Aye, the wind was blowing coldly and cruelly from the north at what I guessed to be around 50 knots. And as I stood on the rig floor, I could hear the steel in the derrick groaning as the wind screamed through the trusses, plucking the turns of wirerope as if they were strings on a zither. The roughnecks were slinging the monstrous iron tongs about as if they were little plastic prizes from a box of cracker jacks. And the snow poured in over the tops of the steel panels that shielded us from the wind. And I stuck my head out of the side door next to the vee-door and screamed down through the churning snow, hoping that my voice would penetrate the roiling sheet. Somewhere in the distance I heard Dennis shouting back at me and I took it to mean that he had heard my request, whereupon I ducked back into the relative warmth of the rig floor enclosure, back into the haze of diesel exhaust fumes. I fixed the latch on the steel door and turned to see the tongs attack the drill pipe. The squealing of the cathead was a haunting noise and the rig floor shook as the chains went taught on the tongs. The thunder of the generators and mud pumps rattled my teeth in their sockets. The rig floor is an exhaustive collection of exotic ways to die and the passing of time is measured in near misses and close calls. Hence the bristling hair and tickling sensation in the back of my neck and the tightness in my throat.

The two dozen or so stands of drillpipe that towered in the derrick looked like bundles of giant black whiskers as they writhed in the wind. And I shuttered. These stands were of heavy weight drill pipe and to stand beneath them as they bent and gyrated in the fingerboard was as frightening as being exposed to the indiscriminate malevolence of a tornado or a surging tidal wave. To see such massive iron objects bend like boiled pasta was highly unnerving. You could not but anticipate the violent consequences of even a single break, a thousand pound javelin plunging through your body like a lawndart through a ziplock bag of tomato soup. The roughnecks, as a matter of course, were oblivious to such remote hazards and they looked like fleas as they worked amidst the weaving iron shafts.

The drawworks roared back to life and began winching the wirerope into its ravenous belly. The travelling block, a colossal pulley the size of a small car, rose ominously into the night, vanishing into the blinding glare of halogen lights shining through blowing snow. Again the rig floor shook as the tongs wrenched the joint loose. In went the slips and the kelly whined as it spun up.