In nineteen-seventy-seven, I was freshly divorced and working in a high-stress job as a geologist - "A new drilling prospect every week or you’re fired!" Nights would find me in a disco called Clementine’s located in the basement of Oklahoma City’s Penn Square Mall. The place was dark, the music loud, the drinks and women loose. I was usually inebriated, or well on my way to getting there.

Yes, it was in the post-Vietnam, pre-AIDS era. Practically every night I would spend many hours line dancing to the anthems of Gloria Gaynor, Donna Summer and KC and the Sunshine Band. Nineteen-seventy-seven was the year I first saw the movie Saturday Night Fever and fell in love with the music of the BeeGees.

There were two ways to enter Clementine’s. You could walk down a narrow flight of stairs or slide down a chute. Either way you’d wind up in a huge open room that was illuminated only by a rotating disco ball, colored strobe lights that warped your reality even if you weren’t drunk or stoned, and a few discreetly placed floor lamps that provided little more than a dim haze. Most of all there was a pressing multitude of warm bodies and the sounds of disco, belting out the message of freedom, expression and free love.

A huge bar extended across the front of the room where three bartenders served drinks as fast as they could pour them. The dance floor of diamond-shaped black and white tiles was rarely empty; the occasional cooling fingers of vapor rising from grids in the floor made the swaying dancers seem like uninhibited creatures from Hell’s nether regions.

The dance floor was like hypnosis, insanity and blasting sound. Bodies crushed together amid the beat of drums as ancient as Africa. Once, across the crowded dance floor, I saw a beautiful young woman staring at me. Our eyes locked. We danced toward each other. She passed me a note with her phone number and when I called her the next day she invited me for spaghetti that night at her apartment. I showed up with flowers and a bottle of wine.

Marti was her name. A single mother, she had a five year old son named Chris. We ate our spaghetti and drank wine by candlelight. When we finished, I helped her with the dishes and then she put Chris to bed. Afterward, we made love in her bedroom.

"I want to thank you so much," was her unexpected reply as we lay beside each other in her little bed.

"My pleasure," I said.

"You don’t understand," she explained, sensing the flippant tone of my voice. "I’m in remission from cervical cancer. You are the first man I’ve slept with. I’ve been so worried that I would never have the feelings of a woman ever again. You proved to me tonight that I’m okay and I thank you."

Confused and too young or too stupid to understand the depths of Marti’s feelings, I contributed little more than small talk before saying good bye and disappearing into the night. I never saw her again and I don’t think she needed me to.

Those were the days of disco, my days of disco, for whatever that means. Some people have even suggested that disco isn’t cool and people that liked it were somehow less than intelligent. I don’t think so. I think we were all just as young, human and vulnerable as any young person today.

And I do know this. Whenever I hear Gloria Gaynor, Donna Summer or the BeeGees, I find myself back on that same dark dance floor with wisps of vapor cooling the sweat dripping down my neck and forehead as I pulsate to a hypnotic beat and message of love and coming together. And when I do it makes me feel young again.

http://www.ericwilder.com

Natural gas was discovered in northwestern Louisiana in 1870.  A water well drilled in Shreveport caught fire when a worker noticed a strange wind escaping from the hole and struck a match to get a better look.

Oil explorers began drilling wells in 1904, searching for black gold.  What they found was a little oil along with huge flows of natural gas.  For years, millions of cubic feet of natural gas were either flared or vented, in order to recover small amounts of oil.  Legendary oil men, Mike Benedum and Joe Trees, knew there must be a better way.

There was.  Producers had already begun using steel pipe to “case” oil wells.  The problem is that boreholes are not uniform in diameter from top to bottom and neither are they always vertical.  Wash-outs and deviations are the rule rather than the exception.  With water wells, wash-outs and deviations presented no problem.  When large flows of natural gas were present, they often blew-out, uncontrolled.  Joe Trees’s father suggested a way to cure the problem – the use of cement to bind casing and formation.

In the early days before Halliburton, no one knew how to cement a well.  After much experimentation, cementers learned they could put the cement directly down the borehead – they did this with shovel and elbow grease – and that the weight of the cement would cause it to u-tube out of the pipe and up the backside, cementing the casing and the borehole.  Later, cementers learned they could employ heavy fluids to displace the cement out of the casing, raising it hundreds of feet.

Using this technological advance, monster gas flows in the area were soon contained, allowing for deeper drilling and the recovery of oil that early explorers had long known was present — oil otherwise unrecoverable, except for a simple sack of cement.

http://www.ericwilder.com