The first time I got blown up, I didn’t think much of it. The second time, I began to perceive a trend.
When I graduated from high school, my father got me a summer job on one of the seismic exploration crews that reported to him in his role as Chief Geophysicist for a major global oil company. A seismic crew searches for oil and gas using wave physics. Onshore, this meant spreading thousands of specialized microphones called geophones over a large area, drilling holes in the ground, placing high explosives in them, and detonating them in carefully timed sequences.
The shock waves propagated through the earth, reflecting differently off layers of rock, oil, gas, and water. Those reflections were recorded by the geophones and sent to a supercomputing facility—usually in Houston—where complex processing reconstructed a map of the underground strata. That was how they found oil and gas. Pretty standard stuff, really.
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The Shovel Boy rock climbing six short weeks after the
events related here. Still 100% boy. |
As the youngest and lowest-ranking “man” on the crew - though at eighteen I
possessed few of the traditional characteristics associated with manhood - I
was given a shovel and told to follow the shooting crew around. From time to
time, charges would “blow out,” producing eruptions that looked like scenes
from a war movie. My job was to fill in the resulting craters. Hence the
nickname “Shovel Boy,” though more often they called me “hey you” or “kid.” The
crew took a particular pleasure in hazing the boss’s son.
My secondary job was helping hook up the charges. Typically, they were
spread over several hundred meters and connected by wire to the Shooter’s
detonation device. Once everything was ready, the Shooter would notify the
Observer, who sat remotely inside a truck filled with computing equipment. The
Observer would issue the command “Get it hot,” the Shooter would relay it, and
we would clear the area before detonation.
Sometimes one of the connections failed. When that happened, the Shooter
would send us back to reset it.
That was how I got blown up.
The first time happened in dense forest. I couldn’t hear the Shooter clearly
and was struggling with the connection when he yelled, “Hurry up, kid!” I
shouted back, “I am!” He interpreted that as “I’m done” and detonated the
charge while I was still standing over it.
In moments like that, time really does seem to slow down. I distinctly
remember thinking, So this is what it feels like to be blown up,
before the blast threw me backward into a pine tree. Then all I could think
was, Ow.
Remarkably, I escaped with nothing more than a spectacular bruise.
The second time happened in a swampy forest with knee-deep water. When the
charge detonated prematurely, I wasn’t thrown into the air. Instead, a geyser
of swamp mud erupted upward. Time slowed again, and I remember calmly thinking,
That’s going to land directly on me.
It did.
The mud itself didn’t hurt me, but it came with an unfortunate side effect:
exploded swamp mud smells exactly like what you think it smells like. I spent
the rest of the day retching and trying unsuccessfully to wash foul-smelling
swamp sludge off my body. On the drive back to the motel, the crew made me ride
in the bed of the truck. Eventually we stopped at a self-service car wash where
I stripped down and was literally hosed off like a car.
So thoughtful readers may be wondering: Why did you keep getting blown
up?
The answer was simple. The Shooter and his assistant had the ‘civilized’
habit of smoking a bowl of weed before beginning work and again during lunch.
Our routine involved hiking equipment deep into the field and then waiting
while the rest of the crew repositioned the geophones for the day’s shoot. That
gave us idle time in the mornings and at lunch that \they used it to get high.
Yes, it was incredibly stupid.
But fortunately, I had asthma. Which may have saved me. Whenever I tried to
smoke weed, I’d start slipping toward anaphylactic shock before I got anywhere
near intoxicated. So I stayed sober.
After the second incident, the crew took its normal two-week break. I went
home and told my father absolutely nothing—not about the drugs, not about the
explosions, not about any of it.
Why?
Because, I desperately wanted to be accepted by the men around me. Reporting
them would have made my life unbearable. Besides, I had already survived two
explosions. I convinced myself I could handle it.
Then we relocated from swampy Vicksburg, Mississippi, to the dry plains
around Elk City, Oklahoma, and things ‘got real’.
Two things changed.
First, the charges got bigger - from roughly five pounds
to twenty pounds per hole (equivalent to a 155mm artillery shell). Although the
holes were supposed to be drilled deeper to compensate, the rocky terrain often
made that impossible. The result was more shallow charges and many more
blowouts.
