Fathers and sons are next-door neighbors. Some towns — places with names like Security and Stacy and Omega — are really just the occasional house or trailer surrounded by cotton and soybean fields, as remote as a platform in the middle of the sea.  There were four men from this area who were together on an oil rig on the night of April 20 when it exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. The four lived within an hour of one another on quiet roads here, more than a hundred miles from the shore.  One of them, Wyman Wheeler, 39, returned home on Monday night, his legs broken and burned. First thing Tuesday morning, his father, Pete, who lives a few yards away, began taking the doors off the hinges in Wyman’s house so he could make it around in his new wheelchair.  Another man, Chad Murray, 34, from Ferriday, came back unscathed, at least physically. He met his family early Thursday morning at a hotel in New Orleans, after a roughly 30-hour odyssey by lifeboat, rescue vessel and bus.  The two others — Wyatt Kemp, 27, of Jonesville, and Karl Kleppinger Jr., 38, from just over the Mississippi River in Natchez, Miss. — have not come back. They are among 11 rig workers missing and presumed dead.  That most of the four men’s families know one another is hardly surprising, given how small these towns are. Mr. Murray’s father, Stanley, helped Pete Wheeler install a new kitchen in his own house on Tuesday morning after the door removal in his son’s house. The man who persuaded Pete Wheeler, 65, to work in the oil fields when he was a teenager still lives about a mile away.  That the four men were all working offshore is not surprising either. There are not many other options here. International Paper in Natchez closed about seven years ago, and Titan Tire a couple of years before that. There is still farming, but that is about it.  “Without a college education, you could probably work in construction or plumbing,” said Ryan Merritt, 24, from nearby Vidalia, who is working as a roughneck on an offshore rig to support a fiancée and a 1-year-old daughter. “But the thing is, people that work around here, they already have those jobs.”  So a young man from here leaves home and becomes a roustabout, an entry level job on a drilling rig, and his career is set. The money is good, enough to support a family. But the price is exactly half your life: hitches offshore last for two weeks on, two weeks off, or three on, three off, and so on.  “By the time a child reaches 20, his father’s been away for 10 years,” said the Rev. Stan Wyant of Lismore Baptist Church, which two of the four rig workers, the two who survived, attend.  Taking out a pencil and running down the church directory, Mr. Wyant recognized the names of 19 men who worked in the oil fields, not including those who are retired or disabled.  “I don’t know of any of them that want their children to go into it,” he said. For that matter, he said, “I have yet to talk to a single one of our men who didn’t say that he would leave if he could.”  Pete Wheeler, Wyman’s father, is one of them.  “I’d have rather him went to school and done a little bit different,” he said of his son. But, he added, “he never did seem to mind going as I hated to go.”  Wyatt Kemp had just been promoted, which made it easier to see his newborn daughter.  “He would be able to have holidays home, and he was real particular about that,” said his grandmother, Carolyn Kemp.  Mr. Kemp, of all people, would have known the value of even fleeting moments of family time. His father — a former oil field worker himself — was killed in a car accident in February. He was 53.  “We just had the funeral, it seemed like, and now it looks like we may have another,” Ms. Kemp said. “I don’t know what else can happen. I’m hoping nothing else.”
Four of the men on board the rig when it exploded came from an area where working offshore is one of few options.