Juggies

Jugheads are often regarded poorly by the helicopter pilots that work with them on seismic jobs. That is too bad, but I understand how the low opinion can be formed.When somebody does something that threatens to end your life you tend to react negatively. Jughead is defined in the Urban dictionary as follows:

A Juggie is a doodlebugger — someone who works on a seismograph crew (oil exploration). The term “Juggie” or “Jughead” has been used since the late 1940s in the United States. A Juggie may work on a portable (helicopter) crew, a land crew or marine crew.

Flying seismic for a few years, I got to meet a lot of juggies.In the 70’s and 80’s before the oil exploration business collapsed most juggies were North Americanos and hailed from places like Anchorage, Kemmerer,Alpine, Oklahoma, Houma, Mineral Wells,Victoria, Calgary,Houston,Denver and every where in between. In the 90’s and in to the 21st century the juggies were Mexicans and Central or South Americanos.

The hard working, hard drinking ,stoners of the early years were replaced by harder working poorer paid Spanish speaking laborers who drank little, ate less and suffered in silence lest the border patrol visit the job site and arrest almost all of them.

Exploitation of humans in the U.S.A. or just history repeating itself? I don’t care to debate the issue.

Fact is, that almost every ethnic group has taken its turn working itself up from the basement of the outhouse, in this land of great opportunity. Those ethnic groups haven’t asked you to pity their lowly initial status. The men I worked with from Mexico, Central and South America were very happy to have the job and yes they knew they were not getting a fair deal. But they sure as hell knew that what ever the deal,it was far better than what they had left behind thousands of miles south.

I had a few of them try to kill me, but for the most part it was ignorance and a failure on my part to understand just how little they comprehended about what we were doing. Men who fear for the loss of their job will tell you in two languages that they understood your safety briefing and then go out and do something so colossally stupid and dangerous that you can barely react quickly enough to save them, yourself and the rest of the passengers.

One of several examples to come:

Moving men around in steep mountainous scrub brush country meant that you often had several toe in landings to perform.A toe in landing is a balancing act that places the forward part of the helicopter skids on a steep hillside or rock outcrop. The standard rule is that all entries and exits from the helicopter are done slowly to allow the pilot to adjust for the shifting center of gravity as he or she holds the helicopter in its tenuous position.

On this particular seismic job I had removed all the doors from the helicopter. This accomplished several things. It allowed easier ingress and egress , eliminated people forgetting to close (latch) the doors properly,prevented the doors being slammed,handles torn off, windows grabbed and broken, doors flying open in flight and almost completely eliminated me having to remind people to fasten their seat belts. Nobody wants to fall out the open door at 7000 feet. That is a long way to scream. It didn’t prevent people forgetting to latch their seat belts back up so that they often flapped outside against the paint of the fuselage as I cursed over the radio and returned to toe in again to have the offending belt secured.

On this memorable day I had been picking up crews off some steep mountainsides in the Wind River Range in Wyoming. It was all rocky ledge pick ups where I could just get enough of the skids on to keep me clear of hillside brush and rock. My first two people had been together and for some reason had both climbed in the back seat after loading their packs in the rear baggage compartment. I yelled at them to take the outside seats so that the middle back seat was empty and would also block my third passenger from attempting to get in the back seat.

What I had not considered was that the crew boss was occupying the seat directly behind me and not in his usual ,better more privileged, front seat. Landing a little further up the mountain on a very tight rock outcrop my third passenger,a stocky,muscular kid from Chiapas, upon seeing the bosses seat open, went quickly back down the skids to “his’ backseat. Everyone was shouting,”Nooo!” There was of course no place for him ,which didn’t matter at this point because we were so far aft of my balance point that we were leaving backwards a lot faster than we had arrived. I was going backwards pulling power and hoping that my friend from Chiapas was ideally going to pull himself up to the front seat , get in somewhere, or at the very least not fall off.

I had about 4,000′ behind and below me to figure my problem out and with three bug eyed rear seat passengers staring back at me, I made a rapidly descending right pedal turn to a long run on landing on a bit of straight dirt road with my cyclic almost against the forward stop.We changed the seating arrangement and laughed all the way back to staging. That much adrenaline can get you laughing giddily or chucking your tortillas. Laughing worked out better.