The Well

Docherty was fed up - with a large, capital F. Thoroughly browned-off. Quite honestly, I can't say I blamed him. Given similar circumstances, I'd be fed up myself. But, they only had themselves to censure, as Reardon often pointed out.

Still there it was - a bed they had made for themselves, and must now lie on. For the foreseeable future, anyway.

What annoyed Reardon mainly was the money they'd forked out on this venture. Five years good pay down the drain and only a subsistence income to live off by comparison. Docherty was quite philosophical concerning the money. They had made what they considered a worthwhile investment, and it simply hadn't paid off. He was irked by the fact they were stuck in the backwaters of East Kalimantan, without the funds to extricate themselves from their dilemma and return home to Ireland.

'We're just a pair of thick bog paddies,' he would tell Reardon. 'We should have stayed on the construction sites in Kuwait then gone home once our money was earned.'
This had by then come to be a diurnal statement, and Reardon never tired of hearing it. There really were words of truth in Docherty's observations regarding their collective fates – and a fair reminder of their lack of business acumen.

But, in the two years they had been in Kalimantan, both had survived - and learned an immense amount outside their apprentice-taught skills. They built houses on the five hectare lot they jointly owned: sturdy, comfortable houses too. Both had married local women, very pretty girls, and while much their junior in years perhaps, quite capable of looking after their husbands and running their respective households efficiently.

Docherty and Reardon had cultivated over four hectares of the lot: growing rice and sago, and a wide variety of kitchen vegetables. They bred pigs and chickens, and owned two water buffalo that were used for ploughing and hauling the cart Reardon had constructed of local timber. By Indonesia standards of provincial lifestyle, they were pretty well off.

Together they had sunk their own bore-hole and hit potable water, which was pumped by windmill to an elevated storage tank. The same bore-hole was used to irrigate their fields during the dry season, thus ensuring crop growth all year round.

Aye, they might have invested twelve thousand pounds in this venture, but neither of them ever went hungry. Their wives turned them out each morning in clean, albeit somewhat patched, work clothes. They still had their city clothes stored away in mothballs. These were brought out into the light of day on the rare trips they made into Balikpapan. The Bangkok of East Kalimantan, Reardon would joke to Docherty.

Handal Dua was a quiet, isolated place, but the Russian Road ran past their lot, and transport was always available for the trip. The road had been laid years before by the labours of the austere people whose name still clings to it – back during Sukarno's heyday, before the Supreme Soviets great fall from grace. Its main purpose then was to transport oil from Samarinda to the refineries and waiting tankers in Balikpapan. And that was the source of their problems and miseries: oil.

They went out to Kuwait together in 1967, to service an ever-expanding construction project with a multi-national company. Both were master craftsmen - Docherty, the mechanical engineer and Reardon, the mason and carpenter. Alike the majority of their race, they were hard workers, and took only a month's leave in the first two years they were in the Middle East. Flying to Thailand for their holiday, they experienced at first hand the infamous fleshpot pleasures of Bangkok both had heard so much of from their work-mates in Kuwait.

Well, needless to say, they both enjoyed a vacation in the exotic Orient, and fore-swore to take a month's leave for each successive year they worked. As Reardon so rightly said, 'What's the point of killing ourselves when we can afford a good holiday, and need the change of air too.'

So this was the bargain they stuck to when their contracts came ready for renewal each year. Both had maintained an ex-patriot status during their time working abroad, and owed nothing to the taxman’s coffers back home. And they had amassed over twelve thousand pounds sterling by their fifth year - in 1971. By God, they were the boys who had made good, and could walk down O'Connell Street with a feather in their cups. Better than the legendary Carney, and his California gold.

Thus it was they returned to Bangkok from Dubai on the completion of their fifth contract To once again enjoy the unfettered pleasures of an adult's playground. For in those past days of United States involvement with wars in South-East Asia, Bangkok was a rest and recreation centre for their troops. It could really swing, as the visiting G.I.'s would aptly phrase it.

