Pumpjacks! (Or pump jacks, depending…). Round Mountain Road, Tupman Road, Highway 33, 7th Standard Road. California, October / November 2009.
The first time I drove through Bakersfield (on my way to the Mojave) I started seeing the pumpjacks. They were everywhere, moving off in the distance — or right up next to the road. Some of them even seemed to be in suburban backyards, with kids playing near them. I’d only seen these on TV or in movies, so this was a first for me — I was fascinated and amazed. I’d worked in a refinery complex in Australia when I was younger, so I actually knew a bit about the industry, but I’d never seen anything like this up close.
Back home we used to call them “nodding donkeys”, but I quickly learned to call them pumpjacks (or pump jacks) here. I’ve always had trouble capturing the sheer strangeness of the way these things insinuate themselves into the everyday life of a place like Bakersfield, or the mesmerizing combination of stationary movement and endless repeating soundtracks. That sort of thing just doesn’t come through well with still photography. So when decent quality video became cheaply available to amateurs like me, pumpjacks were one of the first of my obsessions to get the video treatment — and this is the first resulting video, one of my all-time favourite videos. The original Machine Age video, and still by far the most popular of my videos (more than 350,000 views on YouTube).
Shot back in the Paleolithic era with a 1440i Sony prosumer DV tape camera on Round Mountain Road, Tupman Road, Highway 33, 7th Standard Road (all in the Bakersfield / Taft area of California), during October / November 2009, it’s kind of primitive even for the time. It also involved a bit of trespassing — run-and-gun’s difficult when you’re using a huge heavy tripod and you’re parked on the non-existent shoulders of roads that have heavy trucks thundering down them. It’s definitely one of my fave videos… and it’s definitely also showing its age (2009!). People sometimes complain that the soundtrack I cobbled together isn’t synced or that it’s monotonous, but hey, that’s kind of the point, right?
I’d love to redo both this and Drive-By: Oilfield again with better gear now, but they’re much more savvy about oilfield security nowadays, and I’d never be allowed.