Hidden America

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  Construction of the island had just been completed when I first visited in the summer of 2007, and a lot of the people from the Dallas corporate headquarters were there marveling at it and feeling optimistic and remarking on the weirdness of the word “Oooguruk.” We took a boat over from shore, and we wore hard hats and orange vests and safety glasses, and as we toured around the island, one of the workers stopped to show us a polar bear cage, a giant jail-like structure. There were ten of them placed around camp.

  “Wait, why do you put the polar bears in cages?” a guy from Dallas asked.

  “The cages are for the people,” the worker answered. “You see a polar bear, you ring the alarm, and jump in the cage.”

  Even in summer, when the temperatures got up to 60 degrees, and herds of caribou ambled quietly over the marshy tundra, and the sun never went down for months at a time, life on the Slope seemed extreme. All that alone time. Nowhere to go. Stuck in a camp, little to look forward to other than food and a phone call home. But nothing could have prepared me for life on the Slope in winter.

  The temperature, on the day I landed in Deadhorse in February, was 45 degrees below zero. I worried about what that might feel like, wondered if the clothing I’d been provided—thick overalls, massive parka, enormous gloves and boots—would really do the trick. I geared up and felt like an astronaut. I bounced out of the plane, squinted as if preparing for a punch. I felt nothing of the sort. For the first three or four seconds, cold is just . . . cold. Nothing spectacular at all. Then my glasses seemed to freeze to my face, and I took a breath and felt a sting in my lungs that might have been instant ice but probably wasn’t. Within minutes, my cheeks, chin, and nose began to ache, first the skin and then . . . muscle? I had no other way of understanding that weird sort of ache. Soon I learned to aim the hood of my parka, lean my head so the fur trim would catch the wind and steer it away. Every little bit helped. I started admiring animals with very bushy fur.

  Deadhorse is a place that greets you with the emblematic architecture of the Slope. Nothing is lovely, nothing is charming, nothing is intended for anything other than hard use. Modular corrugated-steel Conex boxes serve as office buildings, machine shops, a hotel, and a general store decorated outside with a cartoon drawing of a dying horse with its tongue hanging out.

  The two-hour bus ride to Oooguruk, over the ice roads, was a visit to a post-apocalyptic world, an endless industrial landscape without the humanizing effect of pedestrians. We saw a musk ox. The heater on the bus barely worked, and so the guys huddled into their parkas and shivered but did not complain. Oooguruk is six miles off the coast, on the western reaches of the Slope, and so by the time we drove over the Arctic and into camp, there were no signs of other rigs, other camps. No neighbors at all.

  The camp, a series of Conexes all stuck together, was rather luxurious in the scheme of things. Inside, a few conference rooms, a weight room, a movie room, a dining hall. Bedrooms were overbooked, I was told, so my bunk for my two-week hitch would be in an “overflow area.” Aaron, a welcoming guy on the operations team, offered to escort me there, leading me through camp and out the back door, which opened back into the bitter air—and into a polar bear cage.

  “Follow me,” he said, unhitching the thick metal latch, and we went out the other side of the cage into the frozen night.

  “So my room isn’t attached to camp?”

  “Oh, a lot of guys stay out here,” he said.

  We hurried down a narrow pathway of crunching snow, toward a long building resembling a boxcar that had a series of freezer doors with numbers spray-painted on them. He gave the door marked 305 a shove and it opened just fine. There was warmth inside, plenty of warmth, and a fluorescent light over a bed with a sheet and a blanket. No sink, no bathroom—all of that was back at camp, and so I’d have to go outside, back in and back out of the polar bear cage, and into the main camp if I wanted to use it. Aaron said he’d try to scare up a two-way radio for me to keep in here, in case I got stuck. He said sometimes the snow blows and piles higher than the door, and if that happened, he would come and dig me out.

  “Now, guys are going to mess with you and tell you you’re sleeping in a bait box,” Aaron said. “Because you’re sort of polar bear bait out here? But look, the bears are out hunting seals this time of year, up where the ice is broke, so it won’t be a problem. And really, it’s a lot quieter out here. Very peaceful.”

  Then he left. I stood there. I stood there and tapped my foot. The room smelled strongly of Lysol. There was an extra can of it provided on a shelf. There was a window with a blue blanket covering it, nailed in place. There was nothing else, just a new kind of aloneness. I’ve known silence before, and I’ve known solitude, but nothing quite like this. It was the kind of alone maybe a monk feels, or someone in solitary confinement? No, that wasn’t quite it, either. I stood there utterly cut off, a person in a tiny bubble of warmth, out on the ice, beyond tundra, beyond good sense, a freezer door away from a solid white wilderness, a place I figured even God forgot.

  Aaron was right about the peace, right about the quiet, right about the bears not showing up, but it was all that he didn’t say that kept me guessing. All that no one on Oooguruk ever seemed to say: This is ridiculous. Was life out here not an absurdly desperate way to make a living?

