Will oil rig's sinking raise gas prices? Should we really care right now?

It would be hypocritical of me to slam the oil and gas industry right now as I finally unloaded one oil and gas property last week for more than just pocket change — not much more than that to be sure.

But I don’t control the petroleum markets, obviously, or I wouldn’t be sitting here writing on a blog that only a couple of friends, a few of my brothers and I read. I’m joking, of course. I have had readers from 21 different countries on the last 500 page hits. However long a period that might be. And it might interest you to know that behind the U.S. and Japan (my friend Paul), 1.6 percent of my page visits have been from the Ukraine while 11 countries including China, India, Germany and Iran tie for 0.2 percent of my readers, visits, whatever. Filler. That’s what that was.

The point I was going to make was that gasoline remains higher than it was a year ago, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. On average it is anywhere from $0.70 to $.0.95 per gallon throughout the U.S. It seems, as well, that it might just take another jump because of the explosion and sinking of Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Coast Guard Cutter Zephyr from Pascagoula, Miss., searches Wednesday for survivors from the Deepwater Horizon explosion about 50 miles southeast of Venice, La. USCG photo

No one is saying that right now, except people like myself who know absolutely nothing about the workings of the oil and gas industry. However, doesn’t it seem logical? Even though the Deepwater Horizon had yet to produce any oil it would seem a rig which would cost about $600 million to replace, not to mention scores of lawsuits that one might bet are already on the horizon, sorry for the pun, would set off a chain reaction. And it seems that at the bottom it all ends with the consumer paying more at the pump. S**t rolls down hill, we used to say in the Navy. I don’t know why, it doesn’t seem much like a nautical saying to me.

Transocean Ltd. operated the rig for BP, the artist oil company formerly known as Prince British Petroleum. That company is relatively fresh from having millions upon more millions of dollars extracted from it in fines and from a settlement engineered by local (Beaumont, Texas) lawyer Brent Coon over the BP Texas City, Texas  refinery explosion five years ago. That blast killed 15 workers.

With the oil rig’s sinking, the Texas City saga somewhat fresh and the fact that both Transocean and BP each lost more than 50 cents in stock trading today on the New York  Stock Exchange, it would certainly seem that a chain reaction is not unexpected. That, of course, could set off more s**t running down hill and ultimately cause motorists to have lighter pocketbooks or at least fewer digits to the left of the decimal point in their bank accounts.

It goes unsaid that as time goes on from when the explosion happened that the fate of the missing workers becomes more and more ominous. That has nothing to do with the price of gasoline in Beaumont, Texas, for now at least, nor does it affect the price of eggs in China.

People have real issues over which to worry such as whether their loved ones are alive or dead in the sometimes unforgiving waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Whether we pay more for gasoline because of this is really irrelevant when looked through the lens of  life. Nevertheless, some will pay with their lives so we can pay at the pump.

Inarticulate perhaps as it is to say, it sucks. However, it’s just another day’s work.

Talking about fire on the ground and smoke on the water

Driving home this afternoon from Nacogdoches I decided abruptly to take a drive through the Angelina National Forest. I turned off U.S. 69 near the Neches River on the road that leads to the Upland Island Wilderness Area and the Bouton Lake campground.

It has been years since I drove the whole enchilada from the other side of where the road leads. I didn’t know how far it was to Bouton Lake this way. I didn’t want to spend all afternoon driving so I decided I would drive five miles and then turn around if all I saw was road.

As I drove about five miles I had noticed some guys in a little four-wheel buggy of sorts — something like John Deere’s Gator — but I don’t think that’s what it was in which they were actually motoring. The guys waved. In fact, everyone I encountered driving down this road waved. Friendly bunch.

Just up the road it began to get smoky and I could then see some fire crawling along the edge of where the timberline begins just off the road.

As the woods start to get a little smoky I realize I am without marshmellows.

I kept driving a little ways and noticed that the fire went off into the woods for a little ways. My first instinct was to call for a fire department or the forest service. Conditions have been a bit dry lately in East Texas and certain areas have been beset, for a number of reasons, by woods arsonists. But I thought, well, those guys had just been driving away from where the fire began.

The more I thought about the fire the more I began to wonder if this was a so-called “controlled burn,” or a fire intentionally and legally set for one reason or the other. In the older days, fire from natural sources such as lightning used to create their own sort of controlled burn. Those fires would destroy the underbrush and allow in certain areas a park-like ground cover in the woods. Growth and Smokey the Bear put the brakes on uncontrolled woods fires in more recent years. Of course the Smokey campaign was well-intentioned but perhaps sort-sighted in selling to the public that all wildland fires were bad. They’re not.

