Ingenious

The day before New Year's Eve (New Year's Eve Eve?) I had a job drilling on a property along Skyline Boulevard. For those of you who don't know Portland, Skyline runs along the crest of the West Hills. These are the West Hills that Everclear refers to in the song "I Will Buy You A New Life", the ones with the shiny new car, the garden, and the handsome man with the athletic thighs?

These hills are, as the song implies, home to many of Portland's wealthy in the tradition that places the homes and lives of the rich and graceful physically as well as emotionally and socially above those below them in the insomnia of the American Dream.At some point when navigating the West Hills I recall a novel I read in my youth which described a fictional city as resembling the layers of "...an Italian wedding cake, richly emblematic of the crumbs inside..." and describing how each social stratum would use the layer below as the receptacle for its garbage until it reached the bottom where "...it is believed that, there being no one lower upon whom to throw it, it is eaten."

That has nothing whatever to do with this post.

While the elevation of most of the Portland area is about 50 to 70 feet above sea level (MSL), the crest of the Hills is anywhere from 600 to 1,000 feet above MSL. This makes Skyline its own little climate, and you tend to find snow, or ice, there when the rest of Portland is getting our traditional rain. Which makes getting your burger-and-fries at the Skyline Restaurant kinda chancy when the wind is from the east. You have gotta know your tire chains from a handsaw to get up to our work site, which was just north of the aforesaid iconic Portland diner.

So the Hills are really more than "hills"; their correct name is the Tualatin Mountains and I should really do a post about them because the geology of the Hills is kind of fascinating. They're a huge fold in the nap of Portland's carpet, an immense hump of folded and faulted basalt mantled by yellow-brown silt blown up from the Portland basin to the east. Much of the Hills is dominated by Forest Park, which is just what it says it is - a park that is a forest. Very pretty in a dank, Northwest woods sort of way.

But. Every winter we get two, or three, or four, periods when our winds that typically bring the warm rain off the Pacific shift and come from the east. This pushes cold, cold air down off the interior of the continent, and we freeze over. Which is what we're enjoying at the moment. These east wind iceboxes usually last a couple of days or a week or two before the jet stream unspools and brings the rain back.

And when Portland catches a cold, the West Hills freeze right through.So when the drillers and I arrived Thursday morning, we found that since they had not sufficiently winterized the drill rig the rig pump - soil drilling can be done using air to lift the soil and rock cuttings out of the hole, or with a sort of giant screw (called an auger) but is often done using a mixture of water and a thick bentonite slurry, called "mud rotary" - was frozen.

Solid.

I suggested that we might use their propane torch to thaw the pump and was told that the propane place didn't open until eight (why we hadn't stopped by the day before was left unexplained). But the drillers were undiscouraged, and showing that American ingenuity that we've been famed for since Valley Forge, proceeded to melt the frozen mud within the pump using flaming bits of cardboard stuffed inside.And off we went.

Is this a great country, or what?

Barge

Well, the barge is in place, the driller ready to go, now all that remains is to foregather in Hood River tomorrow for four days of drilling in the middle of the Columbia River in the middle of winter."Growltiger was a Bravo Cat, who lived upon a barge;
In fact he was the roughest cat that ever roamed at large.
From Gravesend up to Oxford he pursued his evil aims,
Rejoicing in his title of "The Terror of the Thames."

"Then Gilbert gave the signal to his fierce Mongolian horde;
With a frightful burst of fireworks the Chinks they swarmed aboard.
Abandoning their sampans, and their pullaways and junks,
They battened down the hatches on the crew within their bunks.""The ruthless foe pressed forward, in stubborn rank on rank;
Growltiger to his vast surprise was forced to walk the plank.
He who a hundred victims had driven to that drop,
At the end of all his crimes was forced to go ker-flip, ker-flop."

"Oh there was joy in Wapping when the news flew through the land;
At Maidenhead and Henley there was dancing on the strand.
Rats were roasted whole at Brentford, and at Victoria Dock,
And a day of celebration was commanded in Bangkok."

(T.S. Eliot "Growltiger's Last Stand")

We'll have to see how this whole thing goes.

Prisons of our own devising

I spent a frustrating day in southeast Portland today.

The cold, wind and the intermittent rain wasn't really discouraging. But we were supposed to be drilling a one hundred foot rotary boring to obtain geotechnical data for the new emergency communications site, and the driller ran into trouble before he even arrived.

First, he started late, and starting late got snared in the usual awful traffic on I-205, the east loop route through East Portland. When he arrived he discovered that he was lacking the "sub" - a small metal cylinder - that connects the kelly bar to the top of the drillstring, in this case standard AWJ drill rod.

That meant another 45 minutes we had to wait to drill.

The guy's boss finally arrived with the sub and we got to drilling...and there the poor bastard got another nasty slap, because the East Portland substrate is an ugly pottage of sand, silt and gravels all the way up to boulder size, a real nightmare for drilling, and drillers.

The only real silver bullet I've ever seen for East Portland is something called a "sonic" drill rig, that uses a high-speed vibratory casing advancer. It can jackhammer through the big boulders while the casing stabilizes the hole and prevents the caving or collapsing that almost no small mud rotary drill can prevent.

And our driller today was no exception. Almost immediately below the asphalt he got caving, and lots of it.

Here's where my observation for today came in; when we are unable, or unwilling, to consider options or ideas outside our experience we make ourselves stupider than we are. We imprison ourselves in our incapability. And my driller today was that sort of man.

He couldn't, or didn't, stop and try to figure out a better way to deal with the caving gravels, even when we encountered a truly rotten loose quarter-inch to half-inch gravel (what your commercial rock store calls "pea gravel"). Instead he tried to weight up the mud - adding bentonite to the water to thicken the drilling fluid and hold the gravels out of the annular space - and cooked up such a thick glop that he plugged off his own suction hose and lost another 40 minutes or so trying to clear it.

This poor gomer fought the caving sand and boulder gravel for about 20 feet before he snapped the threads off the kelly and had to admit defeat. My own boss was first frustrated, then impatient, then dismissive. He, in effect, tossed the driller's company off the job; I'm back there tomorrow but with another driller who seems to understand the conditions better.

The saddening thought is that my driller today was not a stupid man, or a bad one, or an incompetent one. But he started badly and then became caught up in his work troubles, and could not or did not try and think his way out of his distress. Bill James wrote once about a man he worked with who was like that; when confronted by an obstacle he'd go from force to more force to maximum force without ever stopping to think if brute force was the best solution to the problem. He wasn't being tricked or led or driven; he was crafting his own failure, using only his impatience and his inability to create ideas to construct the bars.

What a sad, very human business. Haven't you made one of these little lockups before? I have. I think we all have. How many times a lifetime do we set to work, busily hammering away, intent on our task, every stroke confining us more tightly and directing us more narrowly into the mental bastille that when we have completed it and ourselves within it, will hold nothing but defeat and dismay?



(Needless to say, the accompanying photos are NOT from a rainy Wednesday in East Portland - that's last Friday and the job I got to do over in Redmond on the sunny east side of the Cascades. Parts of Highway 26 are very lovely, and I just had to show them to you. I'm not so lovely, but it's my blog, so I get to show you me, too.)