TRAVELLING MORE THAN EVER BEFORE

BUENOS AIRES, THE ARGENTINE CAPITAL,
ONE OF THE JEWELS OF LATIN AMERICA

At first it was kind of nice, going places with all expenses paid, travelling first class and staying at five star hotels, I confess, was really fun when I was 40, but, when such travel means you have to leave your family behind more than two thirds of your time, I can tell you, it soon gets into your nerves! That was the case with me. Between my trips to Argentina and my visits to the Cayman Islands I was away from home more than it was humanly tolerable.


THE CAYMAN ISLANDS, A PARADISE
FOR SCUBA DIVERS

Even for a young guy like me, staying away from the family most of the time was not pleasant at all, to put it in a mild way. The whole weight of growing the kids, of caring for the three young ones in the family was falling on Fanny’s lap, it wasn’t fair to say the least, though, much to her admirable endurance and character, she never complained. True, when I was at home we tried to make up for my frequent and prolonged absences by going places, visiting friends, going fishing in the summer or skiing in winter time. My wife was very understanding of the whole situation, however, the kids started to complain more and more, especially the youngest one, two year old Angie, who sometimes didn’t even recognized me when I returned home after being away for three or more weeks. So, without saying anything to anybody, I began to think about looking for another job in the winter of 1983, however, I just send my first application for a job in July. It was for a position as an analyst in the World Bank, in Washington D.C. My application was never answered, nor did I make an effort a follow up on it, I was just testing ground. Behind my lack of real desire to leave was the fact that I was being paid an excellent salary at Northwest, a salary that was certainly well above the market for comparable positions, so it would have been hard to match it in any other job within my scope.

THE SEVEN MILE BEACH IN
GRAND CAYMAN, THE CAYMAN ISLANDS

Between trips to Buenos Aires and Grand Cayman, the months went by; the skiing season of 1982-83 was great, as there were over 70 inches of snow in the mountains in the Salt Lake City area for most of the winter. My family and I enjoyed that skiing season together most weekends and holidays. We found a family who cared for Angie on Saturdays and Sundays and off we went to the mountains. Mariuxi and Rafaelito (10 and 8) were good skiers by then, and participated in the company’s skiing club contests. They were very happy kids. Maria Paula Angeleri, who was spending the winter with our neighbors the Bemis, was always in the mountains with us, she loved skiing and therefore she was having the time of her life too. In fact, Maria Paula used to spend a great deal of her time with us, where she always felt at home.

Our Argentine operation was not changing very much from what had been for the previous ten years. Naviera Perez Companc, the majority partner in the Entre Lomas Oil field joint venture, was always doing things the way they thought was most beneficial to their own interest; with no regard whatsoever for the interest of their minority JV partner, APCO ARGENTINA. By then it was time to start what is called in the oil production industry a “secondary recovery project”, and, therefore, it was time to “reinvest” the profits generated by the Entre Lomas milking cow. Again, APCO Argentina was a almost a completely passive witness to the important events going on in the field. For us, it was like saying "hey, we are rich, very rich, but, unfortunately we can’t have our money, our partner says it has to be reinvested so we can become richer at a later time"
In the summer of 1983, we decided to take a vacation in Ecuador, so in early July, off we flew to Guayaquil. We were five in the family, our kids did not have a good memory of how Guayaquil was like, and we were all excited to go back to our country, to our home town and to see the relatives we hadn’t seen in several years. The weather however, played a bad trick on us. As we arrived in Guayaquil, the El Niño atmospheric phenomenon, which manifests itself with torrential rains and very hot temperatures, as well as hotter than normal sea waters, was blasting with no mercy the Ecuadorian Coastal Region where Guayaquil is located. It rained and rained, and rained, day and night, thundering and lightning were an intermittent part of our daily lives, it rained cats and dogs, there were mosquitoes and all other kinds of hot and humid weather insects every where, in sum, Guayaquil had become itself the nicest place to be away from, and so away we went. We changed our plans and decided on having our holidays in Quito and Buenos Aires, where we found a lot better weather to accompany us. Though we didn’t say it, we all felt that Guayaquil was not a nice place to spend our vacations any more, at least not our summer of 1983 holidays.
Spanish Cove our Caribbean scuba diving resort, also under my jurisdiction of controllership, was showing a negative bottom line, although not seriously negative, it was a reason to be concerned and to monitor it more frequently. Though we couldn’t say it was a seriously bleeding wound for the parent company, Northwest Pipeline, there were reasons to monitor it closer than in profitable times. Aware as we were, that this was our CEO’s favorite toy, we needed to make sure that things were running in an orderly and business like way, after all, he used to come by at least once a month, flying the company's plane and accompanied by his wife and other important business associates, so it was in the order of the day to make sure everything was marching very much to his satisfaction.