  For days I would try to sympathize, offer a compassionate ear, try to get at how these people survived the cold, the remoteness, the working conditions, the time away from home. I suppose I was prepared to pity them. I wanted to understand how they’d gotten themselves into this mess.

  I was getting nowhere; I couldn’t seem to phrase my question in a way that made sense to anyone.

  One night in the dining hall, a guy turned to me and said, “You don’t get it. We want to be here. We haven’t been sentenced here. We choose to be here. We are happy here.”

  —

  TOODOGS RUNS A FAIR RIG, a respectful rig, where standards are high but no one is going to chew your face off for no reason whatsoever like what happened to him all those years roughnecking. All those years. And all those years before that. A lot of terrible shit, excuse his language. But a lot of terrible shit happened to TooDogs even before he ever got on a rig and started roughnecking, way back home on the reservation in Montana. Let’s just say more shit than any kid should have to deal with. And listen, when he hives up the way he does, it has nothing to do with allergies. It’s memories. It’s just bad memories popping up on his skin, and it only happens if someone touches him, so people here learn, they just learn, never to touch TooDogs.

  He says none of it is a big deal. He says it’s all workable. “You can’t control anything. Have you ever tried? See how messed up it gets? So just let ’er lay.”

  I have no idea what day it is. No one here speaks of Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday. What would be the point? Every twelve hours is the same, working or sleeping, working or sleeping. Time blends, blurs, all but disappears.

  A lot of people I meet on the Slope have a history they’re running from. They’re running from families that don’t work, that they can’t make work, that fail them, that they fail. Kung Fu has been in and out of jail more times than he remembers. Stubbs, a recovering drunk, keeps finding and losing the Lord. Willie, one of the young ones who rarely speaks, has a mom at home who beats him. Alaska has always been a place people flee to; the Slope is a place you flee to after you have fled to Alaska. A last chance. For some, it’s redemption. For others, salvation.

  By now I have spent a good many hours over on the rig, a series of stairs connecting platforms, rooms with roaring motors, pumps, pipes, long avenues of wellheads, bright blue and bright red and bright yellow—it is like the biggest, loudest, most colorful furnace room you ever entered. An oil rig, no matter if you are talking Alaska or Texas or Saudi Arabia or Iraq, is most famously recognized by its tall and mighty derrick, which is the suppor
t structure holding the drill. The reason it’s so tall—in this case, 183 feet—is to enable drillers to add new sections of pipe as drilling progresses. You keep adding pipe so you can reach deeper and deeper into the earth. The drill bit paves the way, turning clockwise, grinding down. (The scale of all this is much smaller than most people imagine: the drill bit ranges in diameter from six to thirteen inches; the pipe is as small as three inches. An oil well is a remarkably skinny hole.) The people on the rig orchestrate a constant parade of steel pipe, moving it, positioning it, connecting it, sending it spiraling down. They never see the oil itself, never smell or touch it—except in the rare case of a spill or an explosion or some other catastrophic event. The disconnect is absurd, or perhaps holy: the goal is to find that which must remain unseen.

  The torque, over here on the rig, has gotten worse. Way worse. The torque is on account of the top drive trying to turn the drill bit and the drill bit refusing.

  “We’re stuck,” TooDogs says to Rod, his immediate boss, the “company man” who typically spends most of his time in his office behind a computer. The torque has brought Rod over to the rig.

  “We are not stuck,” says Rod, who also goes by Colonel Klink, after the guy on the old Hogan’s Heroes sitcom whom he resembles, sort of. “We are ‘temporarily detained.’”

  “Dude, we’re stuck,” TooDogs says.

  They’re sitting in “the doghouse,” the heart of the action, command central. It looks like the pilothouse of a ship, only instead of overlooking the sea, everyone is watching the rig floor where the drill should be turning 80 or 120 rpm but isn’t. Kung Fu is standing out there looking at the hole, waiting for action. Beside him, the man they call Brain, because he is the only college-educated guy on the crew, is motioning to Andy, the driller, who sits in the doghouse at the console. Mostly Brain’s motions say: What the hell is going on?

  Andy leans into his microphone. “We’re temporarily detained, gentlemen,” he announces to the men on the rig floor.

  “Thank you, Andy,” Rod says.

  “Jiminy Christmas,” TooDogs says. “You two should date.”

  TooDogs and Rod have worked on so many rigs together over so many years, they can’t help but relate like brothers. “Rod’s hole, my rig” is the way TooDogs describes the division of labor. While the toolpusher is in charge of the iron and the crew and the tone and the humanity of the drilling operation, the company man’s total focus is the hole being drilled, an infinitely complicated, invisible place full of mystery and challenge and all the tools the toolpusher sticks down into it. The company man is the guy who reports back to the bosses in Anchorage and Dallas on the morning conference calls, discusses the day’s plan-forward. TooDogs goes to the meetings, too, but he doesn’t usually have to talk, and one of his favorite sports is watching Rod click his pen and yank at his eyebrows and get all red and irate about how dudes at desks don’t know shit compared to guys on a rig.

