Chapter 26 Field Work and uh, Drilling in Nevada

When I started at PPCo I was working in a relatively new high tech area of satellite interpretation. Remote Sensing it was called. It was based on a series of Earth observation satellites put in orbit to originally monitor crops. The geological community found it could map structures equally well and showed them things that could only have been imagined in their wildest dreams. Geologists had had orgasms over early hand held photography taken by the Gemini and Apollo astronauts. The Landsats as they were collectively called turned them into whores. A whole community of geoscientists became Remote Sensing whores. They sold themselves for grant money and prostituted themselves in order to get companies, particularly oil companies, to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars for processing systems. At the time, the government subsidized the satellites so digital tapes with imagery of large areas were only $200. Photographic negatives or positives were even less expensive. Phillips was one of the first to lie on her back. A whole group existed and they even had their own research support. Namely me. What ultimately happened is we bunch of whores got syphilis and died. Metaphorically speaking of course. The powers that be in the community over sold what we could actually do. The oil companies, Phillips, Cities Service, Amerada Hess, Oxy, Amoco, Exxon, ARCO, Pennzoil, the list goes on and on. Most no longer exist, all shelled out the bucks to have their own Remote Sensing group. The community held annual meetings in South Dakota at the remote sensing data center in Sioux Falls. Still others were held in Michigan, and in Colorado. What I learned right off was that a lot of the "research" was being done by the same guys and a lot of them were in academia. They just flogged the same data, looking at if from 90 degrees and writing a paper, the stepping a few paces to the right and looking at it at 45 degrees and writing another. It was a business. All the while the oil companies were shelling out the bucks for staff and equipment that never delivered. The oil crunch of the mid-80's changed that, along with President Reagan privatizing the operation of the remote sensing satellites. This led overnight to the cost rising 10 times to $2000 a tape with a copyright hanging off of it. No longer could companies swap tapes to save a buck now it was $2000 each time anyone used it. This had a dampening effect on the party. Then the price of oil dropped and almost all the staffs were cut back. Some drastically. Phillips went from probably 20+ people to 5. A whole new industry sprang up then. It was called the value added industry. All those people who worked for the companies set up small companies with new or used equipment they might have purchased from their former employers. They now would do the value added processing on the raw data for the oil companies for a fee. That is pretty much how things work 20 years later. Now as part of the ongoing effort to get the oil companies to shell out money, independent groups, I guess lobby groups sprang up. One was called the GeoSat Committee. Their stated goal was to demonstrate the need, and lobby for new generations of satellites that the government would fund. Things called group shoots where a consortium of companies would fly at their own expense, new sensors while teams mobilized from the participating companies, swarmed over the target areas taking readings in order to calibrate the data received from the sensors. My first experience was to go to Nevada for several weeks with three co-workers and collect ground truth data. We flew into Reno and then drove a circuit of the state, mainly through the central and north, never venturing to Las Vegas. On our first lunch stop, one of my co-workers disappeared into a book store. When we sat down in a cafe he tossed the book in my lap. It was called "The Brothels of Nevada". Well, being the only bachelor of the group, I was expected to give a report of the night's "discoveries" at breakfast the next day. It was a duty I ably performed for the next couple of weeks. It was tough but someone had to do it. Some of the little mining towns had two or three brothels and I felt duty bound to visit them all in the time allotted to me. We headed toward Hawthorne near Walker Lake and the huge Army ammunition depot. Bunkers dotted the valley hillsides as far as the eye could see. We headed on to Tonopah and I sampled the charms of the gals there. They were a delight. We eventually turned north toward Ely, then cut over to Winnemucca, then Battle Mountain and eventually back to Reno. There were a lot of stops in small towns along the way, Goldfield is one I remember. It was a long time ago, but I can still remember the good times. The reader has to remember that this was pre-AIDS. The girls didn't even require you wear a condom. The etiquette went as follows. You walk in. There is a bar. You sit down and order a drink. The proprietor or madam will try to rush you to pick a girl by trotting them all out for a look see. You take your time, have a drink, chat, then choose one. You talk, possibly buy her a drink then head to her room. The Madam tried to rush me, I turned to her, smile and said "Am I in a hurry?" All of a sudden they stopped treating me like the horny 20 something I appeared to be, and was. I all of sudden appeared to be a veteran, all because of the little book. Each gal, has her own bedroom. About he size of a very small motel room. Money changes hands. The Madam comes by and collects it. The clock starts. She asks you to drop trousers and then checks your equipment for leaks. Really. She would manually inspect you for anything she didn't want any part of. Then she would wash you using a basin of warm water. Then you get naked and talk specifics of what you wanted. French, Half and half, etc. Yeah, the book explained the vernacular. Basically, French was your garden variety blow job. Half and half was she started you off with a blow job and finished you with intercourse. Of course you could just start off with intercourse. I didn't need any assistance getting me up so I just opted to get after it. The first gal that entertained me was a very pretty one of Afro-American descent. She was , as most of them were, from southern California, and was up doing a stint at one of the "Ranches". It must have been a slow week, because she broke a few rules. One, we got into some heavy kissing, and two, we ran overtime and she didn't seem to mind much even though the Madam was hammering on the door. Another gal I remember was named Lola. Even had a playboyesque business card with the stylish Femlin silhouette. This gal had big honking hooters with bright pink aureoles and long pencil eraser thick nipples. She had a shock of blonde hair and pale ivory skin. Another gal was named Terry, a pretty brunette with a nice figure. How time flies all those 20 something hookers would be old enough to be grandmothers now.