THE CAYMAN ISLANDS, GREAT
BEACHES AND SCUBA DIVING

As the year end holidays approached, on December 22, 1983, after completing my review of the books of Spanish Cove, in Georgetown, British West Indies, I was scheduled to go back to Salt Lake City via Houston. The night before my departure for the continent, I was approached by Buzz Murphy, the manager of the resort and Barbara Murphy, his wife, who asked me to take with me a pack of things they were sending to their family in the US. I said of course, I can do that for you and I took the sealed package weighing about five pounds and took it to my room where I placed it in my suitcase.



CAYMAN ISLANDS DIVING AT ITS BEST


The day after, in the morning, Buzz took me to the airport in Georgetown and off I started my flight to Houston. Once in the airplane, I handed a copy of the local newspaper and started to read it. At first there were no news that attracted my attention, but, all of a sudden, in the third page of the paper, I saw this large headline: “CAYMAN ISLANDS ARE A TRANSIT PORT FOR DRUGS GOING TO THE US". I immediately started to read the article where they reported that for some time, the US DEA had been capturing small cargoes of cocaine originating in Colombia, as they were in their way to be smuggled by people flying from the Cayman Islands to Houston, Miami and Atlanta.
Suddenly, I was scared to death!, what if the package that was given to me the night before and that was in my travelling bag was cocaine that Buzz and Barbara were sending to the continental US, using me as their mule?. I suddenly felt like vomiting, I was anguished to the point of desperation. For a moment I felt like talking to the one of the crew members to tell her my story and my fear, but then, I felt horrible for making such a terrible pre-judgment about people I thought i knew damn well. I thought I was making a serious mistake, after all, I had known Buzz and Barbara Murphy for over a year, and both of them were very nice, hard working people whose friendship and respect I had gained over time.
I had this very serious dilemma in my mind, it was almost like “I’m at a horrible risk, and my family is too, if the package I’m carrying in my suitcase is cocaine I’m dead meat, my family and I will pay the consequences of my stupidity, but if it’s not, I’m making a terrible judgment on two people I know and respect very much”. “What should I do?” I didn’t know which side to take, I had been thinking about which way to go and haven’t taken a decision until the crew announced we were approaching the Houston airport, at which time it was too late to try talking to any member of the crew, so I decided that I would stay put, I will just pray to God that everything was alright and that in fact the package contained Christmas presents for Buzz and Barbara’s family in the US. And praying I did.

In my next posting: WHAT DID THE PACKAGE CONTAIN?

BACK IN SALT LAKE CITY

It wasn’t a change in itself, on the contrary, it was a kind of “back to normal” situation where the kids got back to their school, we got back to our home, which we had rented for a year and was vacated a week before we returned. Everything was just like having been kept on a freezer for a year and suddenly returned to life. Our neighbors, our friends, my office, Fanny´s daily work was just as if it was only yesterday that we left and today we returned.


YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK-
NATURE AT ITS BEST

By the beginning of June of 1983, we decided to go visit Yellowstone, the most beautiful National Park we have ever seen. This is the oldest National Park in the US and was established in 1872, Yellowstone extends its natural wonders to territories in three different states; Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.

BUFFALOS PASTURING IN YELLOWSTONE
JUST LIKE IN THE MID 1800'S
The park is only hours away from Utah, and it is home to a large variety of wildlife including grizzly bears, wolves, bison, and elk.




OLD FAITHFUL THE MAIN
ATTRACTION IN YELLOWSTONE

Carefully preserved within Yellowstone National Park are Old Faithful and a collection of the world's most extraordinary geysers and hot springs and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, all of them true wonders of nature in which the US Parks Service has traditionally done a magnificent job at preserving the beauty of Mother Nature.


A BUFFALO AND HER CALF AT
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK

In our way back from Yellowstone, we stopped in Idaho and as we arrived to jackson Hole, we enjoyed a boat ride in the Snake River and watched an enormous variety of wild life on both sides of it. Angie (2 1/2 years old) endured the whole trip and seemed to enjoy not only mother nature at its best, but the company of her sister and brother as well as the pampering of her parents.


