When I attended a recent Chamber of Commerce breakfast for new members, Brian Lallement announced that he had just started a new business in town as a mobile notary and bilingual loan-signing agent. Making polite small talk afterwards, I asked him where he had learned to speak Spanish, and his answer began to reveal a fascinating life history. In his straightforward manner, the 51-year-old Lallement said he had picked up Spanish when the boats he was working on were docked in Latin American ports during his 23-year career in the oil exploration business. He had visited or worked in 40 countries, on every continent and ocean around the globe’and he had photographs to prove it. Growing up in Pacific Palisades, Lallement attended Marquez, Paul Revere and Palisades High before graduating from UCLA in 1977 with a major in geography and ecosystems. He looked for a job in the environmental area, but since it was a relatively new field (he was in only the third class to graduate with that major from UCLA), he was unsuccessful. Through a friend he landed a job with Western Geophysical, an oil-exploration company. Although his college training was in direct contrast to his job description, he was a pragmatist about making a living. Lallement flew from the Palisades to Houston to catch a plane for Egypt, where he spent the next eight months searching for oil in the desert. From there, the company transferred him to a ship where he was a junior observer. They laid “recording tapes” cables behind the boats and set off small explosions in order to get a geological picture of the sea floor. The sound, which echoes off the floor differently depending on the terrain, was recorded and geophysicists then interpreted the data. When looking for natural resources at sea, navigation is extremely important. “If you find oil, you have to be able to pinpoint where it is in the ocean,” Lallement explained. “There aren’t roads, labeled with signs like there on Sunset, helping you to find the location again.” Before global positioning systems, navigators and explorers used different methods to help ships pinpoint their location on the ocean. At one time they put three different radio points on land, using a triangulation to help find the exact spot on the water. From the boat, Lallement spent a month in a pup tent next to a 10-foot radio tower on an isolated and desolate area on the Venezuela coast. The company left him with enough food and water for several weeks. Alone with nothing but a radio for company, he also faced other hazards, such as being stranded. A fellow co-worker was left on a deserted island off of Nicaragua. Due to weather, the boat couldn’t retrieve him for months. He existed on coconuts until he was finally pulled off the island. In 1978, he worked off Yucatan. He was on the boat 10 days and then off for four. “I couldn’t talk to anybody when I went ashore,” he said, “so I started to learn Spanish.” Lallement is now fluent in Spanish, speaks French and Portuguese and can swear in Arabic. He smiled “In any foreign language,” he said, “you learn to say please, thank you, yes, no, count to 10 and curse.” Most of his stays on boats were eight weeks or shorter. “You can’t function in a floating industrial environment longer than that,” he said. “You can’t maintain a level of concentration and safety.” The first time he was aboard a boat, he was seasick. “I fed the fish for three days. After that, I only got sick the day after ‘indulging’ with friends the night before.” Then he reached the point that no matter how nasty the sea, he was never sick. There’s dangers living on the water: waterspouts, hurricanes, reefs and fires. “Fire’s the scary one,” Lallement said. “You don’t have anywhere to go.” Even though there are warnings for hurricanes, sea storms can come up with phenomenal rapidity, especially in the North Sea. “You spend four hours laying cable, then you have to pick it up in an hour. You ‘run’ for land and hide near islands.” In close quarters, the crew have to get along. “If you fight on board,” Lallement said, “you’re fired. It’s too isolated and too intense.” Brazil hired the Western Geophysical exploration department to do scientific research off Antarctica, measuring fissures on the sea floor. “That was the trip of a lifetime,” Lallement said. “Antarctica is where the Atlantic and Pacific ocean run into each other’and they’re not friends. It was nasty. There are 40-foot waves in the summer.” And the winter? “Nobody goes out then.” The waves are so strong that they come together and corkscrew. They’re so tall that a boat can’t ride the wave down the back; instead, it slams down into the trough with a big slap, and the steel hull of the ship vibrates. Lallement met his wife, Floralc Chacin, in Venezuela, but their marriage lasted only five years. He said it was hard for her to have a husband who was home just four months out of the year. They have a son, Robert, who is now 17, and plans to attend college in the United States next year. Six years ago, Lallement was aboard an Italian boat, with a Filipino crew, off the coast of Mozambique. They were surrounded by a Spanish fishing fleet. Since he spoke Portuguese, he was the only one able to communicate with the dock workers. It was then Lallement learned he was laid off again, for the fourth time. He decided to retire from that line of work and return to the Palisades. There’s no room on a boat to stockpile possessions. After all those years on the sea and his travels, Lallement has only photos and memories. Along with shots of beautiful sunsets, dolphins, and co-workers, his work shows the poor in nation after nation. It took him nearly three years to acclimate to the U.S. again. “Living in this country, we have so much,” he said. “We overuse so many resources. We don’t recycle anything, we trash it.” He showed me a picture of a bus that had been turned into a communication center in South Africa. “What would we do with a bus like that here?” he asked. “Scrap it, put it in the junk yard.” In the U.S. “use, throw away.” Rhetorically, he asked, “How many of these houses that we tear down here, could we recycle and give to the poor?” “We don’t use solar power here, because there are not enough people to get behind the politicians and put pressure on them.” Brian Lallement is in a position to comment; he’s spent years exploring for oil.
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