Why a Love the Desert Why I Love the Desert I guess, at first glance, you might think, “Old Richard has done lost it.” Yes, if you think of sand dunes and trackless wastelands as the desert, you might believe that. But my love of the Libyan Sahara Desert is more complicated than Hollywood’s version, and I do have desert experience. During my work with Exxon as a well-site geologist, I spent two thirds my time in the desert on drilling rigs, examining samples of rock drilled, every ten feet, and if I thought the rocks might be oil bearing, I stopped the drilling and ran a test. What made it complicated was, many layers of rocks drilled had traces of oil, and every test would cost the company $100,000, and if you didn’t get oil on those extra tests, you could receive a “Your services are no longer needed” note. But my time in the desert wasn’t spent just looking at rock samples. In any drilling operation there are hours of down-time especially for a geologists. In Libya there is a formation called the Heira Shale, a thick layer of rocks, and it takes a drilling rig days to drill through it. That’s when my day’s work would finish in thirty minutes and my morning report would say, “TD 8050’, drilling, 100% Heira Shale, black, splintery, shale” and that would be it until the next day. Then, when the drilling bits became dull, the bit would have to be pulled, and replacing the dull bit would usually take 6 to 8 hours. Those are the times when I would gas up the Land Rover and head for the desert. When you’re driving in the desert, you realize it’s not barren, trackless, and endless sand dunes. Since the desert was once an inland sea and later a lush African forest, and had seen countless armies march across it, remnants of all those things are still there. And it’s not “trackless”. Almost two thirds of the desert is called hard-pack, and it’s like driving on an endless, flat gravel road. All you have to do is not drive off into a wadi (a former stream bed, or drive over a large sand dune, where you would get stuck). Actually sand dunes make up less than a quarter of the desert. Trackless? Nope. You can still see the tread marks of German and British tanks from World War II, and German jerry-cans dot the desert. When we were near the coast, we were warned not to drive off the cleared, posted road near the wellsite. The Germans and English planted several million land mines, which are still active. Near the coast, on the low ridges there were machine-gun nests, which looked as if the soldiers manning them had just left. One of the oil companies hired some old ex-German soldiers, to clear land mines and these ex-soldiers had the maps where they put out the mines. I traveled by my dashboard compass, and when I would be driving cross-desert, I would sometimes read a book propped up on the steering wheel. However, that compass driving didn’t always work. I ran into a sandstorm, was lost for twelve hours, and had to spend the night in my Land Rover. But driving in the desert always turned up surprises, such as a World War I bi-plane, which I spotted on one of my drives. The plane had crashed and burned, but the metal remains were still just lying on the top of a small ridge One cross-desert trip I drove to the Kufra Oasis, where I sat in the sand around a steaming pot of vegetables and camel meat and lunched with the village heads. Then I drove down to see an American bomber, the Lady Be Good. The World War II plane had been hit by anti-aircraft fire, its navigation system disable, and ended up landing in the Desert. When the plane’s fuel supply was depleted, the crew bailed out and the plane guided down and landed. It was still intact except for bent props and collapsed landing gear. The remains of the crew were found in the mid-1950. They had all survived the bailing out, but trying to walk across several hundred miles of desert was too much for them. For a geologist, the desert was a treasure trove of many things, such as remarkable gypsum fossils just lying in the dry stream beds. Those glistening fossils kept me busy for hours on end, and the rock walls on the sides of those dried up stream beds had scratched out pictures of animals. These petroglyphs were from a pre-historic time when the climate was much wetter. At one time Libya was called the Breadbasket of the Roman Empire. As I think back on our two years in Libya, and reflect on the desert assignments, I consider them a somewhat pleasant part of a hardship tour. To be honest, Vertis has a completely different view of my desert tours, and for good reasons. After the Second World War, Benghazi had an influx of residents and the electrical system couldn’t handle the load. That meant one quarter of the town would have their electricity cut off each night. Vertis had to lock her doors, bolt the windows at dark, and couldn’t leave the house. We had a short wave radio, and when President Kenney was assassinated, she sat in the dark and listened to his funeral on the BBC. One of my last desert tours was to a remote wildcat in western Libya near the Algerian border. It was 800 miles from Benghazi, and I spent 23 consecutive days on a French rig with one other American, a French roughneck crew, and a bunch of Libyan roustabouts. It was in the red sand area of the Sahara Desert, which at one time held the world record for the world’s hottest temperature, 136 degrees. The large sand dunes in the area had a soft red hue due to iron oxide in the sand, and the red sand soaked up the sun’s energy, and held it. In other parts of the Sahara, the white sand dunes reflect the sun’s rays, and it cools down at night. It was by far the most interesting of the desert tours, and since the beat-up French rig stayed broken down a lot of the time, I had plenty of time to drive the desert and see some of the Western Sahara Desert, which was more varied and different than the central and eastern Sahara. The French rig had a French chef, and outside of squid-in-its-own-ink sauce, the food was head and shoulders above the standard fare on the American rigs in the area south of Benghazi. Since we were drilling in a different geologic basin, the rock formations were different, and that made the well site sample work more interesting. I was the geologist in charge of evaluating and testing the well, and the other Americans was the drilling engineer in charge of supervising the actual drilling. The two men responsible for the drilling and evaluating a multimillion dollar Exxon wildcat had both graduated from---and you’re not going to believe this--- Norphlet High School!