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Ondas del Lago
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Steve Sleightholm
Steve's Venezuela Memoirs
Carretera Nacional
Steve Sleightholm's Venezuela Memoirs
Carretera Nacional
First there was no road between Lagunillas and La Salina much less Palmarejo
because there were no ferries. If you went to Maracaibo you did so by company
launch and the launches were small at that time. La Salina and Lagunillas had a
dock where the shallow draft tankers loaded oil and where freighters off-loaded
supplies. Any transportation for equipment, supplies or people between the camps
occurred by boat. That's about the time when my grandfather, William, went to
work for Lago Petroleum.
My grandfather was British and was a trained master-machinist. He could build
anything and one of his jobs was to build a small narrow gauge locomotive (I
have pictures of the engine and him leaning against it.) It was a steam engine
fueled by oil that was in a tank on top of the roof. Lago Petroleum laid a
narrow-gauge track from La Salina to Lagunillas and when I was a youngster on
one of father’s many hunting trips we used to drive over remnants of the tracks
behind La Salina and he would tell me many stories about it. When my father went
to Venezuela to work for Lago Petroleum he used to ride the small train which
had small coaches as it ran between La Salina and Lagunillas carrying workers
and supplies.
Eventually, Creole which is what Lago Petroleum became after Rockefeller bought
it, built Carretera Nacional. It was a crude, arched 1 1/2 lane road and ran
from Palmarejo to Lagunillas and beyond. You could not go fast on the road and
in those days cars did not go fast. In fact the road was the only “road” along
the lake. Shell Oil Company and Mene Grande (Gulf Oil) built crude roads to the
wells on their land leases. I wouldn't call them roads back then.
Observations about the road over the years: Dead cows; dead burrows; dead dogs
which there were thousands of strays; occasionally a dead person; many times a
drunken person, and thank the Lord, buzzards to clean up the mess.
Then thousands of skilled Italian immigrants entered the country after WWII and
you began to see small neat stucco homes appear along the sides of the roads and
they were in bright colors -- blue, pink, green; red -- and they usually had a
tall stucco wall built around the house with cracked jagged many colored glass
bottles imbedded in cement at the top of the wall which would glisten in the
sun.
And then there were car junk yards along the sides of the road and eventually
cantinas with their strings of colored lights. (In back of Tia Juana and
Lagunillas behind the native camps there were also buildings -- some two stories
and they also had strings of colored lights with a bar, music and adult
entertainment up stairs -- another story)
So Ojeda and Las Morochas - as the oil fields prospered – added stores even the
first Supermarket built by Rockefeller where you could trust the products you
purchased not to threaten your health if eaten -- another story).
And then following Castros exporting of his revolution to Venezuela the paisanos
poured out of the backcountry and squatted on Oil Company’s property along the
road -- first with cardboard shacks and then more permanent fixtures and small
businesses. Paisanos built shacks in the dry riverbed under the road's bridge
between Ojeda and Tia Juana and every rainy season the storms could be seen in
the distant mountains and you could count the days before the water would roar
down the river gulch and wipe out the families caught under the bridge.
Year-after-year this occurred.
Anyway, traffic grew on the road -- traffic of all kinds and the road was not
widened. So the road was expended by people driving on the sides of the road and
in the dry season you see where the road was by the concentration of dust in the
air. New rules of the road developed -- the main one was if your vehicle was
bigger than the one approaching you, then you had the right of way and people
used to love to ride with their hands and arms waving out of the cars because
they talked with hands and arms and they pounded the sides of the cars instead
of using the horn and people lost hands and arms as those unfamiliar with road
rules learned the hard way. Now at this time the bridge was built across the
lake and now the farmers in the mountains could get their fresh produce to the
Maracaibo markets and we began to see produce trucks coming down from the
mountains.
A new form of entertainment presented itself. My brother and I and Randy Sharpe,
Eddie Robinson would get in the jeep and drive to Ojeda and sit in a cantina
drinking Polar until a stake-truck loaded to the brim with ripe bananas went by
and we would jump in the jeep and make chase. The driver of the truck could not
see a thing behind them and we had no fear of them even looking anyway -- who
cared what was behind you. So, we would drive the jeep right up to the rear side
of the truck and reach out and pick bananas and once we had our fill we sped
past the truck and headed down the road to the next cantina and had Polar and
ate bananas and talked about our exploits and had many laughs and this would
continue until we were bored.
We knew things on the road had reached the serious point when we learned that
two large oil service trucks had approached each other on the road and stopped
with neither driver willing to move his truck aside. They argued until one of
the drivers became enraged and he grabbed a revolver out of this truck cab and
shot the other driver and then drove off around his truck.
At this time we started to take the back road between Lagunillas and Tia Juana
to avoid accidents but even there you had to be watchful. One day I was sprawled
back in the seat of the jeep approaching a cross-road intersection on one of the
back roads and I pressed the jeep horn thinking that I had the right away, when
out of the side of my eye I caught a glimpse of one of those 70 ton Shell mobile
well service rigs coming barreling towards the intersection and I had to quickly
jam on the brakes and brought the jeep to a halt almost in the intersection when
the rig roared through it. Jesus, that was close and the next lesson I learned
was if your vehicle was large enough you could ignore any other vehicle
approaching an intersection.
That's all.
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