As I sat on the edge of that oil drilling rig outside of Hobbs, New Mexico, the importance of that job was lost on me. I was nineteen. This, my first away-from-home job and home was nearly five-hundred miles away. My first real full-time-job title, "roughneck". My family did not have the money to send me to college and construction jobs around home didn't pay nearly so much, so there I was, in a place I had never been, at a semi-dangerous job I had never done, surrounded by people I had never met.

One evening, on break, with those loud Waukesha Motors roaring in my ears, thinking about that pretty girl back home, all my rowdy underage friends enjoying beer out at the lake, my mother's cooking... I was sort of feeling sorry for myself as that sun started down across that endless prairie. Suddenly, movement on that prairie. Suddenly, I saw something I had to see more of. Suddenly, I was in the here and now and had to get a better view!

A pulley cable runs up the derrick. On one end, a counter-weight, on the other, a safety belt. With that belt on, a man (or boy) could nearly fly up that ladder to the deck about one-hundred-twenty feet above the prairie. There, I stopped, unhooked and went to the rail. There they were; antelope! Lots of antelope! A Texan, yes, but a city-boy Texan and I had to go to New Mexico to see something so awesome as a large herd of antelope! Grazing, running, then grazing, playing across a desolate prairie against a brilliant orange sky. Never had I seen anything so amazing, so beautiful, dare I say, "inspiring", although I did not recognize it then. I only saw a welcome. It was as if New Mexico said to me, "Give it a chance, kid, you'll like it here."

But, then darkness fell and the herd disappeared and we had to get back to work. Time to change the worn bit at the end of that 10,000 feet of drill pipe, so my attention turned to staying alive and getting the new bit back on bottom making hole... Yet, when the shift ended and we climbed back into the truck for the trip back to Hobbs, I sunk down in that back seat, closed my eyes and relived the gift I had been given; a view of a special place that I had never seen. I was very sure that I would never forget the antelope playing on that prairie at sunset...

They did not appear again on that prairie for weeks. I looked. I waited. I was truly lonely for them. I remembered a recent read, Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" and how, in his isolation in that small boat upon that large sea, day and night, he leaned on his memories of Africa. Of how, as a young man, he had observed lions playing on the beach. My experience with antelope gave me a new appreciation of what the old man had seen and the memories he had carried into the twilight of his life.

Later in life, Navy service made such a difference for me. Those years in Asia were so awakening. I loved Texas, all my rowdy friends were still drinking beer there at the same lake, but I'd seen such interesting places and had had the opportunity to work with people who didn't look like me, talk like me or think like me. So, my return to civilian life meant a change of life, of major and career which eventually took me to many countries. Some were fancy beyond my style, but many were quite "humble" by American norms. In those places of deepest isolation (like in a base camp in the Sahara or a distant Indonesian island, for example), I'd sit alone, pour a wine, peer off the balcony, and whisper to myself, "Give it a chance, kid, you'll like it here."

Now, in the twilight of my life, I return to my bed each night to await dreams of the antelope playing on that prairie at sunset...