I came to my five-mile limit and turned around. A little ways down the road I saw the two men in the little four-wheel utility vehicle. They were parked in front a big pickup truck which had attached an empty trailer, I suppose for the little cart they were using. I stopped to ask about the fire and almost felt stupid asking because I noticed some type of tank in the bank of the truck of the type used for various types of fuel. Fuel like that used for setting controlled woods fires.

" I'll gas up my hot rod stoker we'll get hotter than a poker/ You'll be broke but I'll be broker tonight we're settin' the woods on fire." Hank Williams

One of the men told me he could understand why I would ask and seemed almost grateful that I did. He called his fire a “very controlled burn” and said that the fire was just creeping along the edge of the woods. I didn’t ask  them why they had set it. I figured if they wanted me to know, they’d have told me. I just wanted to satisfy my mind that it wasn’t a wildfire, which I did.

My little fire pictures, thankfully, are nothing compared to the fire pictures I have seen like the ones coming from the offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon.

Fire boats deluge the oil rig Deepwater Horizon about 50 miles off the tip of the Louisiana coast. USCG photo

The rig, located about 50 miles southeast of Venice, La., exploded overnight injuring more than a dozen workers, three critically. The U.S. Coast Guard said 11 workers on board the rig, owned by Transocean, were still missing despite word from a Plaquemines Parish government official who said they’d been found.

I’m happy my encounter with fire worked out okay. Let us all hope those missing from the explosion and fire on the Gulf of Mexico are found safe and sound.

By the way, old Hank’s wonderful songs depicted a lot of the backwoods, cracker life of the South of his time. That makes me wonder if all the words in “Settin’ the Woods on Fire” were strictly figurative?

Give me that country side of life

It’s hard to believe that I haven’t lived in the country for 25 years. When I say “the country” I mean in the sticks, rural free delivery, the outback. It does not mean I haven’t lived in the U.S. of A., but sometimes I wonder if it is the same country that I have been living in all these years.

For two years and then another year after a year in the city, I lived nine miles outside of Nacogdoches, Texas, on about 200 or so acres of mostly pasture land. Since I was in college most of the time I lived there the place was just right for parties, big parties, big normal college parties where you would do things like  empty your guns into a couch and then build bonfires out of the couch, then walk on a log thrown on top of the burning couch, or sit on the roof or in my late friend Waldo’s case, fall off the roof. No the fall from the roof did not kill him. He died of cancer about 14 years later.

I went on a photo safari today during my drive in the country to my old haunts and to downtown Nacogdoches where I once worked as a fireman. Unfortunately, my old digital camera seems to be giving up the ghost. I’d say that is quite appropriate since I’m visiting my old haunts. I took a bunch of pictures, including those of where I used to live. Wouldn’t you know that those I took of “the farm” were absent.

Little pines grow to be big pines for 30 years or so until they are "harvested."

It is impossible to convey how much I miss country life. True, I haven’t lived in any humongous cities since I left college. Well, I did spend some time, equaling maybe a year and a half in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. But mostly I have lived in cities the size of the one I am living now. A city of about 115,000 with a metro population of about 250-300 thousand people. Still that doesn’t even compare because when I lived in the country it was outside a city of about 30,000 people. Whether all of this is relative, I can’t tell you.

All I know is the country out toward Woden and Kingtown seemed on a beautiful semi-cloudy spring day as even more beautiful than I remembered it. I drove down what used to be called “CCC Road.” Whether it was trailblazed by the Civilian Conservation Corps I couldn’t tell. I can tell you a couple tales about that road.

First, after I graduated from college I came back to Nacogdoches and had intended to stay with a friend for the weekend but that friend wasn’t around and I couldn’t get in touch with some of my other friends for some reason. This was, of course, before everyone had cell phones. So I ended up out toward where I lived and then pulled onto a little trail off CCC Road into the woods a little ways. I stopped there and spent the night. I think my car seat completely reclined all the way back. The next morning I woke up and saw this huge dog, something like a St. Bernard, staring at me through my window. It wasn’t hostile or anything. Just kind of matter of fact.

Another time, leaving out all the gory details, Waldo and I were traveling into town from the farm. He lived there for about a year before moving to the Dallas area and then I moved in. We were in his little Tercel hatchback. Ironic, sense he had complained that the little Ranger pickup he had before could carry a payload of maybe … “crackers.”

The entire area near the other end of CCC Road had been clearcut for timber. Since they cut down or “harvest” pine trees after25-30 years, it was no coincidence that the same area was clearcut today.

