Dangerous Things I Did in Midland/Odessa In My Youth, Like Riding Pumpjacks
If you have lived in this area for any amount of time, you have done some pretty crazy things. I am a native of the area who has actually ridden a pumpjack.
If you have never ridden a pumpjack, they are a little bit more patrolled than they used to be in the mid-80s, so it is not recommended to try to ride a pumpjack in 2022 not just because it is monitored, but also because it is dangerous.
I may have been under the influence of some liquid courage to do such a thing also because that is what you do when you live in an area known for having pumpjacks all over the place and you are a bored young adult during your college years.
The dangerous part of it is climbing on the pumpjack while it is moving cause the hammer part of the pumpjack that rotates around to make the pumpjack go up and down is going to knock you out or kill you if you get hit by it.
If you look at the picture above, you see the ladder you have to climb on to get on the pumpjack is usually in the middle and the working parts are at the rear of the pumpjack, these are the ones that are easiest to ride since some pumpjacks have the moving parts in the front, those are the ones that are the most dangerous.
Now all of this is to tell you about what a stupid young adult like myself did back in the 80s, as I said previously, pumpjacks are now monitored by cameras and other technological means.
So I am not telling you to go and ride pumpjacks since my friends and I are probably the reason why they monitor them a lot more heavily and make it a lot harder to get near a pumpjack, I am just telling you about it from an adult who realizes he was a stupid kid back then and did risky things because we were young and stupid, but it was a lot of fun.