Notorious Seiscom Delta Crew

By Jon Horton

I'm not positive what year it was but my Swiss cheese memory places it in May of 1978. I was in Afton, Wyoming when the phone rang and a guy named Mike Desjardin asked me to meet him at the Valley Vineyard bar so I drove down and shook hands with a guy who was about 6'4" and must have weighed at least 300 lbs.

He bought me a beer and said, "I work for Seiscom Delta, it's a Canadian company, and I'm starting a heliportable crew up down here. I heard that you know all the juggies in the area and I was wondering you would help me put together an experienced crew so I can hit the ground running. I said that I could, there were enough people wintering over in Star Valley to supply two crews. He said that for the moment he would need eight people to fly down to Houston to pick up vehicles and drive them north so everyone had to have valid drivers licenses. Cool.

I phoned Uncle Piss and told him what was happening. He put out the word and we all met with Mike the next day. Shortly thereafter we were in the air and headed for Houston. Just before we left Mike handed me $3,000 in cash and said, "I don't have an accountant, there are no books so don't bring back any money just bring me receipts. Do you think this will be enough?" Remember, this is 1978 so that is about $7,000 in today's money. Do you think you could buy gas for eight (actually ten, as it turned out) vehicles and food for ten people for three days with $7,000? I figured that even with paying for the bar bills for Pee Pee, Diana Lee, Little Joan, Keith Milam, and four other binge drinkers I knew there would be beaucoup money left over. "Well, Mike, if I start to run out I'll phone and you can send me more by Western Union." "That's a real good idea, Jon. I knew I got the right guy when I hired you." (Hmmm, what part of the Canadian bush did this guy grow up in?)

We landed in Houston and got rooms in a plush hotel, then it was time to find a restaurant. Someone recommended a famous Chinese place so we went there and found out that the only food Desjardin had ever eaten was cheeseburgers, oatmeal and moose meat. I think it was Little Joan who talked him into ordering a Sichuan dish and when he took one bite he started to sweat bullets, choked down a glass of ice water, turned beet red and went to the Men's room so he wouldn't pass out in front of lots of people. That's when we learned that in Canada they think Ketchup is a spice.

The next day we headed north, stopping in Conroe, TX to pick up the last three Chevy pickups. Afterwards we stopped in, I remember, Corsicana and went to the best barbecue joint in the state where we drank nine gallons of beer each and laughed at our good fortune until we cried. Here we were, all these rank old juggies freed on the dinosaur trail with little or no supervision (as if I really qualified) and two or three thousand dollars of extra money to spend any way that we could think of to spend it. I went to the drugstore and bought four receipt books with different sequences of numbers, for starters.

When we got to the office in Denver, if you can believe it, Mike gave me another $1,500 to get us to Great Falls, Montana by way of Afton and Dillon, Montana. I handed him a handful of good receipts salted with bad paper and off we went, most of the trucks with six packs stuffed in the grills, just as they had been ever since we left Conroe two days before.

It was in Great Falls where things got really funny because it was there that we picked up Radar. I can't remember his name but he was to be our clerk and he looked exactly like the guy on MASH, complete with thick granny glasses and baby face. And, we found out, he was a virgin. When Diana Lee found that out she started, literally, to pant. She went over and sat down beside him and started molest the little fellow there in the hotel bar. She'd touch his little penis and he'd jump and blush while we hooted and told him what a great guy he was, and lucky to have an experienced woman like Dee take an interest in his education. He wasn't so sure about it all but after two beers, his first two, he let Diana lead him off to her room.

The next morning neither of them showed up for the bus ride to the airport for transport to Calgary. We had to send the gals to Dee's room to rouse them and when they came back they said the place was torn up and smelled like Cupid's gym. Both Dee and Radar collapsed on the bus, collapsed on the plane, collapsed on the ride to the hotel in Calgary. When Diana finally got enough rest to tell the story she started to laugh so hard she barely got it out. She said at first he was terrified, then he was interested but his dick wasn't, then his dick was but didn't know where to go so she took off his glasses, placed them between her legs and said, "There you go Honey!" After he got the right idea she said it was like being ravaged by a demented Tasmanian Devil.

In Calgary I turned in a fistful of receipts, they gave me even more cash and we headed south for Rexburg, Idaho to finally go to work for Sohio. There we met the Louis Killius, the Gillies boys and two dozen more people where we began to plod across the barley, potato, and lava fields of eastern Idaho and through the portals of the Juggy Hall of Fame."