On with my story, for whatever reason, I suppose it makes trees grow better or something, I don’t remember. But the people who owned that land that had been cut over planted just about the whole thing in watermelons. I mean, it was a major watermelon farm. Big trucks pulling what Waldo described as “rattle trailers” (’cause they rattled) would be going down all the roads around Watermelon World at all hours of the night. Also, for some reason, the dirt on CCC Road near all the melons had turned to what I believe — from my two semesters of Geology — as being some of the area’s Sparta sand. It was very difficult to negotiate even on the best days driving through those sands. And the night we attempted to go to town we got stuck in what I had dubbed “The Moon.”

We went back to Waldo’s, later my place, and called a wrecker. The wrecker guy said he’d be out. Asked what it cost, he said: “That’ll be a $50 bill, Bubba.”

On through CCC I traveled this afternoon and then shortly after turning onto Lacyville Road, I then turned on another partially dirt, partially gravel, partially clay road called Saint’s Rest Road, so named for the missionary Baptist church about a mile from Lacyville Road. I don’t know if I had ever actually gotten out and looked around the church before but I did today.

The wooden building is a simple, but fine little structure. The kind of building most folks who would like a little church in the country, would want. It reminds me of that old hymn, or I guess that’s what you would call it, “The Church in the Wildwood,” altlhough the little brown church or the song wasn’t brown at Saint’s Rest. It was white.

Trees out in front of the church sport moss, at  least  a few do. They say moss gathers on trees on the side pointed toward a river. In this case it is true because the Angelina River isn’t too far away.

I got back almost to pavement after driving onto Pine Flat Road, to what eventually becomes a Texas farm-to-market road. As I rounded the curve right near where the dirt turns into pavement,  a big old county dump truck was parked with a load of asphalt. Two county prisoners in their black-striped uniforms where shoveling asphalt.  I wanted badly to, at least try, to take their picture but decided against it.

One thing I recall from riding down these country roads this afternoon — aside from all the good memories — was how serene I felt. It was if I didn’t have a care in the world. That was even the case when my co-worker called me and told me she was going to have to change schedules with me next week and I would be out for evaluations with my boss for two days on Monday and Tuesday instead of Wednesday and Thursday. Who cares? I didn’t have any red lights at every intersection or cars that were rolling boom boxes or the constant hum of noise coming from the interstate.

It has been so long I don’t know how I’d adjust living in the country again. I remember after moving back after being gone just that one year and it freaked me out for awhile listening to all the crickets outside at night. But if there was anyway to make it happen, to still make a living or to make a better living, I might have  to try one more tour in the country before I get too old and have to once again live near folks.

The drive today just told me what I already knew. I really miss the country.

First endorsement of the year: Texas House District 9

Democrat Kenneth Franks will once again challenge incumbent Republican Rep. Wayne Christian for the Texas House, District 9, race in November.

Franks, a retired teacher and now rancher and businessman from Pineland, announced his candidacy in an e-mail to eight feet deep sent Tuesday. Christian was first elected to the House in 1995. Christian is a financial advisor from Center. He has served six terms in the Texas House. Christian advises potential investors on his Web site: “Those wanting to “play the market” might want to move on to another site. Our clients provide us their “serious” dollars they don’t desire to lose.” A staunch conservative, Christian said he was honored to be named one of the “worst legislators” by Texas Monthly. So proud is he.

Both state Democratic and Republican party Web sites, checked today, indicated Franks and Christian will have no primary election challengers. The filing deadline was Monday.

District 9 encompasses the Pineywoods counties of Shelby, Nacogdoches, Jasper, San Augustine and Sabine with a total population of almost 140,000 residents, according to the 2000 Census.

Christian defeated Franks by 62-35 percent during the November 2008 General Election. He is president of the Texas Conservative Coalition, which its Web site says is for individual liberty, limited government, free enterprise and traditional family values.

But even though Rep. Christian might espouse some of those virtues, Christian does not seem bothered by favors askew with these values when it serves the Representative or his friends. One wonders if  Wayne Christian was thinking limited government and individual liberty when he sneaked in a last-minute bill  allowing reconstruction of  his beach house on Bolivar Peninsula — out of his legislative district — which was considered by the state as open beach after the property was rearranged by Hurricane Ike. Perhaps Christian and his ilk see limited government as good government … just as long as it is good for Rep. Christian and his beach neighbors.

