The Good Hand

Now North Dakota, like 1860s-era Pennsylvania, has boomed. Williston sits near the center of the Bakken Formation, a subsurface rock unit bigger than the state of California, and one of the largest contiguous deposits of oil and gas on the planet. The gourd-shaped Bakken Formation underlies the soil of North Dakota and Montana and stretches into the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Advances in drilling technology—horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing—have turned this massive though previously unrecoverable shale deposit into a river of sweet crude grease. During horizontal drilling, a joint is inserted at the end of the drill bit, making it like a bendy straw. Hydraulic fracturing is an application wherein sand, along with a chemical stew called “salt water,” is pumped through the drill head at pressures high enough to crack the strata surrounding a well. These technologies allow drillers to reach reservoirs that, until recently, would have been inaccessible. As of 2013, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) put the amount of recoverable oil from the Bakken at a mean estimate of 7.4 billion barrels. In layman’s terms, that’s a lot of fucking oil.

These technological advances along with the state’s lax regulatory environment and a spike in worldwide oil prices combined to make investment in oil exploration in North Dakota incredibly attractive to wildcatters. They put the straw in the milkshake and started to suck. The rush to the region followed.

Oil field contractors began moving into North Dakota just as the working class of Middle America found itself unemployed. In 2008, the economy cratered, the housing market collapsed, and the price of oil peaked at $145 a barrel. With no houses to build, framers had nothing to frame, painters had nothing to paint, roofers had nothing to roof. The cost of silver and gold dropped, and miners had little to mine. The Great Recession flipped nationwide migration patterns on their head. While constricted economic circumstances led to the majority of Americans “battening down the hatches,” and sticking close to home, the flood of workers into northwest North Dakota looked like a modern Grapes of Wrath.

Desperate for bodies to work the rigs, North Dakota’s oil field companies gained a reputation for offering good pay, benefits, signing bonuses, per diems, and housing to any dude who could make the trek to town and swing a hammer when he got there. Men from all corners of the nation poured into the region looking for jobs. The population of Williston nearly tripled between 2008 and 2013, rising to roughly thirty thousand, with most estimates not accounting for job seekers sleeping in their cars or crashing in trailers and flophouses. Some estimates put the number closer to fifty thousand, others higher still. Between July 2012 and July 2013, one new person arrived in Williston every three hours—eight new people each day.

Who were these people? Men who flooded into Williston, spilled onto the streets, and poured in and out of bars, taking on the very attributes of the resource they had come to extract. Far from the delight of their children, far from the comfort of their girlfriends or wives, far from the comradery of brothers and fathers, or the caring of sisters and mothers, boots tottering on this ragged edge of America, so close to falling off the flat earth, with no money in their pocket and no friends for a thousand country miles.

Who were they and what were they running from? What was I running from?

I hit Williston with almost $3,000 in cash and about $2,500 in credit. You could say I was boomer rich, but in most ways, I was like everyone else. I didn’t foresee a long future in the oil and gas business, but neither did plenty of other guys. Williston was a tool, and we were using it to extract money from the oil companies in the same way those companies were using us to extract oil from the earth.

Perhaps the most concise explanation can be found in an old joke I pulled from Smith Dalrymple’s 1914 humor book From Pithole to California:

Where is the best place to go when you are broke?

Go to work.

All I knew was that I was driving into a city whose population was, as one oil field hand would put it, “ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag.”

It was a modern-day Pithole.

DK’S

DK’s Lounge is a square, windowless brick building that, from the outside, could pass for a bomb shelter. It sits on an access road off the main strip surrounded in every direction by parking lots and squat one- and two-story buildings the color of dust. Inside is a cavernous, open-room casino dressed in dark velvet like a porn shoot from the ’70s. The place is huge: the main room holds a circular bar, some pool tables, and a handful of blackjack tables. I brush past a guy on my way to order a drink.

“Excuse me,” I say.

“Is it Feel-Me-Up Thursday already?” He is thin and craggy with a ton of pomade in his slicked-back hair. He watches me order a beer from a young bartender in heavy makeup and a tight, low-cut top. “Am I a pervert to stare at her cleavage?” he asks.

I shrug off the question but offer him a smile.