GRAND TETON NATIONAL
PARK, WYOMMING

Jackson Hole is a beautiful old town reminiscent of the old Wild West and here we took pictures of Angie and Rafaelito with the traditional raccoon tale hat used by hunters in the old west days. Not very far from Grand Teton National Park, which is located in the northwestern section of the state of Wyoming, we found spectacular views with immaculate mountains and clear bustling streams, all within the Grand Teton range of mountains peering up above it.


GRAND TETON IN THE FALL,
INCREDIBLE NATURAL BEAUTY

Grand Teton National Park was established on February 26, 1929 and covers almost 500 square miles of land and lakes water. There are nearly 200 miles of trails for hikers to enjoy in Grand Teton National Park, which attracted then over 2.5 million visitors a year, making the park and the Grand Teton Range one of the most visited sites in the United States

A few weeks later, for the 4th of July holiday, we headed south toward the Arches National Park, a great wonder of nature which preserves over 2,000 natural sandstone arches which include the world-famous Delicate Arch, as well as many other unusual rock formations.

ARCHES NATIONAL
PARK, UTAH

In some areas, the forces of nature, mainly the winds, have masterly exposed millions of years of geologic history.

The extraordinary features of the park create a landscape of contrasting colors, landforms and textures that is unlike any other in the world.


CRAFTED OVER MILLIONS
OF YEARS AT ARCHES NP

NO MAN'S HANDS
COULD HAVE
EVER DONE THIS

We spent two days at this park, staying within it for one night.


DELICATE ARCH AT ARCHES
NATIONAL PARK, UTAH

As we continued driving on the Interstate 15 highway, we visited Zion National Park, designated as such in 1919. Zion is Utah's oldest national park which is known for its incredible canyons, including spectacular “The Narrows”, which attract canyoneers from around the world. Hiking possibilities are endless, however, we couldn’t do any of it as we had little Angie with us, riding either her little stroller or my own back. With nearly two million visitors per year, Zion was then, as it is today, Utah’s most heavily visited park.

THE THREE PATRIARCHS IN ZION
CAYON NATIONAL PARK, UTAH

A prominent feature of the park is Zion Canyon, 15 miles long and up to half a mile deep, cut through the reddish and tan-colored Navajo Sandstone by the North Fork of the Virgin River, a tributary of the Colorado River. The lowest and highest elevations are 1,200 and 8,726 ft respectively.

OTTOM A THE ENTRANCE TO
ZIONS NATIONAL PARK, UTAH

The park is Located at the junction of the Colorado Plataeu and the Mojave Desert regions. Its unique geography and variety of life zones allow for unusual plant and animal diversity. Numerous plant species as well as 289 species of birds, 75 mammals and 32 species of reptiles inhabit the park's four life zones. Its fauna include mountain lions, mule deer and Golden Eagles. Zion National Park includes mountains, canyons, buttes, mesas, monoliths, rivers and, of course natural arches.

In September, by the Labor Day holiday we again decided to travel far away in our very comfortable and efficient 1981 Honda Accord. This time we drove west on Interstate 80 toward the Pacific Coast. We drove about 500 miles in one day to Reno, Nevada where we stayed overnight at the Flamingo Hotel. It was in Reno that we had a bad time when we parked our car in front of a food store and found that it wasn’t there when we returned. Firtunately it hadn't been soled, it had just been tugged away for bad parking and I had to pay a $50 fine to have it returned.

Our next destination was San Francisco, however, the second night we slept in San Jose, since we wanted to visit Yosemite National Park, another wonder of Nature, which we did the following night. John Muir helped sparked the creation of Yosemite National Park, home to the gigantic sequoia trees, in 1890. The beauty of this park is almost unparalleled and inspired one of its admirers and guardians of the Yosemite Grant to say:

“I have seen persons of emotional temperament stand with tearful eyes, spellbound and dumb with awe, as they got their first view of the Valley from Inspiration Point, overwhelmed in the sudden presence of the unspeakable, stupendous grandeur.”

For tens of thousands of years, humans have changed, and have been changed by, this place called Yosemite. The Ahwahneechee Indians lived here for many generations, followed by the arrival of Europeans in the mid-1800s. The rugged terrain challenged many early travelers, with just a few—only 650 from the mid-1850s to mid-1860s—making the journey to Yosemite Valley by horseback or stagecoach. By 1907, construction of the Yosemite Valley Railroad from Merced to El Portal eased the journey, thereby, increasing visitation.