Second, when a hole blew out in Oklahoma, it didn’t produce a neat crater or
a shower of mud. It produced a deadly spray of gravel and sand—more like
grapeshot from an old fashioned cannon. Anything directly above the blast zone would be
shredded.
After witnessing one Oklahoma blowout, I immediately realized the stakes had become existential. From that point on, whenever the Shooter told me to check a
connection, I insisted he physically step away from the detonator before I
approached the line. Since he had to keep pressure on the firing mechanism for
the Observer’s signal to work..
The Shooters hated it.
They mocked me relentlessly. Called me chicken. Blamed me to the boss for
slowing things down. But self-preservation is a powerful motivator, and I held
my ground.
Eventually the Crew Chief pulled me off the shooting team and reassigned me as his personal dog’s body -
miserable but much safer job. My replacement was an older man, maybe
twenty-four, newly hired.
I met him at the crew’s weekly Sunday barbecue. I remember shaking his hand
and thinking, I need to warn him.
But everyone was drinking, including me. Before long the hazing resumed, now
with sharper edges. I was mocked as a coward afraid of loud noises and
explosions. It is difficult to describe how painful that humiliation felt to me
at eighteen. I had tried so hard to “be a man”.
Then I noticed my replacement laughing along with everyone else.
And I thought: Well, fuck you too.
The next day I still told myself I would warn him, but in truth I had no
intention of doing so. After a few more days, I rationalized that he had surely
figured it out on his own.
Then, on Thursday, we got the call:
“Man down.”
The Crew Chief and I were the emergency response team. We arrived within
minutes. The new guy had misunderstood a “Get it hot” warning as a command to
check the line and had knelt over the charge when it detonated.
It blew his face off.
Not completely—there was still flesh clinging to the bone—but his face
looked like raw meat mixed with gravel. His eyes were ruined. He was conscious,
disoriented, and trying to claw at himself.
We loaded him into the truck. The Crew Chief, a Vietnam veteran, shoved me
into the back beside him and barked:
“Don’t let him touch his face.”
That was my lowest moment.
At first, the wounded man would not stop moaning and babbling. He was weak
enough that even I could restrain him, but during the drive to the hospital the
full weight of what I had done settled onto me. I had known the danger. I had
failed to warn him. My shame didn’t make me more compassionate—it made me
colder. I just wanted him to stop talking.
There was an investigation afterward. My father flew in with the corporate
team and immediately took me aside to ask what had happened.
I lied.
I said I didn’t know. I said I wasn’t there.
And it worked.
After that, the crew no longer treated me as the boss’s sheltered son. I had
proven myself loyal. One of them. All it had cost me was betraying my father
and the horribly injured man who replaced me.
Then came the most shameful part of all:
I buried the memory.
I shoved it so deep into my subconscious that even while caring for my
father during the last eighteen months of his life, I never consciously
revisited it. Only after his death did the memory fully resurface. I never
confessed to him. Never asked his forgiveness.
And the faceless stranger? I never even learned his name.
Since that memory returned, I have spent a great deal of time reflecting on
what happened that summer. I have concluded there are many kinds of cowardice,
and mine is moral cowardice.
I am not physically timid. In many ways I am the opposite. Nor am I socially
timid. I can confront almost anyone if I choose to. But when the morally right
course becomes personally costly—socially, professionally, economically—my
instinct is to protect myself.
Yet there is, strangely, a kind of grace hidden in that realization.
Much later I recognized that this experience changed me, even while it
remained buried. I learned, almost unconsciously, that the only reliable way
for a moral coward to behave honorably is to commit publicly to the truth before
the moment of pressure arrives. To take the stand early, while it is still
relatively cheap. To trap yourself with your own stated principles so that
betraying them later becomes more painful than defending them.
It is a kind of moral jujitsu I practice on myself.
So the bad news is that I'm still the moral coward who betrayed my own father. And always will be. But the good news is that God has built into me an imperfect but often effective habit of taking stands early, before they become costly and by doing so allowing me to better live up to the standard that I profess as a Christian. And crucially, he did it by taking one of the worst things I've ever done and using it to change me. Without me even realizing what he was doing.
Jesus Christ said to us:
I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.
John 15:5 English Standard Version (ESV)
I am living proof of the truth of that statement. And of the fact that no matter how cowardly we are, no matter how broken, it is
God who reaches down and changes
us.