I don’t know Kenneth Franks very well, mostly our conversations have been via e-mail. We do have some friends and relatives in common. I also wouldn’t be honest if I said I knew all of the policy positions of either Mr. Franks or Rep. Christian. But I do know a little of the non-policy side of Kenneth Franks.

Kenneth grew up in the home of an educator and he spent almost 30 years as a teacher. He was in the inaugural class at Angelina Junior College — now Angelina College — in Lufkin. He transferred to The University of Texas in Austin where he received his undergraduate degree. He later received a Master’s of Education from Stephen F. Austin, back in the Pineywoods, in Nacogdoches. He has taught in schools from 5A to Class A classification.  After retiring from teaching, Kenneth now ranches and operates a car wash.

It is perhaps the education side that drives Kenneth to want student testing to be meaningful and not puntative. Kenneth, according to campaign information on his Web site, supports pay that will actually provide  better lives for teachers and support staffs. He also supports fully funding mandates that will make college tuition more affordable for all eligible students and to help potential teachers  with more financial assistance.

I spent a lot of time in several of the counties of District 9. Add up the three times I lived  there, and I would have lived roughly a quarter of my life in Nacogdoches County. It’s been awhile since I lived there but it will always feel like a “second hometown” to me. That is one reason I want a good Democratic state representative for District 9. The other reason is Texas needs more Democrats in the Legislature. I’m talking Dems who will actually represent and do the state’s business and not those Dems or GOP-ers who are only interested in better positioning themselves.

I think Kenneth will be a fine state representative who happens to be a Democrat. So my first official endorsement of 2010, for what it’s worth, is for Kenneth Franks for District 9, Texas House of Representatives.

Can I interest you in a proposition?

Texas has one of the longest state constitutions in the country. One might expect that in a state so large and rambling where all is supposedly “bigger” or so goes the old saw. The current constitution is rooted in ending Reconstruction in the state and thus requires each time a child is born in Texas the document must be altered in order to allow that newborn citizenship. Weird huh? Well, that is certainly an exaggeration but the constitution has been amended by voters almost 460 times. A fresh new batch of 11 amendments await voters’ passage during the Nov. 3 general election. Early voting is already under way for those propositions.

A guide giving a varied view of the proposed amendments has been furnished by the ever-informative liberal blog, the Burnt Orange Report. One may take a look-see for all 11 props. But here are a few I wish to cuss (actually, no) and discuss:

Props–Props or No Props?

  • Proposition 4 — Establishing a National Research University Fund

WHAT: This would help provide funding for new potential “Tier 1” universities in Texas in addition to the present two, University of Texas and Texas A & M University. VERDICT: Undecided. I still need to answer a few questions before supporting this. I would like to see more top research universities in Texas but I also want some of the smaller state schools such as the one from which I graduated to remain viable.

  • Proposition 8 — Allowing the State to Contribute Resources to Veterans Hospitals

WHAT: This would put into the constitution the authority for the state and local partners to join the VA in establishing new veterans hospitals. VERDICT: For. I am cynical about the motivation for this becoming an amendment since I have seen at ground level how invested local communities as well as state and national politicians are in attaining and keeping VA medical facilities. VA hospitals, even outpatient clinics are a welcome item for any city and not just for the veterans who need and use them. Like other government facilities they furnish jobs and income to the places in which they are built. That is not a bad thing. But these medical centers should be number one about the veteran in action and not just in words (a.k.a. dollars and cents). Nonetheless, there are largely-populated areas of Texas such as in the Rio Grande Valley and Corpus Christi which are in need of VA inpatient facilities. This is why I support the prop.

  • Proposition 9 — Establishing the Right to Use and to Access Public Beaches

WHAT: This proposed amendment would allow an unrestricted right for accessing public beaches in Texas. This would also let the state to protect beaches and its easements from encroachment even if storms or erosion causes the beach to shift under houses or businesses. VERDICT: For. The beaches and their approaches belong to the public and should remain that way.

  • Proposition 11 — Restricting the Use of Eminent Domain for Taking Property for Public Projects

WHAT: This proposition, if approved, would by constitutional edict prohibit private property to be taken by eminent domain laws for economic development means or enhancing tax revenues. VERDICT: For. There are loopholes in this prop which I hope will eventually be addressed but I think it is a good start. A two-thirds vote by the Legislature would be required for granting the power of eminent domain. This amendment won’t stop eminent domain abuse, such as was seen in building George W. Bush’s Texas Rangers Ball Park at Arlington or Jerry Jones’ Cowboys Stadium in the same city. Those monuments to commerce had a lot of public support, of course. But perhaps Prop 11 can somewhat curtail the abuse.