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Hard times have hit the oil fields. A barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude has dropped from a high of over $100 to less than $50. But Tracy Perryman, a small oilman in Luling, Texas, has learned how to survive the lean times.

Oil companies that take on a lot of debt sometimes don't survive the downturns. But veterans of oil busts have learned how to plan for the inevitable price plunges.

Perryman's family has been in the oil business in Luling since the 1920s, when a wildcatter drilled down a half-mile through ancient limestone and struck a small but productive field measuring 2-by-12 miles. Nearly a century later, the Luling field, located about an hour south of Austin, is still active — there are about 9,000 producing wells in Caldwell County.

"When oil is up, we know it's going to go down. ... We try to spend the money on our equipment and our production to get it in good shape, so when it does ... we can ride through the hard times..."

- Tracy Perryman, production manager, B.J.P. Inc.

They have made a good living for Perryman, production manager of B.J.P. Inc. Unlike the stereotype of the flamboyant, boorish Texas oilman, Perryman wears work clothes and speaks softly.

Digging into a slice of smoky brisket in the dining room of Luling City Market, he looks out the window and considers what the price drop has meant for traffic rumbling through his hometown.

"Gravel trucks, oil field trucks, oil haulers, rigs ... going right through Luling — it's maybe half as much or less in activity than it was when oil was $100 a barrel," he says.

As it happens, the Luling field lies just north of the monster-sized Eagle Ford Shale formation, which has become one of the world's most prolific fields thanks to fracking and horizontal drilling.

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The old Luling wells are what are called stripper wells — they produce less than 15 barrels a day.

After lunch, Perryman sits on the tailgate of his pickup next to one of his bobbing pumpjacks. The dirt is stained black and the air smells of rotten eggs.

"This well that we're currently sitting by produces about a barrel-and-a-half of oil a day and about 20 barrels of saltwater," he says. "It was drilled in the early '60s. We anticipate that it will continue to produce for many, many years."

Staying Afloat When Prices Are Falling

So how does a small oilman stay above water when prices drop in half?

"When oil is up, we know it's going to go down," Perryman says. "We try to spend the money on our equipment and our production to get it in good shape, so when it does go down, we have no debt, we have good equipment and we can ride through the hard times and get ready for the next boom."

In better times, his company bought new pumpjacks, pipes, tanks, vehicles, forklifts and machine tools. They fixed roads and fences. And they paid cash.

Today, everything has changed. They'll defer downhole maintenance on wells, they'll ignore potholes in their roads rather than call the gravel truck, and they'll try to repair broken equipment instead of replace it.

"I don't believe that hard times are here yet," Perryman says. "In April of '98, we'd seen oil go down to $9 a barrel. And that was tough, because it was costing us $18, $19 a barrel ... just to get it out of the ground."

Most small independents like Perryman cannot afford to explore for oil. They buy up properties from the majors, who decide to sell off marginal wells when they become less profitable. The Perryman family purchased its wells years ago from Humble Oil, which became Exxon.

"Smaller, independent oil and gas producers like Tracy Perryman are of critical importance, obviously, to our state and our national economy," says Ed Longanecker, president of the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association.

He says in Texas — the nation's biggest crude oil producer — 41 percent of all wells are stripper wells like the ones in Luling. "The reason smaller independents can survive is because they are not drilling $5-, $10-, $15-million horizontal wells in the sweet spots ... of some of these shale formations."

Perryman's company owns 116 wells — all of them shallow and vertical. Together, they produce about 100 barrels a day. Last summer when prices were high, they paid $10,000 a day. Today, it's half that.

But year after year, the moaning pumpjacks keep Perryman's company afloat. The one he's sitting next to brings up 1 to 2 quarts of oil and saltwater with every stroke.

"You get enough of these wells," Perryman says, grinning, "you can make a living, even at $45 a barrel, in Luling."

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My mother, as far as I can remember, has been a feminist and that was another thing that I didn't realize was slightly unusual in a household like mine. But also, I think a lot of working-class black women and educated black women — my mother is educated, both my parents went to college — are feminists, but wouldn't articulate as such whereas my mother would. ...

She would always say things like, when people talk about "When we get married," she'd say, "If you get married," and talk about a lot of things as a choice. Or she would always tell this story of a friend of hers who was raising a child on her own and somebody would say, "Oh, you need a husband," and the friend would say, "No, I need a wife." So she was very conscious of the hierarchy of gender and these kinds of things.

On a real-life incident that inspired her to write one scene in the book

One time my mom ... sat me down, we were sitting there, and she said, "You know your father and I aren't married." And I was like, "Really?" And she was like, "Yeah." And I'm struggling because I'm thinking like, my mom is the one who told me not to say "illegitimate." It doesn't matter, but at the same time it kind of does matter.

She was lying. This was some kind of weird prank just to see what [I] would say.

And so I think what I'm doing in the book is thinking about [how] in that moment I felt so like something dropped away, even though I had been taught not to feel that way. I had been taught not to be invested in this foolishness. But that's part of why it's there, because it was a part of this learning process that Kenya undergoes about her parents and about the mythologies of her childhood that fall away. And I could draw on that one bizarre moment of my mom's sense of humor.