YOSEMITE AT MID OTTOM

History says that seven present-day tribes descend from the people who first called this area home. Europeans arrived in the mid-1800s, and provoked violent disruptions that displaced the native populations. Early white settlers arrived and hosted writers, artists, and photographers who spread the fame of "the Incomparable Valley" throughout the world.


MOTHER NATURE SHOWING OFF
AT YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK

History books detail the Mariposa Battalion entering Yosemite Valley in 1851 to remove the Ahwahneechee. As Euro-American settlement occurred, people arrived on foot, on horseback and by rail to rustic hotels. Parts of the landscape were exploited, spurring conservationists to appeal for protections. President Abraham Lincoln signed an 1864 a bill granting Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove to the State of California.


MAMMOTH SEQUOIAS AT YOSEMITE
NATIONAL PARK IN CALIFORNIA

When we finished visiting Yosemite, we left for San Francisco, that beautiful city which Frank Sinatra sang to in “I left my Heart in San Francisco”. We enjoyed the city, visited the Golden gate, we rode the trolley and visited the market place.. One day later we headed south toward Los Angeles and San Diego, but that is going to be the material for my next posting.

The summer of 1983 was the most educational and entertaining summer our family and I had while lived in the US. Our children learned to like and respect Mother Nature and we educated ourselves by visiting these wonderful places not many people around the world have the luck to visit.

We all in our family learned then, and we know now, that Mother Nature is very delicate, she needs to be cared for, she needs not to be abused, but we feel extremely frustrated to hear even now, some 30 years later, that some people continue to claim that climate changes are a fact of life we have to live with, that there is nothing we, as a human race can do to stop those changes. We feel extremely frustrated by the fact that there are countries, first world countries that are willing to do nothing to stop the damage. Eventually they’ll learn too, however, by then it may be too late, and our children and grand children may have to live in a devastated world.

Meanwhile, at work, I got more responsibilities. Northwest Pipeline, through one of its international subsidiaries, decided to invest in the tourism industry and bought a couple of diving resorts in the Golf of Mexico, in the Cayman Islands, half way from Cuba to Honduras. I suspect this investment was a good excuse for the CEO of the company to use the company´s plane to go diving, since that was one of his favorite sports. Any way, two diving resorts in the Caribbean needed to be kept under control, and I was the Comptroller of those operations, on top of being the comptroller of the Argentine oil operation. Between the two operations, my travelling got more frequent than ever.

