[Kate Parker Adams]

I must admit that I am a relative late comer to oilfandom, given my age at 
least.  I got started with a pair of jumper cables previously kept in the 
trunk, unseen.

It was late in 1992.  I was between jobs, taking classes, enjoying the last 
of a generous severance package and in the general situation of figuring 
out my next move.  I knew that I didn't want to stay in engineering 
consulting.  I was exploring my spirituality. I was questioning most 
everything about my life, trying hard to find a better way to live as it 
was the first time I had ever had the security and discretion to make such 
conscious decisions.

I was driving down the road at midday just before Thanksgiving, can't 
exactly remember why.  For various specific personal reasons I won't get 
into, a song I must have heard a thousand times before scored a direct 
hit.  I knew the lyrics, but this time I really listened to them.  The song 
burrowed into my brain and expanded there in such a way that it has never 
left.  That was the beginning, the event zero of Oilfandom for me, silly as 
it may sound.

That weekend I bought BSM and D&D.  I couldn't stop listening to them, 
lyric sheets in hand.  I'd heard Blue Sky Mine and The Dead Heart and Beds 
are Burning many many times before, but now they and their companion songs 
had taken on a whole new life.  D&D evoked memories of a childhood spent in 
dry, dusty places.  A week or two later I scrounged up copies of a couple 
of others and continued collecting.  Each new album brought a new hunger 
for more.  It was like someone handed me a roadmap to the soul and a set of 
keys. I bought ES&M the day it came out.  By the next August I was three 
rows from stage at Great Woods for the famous triple bill with Hothouse 
Flowers and Ziggy Marley.  One live show and the hook was set forever.

I think it is the combination of the driving and moving music and the 
incredible lyrics that have pulled me in and taken me somewhere I might not 
otherwise have headed.  I go through phases of listening to the Oils, but I 
always come back when I need to motivate myself to do something I feel is 
important, something I need to throw my heart and soul into.  The music 
always seems to pickup and get moving, to go somewhere, to become active ...

Oil songs resonate with my most deeply held values and sometimes bounce off 
stuff in the old mental attic that I didn't even know was there.  I am 
forever finding new stuff in old lyrics, sometimes because of where I am in 
my life and sometimes because my perspective has changed.  Like when I 
recently found myself listening to One Country over and over, only to 
figure out that it was because of the important things it has to say about 
living a life in balance:

	Who hands out equal rights?
	Who starts and ends that fight?
	And not rant and rave
	Or become a slave

That lyric had not made much sense to my conscious mind before.  I had been 
running myself into exhaustion and One Country helped me realize how I 
risked becoming like a number of activists that I really do not like if I 
kept up such an insane pace - people who are cynical, judgemental, bossy, 
single-minded, arrogantly expert yet blind, unwilling to understand or 
consider the perspective of others, neglectful of their families, etc.  The 
Oils have never gone there and, hopefully, neither will I.

I won't say that I migrated away from amoral engineering business 
consulting for corporate and government clients of lacking virtue toward a 
career involving activist environmental and social justice pursuits simply 
because I followed the Oils.  I will say that I have been inspired and 
motivated and coached along that path through my interaction with their 
work.  Shaking my booty to the driving beat and surfy guitars all the 
while, the music carrying the message through my body and soul with a great 
life energy. I climb the music toward the sun like my roses climb the wall, 
like pea vines climb the garden fence.