WELL FIRE'S and LOVE

Well Fires and Love
Or
It’s Amazing What You Can Find
Trying To Get To South Dakota
A True Story

      The car slowed and stopped on the on-ramp of the northern Colorado highway. I was at the time a young man hitchhiking across America. I was road weary, jaded, and searching as I got in the welcoming vehicle.

        A middle aged, comfortably dressed, man sat behind the wheel of the high powered luxury Lincoln. There were two large black, steel banded, strong boxes resting on the back seat and filling up the interior. After the initial safety assessment from both parties, our conversation turned friendly and light. Traveling north and caught up in the conversation, I hadn’t noticed the excessive speed at which we were traveling.

      What eventually caught my attention and raised my immediate concern, was the fact we had just passed a Wyoming Highway Patrol Officer in excess of one hundred ten miles per hour, with nothing more than a forward wave from the officer.

      Something was very much amiss here in my present situation. Obviously there was far more going on than I was currently privy to. Stunned into sudden silence I tried to reason out what was going on. I knew I was not wanted nor could anything I have never admitted to, be worth the planning and expense for so covert an apprehension. This could not have anything to do with me or my alleged behaviors and propensities.

      At that stage of my life, to say I was a member of the fringe element, would be a somewhat kind and modest statement, in comparison to the reality of my existence of the time. It was the seventies and, rules and laws, if even acknowledged, were best left to others born with an acute lack of imagination and sense of adventure, in my opinion. I struggle slightly with this premise even today.

      Baffled by this bazaar event, I inquired into the exact nature of my current situation. The man merely smiled a knowing smile at me and asked me a simple question.

      “What do you think are in those two cases back there?”

      I stated what I had comfortably filled in the blanks with in my mind.
      “Well, I figured you’re a traveling bassist for a jazz quartet, or a traveling jewelry
      salesman.” I replied.

      The man laughed an honest laugh and shook his head no.

      “I blow out well oil fires for a living and right now there is a bad one outside of
      Casper. I just flew into Denver from Venezuela to put it out. I am carrying one
      hundred pound of nitro-glycerin in those cases.”

      Shocked and sputtering, I told the man to pull over and let me out on this now oddly deserted freeway. Again he gave a very hearty laugh, and told me not to worry. He explained that if that much nitro was to go off it would take out the entire six lane freeway we could see for a quarter of a mile in both directions and leave a hundred foot crater. Not to worry, I’d never feel a thing, he comforted.

        This did little to console me. He then took time explaining to me, that the solution came in three parts, which had to be mixed in precise ratios in order to be effective. This I accepted, due mostly to the high level of virtue and character the man had demonstrated to me throughout our previous conversations. I found myself admiring him several times during our prior talks.

        I had also, at that stage of my life, managed to stay alive by my wits, and my insights into others character. I had been through many a precarious situation, when to the untrained eye all looked benign. My gut told me this man was the real deal, back when I thought him just some, jewelry subsided, bassist.

        Silent for a time, I finally questioned him on the oddities of life that so often and naturally occur to me.

        “Do you ever worry about tripping over an untied shoe lace or pebble when you are
        walking up to a well fire holding all that nitro?”

      He laughed easily again, and then turned deadly serious as he spoke words that would forever change my life.

        “No.” he said with a depth that was far deeper and reaching than a single syllable
        should be.
        “I believe in love. It is the governing force of the Universe, the strongest force that
        exists.”
        “I love my wife, and my wife loves me. I will always come home to my wife.”

        Then he was quiet, lost deep in his own thoughts, in his own private world.

        I on the other hand, was rocked to the very foundation of all I knew or had ever witnessed. Countless cars and drivers had ferried me across this great continent numerous times. Not a single man had done or said anything more than a cursory acknowledgement of his wife or girlfriend. Most had complained, and revealed in great and graphic detail, the shortcomings of that poor woman. Love never appeared to actually exist in the real world to me; Up until that very moment.

        I am forever grateful to that peaceful, daring stranger, whose name is forever lost to me. Whether or not, those were really some merchandise cases or the tools of an explosives expert I will never truly know. I choose to believe the man.

        What I will forever truly know, and now have personally experienced, is that love, true love, real love, curl your toes after seventy years together love, does indeed, actually exist. It is rare but it is real.

      Sometimes, it only takes believing in the possibility of it for it to begin. Then the willingness to do the human work that is involved in it to make it last. I am proud, honored, and humbled, to have known an amazing woman that made this remarkably easy and natural for me. She has gone now to a better place, but she has taught me to truly live in a better place as well. May you find this amazing experience in your own lives now.