On Solomon's experience attending an affluent private school

It was alienating in a lot of ways, but I certainly got an excellent education. I guess it took me a long time to understand the mix of feelings I have about that. It's something I've written about a lot and thought about a lot because [Bryn Mawr's Baldwin School] was a great school, aesthetically it was beautiful, I got to do so many things, but I always felt just kind of cold and out of it there.

I and a lot of the other black students were just marginal because we were black. We would never be at the core of the social experience of that school, I felt, because we were black.

- Asali Solomon

There were things that could clearly explain this, like people really would ask me questions about the city, like, "Were there pools of blood on the ground?" and people would say things that were subtly or not-so-subtly racist. And class was a big issue. A lot of the kids were wealthy.

We weren't poor, but we weren't wealthy. We didn't have a lot of money — and that was something that was always there. I was very nervous about people coming to my house, which, in a lot of cases, they were not even allowed to do, because they weren't allowed to come to West Philadelphia.

But I think that recently I was thinking about how to articulate it. And I would say that in that situation I and a lot of the other black students were just marginal because we were black. We would never be at the core of the social experience of that school, I felt, because we were black. ... I didn't go to high school there, but I imagine that would've only increased as people got into dating, because [we] weren't going to be dating out there.

On the trade-off of attending a school where you feel marginalized

The thing that's difficult about "good schools" where you feel alienated or socially marginal, is that depending on who you are as a person, you can make it out of that and write fiction about it — about the pain that you experience. But a different kind of person won't necessarily get the benefit of the education because they're so broken as a person by that experience. So that's a kind of risk there. For me, I was definitely affected in ways that were negative and positive. But I think partially my ability to communicate about it in this way really means that it was a positive.

Read an excerpt of Disgruntled

President Obama, speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast today, condemned the twisting of religion to justify killing innocent people, saying that it always goes against the will of God. He also praised the Dalai Lama, who was in attendance, calling him a good friend.

The audience of 3,600 people gathered for the annual event in Washington included for the first time the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader who has lived in exile since 1959, when he fled Tibet amid a Chinese takeover. Beijing objects to any official recognition of the Dalai Lama by foreign governments.

Even so, Obama has met privately with the Dalai Lama on several occasions and today referred to him in remarks as "a good friend."

But the main focus of the speech was on concerns about religiously inspired acts of terror, echoing a theme he has touched on in past prayer breakfasts.

"From a school in Pakistan to the streets of Paris, we have seen violence from those who profess to stand up for faith and in the name of religion," the president said.

He pointed out the "horrific acts of barbarism in the name of religion" and the "rising tide of anti-Semitism and hate crimes in Europe" which, he said, was often justified by faith.

"No god condones terror," the president said. "We are summoned to push back against those who would distort our religion for their nihilistic ends," he said, describing militants of the self-declared Islamic State as a "death cult."

The Associated Press says it was the first time Obama and the Dalai Lama attended the same public event.

The president, who the AP says clashed his hands in prayer, smiled and nodded the Tibetan leader called him "a powerful example of what it means to practice compassion."

He "inspires us to speak up for the freedom and dignity of all human beings," Obama said.

National Prayer Breakfast

China

Dalai Lama

President Obama

Taipei's mayor and others are hailing the pilot of TransAsia Flight 235, which crashed Wednesday shortly after takeoff, for steering the aircraft into a river and avoiding buildings and likely more casualties.

"We really have to thank that pilot," a tearful Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je said of Liao Chien-tsung, the 42-year-old pilot who died in the crash. "He really tried his hardest."

The comments were reported by The Associated Press.

Dramatic video of the crash showed the ATR 72-600 propjet barely clearing buildings near Taipei's Songshan airport, clipping an elevated roadway with its left wingtip before falling into the shallow Keelung River. The plane was carrying 58 people; at least 31 of them were killed. Fifteen passengers survived the crash; 12 are still missing.

"The pilot's immediate reaction saved many people," said Chris Lin, brother of one of the survivors, told Reuters. "I was a pilot myself and I'm quite knowledgeable about the immediate reaction needed in this kind of situation."

Experts said it's too soon to tell whether Liao's actions prevented a higher toll. Investigators are piecing together what happened to the aircraft, which crashed shortly after takeoff. The plane's black boxes were recovered Wednesday.

Liao has nearly 5,000 flying hours under his belt, Taiwan's Civil Aeronautics Administration said; his copilot, who also was killed, had nearly 7,000 hours.

Reuters adds: "Taiwanese media reported that Liao, the son of street vendors, passed exams to join the air force. He later flew for China Airlines, Taiwan's main carrier, before joining TransAsia."

The AP reported today that moments before the plane crashed one of the pilots told the control tower: "Mayday, mayday, engine flameout."

The aircraft itself was less than a year old; one of its engines had been replaced in April 2014 because of a fault with the original engine.

Aviation experts say the ATR 72-600, the most modern version of the plane made by ATR, is among the most popular turboprop planes worldwide. It is known to be safe and reliable, as well as cheap and efficient to operate.

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