I had never been more homesick or stressed than that Christmas in 1981, the year my husband, Charles, and I pulled up stakes and moved to the Texas badlands to work in the vast oil fields of the Panhandle.
We were thousands of miles away from home for the first time. Our relationship was young, so we didn’t have the comfort of long years of habit to smooth over the bumps in life. Money was tight.
If I hadn’t been madly in love with the man with the turquoise-blue eyes, I would have run home to Mama. As it was, I cried every time I heard “White Christmas.”
Texas just didn’t look right—19 shades of brown, flat and nary a tree in sight. Charles and I were both mountain-born and raised back east, in Tennessee and upstate New York. Out in the badlands—with no green hills to hold me in their hollows—I felt as if I might fall off the earth.
Charles had three children from a previous marriage who came along to live with us—Charlie, 15, Sherri, 14, and Kresti, 9. All were sick for a full three months after the move—measles, chicken pox, tonsillitis. They grew out of clothes faster than they grew into them.
Then there was Charles’s brother Jim. A gifted musician, Jim had rolled through from the West Coast on his way to Nashville. He stopped in the café where I waited tables and said he would be in town for a few days, sleeping in his car. I offered him our couch. Four months later, Jim was still on the couch.
With six mouths to feed, house and car payments, doctor bills and what have you, we worked countless hours just to make ends meet.
One night I woke up crying. I didn’t know how to work any harder, any smarter, or make any more money to afford a good old Christmas like back home. This year we just wouldn’t have Christmas. It broke my heart.
Not long after, Jim came in from his job at a shop where he repaired drilling equipment to say there was a fellow who needed his wells watched during Christmas. Wells have to be watched when workers aren’t around, and they would all be off for the holiday.
If the generators go on the blink, the wells can explode. Besides, this fellow had had some tools and expensive equipment turn up missing and he suspected thieves had been sneaking around.
Charles, Jim and I had a quick conference around the kitchen table. “If we take the work,” Charles said, “we can afford to celebrate a few days early. Then we’ll watch the wells in shifts on Christmas Eve and Christmas, with one of us always here to keep an eye on the kids.”
That’s how I came to be guarding an oil well my first Christmas Eve in Texas.
Charles’s job was to babysit the gas well. It needed a practiced eye because gas wells can blow sky-high if anything goes wrong. Jim and I split shifts at the big oil well. He drove me out for my shift with the kids and my feisty keeshond, Foxy, crammed in the backseat.
I had been told there was a trailer with phone, electricity, radio, TV and flush toilets. Still I was nervous. That’s why I was bringing Foxy along, as well as the .22 in my purse. We were jouncing along when Charlie hollered, “Look!”
In the black-velvet sky shone a single dazzling star. Yes, like everything else in Texas, stars are big. But I had never seen anything like the brilliance of that star in the eastern sky. It was the size of my fist. “You think that’s the same star the Wise Men saw?” Charlie wondered aloud. For an instant it really felt like Christmas.
My joy faded, though, when we bounced into the oil well site. It’s hard to convey the size, smell and roar of a Texas oil rig. The drilling floor was almost five stories off the ground! Jim went over the checklist with me for the monstrous generators.
Set inside a building, they reeked of fuel and made a noise like their name: Waukeshas. Wa-kee-sha…wa-kee-sha… Even with our bulky ear protectors the noise still drummed into my bones. A vast waste pit contained drainage from the rig. The stench of oil permeated everything.
It was about as far from the Norman Rockwell Christmas of my dreams as I could have imagined. Jim dropped me and Foxy off at the trailer. “See you tomorrow,” he said as he and the kids drove off. “Merry Christmas!”
I tried to settle in. I had brought some sewing to do and some snacks. I turned on the TV but reception was bad this far from a transmitter. I thought of my relatives back in Tennessee—cousins, brothers, sisters, nephews, uncles, aunts—all having a joyous Christmas Eve together.
I grabbed the phone, thinking to call my folks. At least we can cry together, I told myself. The phone was dead.
I hoped robbers wouldn’t be out on Christmas Eve. I had Foxy, who would bristle, snarl and snap if there was trouble, though I didn’t think she had it in her to attack. Well, I could shoot the thieves—if I had it in me. I checked the pistol. No bullets. Great.
I was 30 miles from help, with no car, a phone that didn’t work, a dog that wouldn’t bite and a gun that couldn’t shoot. Lord, I prayed, please don’t forget about me all alone out here.
It was a good thing I had brought the sewing with me. The generators wouldn’t need checking until morning. I sewed until my eyelids got heavy, then bundled up and went to sleep.
Dawn drifted in the windows as I awoke. Sunrise in the desert is wondrous, the colors amplified by the stark landscape.
Texans say when God was making the world he ran out of mountains, trees and rivers by the time he got to the Texas badlands. So he just emptied his paint box and gave them the most glorious sunsets and sunrises on earth. I think it takes that kind of desolation to make room for so much beauty.
As a bonus, my favorite Christmas hymn, “Joy to the World!,” was playing on the radio. Smiling sleepily, I reached to turn it up and was quite surprised I couldn’t. The radio wasn’t playing. It wasn’t even plugged in.
“He rules the world…”
It sounded like a huge choir, the soaring voices blending perfectly. I looked at the TV. It too was off. I got up and unplugged it anyway. Still the choir rang out, even over the thrum of the Waukeshas. It seemed like the sound was coming from everywhere at once.
“And makes the nations prove…”
I searched the trailer. There was nothing to account for the ringing chorus of joyous voices. I knew the song by heart and could understand every word the choir sang. Sound carries far in the desert, but 30 miles? Impossible. It must be coming from outside.
I wrapped my coat around me and stepped out into the sharp morning air. Foxy was dancing circles around my ankles, her ears at the alert. We looked and looked for a source. The music seemed to be coming from the east…from all of the east.
“No more let sins and sorrows grow…”
Was there someone on the other side of the pit? Foxy and I climbed an embankment. We were completely alone with the most awesome sunrise I had ever seen, even for Texas. The midnight-blue of the sky lightened into vivid colors that spilled across the desert—lilac, cerulean, magenta, sienna.
I sat on the cold, sandy bank, my arm around Foxy, awash with music and light. There were no other intrusions on my senses—no sounds, no smells. Maybe I was hallucinating. Maybe I was reacting to stress and loneliness. When the verses were over, no doubt, the music would fade.
But then something happened, something I still can’t explain.
The voices swelled into a fourth verse of “Joy to the World!” I knew only three verses. Still, I was hearing a fourth as clear as the day that was dawning, with the full force of the invisible cosmic serenade.
I cannot remember the words to that verse. They were rich with praise and glory, I know, and clear to me at the time. But today I cannot repeat a single line. (I’ve checked hymnbooks and discovered a fourth verse—though not the one I heard!)
Like the colors of that dawn sky, the words were both tangible and intangible, meant only for the moment yet leaving an impression for a lifetime.
A heavenly host sang that morning out in a Texas oil field. I thought I was alone and forgotten, forced to endure the most desolate Christmas of my life. But God shook me awake with an unforgettable reminder that his glory and the glory of his Son are everpresent.