“My old lady is a pain in the ass,” Pomade says. “She’s hot for a forty-year-old, though. You could open a beer bottle on her ass.” He actually whistles. “She’s studying criminal law in South Dakota. Wants to become a cop. With my record!” he says. He leans back against the bar, swills his beer, and looks around the room. “Thing is, she’s gonna be able to get shit on everybody. She’ll wanna be a Goody Two-shoes for a year or so, but I’ll make a dirty cop out of her. You bet. I’ll turn her into a dirty cop.”

He smiles, relishing the thought. “I spent six years in prison in Pittsburgh,” he says.

I’ve always had great admiration for scoundrels and I’ve found, throughout my life, that they are drawn to me. I’m a good listener, and I’m not quick to judge. Until I’ve sussed out a situation, I keep my mouth shut. The boom, I am to realize, is like the first day of high school or college: everyone is new and hungry for comradery. I can use this to my advantage. I need a job.

A couple seats down from us, a guy in a Pirates ball cap invites himself into the conversation. The two of them talk baseball, and I listen. After another beer and some more bullshitting, I tell them that I am looking for work, and they give me my first inside education on boom economics, oil field jobs, and the kind of people who work them.

Pomade is an electrician. He works two weeks on and one week off. On weeks off, he drives to South Dakota to see his old lady and their nineteen-month-old daughter. He also has a son in Pennsylvania who is twenty-six. His son is married with kids, so Pomade has grandkids older than his baby daughter. “But that’s life,” he shrugs.

Ball Cap is a truck driver. Or about to become one. “Just started today,” he says. He is pushing fifty, and he’s been unemployed for some time, living off his wife’s income in Wyoming. This will be his first trucking job, hauling water and sand to frack sites from 4:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. for fourteen days straight. He then gets a week off and returns to work the night shift. It will continue like that, with days and nights flipped upside down and a week off in between, for as long as he holds the job.

“I’m only making sixteen dollars an hour,” he says, “but I get a guarantee that I’ll be paid for one hundred and ten hours each week. And they promise I’ll never work more than eighty hours a week. So it’s a big win.” This doesn’t make any sense to me, but the companies in Williston are hard up for workers. I will learn that bizarre math is not uncommon in the oil field. “And,” Ball Cap tells us, “I get paid for forty hours on my weeks off.”

“What about overtime?” asks Pomade.

“Time and a half after forty,” says Ball Cap.

“Double time?”

“With that many hours it doesn’t even matter.” Ball Cap takes a slug of beer. Pomade nods in appreciation.

A pair of women sit at the end of the bar. They are the only women in the joint except for the bartender. Costumed in dyed hair and heavy makeup, big earrings, and long fake fingernails, they sip colorful drinks and speak quietly to each other. Pomade gives them a sideways glance. “Thing is, you start making eyes with them and thinking they like you, but they’re just sizing you up for money,” he says.

Ball Cap takes his hat off and then puts it on backwards. He says his buddy was recently given two hookers as a gift for his birthday. “Twenty-six hundred dollars,” Ball Cap says. “That’s the kind of money that’s up here. He had them all night, too. All night. From nine p.m. to nine a.m. They were out at the bar, hanging out together.”

“I like hookers,” says Pomade. “I’ve done a lot of drugs with hookers.”

“All night,” says Ball Cap. “His friend got him hookers for his birthday!”

Pomade nods in appreciation. “His friend is a good man.”

I’m out of cash and trying to stick to a budget, but I don’t want to leave. I stand for a while with nothing in my hand. Ball Cap notices and buys me a beer. I’m the only one without a job. “And besides,” he says, “they’re only three bucks for happy hour.”

Pomade pulls a photo of his daughter out of his wallet. “It kills me to be away from her,” he says.

“Oh, I know,” says Ball Cap looking suddenly miserable. He shows us his phone’s screensaver, a picture of two kids, ages five and six. “I just talked to them,” he says. “They don’t understand I’m gone. They think I’m hiding in the basement. They said, ‘We can’t find you.’” He looks at Pomade, then at me, then sheepishly back at his phone. “I play hide-and-seek with them,” he says.