In my next posting: TRAVELLING GETS MORE FREQUENT THAN EVER BEFORE

HOUSTON IS OUR NEW HOME TOWN

Glenn pushed for a decision in that direction, and relatively soon he got the home office approval for his request. As a result, by mid April 1981, I began commuting between Salt Lake City and Houston every week, flying out to Houston very early on Mondays and returning to SLC late on Fridays. The Hyatt hotel in downtown Houston, which was only three blocks away from our office on Lamar Street, became my home for nine months, and the Restaurant Benihana of Tokyo became my dinner place every night. Dining at Benihana in a table for eight people made my daily solitude more bearable. That was the time when I became a fan of Japanese food, which I still love.
Working in Houston resolved one problem but created another. I was given high responsibilities in Houston and I felt that I was indeed earning my salary and making a good contribution to our company, but, I was away from my family seventy percent of the time, therefore they missed me and I missed them too. Working for APCO required that I travel to Argentina at least once every two months for a couple of weeks. Usually I would fly to NYC to make a connection to Buenos Aires, a flight that would take between 10 and eleven hours, but was not too tiring because, number one we were flying within the same time zone, and, I was always flying first class, a luxury that was allowed in all company business flights with a duration of four or more hours.
Those were the days when I began loving Buenos Aires in particular, but, Argentina in general, its people, and its food but I never got used to the tremendous fluctuations of Argentine prices and exchange rates. In one trip the cost of one night’s stay at the Claridge Hotel, one of the most traditional hotels in Buenos Aires was about $70, and the next trip it was $250, all because of the never ending escalation of prices and exchange rates. Between the bimonthly trips to Buenos Aires and the weekly trips from SLC to Houston, the rest of the year 1981 went by. In April 1982, I discussed the matter with Glenn and he requested and obtained approval from the upper management in SLC to have me and my family moved to Houston, which we did in June 1982.
Moving to Houston with the whole family we did in May of 1982. At first, we rented a house in a very nice golf area in NW Houston, about ten minutes away from Interstate Hwy 10, better known in Houston as the Dixie Highway. We lived in the Heartstone subdivision, 45 minutes away from my office in downtown Houston.
Houston was in those days something like the world’s capital of the oil industry, almost everything there was somehow connected to the ever expanding oil industry. It was the home town for the most important players in the world’s oil such as Mobil, Pennzoil, Royal Dutch, Shell, Texaco, British Petroleum, Conoco, Halliburton and the likes. In fact, it was home to the oil barons of those days.
Our company, Northwest Pipeline Corp, in spite of being a large company in the US Stock Exchange, was small in comparison to all those giants in the oil industry, in fact it had no significant oil fields in the continental US and 95% of its revenues were generated by its gas production and transportation geographically located in the Northwestern United States. APCO Argentina, its small subsidiary, domiciled in Houston, the company I was now assigned to as a Controller, derived all it revenues from the Entre Lomas oil field, located in Neuquén, in Southern Argentina, where we were a minority shareholder of Petrolera Perez Companc, the concessionary of the field, which was operated by our associate Naviera Perez Companc (“Naviera”). The company’s revenues deriving from the oil field, however, were very seldom materialized in cash, since the operator and majority shareholder of the oil company was always “reinvesting” in the field.
My job as a controller of the company in Houston was to make sure we kept a good eye on what our Associate Naviera was doing in terms of “reinvestments” in the oil field, since all works in connection with those reinvestments were carried on by Naviera our majority shareholder. I saw it from the beginning that it was a no winning situation, because the contract did not allow the minority shareholder (APCO) a veto power on the “reinvesting decisions of the majority shareholder. As a consequence, in the end, my job was to try to report, as accurately as possible, how much we were being screwed by our Argentine associates in Naviera.
Neither the continuous and clear technical reports from our people in Buenos Aires headed by Alberto Angeleri, who was always waiving red flags to Houston, nor the continuous visits to Buenos Aires by Glenn Nelle who was meeting with the top shots of Naviera , improved the cash flows for APCO Argentina. Somehow, The Northwest people had decided that in the end, patience will pay its dividends. No significant dividends were reported to the company for my entire tenure as a controller of the company which ended in May of 1984.
Meanwhile, our life in Houston was different in many ways to our life in Salt Lake City. To begin with, we were now living in a much larger city, a city of two and a half million people, as opposed to only half of a million people in SLC. People in our neighborhood in Houston were not nearly as friendly as they were in SLC., each family seemed to live their own lives, minding their own business and letting every body else mind their business. Our older kids were registered in the nearest public school, in a school district that was well known to be very good for the State standards, so that was OK, in fact neither Mariuxi, nor Rafaelito felt any significant negative or positive impact from the change.
In the absence of friends in our neighborhood, we looked and soon found some friends elsewhere in the area or through a networking that we began to apply when we started to feel the isolating effects of the lack of friends in the area where we lived. First it was some dear and old Ecuadorian friends living not very far away, and then the net started to work. Soon we began to feel as a part of a social group it was nice to be associated with, then the group made us feel as an important part of it. Our children found some friends of their age to play with, some of them attending the same school they attended. Felipe Rodriguez, a former classmate at the U of Guayaquil and a man who loved Houston more than any other place in the world (he called it “paradise”) was the first friend we found, and through him we found many other friends, including the Ecuadorian Consul, Mrs. Huerta who was the one who introduced us to many other Ecuadorian people who had been living in Houston for many years and loved it.
In spite of all the friends we found, and the fact that my wife Fanny felt much better in Houston than in SLC, I did not find very amusing the fact that I had to mow the lawn in my 2000 sq ft backyard, twice a week under 100 degree temperatures in the Houston Summer time, where I could almost watch the grass growing in the hot and rainy summers of the “oil capital of the world”. It was like being inside a sauna box. I did not enjoy this at all, so, when a year later my bosses in Salt Lake City announced that I had to go back to live in Salt Lake City, because the APCO Argentina offices were being moved to Utah, I was so much relieved and happy, I felt almost like getting out of hell. Our children loved it too. Fanny was less enthused but finally she was very happy to go back to our loved Utah too.
In my next posting: BACK IN SALT LAKE CITY