Ride Like Hell and You'll Get There
PRAISE
FOR
PAUL CARTER
‘Carter writes as if he has ADD, careering through his life on oil
rigs in exotic locations. He won’t win the Booker, but his yarns
burn with anarchic . . . in a word, irrepressible.’
Herald Sun
‘This is one of the most split-my-sides-laughing memoirs I think
I have ever read . . . that blows along like the North Sea.’
Northern Star
‘What you have here . . . is that rare situation of somebody who
not only has a story to tell but the ability to tell it. Carter’s
anecdotes are told with great good humour and perfect timing.’
The Age
‘Ever wondered what happens to the boys from the movie
Jackass
when they grow up? They become oil rig workers. Shit happens,
so some of the stuff that Paul Carter and his friends get hit with
probably isn’t their fault – although sitting at the top of an oil rig
derrick during a thunderstorm is probably inviting God to hit you
with something. Otherwise most of the madness and mayhem,
interspersed with the occasional car or motorcycle accident and
totally over the top practical jokes, are clearly all down to Paul. As
for the chain-smoking monkeys, pool-playing ferrets and bartending
orangutans . . . if the humans are crazy the animals should be too.’
Tony Wheeler, founder of
Lonely Planet
‘Great two fisted writing from the far side of hell.’
John Birmingham, author
‘Literary black gold . . . Horrifying and hilarious.’
Sun Herald
‘A unique look at a gritty game. Relentlessly funny and
obsessively readable.’
Phillip Noyce, film director
ALSO BY PAUL CARTER
Don’t Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs,
She Thinks I’m a Piano Player in a Whorehouse
This Is Not a Drill
Is That Thing Diesel?
First published in 2013
Copyright © Paul Carter 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
The Australian
Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one
chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be
photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes
provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it)
has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL)
under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: [email protected]
Web:
www.allenandunwin.com
Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the
National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au
ISBN 978 1 74331 276 6
eISBN 978 1 74343 191 7
Text design by Design By Committee
Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia
For Sid
CONTENTS
THIS IS NOT
a motorcycle, travel or adventure book—it’s just what constitutes my life and ranting about it in book form again. I have no idea why people keep buying them. If you have indeed done that then I thank you. Its clinical name is ‘Attempted observational humour based on an obsessive-compulsive middle-aged man’s attempt to deal with various forms of self-induced task saturation’. Life is sometimes all about managing expectations. Bearing that in mind, I urge you to read on.
ONCE IT WAS
A VICE, NOW
IT’S JUST
A HABIT
PICTURE THIS
—a man with everything a man could hope for, the essentials in place, his personal pursuit of happiness completed. Solidified in a look, one that draws down deep, charging through his mind in resolute fulfilment. Just a brief look, a glance, nothing more, the clearest twinkle in a diamond eye from a wife that makes him all that he is and more.
Perfect to me, she is constantly surprising, unable to be ordinary, even when she tries, she doesn’t care what other people are doing, or what they think or how much they have. She has style and grace, the ability to see beyond what’s presented; she was born that way and it never fails to get my immediate and full attention.
That should do it, right? I can stop, just stop and smell the roses, and let the oil turn to stone in my motorcycles.
But it’s not enough. Just to get to this point was considered impossible for so long—now it’s here, what’s next? It’s not just death and taxes; it’s not just growing older or watching your life speed-ramping into retirement. I need more, I need to challenge myself, otherwise I’m going to fail at middle-age bliss.
So I ask my wife, ‘Can I go?’ and she smiles and says, ‘Sure, don’t kill yourself.’
I carefully laid out my plan, my next bike challenge. Last time we did longevity and explored the distance end of bio-diesel; this time it’s all about speed.
Two years ago in 2009 I was sitting in a bar in Adelaide opposite Dr Colin Kestell, the man behind the only properly compliance-plated, road-registered and insurable bio-diesel motorcycle in Australia. He had just agreed to let me take his bike on a trip right around the continent. He told me about another bike he was planning, one to break the motorcycle land-speed record in the alternative-fuel class—the record to beat was 210.203 kph. But there was no rider. It was right at that moment, while I sat there saying ‘I want to do it’ and he was eyeballing me through the bottom of his whiskey tumbler, that our friendship started.
We completed the ride around our great country on the bio-diesel bike and now this new project, conceived back then, had come full circle as well. The land-speed bike was almost finished.
For the two years I made regular trips to Adelaide to talk through our plan, I watched the bike take shape slowly. At first it was literally just an engine sitting on a table, then the rear swing arm, and with each trip another component was built and added to the jigsaw. I watched, feeling a growing sense of purpose placate my need for adventure, adventure that wouldn’t pull me too far from home, because home was getting busy. My wife, Clare, was pregnant while Lola, our three-year-old daughter, ran a total muck through our previously clean and calm home.
Another cusp approached in the form of a change in direction in my work as well. I decided to buy into a new-start business, along with five other oilfield mates.
The plan was simple, perfect; my lawyer and accountant looked over the plan and basically said they wanted to buy into it, too. Good enough then, I thought.
‘You read a book from beginning to end. You run a business the opposite way. You start with the end, and then you do everything you must to reach it. ’ These were the wise words of Harold Geneen, a successful American businessman most famous for heading up the ITT Corporation.
Going from an employee to an employer is a weird and worrying transition. My complete lack of skill sets to be a business owner also had me worried, but in the true and tried tradition of overspending we hired the right people to do it for us and thereby could go forth into the oil and gas market that at the time was wide open to a newcomer who could fill in the blanks that were severely lacking. My partners and fellow shareholders had been playing the corporate oil game for decades and we quickly grew with landed contracts and a growing client base.
I was suddenly in a place where I was making decisions, important ones that would affect the future of our business and its employees, and I loved it. I found myself in meetings that had follow-up meetings that ended up with some poor sod poring over pre-qualification tender documents as thick as the phonebook, while the meetings being held in the city would all end up in a middle-aged men’s bar with more polished wood than a whorehouse. There we would sit and plot our business on large worn leather chesterfields, our neckties jutting out across unexercised bellies. Fine single malt was poured on company credit cards from decanters that took two hands to lift and looked like giant perfume bottles for men. I kept thinking it was all just a house of cards.