During the second week of their vacation they met up with Boyd Matthews - a pilot with a contract company in Thailand, and maudlin in his cups one evening in a quiet watering hole on Silom Road. They got to talking, and Boyd related that his current lack of good humour was due to a prospective buyer for his land and oil well in Indonesia backing out. He had bought instead a house and lot fronting the beach in Pattaya, for his newly-married Thai wife.

'Hell, I wanted to sell out and retire back to the States,' Boyd moaned bitterly. 'And my own buddy too. We had the deal all set up. He was going to buy me out and run the well. Then he meets this chick, gets married, and it's bye-bye Boyd, no more deal.'

Oil? Oil well? Docherty and Reardon looked at each other. They had been around the fragrant wealth of an oil economy in Kuwait and the UAE for five years, and knew of the riches associated with oil wells. And this pilot sat at the bar, a heavy boxed gold chain around his neck, a gold Rolex on his wrist, and an even heavier gold bracelet adorning the opposite wrist. Yes, oil was truly the substance from which Rolls-Royces and private aeroplanes sprang.

They broached the subject gently that evening, due Boyd's inebriated condition, and met the following lunch-time to discuss their proposed deal. Matthews wanted thirty thousand dollars for his well and adjoining land, but agreed to settle for the twelve thousand pounds sterling they were offering: if they could give him an accredited bank draft within the week.

That afternoon, they telexed their bank in Dublin, and had their total deposited funds sent by telegraphic transfer to an accommodating bank in Bangkok. Two days later, in a Thai attorney's office, they concluded their deal. Boyd Matthews surrendered his deeds for five hectares of East Kalimantan in exchange for a bank draft of twelve thousand pounds English.

They still had a few hundred pounds left in cash once their business was transacted - enough for the fares to Balikpapan, and to commence their oil producing operations. Boyd was quite frank with them when he related he hadn't been over to Handal Dua during the last two years. But the pumping equipment was manned and serviced by an old local mechanic. The output was five hundred barrels a day, and even at a dollar-fifty a barrel, that was money in the bank.

Their first initial shock, when they arrived in Handal Dua, was the state of the pumping equipment. It was housed under a dilapidated, grass-thatched lean-to: built on a rotting bamboo framework. The Dormann gas engine poured out sooty, black smoke, and there were puddles of crude oil stinking up the dirt floor from the leaking well-head seals. Every time the nodding donkey pumped, the whole unit shifted in a stirring motion - like some old lady mixing a cake with a wooden spoon in an oversized bowl.

The second shock came when the local pump tender, who Docherty thought might be Methusela's elder brother, informed them, in very broken English, that he hadn't seen Mister Boyd in two years. Nor had he been paid during that same period.

Shock number three was the crippler. The pump mechanic informed them that ‘the well’ was doing ‘very well’ if it produced forty barrels a day. They both bemoaned their fates for a day or so. Then, in the stalwart Irish tradition, put their backs into it.

They expended the main total of their remaining capital on overhauling the pumping engine. From the vast profusion of spares lying around they were able to refurbish the seals in the pump unit itself, and fitted a shut-off valve below the pump's piston. They built a long, weather-proof shed to house the pumping equipment and workshop, and mounted the pump unit in a proper reinforced concrete bed. After replacing the pipe-work to their voluminous, yet practically empty, storage tanks, they managed to increase their oil production to a total high of fifty-six barrels a day.

The road tanker transport to Balikpapan took a good portion of their meagre oil income. The remainder was expended on materials for their projects of building first one house, then a second: on the adjoining lot. But, by the end of the first year, it was a dry and clean operation - albeit still running at ‘subsistence level’, as Reardon liked to term it. Luckily, fuel for the pump drive engine cost them nothing, as it was fired by the well's residual natural gas.

