing 727’s. He had to teach all topics to all trainees – hydraulics, electronics, engines, you name it. No one was allowed to be a specialist, but none of the trainees could grasp all of an airplane’s complex systems. This man was not allowed to leave China (he said) until everyone was trained – he had been there six months already and showed serious signs of mental illness. And he was by himself – no helpers, no family, no way out. Maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t get the contract.

My log analysis in 1973 was done on the first pocket-sized programmable calculator ever invented – the HP-45. It had memory for 49 program steps and 7 registers to hold input data, parameters, and answers. Imagine – a complete log analysis program in just 49 steps! Later, we moved up to the HP 41C and TI 59, giving us the equivalent of 400 steps and a dozen registers. Wow!

Computer log analysis for PanArctic was done using Schlumberger’s Saraband and Coriband programs. With my direction, Computrex digitized and plotted the core data on a scale that would directly overlay the Saraband plot. This was the first time log and core data were  integrated in a clear visual manner.

Bob Everett ran most of the Saraband jobs at the Schlumberger data center in Calgary. He was a sharp engineer – I had been one of his trainers when he was stationed at Swift Current. Bob went on to Schlumberger Ridgefield, later to GRI in Austin, and now consults from Victoria BC.  I told you this story was about traveling!

We also ran dipmeter and directional surveys in most wells,also processed in Calgary. Since the surveys were run close to the magnetic North Pole, magnetic compass directional surveys were useless and gyro-compasses were used. The survey was "closed" by logging all the way in and out of the borehole - that could take up to 30 hours. Gyro drift and earth's rotation were distributed mathematically to make the closure error equal to zero.

Sperry-Sun direction surveys were also run while drilling. They never agreed with the Schlumberger surveys. The problem was that they did not run a closed survey, choosing instead to run short "add-on" survey segments to earlier surveys. The accumulated errors were huge and directional information was grossly different than the closed surveys. No amount of discussion could convince Sperry to run a closed survey to convince them of their errors. Today, everyone uses 3-axis accelerometers for this, and all surveys are closed.  

The Panarctic contract ran until the PetroCanada takeover around 1984. From the very beginning in 1973, the work involved a highly integrated petrophysical analysis of each well, performed first at the well site, then more rigorously in the office. All geological data (sample descriptions, mud logs, cores, regional geology, special core analysis), engineering data (drill stem and production test recoveries, pressure transient results, capillary pressure data), and geophysical data (basin maps, local structure) were integrated during the petrophysical analysis.

A composite report was generated in 1977, covering all Arctic wells drilled to that date, and maintained as new wells were drilled. The report included 70 pages of text, 150 illustrations, and over 1000 pages of supporting data, as well as a wall of file cabinets with original and computed log prints, and a room full of magnetic tapes. This was the first of a great many integrated petrophysical reports to follow over the next 30 years.

I made about 200 flights to the High Arctic on PanArctic's Lockheed Electras and later PWA’s 727 cargo birds, 7 to 8 hours each way, counting layovers. Then a Twin Otter to the airstrip nearest the rig. Then a Nodwell or chopper to the rig. Then check in, find a bunk, find the loggers, find the wellsite geologist, find the drilling supervisor, find the radio operator, and most important, find the kitchen. All of this at 50 below and in the dark of an Arctic night. Not bad for a blind man, I told myself.

There was always the risk of Polar Bears, so each rig camp had a guard dog. One very dark blizzard, I was following the rope out to the rig from camp. About halfway, when both camp and rig were out of sight in the snow, I heard a snuffling sound behind me. “Oh shit” I said, “I’m done for, now”. It was the dog, not the bear.

There was a problem bear at Rae Point with a cub. They were captured, tranked, and sent to the Calgary Zoo. I was told they were on the same plane as I was on going south. I never saw the cargo half of the plane so I can’t vouch for the truth of it.  Scary thought.

PanArctic lost 28 men in a plane crash when CF-PAB went through the ice on approach to Rae Point base camp. Most perished of hypothermia on the ice. I had come out the day before and went back the day after. Everyone wore their parka and boots for the whole flight, just in case. No one spoke. Inside three weeks, everything was back to normal but not entirely forgotten.

Dave Curwen joined as an Associate in 1975. Bob Bigg and Kelly Woronuk joined in 1976, and Ian Norquay followed in 1978. They handled all the Alberta Deep Basin and foothills field supervision jobs, while Dave and I worked both field and office consulting. In 1981, Dave left to follow his own path in the oil industry. Bill Clow joined in 1982. This group of professionals was probably the best team of petrophysicists ever assembled in Canada. 

Kelly worked from his farm at Rycroft, Bob from home in Grande Prairie, Ian from Selkirk, Manitoba, Dave from Vernon BC (on his motorcycle in good weather), I worked from Bragg Creek, and Bill, the sensible one, actually lived in Calgary.

By 1976, it was obvious that there must be a better method than programmable calculators, and cheaper and faster than Saraband, for large scale log analysis projects in the office. But there wasn’t – some main-frame computer programs at service bureaus and a few time-share systems existed. I had written some of them myself, beginning in 1963, but they were slow, cumbersome, and very unfriendly.

