Stories from the Down side of Seismic
By Dan Cote

One of the drawbacks/good things(?) about seismic. Many of us had no home. It was the back of our truck or our tent or our Tepee or the next motel. When a job was over - "jobs" typically lasting 3 months to 6 months ... sometimes longer - sometimes less, the companies often would not have the "next" job firmed up. A normal scenario was to finish a job say, July 15th in Buffalo Wyoming and be told to show up in Farmington NM Aug 1 - only to show up and find out the job had been delayed or never went thru - or getting a phone call (if you were lucky enough to have a phone somewhere) telling you to show up in Wisconsin instead. This always happened as the money was running out so everyone would always show up broke or nearly so. We got a daily cash-rate for our expenses and many of us lived on that - which we got every week - and banked our payroll - which worked great since most of us worked too many days straight and too many hours per day to ever make it to the bank. I remember several times working in Montana or NE Wyoming and on my 5 days off per month driving 5/600 miles to Salt Lake to do my banking only to find out their computers were down and couldn't get any banking done over the 2/3 days I could stay! No ATMs in the day either.

The hard part was winter - bust your ass, snowshoe, expensive Sorrel boots, heavy duty hi-tech coats and thermals, too cold for the campground so had to motel it. Not always enough motel space so had to rent a small house. Those that could afford it had pull-behinds ... so it was more expensive to work in winter, had to eat more to have more body heat - yet, on the helicopter-support jobs the choppers could only fly sunrise to sundown which meant a few months of 9hr days at best which meant less pay (luckily, I was usually on salary) - and it usually took 12hr days to make your get-by ... which left you praying for weather days .. which cut into your payroll but helped you stay sane ... and then a job would shut down ... normally right before Thanksgiving ... and you might be out of work until March. Luckily, you could usually apply for and get unemployment - but only on the payroll dollars you made, not on the "hotshot" (daily cash) and it was never easy to figure out where to pitch a tent in Salt Lake and it was 20 below or colder in Wyoming, Montana or the parts of Colorado that would have us.

When the bottom dropped out of the industry during Reagan's early years, many of us were trapped in the cycle - needing money to make any changes, jobs coming fewer and farther between, having become unfit for society due to the lifestyle - I mean, face it ... if you've been living, working and laughing at the top of the world while never having time to shave hardly, no place to live except your tent thus making the bar synonymous with shelter and comfort and friendship ... it's a little hard to go take that crap job at 7-11 or to go back to the finance industry where you sit in your little cubicle wearing your regular $12 haircut and instep-pinching white-man's shoes smiling at some fool who is your boss and loves telling you what to do but has never stepped foot off a sidewalk and could only speak of driving by a mountain one time. Many of our workers didn't have any college education or even the basic education so for them, it was back to the factories and temp-jobs working for "The Man" and limping thru every winter ... looking up at the mountain or out at the desert every chance they got ... and every time sighing long and loud ... like Igor sighed the several times that the lightening-bolts didn't raise the monster ... until Spring came - and one day, the phone would ring and it would be a Seismo saying "Let's go to work" ... and the monster would groan and twitch and FINALLY come to life!

Then, with a big "Whooppee!!", a trip to the pawn-shop, a bird shoved so far up that supervisor's nose that his/her eyes would wiggle and a night of duct-taping old work-gloves and saying a prayer over old boot-liners and a trip by a store for one new pair of gaitors - it was off to the gas-station and your favorite dealer's house with a prayer and a promise and two days later ... standing on that mountain where you and God both knew you belonged ... and still do ... with the sun and wind on your face, buck-knife on your belt, taking a cold whiz away from the wind ... life was good again!