But, of course, the imagined Rolls-Royces, the private aeroplanes, and gold Rolex watches, had not come to materialise. In fact, Docherty had broken his prized Seiko while working, and now relied on Reardon for the time of day. Not that time held great meaning or significance in Handal Dua. The sun rose, and the sun set. Those were the parameters of their working days.

They eventually managed to reimburse Suhud, the local pump tender, his back salary, even though it was a paltry amount by Western standards of pay. He thought their improvements were the greatest thing since the innovation of the wireless set. He actually owned one, but it had ceased to function during the revolution of 1965, and now housed his broody hen. The most impressive piece of the re-modelling for him was Reardon's self-constructed pipe-line down to the fuel wharf of Samboja.

Their frugal oil production could now run by gravity to the dock, and go onto the shallow-water tankers, bound for Balikpapan, at a much lesser cost that the road tankers. They had to make an honest shilling one of these days, Docherty would moan.
The multi-national oil companies had platforms out on the Mahakam Delta and in Balikpapan Bay producing millions of barrels a day. A pity their own miniscule well was drilled into such a shallow field at the turn of the century by the Dutch engineers.

It was early in the October of 1973 that Reardon summoned Docherty from his cultivating in the vegetable garden. He had been carrying out preventative maintenance on the pumping equipment when the nodding donkey's piston was pushed back to its extremity: in mid-movement. Due being a turn-of-the-century shallow well bored by Dutch engineers, not blow-out preventer was installed, hence the casing seals had blown out, and there was crude oil covering the inside of the corrugated iron roofing of the pumping shed.
'What in hell's name happened?' questioned Docherty, mystified by the whole affair.

'I'm damned if I know, but something's pressurised our well reservoir very quickly,' replied Reardon, wiping crude from his forehead with a piece of cotton waste. 'It was lucky I was in here at the time the seals blew, and managed to turn off the well-head valve. Otherwise we could have been flooded out with the slimy, stinking muck.'
'Well, where's the pressure come from?' Docherty further questioned. 'Something must have filled our well reservoir up.'

Reardon opened the priming valve, below the well-head valve, and allowed the now-pressurised oil to flow through his pipework system. When it was flowing down to the storage tanks at the wharf in Samboja, he timed it on a flow meter for several minutes before sealing off the control valves. Scratching his head, and looking pensive for a few moments, he informed Docherty that his rough calculations revealed they were now producing oil at a flow rate of fifty thousand barrels in a twenty-four hour period.

As the oil came out of their well, they were legally entitled to it. Wherever it had originated, bless Heaven for their good fortune, proclaimed Reardon, forever the philosophical one.

Now they had the shallow water shuttle tankers fully loaded every trip they made that following week. At last, they were making money out of their malodorous white elephant.

Towards the latter part of that week, it became fairly obvious where the increased well pressure had originated. The French company Elf Aquitaine were experimenting with directional drilling techniques in one of their vast oil fields no great land distance away – in the Mahakam Delta. They must have punctured the geological structure dividing the two oil basins. It was most unlikely they would register a pressure drop on a field of such enormous reserves, even though Docherty and Reardon's field was now connected to their own.

Docherty had showered, and sat relaxed with his wife on the veranda of their house that evening, when Reardon appeared.

“I've just been listening to the news on the B.B.C. World Service,” he pronounced. 'It's a good job we're out of the Middle East, boyo.”

'And why is that, might I inquire?' replied Docherty.

'Because Egypt and Syria have declared war on Israel, that's why. And I reckon all the Arab countries will get themselves involved. One of those bloody Jihad things they were always threatening Israel with. Then where would we be, with bombs exploding all around us?' Reardon replied. 'And besides, the OPEC ragheads are threatening an oil embargo on Western countries that support Israel with arms and the like. And that boyo, to my way of thinking, means we can't sell our oil either.”

“Oh bloody hell, no,” moaned Docherty. “And just when we've started to make some damn money too. Even if we still can sell our oil, the price is sure to drop below $3 bucks a barrel, I'll be bound.”