By chance, in early 1976, I saw a demo of the HP9825 “calculator”. It had 24000 bytes of random access memory and a digital cassette tape drive built-in that had a 250K capacity. The operating system lived in a separate 24K ROM, leaving the RAM available for programs and data.

There was also an 11 by 17 inch flat-bed plotter. Shazam! The first desktop computer system for log analysis was born. It was small. It was portable. It was friendly. It was LOG/MATE!

Dave Curwen and I programmed this calculator turned computer to do everything a mainframe program could do, and then some. We used a lot of mathematical tricks with integer and fraction parts of numbers to save memory space, just as I had done with the HP-49 calculator.

Bill Gates was starting Microsoft by 1976, but we were totally unaware of this, the third world-changing event in my lifetime, after the Intel microchip and ARPANET. It was not until 1981 that IBM married the Intel chip and Microsoft operating system in the first IBM-PC model 5150. We had our HP system doing useful work 5 years earlier. President "Ray-gun" Reagan was shot the same year, but survived with minor surgery.

A digitizer and dual 5-1/2 inch floppy disc drive were soon available, then a decent printer. By today’s standards, these were expensive and primitive, but there was nothing else like it on the market for many years. Office consulting expanded rapidly with the LOG/MATE system as the backbone of many projects, large and small. Staff grew to 5 full-time professionals, 3 full-time technicians, a secretary / book keeper,  and several part-time technicians.

The first desktop log analysis system, LOG/MATE, delivered in 1976 - 5 years before
the IBM-PC was invented.

Flying On My Own – Log/Mate Limited
The “Friendly Log Analysis System” had many friends – 40 systems were sold between 1976 and 1982. E. R. Crain and Associates Ltd changed its name in 1978 to Log/Mate Limited to reflect the new nature of the business. Log/Mate Inc and Log/Mate Services Inc were opened in Denver the same year, under the guidance of Monte Fryt.

LOG/MATE, and later LOG/MATE PLUS, pioneered the practical use of Holgate plots to calibrate log to core data, as well as the “4-D Plot” using a symbol to represent the Z axis and colour to represent the W axis on a conventional X – Y crossplot. The use of colour could illuminate rough hole conditions, shale volume, lithology, or anything else the analyst desired.

HP 9825 computer and HP 9872 plotter with output plots in 1976, 5 years before the first IBM-PC..

LOG/MATE in 1976: 4-D crossplot, depth plot, and composite Holgate plot.

LOG/MATE printouts were neat, legible, and reproducible - another first in 1976

Thousands of wells were processed through LOG/MATE by our staff in Calgary, in addition to those run by oil companies with their own systems. We couldn’t have done it without our support staff: Bob Agar, Joan Reinbold, Vicki Sels, Debi Gray, and other part time help

We added seismic capabilities for some clients in 1981 and cash flow analysis for others. Mapping of petrophysical properties was added, but not pursued as vigorously as possible. The mapping code was written by my brother, Ian Crain, under contract to Log/Mate Limited. Ian was then, and still is, an expert in geographical information systems (GIS).

Integration of core, test, and formation top data was always part of the basic system, a foretaste of the integrated software to come. And all of this ran in 24 Kb memory - try to do that today!

Beginning in 1978, I started teaching courses and seminars on integrated petrophysics, both in-house and in open-sessions in our office space on 8th Avenue.. 

Our crowning achievement was the installation, in 1981, of a multi-computer, shared-resource LOG/MATE system for tar sands analysis at the Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board. If "shared-resource" doesn't mean anything to you, think "server plus PC workstations" (not time-share mainframes with dumb-terminals).

There was little time for travel except to Arctic and other remote well sites. But the SPWLA Convention in 1980 was in Mexico City. I took a week at Zihuatanejo on the west coast near Ixtapa. Cervesa, civeche, and hot sun on the beach washed away seven years of stress - missed a day of the Convention, too. A tame bull-fight, Mariachi music, and great food were supplied in plenty. 

One of the side-effects of retinitus pigmentosa is often early-onset cataracts. After the Mexico trip, the cataracts were surgically removed and replaced with lens implants. This eliminated the need for reading-glasses - one less hassle in a hassle-full life.

On the personal side, I had purchased a vacant quarter section south and west of Rocky Mountain House in 1976. This was partly in response to the phony energy crisis of 1973 – 1975 and partly just to get-away.

Over the next 3 years I cleared the scrub, built a house and finally moved from Bragg Creek in 1978. I laid up most of the logs myself, but had 2 carpenters do the roof and finish carpentry. Being an electrical engineer, I wired the house myself, setup a 4 KW wind generator, and charged re-claimed telephone office batteries. The ranch was, and still is, 3 miles from the nearest power line and nearest neighbour. The wind generator died of fatigue and old age in 2001 and has been replaced by a 400 watt solar array. A major house fire in 2001 meant a major rebiold. All is well at the ranch again.

Between 1980 and 1984, I cleared, cultivated, and seeded another 240 acres of lease land. I left all the good trees as windbreaks and shelter belts, cultivating only willows and scrub brush. In 1979, the first of many Horned Herefords were on site and the calving – feeding – marketing learning-curve began, including a two week hands-on course at Olds College. Ranching was a welcome contrast to the hectic oilfield work. I kept an apartment in Calgary and commuted weekly or as needed.