Tom Lovell: Storyteller With a Brush Page: 93
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A Bride's Home at a Wildcat Well
Like pioneer women for generations before them, wives
of the early oilmen followed their husbands into sometimes
desolate environments, yet managed somehow to make a
home. Tom Lovell's painting celebrates the resilient spirit of
these women who carried civilization with them wherever
they went and planted its seed even in the most barren of
soil.
This is a wildcat driller's camp, the tall wooden derrick
of a cable tool rig standing tall against a blue sky that has
managed sometime in the recent past to provide at least a
little spring rain and carpet the ground with bright yellow
wildflowers amid the cactus and greasewood and low-
growing mesquite. The young bride has finished her morn-
ing wash and hung it on a makeshift line to dry in the
desert wind. While the fire slowly dies beneath the black-
ened washpot, she has walked out into the vast open "yard"
with tin plate in hand to feed her flock of "chickens," a
covey of blue quail. Her husband has finished his work
shift and sits resting on
the steps of a new pine-
board and tarpaper
shack, admiring the
pretty girl who has cho-
sen to share with him
both the hardships and
the simple pleasures of
a life miles from town
or railroad, miles from
electricity or runningwater, miles even
from another
woman who might
help ease the loneli-
ness of her long
days.
Lonely or not, it
is an adventure, the
kind for which
youth seems to have
been invented. It is
a shared adventure
to re-live in memory
for the rest of her
life, though she
might never want to
do it over again.
This once, it is fresh
and new, brightened by discovery, faith and hope that out-
weigh the hardships. In later years, looking back from a
time of relative comfort that this experience will help pro-
vide, she will know the hardships for what they were, and
she will probably not regret a one.
Life had a rough and primitive edge in those early-day
drilling camps and in the oil boomtowns they brought into
being. The Permian Basin was big, awesomely so, the
miles long and difficult. For each newcomer there was, for
one thing, a disconcerting feeling of isolation from distant
homes and from family left behind.93
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Kelton, Elmer. Tom Lovell: Storyteller With a Brush, book, 2005; Midland, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1127711/m1/99/: accessed July 16, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Permian Basin Petroleum Museum, Library and Hall of Fame.