The women at the bar get up from their seats, scan the room for eye contact, and then move slowly through the lounge and toward the door. It was impossible to tell while they were seated, but standing it is obvious that one of them is a little person, barely four feet tall. We watch the two of them as they weave their way through the crowd of men. Pomade has his eyes on the small one. He squints at her and a low murmur of appreciation leaves his throat. “Mmmmmmmmm,” he groans.

A drunk at the bar stumbles up to us. He wears a black T-shirt and a nose ring; he has a shaved head, a thick beard, and gauges in his ears, and he wants to talk about drills. He wants to know what drills we think work best. He looks me in the eyes and wobbles. I don’t have a favorite drill. Pomade is game, though. They debate the torque on DeWalts. Ball Cap wanders off to play blackjack.

The bar grows louder and drunker, and happy hour ends. I finish my beer and say goodbye to the men. I’ll never see any of them again.

It is drizzling as I step outside. I turn up my collar and take a few steps into the parking lot when I’m startled by a group of drunks who explode out of the door behind me. “Goddammit, Chris, you better put your dick away!” shouts the loudest of the group in a high-pitched simulacrum of a woman. His friends double over themselves in laughter until another guy does his impression: “You guys are eighty-sixed!” Together they holler, in a shambling, liquid unison, “Put your dick away, and get the fuck out of here!” I walk across the street to my Chevy, parked behind a Super 8 Motel, and watch the drunks stagger to the next closest watering hole, the rear of the Vegas Motel’s lounge. They pour themselves into it, and the door slaps shut behind them.

An old-timer stands on the sidewalk wearing a red trucker’s cap and blue jeans pulled up to his tits. He is with a ruddy-faced kid, who barely looks twenty-one, and they are both in their cups. “Where’s the entrance to the bar?” the old man asks. I point to the front door of DK’s. He stares across the street and blinks several times trying to focus.

“Where you coming from?” I ask.

“I don’t know a goddamn thing about anything around here,” he barks, dismissing me with a wave of the hand. I watch him nearly fall over in the middle of the road as he and the kid stumble into the building on the other side.

I climb into the driver’s seat of the Blazer. There is a six-pack sitting on the passenger side. I’d bought it earlier and left it there. I think for a moment, then twist open a beer and take a sip. My hand is trembling. Am I scared? I take stock. Yeah, I’m scared. But the beer tastes good even if it is a little warm. Whatever calms the jitters, cowboy. I take a big swallow and wipe my mouth. Then I start driving downtown. It is raining, and the beer washes my throat like the rain washes the streets.

FATHERS OF MEN

I arrive at J Dub’s Bar & Grill, a sports bar with wood paneling and exposed brick walls set just west of the train station. In the bathroom, there are fist-sized holes in the drywall and steel plates bolted above the urinals. I slide up to the bar and order a cheeseburger and a beer. A big guy sits down next to me. He is young with an open red face. He says hello, then smiles and lifts his cap to reveal a sunburn that ends an inch below his hairline. Above it, his skin is alabaster white.

“So I gotta keep my hat on,” he says, allowing a shy grin. He asks me how long I’ve been in town.

“Today,” I tell him. “You?”

“I just walked here from the train station,” he says.

We shake hands. His name is Buck, and he is from Missoula, Montana. He is the first friend I make in Williston. We will never become close, but for a short while our lives run parallel. We are both new to town. We need jobs, and we both face the ticking clocks of diminishing bank accounts.

Missoula Buck is anxious to start looking for work. It is Friday night, and he doesn’t want to wait until Monday morning. “I struck out for work once to make something of myself, but my friends abandoned me,” he says, “and I was homeless for a few months, living out of motels in Elko.”

“Elko, Nevada?” I ask.

“There’s a lot of work in the mines,” Buck tells me. “Well, there was before they raised the mine tax. Now everybody’s leaving.”

“You were a miner?” I ask. He shrugs and tells me he did it for a while.

I tell him I am sleeping in my vehicle, and he gives me a concerned look. “It’s packed to the gills where I’m staying,” he says. “I dropped my bag off before coming here to eat. I’ve got my own bed, but a couple of brothers share a mattress on the floor at my feet. I’ll let you know if it changes.”

I nod and thank him. He seems genuine, even a little green. “I worked as a supervisor of the meat department in a grocery store,” he tells me. “I figure I can always fall back on that. I checked in with a local spot, and it sounds like they might need somebody. Baggers there make fifteen dollars an hour.”

