By Will Paulsen
Steam rose from the mug like a bitter mist. It was August 30th, my 29th birthday. Just as I lifted the mug to wake my senses, the message notification buzzed on my phone accompanied by a photo taken from a chopper. I set the mug down, no longer needing the caffeine. Tossing the red bag into the truck, out the door I went, locking it behind me. Get to the airport. Now.
As surprising as it may sound, in my personal life, I’ve never particularly enjoyed loud or fast things. Gunshots are loud. But hunting, punctuated by a shot, is overall a quiet activity. The shot being like a loud “period” at the end of a softly spoken sentence. Strange that the profession that chose me is such a loud one. But for all the quiet that I enjoy and need, there is a type of loud that I crave.
The photo that interrupted my morning coffee was of a drilling rig in the Caspian Sea. They’d drilled too deep into an overpressured zone of earth, took a massive amount of gas into the wellbore and lost control. The gas blew out of the derrick, destroying the blowout preventers and catching fire. Fires like this are why my team and I exist. The drive to the airport was short, as was the phone call to my wife telling her I was catching a flight to Baku, Azerbaijan. “Not sure when I’ll be back hun, could be a month or so. I love you.” This time was different than all the others though. We’d just found out she was pregnant with our first son. Another phone call to my dad to let him know where I was headed. He always wanted to know. Our circumstances were rare as he had been in the same profession in the late 70’s and he worked on fires in many of the same countries where I was working now. As our crew boarded the plane we talked and joked about anything and everything. Cocktails flowed freely. Perhaps it’s all a conditioned distraction from what’s to come, a coping mechanism of sorts. We all tried to sleep.
Baku is a weird place. We checked into the Four Seasons Hotel which is owned by the first lady of Azerbaijan and is the pinnacle of hotel swankiness. Outside the streets are perfectly laid stone and the building’s sleek lines of travertine. Grand columns like a Roman arena. But stepping outside the city’s center is like crossing into a different world. Stark remnants of a former Soviet Union. Large bland buildings and housing units, molding and unkempt. You can buy obsolete Soviet currency and military regalia from street peddlers.
We loaded our red offshore bags into a hulking pile in the middle of the cargo hold. Our ride was a worn out Sikorsky S-92. The yellow beast lurched to life, props vibrating the world around us as it climbed higher. Seeming to struggle with the weight, the cabin smelled like fuel. Staring out the window, down below as we headed offshore, I saw rafts of ducks on the leeward side of rocky islands. Inside my headphones my mind drifted back to the quiet things I enjoy. I wonder if there’s duck hunting in Azerbaijan…
My brain jolted back to reality as the Sikorsky landed on what would be our home for the next two months: a cold, iron, 310 feet long, double-hulled behemoth, with a 600-ton crane occupying its starboard side. Wind whipped the cold Caspian water across her decks like erratic flocks of icy seabirds. The noise. Finally, we boarded the burning rig, protecting ourselves with corrugated tin heat shields we’d fashioned and doing our best to stay under a spray of icy seawater from a support vessel. Up the ladders and gangways we went and onto the main deck, no longer cold as the heat from the massive fire instantly turned the moisture in our saltwater soaked coveralls into a steaming cloud. I called out a non-urgent comment to my teammates a few feet to my left, no one heard me. The furious sound. Blowouts like this produce a noise that cannot be put into words. We’ve all tried to articulate it. Like steaming ghosts, we stalk around the fire, getting as close as possible. Behind our shields we advance in formation, Roman firefighters battling an infernal army. The noise rumbles our guts in a way that might make someone with a weak constitution sick. The flow of gas sucks the snot from our dripping noses.
At the end of each day, laying in my bunk back on the ship, ears ringing and muscles aching, I close my eyes and dream of the quiet things. A doe watching at the edge of a field before she enters, scolding her young one for foolishly bounding into the open. A cottontail, freezing like a furry statue in hopes that I haven’t seen him. A barred owl, gliding onto a low branch of an ancient moss-covered live oak, anticipating the coming night. Steam rising off a balmy marsh as wood ducks descend and disappear. All quiet.
