A slow week on the promotion front as I've been busy critiquing a fellow writer's novel on a crit group. I was able to sell a copy of Deadly Enterprise to the local library and so am on the way to being listed on library catalogs. So today's post has more room to reveal some of the rural eccentricities the Oil Gypsy has lived with.

OG6

The surveyor on a seismic crew in North America used to be charged with getting permission from landowners before unleashing the crew across private land. Even when companies came into existence to perform this service at a cut rate, and less competently, the surveyors still had to mediate between angry farmers and the oil company.

We worked near Smoky Lake for most of one summer, and the company had a permit man who had done most of the work, but I still needed to meet one landowner. He objected to our working past his property on the road and I had to show him where we had adjusted our operation to accommodate him. His bargaining chip, which he told without the hint of embarrassment was that he owned the public road past his house.

Never in a million years, I told him. No municipality could sell an occupied road allowance – it was hard enough to have them part with one that climbed over a mountain, crossed a lake, or was otherwise unusable. He still maintained that he was special, he was involved with a religious charity, so I was supposed to accept divine intervention. We worked past on the road anyway – his house didn't fall down, his well didn't go dry, and no one on the crew was struck down by a bolt of lightning. Not even a surveyor.

Down the road from Noah lived Farmer North, who wouldn't sign a permit for us to work cross country over his land under any circumstances. Permit man signed up his neighbour instead, and Farmer North threatened to sue the company for the geophysical information we were stealing from him under his fence. He was furious that we were able to continue by working on Farmer South's side of the fence.

He must have understood eventually that he had no legal recourse to bar seismic waves from travelling into the earth under his land. The farmer is the owner of the surface rights only in most of Western Canada, and the people of the Province collectively own everything underneath. It didn't prevent Farmer North from hooking on to a mile of our geophones and cables with his tractor – on Farmer South's land – and dragging them away. We patched the repairs, re-laid the line and did the work as planned.

Every district has it's weirdos and crazies – truly – and some are crazy enough to certify. The mistaken idea that the land belongs to them, instead of them belonging to the land – the long term view – seems to turn their minds.

I permitted some land adjacent to the Rocky Mountains so that our heliportable crew could shoot a line over the mountain and into the valley beyond. A heliportable crew travels either on foot or in the air to get over otherwise impassable terrain. The drills that make our holes in the ground to shoot the dynamite that creates the seismic shockwaves are moved in three loads underneath a helicopter. A working crew of four or five drills are set down at intervals of a hundred yards or less of the line and spend anything from a few hours to a few days grinding away into the rock.

At the end of the job, I went back from guiding the line cutting crews to permitman to take around the release forms and pay off the landowners. One landowner raised the accusation that men on our crew had used a helicopter to steal an antique car from its restingplace in a pile of brush on the land next to his. "Hooked onto it and lifted it into the sky," he said.

I was skeptical, but I had to check this out. I would have disbelieved him entirely except the owner of some of the drills was an antique car buff, and not entirely straightforward in his dealings. I was lucky in that the lessee of the land in question was a friend of mine and went with me to check for signs that might reveal where the car had been allegedly moved from. As we walked around, seeing that a collection of five or six quietly rotting wrecks was still in place where they'd been abandoned in the 1930s, I learned why my friend was dead set on determining that no car had been stolen.

The owner of the land had taken a rifle to a pipeline crew when they arrived to lay a major pipeline across the mountains. Moreover he'd also declared war on his neighbours who had been so treacherous as to sign agreements with the company, and threatened to shoot them all. The RCMP came to quietly subdue and disarm him. At the time of this story he was certified and housed in Regina, with an injunction against his ever returning to the family homestead. My friend Mike said, "Even if a car is stolen, I don't want S to find out. He'll be back to make war on everyone again."

The cars were all there, although definitely a magnet for antique car buffs. As far as I know they are all still resting peacefully in their tangles of brush. I should be going past that land later this year; maybe I'll go and look at them again. I think S has passed away.

One winter working around Highway 22 north of Calgary, my brush clearing crew were local farmers. There wasn't a lot of cutting, but just off the foothills, each line had clumps of brush in every field. When the permitman came back with the permit and a story from one landowner visit, things looked to become exciting. It seems the man was the local eccentric who had set his own barn afire while drunk and then ordered a posse of neighbours who had come to help off his land at the point of a shotgun. Permitman reported that this honorable citizen had no less that two loaded rifles stashed around his livingroom, and never got more than a hand-stretch from either as long as they were in the room. Bill, my local farmer brush cutter declared that there'd better be no brush to cut on this guy's land or he'd desert.

When we got to the land, there was brush to cut, in two places. I set up my theodolite at the farm gate and was able to see past both patches to the next hilltop. Bill looked unhappy, but plucked up courage to go after the first patch. "I that crazy s.o.b. comes after me, I'm getting out."

I stood on my vantage point and guided them to place line marking stakes across the field toward the first obstacle. Things started well. Then a VW Beetle zoomed out of the farmyard and bounced across the field toward them. Oh, no. Now what was going to happen?

The Beetle skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust. The driver's door swung open, but no one got out. I watched through the theodolite telescope as Bill gingerly approached the car. A voluble discussion ensued with much waving of hands and pointing, but it was much too far away for me to hear anything. After several minutes the door slammed shut and the car sped away – leaving my crew still standing. It was an hour before the stretch of line was clear and I could rejoin them at the top of the next hill.

"What did crazy want?" I asked.

"Oh, he was mad about a plane. He asked if I'd seen the registration on a low flying trainer, because we wanted to phone and report it." Bill hadn't noticed any plane, and neither had I. Good job farmers can't buy shoulder launched guided missiles.