A young man sits down to my left and politely orders a beer. He’s got a ruddy, sunburned face, and when I nod hello, he holds me for a moment in a pair of steady blue eyes. “What’s your work?” is the first thing he asks.

“I’m looking for work,” I tell him.

“What are you trained to do?”

“Nothing,” I say.

He works on the pipelines as a welder’s assistant. “Drove out to the job site this morning,” he tells me with the slightest trace of a smile, “but they didn’t need me ’cause of the rain. I get twenty-six dollars an hour for the drive plus a per diem of a hundred bucks a day. So I got one hundred and fifty-two dollars today. Just for waking up.”

“Sounds pretty good,” I say, and Buck, next to me, agrees.

“Gravy,” the welder’s assistant says. There is a deliberateness to him, from the way he talks to the way he sips his beer. He says he’ll be working from spring to fall in Williston, and then heading back to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where he works, like Buck once did, as a miner. “It’s warm underground,” he tells us. He talks about Coeur d’Alene, and in his eyes, the lakes shine and the forests shimmer.

He is living in a trailer north of town now, “next to my brother’s trailer.” That gets us talking about family. The welder’s assistant laughs telling a story about his dad beating him with a belt. I grunt in acknowledgment.

“My dad whipped my ass, too,” Buck says.

“I bet,” says the welder. We all chuckle a bit.

“You ever been hit by a braided belt versus a solid leather belt?” Buck asks.

“Oh yeah,” says the welder.

“There’s a difference!” says Buck.

“Gotta say I prefer the braided.” The welder smiles.

“Any day,” affirms Buck. I listen and nod along.

“Once,” the welder tells us, “my daddy had me pull a switch from a cherry tree. Boy, that was the most painful whipping.”

“Them branches got snap,” I say.

“I know all about switches,” Buck says, “and all about soap. My dad’d make me wash my mouth out with soap. For cussing, you know. Once, he made me eat the soap, chew it, and swallow it. I got so sick. I tasted soap for days!” Buck laughs, and we laugh along.

This exchange proves to be the first in a pattern of conversations that I have with countless numbers of men in Williston, often upon first meeting. The conversation can be boiled down to two short sentences: “What kind of work you do? Man, my dad whipped my ass!” I come to think of it as The Williston Hello.

My father was a simmering, rageful presence in my life. Distrustful of his own wife and six children, he lived like a foreigner in his own home. It was always “your mother” and “you kids”; he spit out the words, refusing ownership of his own blood. To him, kin was enemy, and this paranoia made him ridiculous. He felt left out and put upon at the same time. Being raised by my dad was like being the ward of a mentally unstable teenager.

My father’s father was a flophouse drunk, and while my dad rarely touched alcohol, he had all the attributes of a full-blown alcoholic. He was a leering, swaggering dry drunk—narcissistic, depressive, ignorant of personal boundaries, and prone to unpredictable mood swings. We lived in a ramshackle post–Civil War farmhouse built on a lush hillside on fifty acres of valley in central Maryland. The unruly beauty of our surroundings was staggering, but my old man treated the house with the respect an angry gorilla gives a cage. He pounded the walls with his fists, kicked against the plaster, slammed doors until they hung barely from their hinges. He ripped the rabbit ears off TV sets, broke the wobbly legs off chairs, and smashed plates and cups and dishes with such regularity that, as a kid, it was as if the whole world was cracked. My memories of these tantrums, like the dinner plates, are shattered.

One shard: My mother rushes the whole lot of us, my two brothers, three sisters, and me, out the front door of the house. My brother Ryan dropped his fork at dinner, and now the old man is howling behind us, the dinner table shaking from the force of his fists. We race across the overgrown green grass of the front yard and toward the station wagon, my mother urging us on like a track coach, “C’mon, c’mon, keep it up, let’s go.”

In these moments, we are completely isolated. Our driveway is a quarter-mile long, up a steep, jagged hill. Behind the house is a wide expanse of field, and then a forest. No neighbors in view.