  The drill bit isn’t the only thing going down the hole. It’s just the tip of the “drill string,” which contains the tools, or “jewelry,” the drillers need to keep the whole assembly stabilized, to help it get unstuck if it gets stuck, and to read the rock formations that might help explain what the hell is going on down there. The oil is sitting somewhere down there in pockets, trapped, along with gas, within microscopic pores of rocks in underground formations. It flows under its own pressure, sort of like soda in a can. Pop the cap and the gas escapes, and the oil comes with it.

  Long gone are the days when oil wells went straight down like drinking straws. Directional drilling technology allows drillers to go down, over, up, snaking any which way through the earth and landing in ever sweeter sweet spots, reaching horizontally as far as four miles from the rig. In the old days, a single vertical well exposed about 200 to 300 feet of oil reserves. Now drillers can reach more than 20,000 feet of reservoir rock with one well, significantly reducing the footprint above ground, which in turn reduces costs and, in this part of the world, scarring to the tundra. If a person could see under Oooguruk after all forty wells here are completed, the picture would be a spiderweb of looping wells.

  Stubbs, who works downstairs in the mud pits, comes into the doghouse to ask a question about the torque. “Something’s really fucked-up with the number one pump,” he says. “You seeing that?”

  “We’re seeing it,” Rod says. “We’re feeling your pain.”

  Stubbs is a thin man in his fifties who moves as if life has offered nothing but wear and tear. He takes off his hard hat to scratch an itch, and I notice that he has, oddly enough, the same brassy orange-colored hair the kid called Turtle has. I notice, too, that Jason, the welder, has the same color hair. There is something going on here with hair.

  “I think we lost a blower on the number one pump,” TooDogs says to Rod. “I think it’s the blower.”

  “Well, it’s down,” Rod says. “We can’t do shit without circulation.”

  The two are staring up at the monitors in the doghouse, sitting on a cushioned bench. Turtle has mysteriously appeared.

  “Turtle?” says TooDogs, summoning the young roustabout over to the throne upon which he sits. “Turtle, I have a question.”

  “What’s up?” Turtle answers.

  “Come closer,” TooDogs says.

  Turtle moves.

  “Closer.”

  Soon the two are nose to nose and TooDogs speaks. “Why-are-you-here?”

  “I wanted to hear what you guys were talking about,” Turtle says.

  “You don’t get to do that,” TooDogs says. “You’re supposed to work, Turtle.”

  On some rigs, a lowly roustabout would never speak to the toolpusher, let alone the mighty company man, but this rig is different. Some old guys learn to break the cycle of abuse, while others don’t. It happens in all walks of life.

  “Turtle, Turtle, Turtle,” says Jason, the welder, who is here contemplating how to design a bracket to hold a computer monitor at the proper height for Andy, who has been complaining of a stiff neck. (“Would you like me to make it decorative, boys?”) Then he begins singing, just loud enough for Turtle to hear, “The Turtle Song,” a ditty he made up for the guys to sing on the plane ride out of Deadhorse, which they often do.

  Turtle, Turtle, shake your little tail.

  Turtle, Turtle, shake your little tail.

  Wrinkle up your little nose. Hold a snail between your toes.

  Turtle, Turtle, shake your little tail!

  “He’s singing ‘The Turtle Song’ again!” Turtle shouts to TooDogs. “I hate him!”

  “Shake your little tail—” Jason goes on.

  “Criminy,” TooDogs says. “Andy, do something about them.”

  —

  THE SLOPE OPERATES on a 24-hour clock, 365 days a year: Christmas Day, New Year’s Day, every hour of every day, there is never a moment oil isn’t being taken out of the earth. The typical shift is two weeks on, two weeks off, although many people stay considerably longer than that, earning bragging rights and more money than they can figure out how to spend. There is nothing to do here but work. Everything over eight hours in any given day is overtime, except on weekends, when it’s all overtime all the time. A kid like Turtle just starting out as a roustabout can easily pull in seventy grand. “That’s stupid money for a kid right out of high school,” Turtle tells me. “That’s insane, stupid money.” For a while, he thought he’d work a few years, save everything, and pay cash for college. But then he started buying motorcycles. And computers. And just anything he felt like. And now he looks at his dad, a Slope toolpusher making 250 grand, and he thinks, Forget college. His dad has a house in Florida, has a giant hot tub connected to his pool, custom-built in the shape of Mickey Mouse’s head. “It’s awesome,” Turtle says. “It’s the best overspent project ever.”

  I meet a twenty-three-year-ol
d electrician who brags of having no high school diploma and who last year earned $140,000. Charlie, the guy who builds the ice roads, once stayed on the Slope for seven months straight and, legend has it, saved every check, went home to Fairbanks, and bought a new house. With cash.

  The trick for a lot of guys who work here is to figure out how to go home and not spend all their money on booze.