My mother holds the car door and we pile into the back seat, the whole brood frantic—brother piled upon sister piled upon brother. As my mom slides into the front seat and turns the ignition, the old man appears framed by the doorjamb of the house. He was a boxer before he joined the army—he had a reputation as a man who could take a punch—and he moves toward us in that boxer’s stance: shoulders hunched, fists forward, strangely light on his feet. His face looks gray, overcast, and somehow calm with an anger that belies expression. He steps onto the lawn and, as the car moves forward up the drive, he starts to run toward us.

I hear my younger sister’s voice: “Oh no. He’s coming, Mom, he’s coming.”

From the back seat I watch him, his face contorted now, howling a stream of inarticulate curses, spittle flying from his chin. He is maybe fifteen feet away when his boots hit the busted macadam of the driveway. He reaches down and picks up a rock the size of his fist. “Get down!” my mother yells. “Get down!” He brings back his arm, and he throws.

He misses. Through the window of the car, I watch him stoop again to the gravel. He picks up another rock.

A FEW YEARS after I leave Williston, I will find myself glued to the radio in my truck, running late for work but unable to stop listening to Pastor Joe Ehrmann, a former Baltimore Colts defensive lineman, talk about what he calls the father wound:

I still have a father wound. A hole in my soul shaped like my father. A tremendous number of men in America and women, boys and girls, are wounded by absent dads or missing dads in their lives.

The father wound is a big issue. It particularly plays out in masculinity because men are never really sure of their masculinity.

Every man needs two things in life. One: they need some kind of father, some kind of man that’s a little farther down the road that can look back and tell us that we’re on the right path … and the second thing every man needs is some kind of brother that you can walk arm and arm as you struggle through life together.

That scar, that hole in a man’s soul the shape of his father, was a defining feature of every man I met in Williston. Men had built their lives around it. Like a tree growing around a hatchet. The father wound served as a method of communication between me and the men I met. We talked jobs, then fathers. Before women, before politics, before home, “Man, my dad whipped my ass!” It bonded us together. Because we didn’t have that man a little farther down the road, but maybe for a night, over a few beers, by showing off our scars, we could find some kind of brother.

Before I leave the bar, Missoula Buck nods his big sunburned head at me and clasps his meaty hand around mine. He gives me his number. “You can always use a friend,” he says.

I HEAD TO Bill’s Back 40. The bar is crammed with men in dirty work clothes. POW and MIA flags hang from the walls. A pop country song blares out of the satellite jukebox. It sounds like a macho deodorant commercial. I love the outlaw guys—Waylon, Hank Jr., and Billy Joe Shaver—but in 2013 bro country is at its peak. I push my way through the crowd. At five foot seven and 150 pounds, I have never been big, but I have never felt as small as I feel crossing that room. The men crowding the floor—and there are only men, or boys really—stand heads higher than me, wearing PBR- and UFC-branded caps, stained Carhartts, and dirt-smeared jumpsuits. “I’m the Red-blooded, Hardworking, God-fearing American Obama Warned You About,” one shirt reads.

I meet an Australian in a braided cowboy hat with the brim curled over. He has thick sideburns. “I won the Wolverine contest!” he hollers at me over the music.

We end up blind drunk in his souped-up pickup truck, bouncing and rumbling through the night. The evening is wet and warm. The air smells fresh and sweet like a melon just cut open. The Australian tells me that he slept in his truck when he first got to town. “No shame in that,” he says, driving me back to mine. “This is history, mate!” he shouts out the window, to the road and the prairie, the oil and the money. “The fuckin’ gold rush!”

BOOMTOWN, USA

I have just enough room to lie flat from head to toe. I can’t roll over—surrounded as I am by camping gear, clothes, my guitar—a parlor size Blueridge acoustic nestled safely in its case—books, and clutter. Light filters through the tinted windows of my Chevy Blazer. Morning. My mouth is dry, and I need to piss. I blink myself awake to the sharp voices of children. A mother and father walk past, each holding the small hand of a child. I watch them from behind the dark panes of my vehicle’s windows.

I piss into an empty Gatorade bottle, set it by my feet, and go back to sleep. When I wake up again, wrestling a hard-wired sense of shame at being seen clambering out of the rear of my SUV, I flip open the back window and unhitch the tailgate. When it drops, I slide out on my ass. Boots hit asphalt. I stretch in the hot North Dakota sun.