There is an appealing mountain-man rawness to Bo Mason, and when he comes onstage the blood of the book rises. Bo is hungry; he wants things. To Stegner, the thinker and visionary, the Bo type was the whole problem with the West—the prototypical boomer who rushes to a place, scores or tries to score, and then rushes to the next. But while the moralist in Stegner might have seen Bo’s story as a cautionary tale, the novelist knew that in his father he had struck gold. And if in many ways the son was unlike the father, he was not entirely devoid of ambition himself. He, too, wanted things, just different things.
George Stegner, or Bo Mason, would have felt right at home in Vernal, Utah, population 9,000. As I drove into town I joined the white-truck parade that cruised down Main Street through classic strip mall shops and the overabundance of hotels, like the Holiday Inn that local rumor had it was rented out for a year in advance by Halliburton before it was completed. The drivers of the trucks were here for the same reason I was: the boom in drilling for oil and natural gas. Here was a place that embodied Wallace Stegner’s vision of the West as boomtown. It was a town full of Bos, a town full of hunger—that is, full of a kind of palpable urge for more. It teemed with the eagerness to extract, to strike it rich, to take.
There was plenty for the taking. The vast dry lands south of Vernal hold about half of the state’s active rigs for both oil and natural gas, and present a veritable smorgasbord of energy extraction: shale aplenty, fracking—where new technology allows for a return to old fields—and even their very own poised-to-open tar sands. These tar sands, like their more famous cousin to the north, focus on the open mining for bitumen, a heavy, black, viscous oil to which the feathers of migrating birds have been known to stick.
While some of the methods might be new, Uintah County has been Utah’s main oil producer for more than seventy years, and as far back as 1918 National Geographic extolled the area’s potential for yielding fuel: “Campers and hunters in building fires against pieces of the rock had been surprised to find that it burns, and investigation showed that they contained oil.” In other words, what is happening here is no nouveau drilling affair, no young Bakken sweetheart in first flush, freshly wooed, but a long on-and-off-again affair that has been going on for decades.
In Vernal there are signs everywhere of how Big Oil has wooed the town. Not long after I arrived, I drove over to Uintah Basin Technology College, a beautiful sandstone building with the streamlined look of a brand-new upscale airport. I decided to tour the hallways of the school, playing the visiting professor, and peeked in on a class called “Well Control,” where a movie was being shown that, unlike the grainy safety films of my youth, had the production values of Spielberg. If all that didn’t tip the place’s hand, then certainly the dioramas of oil derricks and the prominent placement in the lobby of the name Anadarko, the giant Texas oil company that is the area’s main employer, did. Anadarko’s particular bouquet to the school and town was a $1.5 million gift for construction and faculty endowment.
“Energy is fundamental to our existence,” the plaque in the foyer proclaimed. “It is as important as clean air, water and affordable food.” Amen.
From the school it was a short drive over to the rec center, a looming spectacle of oaken beams and concrete and great sheets of glass that revealed within Olympic pools and running tracks and climbing walls and squash courts. It looked as if Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Shorter had gotten together to build their dream house. Right down the street was the Western Park Convention Center, which covered thirty-two acres, one of the largest buildings of its kind in the West. On top of that, Vernal sports shiny new schools and municipal buildings and baseball parks. Anadarko alone paid $14 million in county property taxes the previous year, and raw total income for Vernal and Uintah County from oil and gas far exceeded this number, as a result of sales tax, production taxes, mining royalties, and lease payments on federal land. In other words, the rec center and other buildings are not gifts outright but the metaphoric equivalent of Big Oil saying, “Here, honey, go buy yourself something nice.”
This is all without even mentioning the word that all defenders of oil and gas speak first and last: jobs. The word is sacredly uttered. And it’s true: jobs have been gained—hundreds of them—and when I drove into town, Uintah County had the lowest unemployment rate in the state at 4.1 percent. But no one talks about what type of jobs these are, or the fact that, as the white trucks attest by way of their license plates, many of these jobs are for people coming from somewhere else. (It goes without saying that most of the profits are heading elsewhere too.)
After taking in the rec center, I paid a visit to the chamber of commerce. There, when I mentioned my concerns about the environmental consequences of the oil boom, a young woman named Misty smiled at me from behind the counter and said: “It’s an oil field town and everyone makes money from the oil field. Tree huggers should go somewhere else.” I climbed back in my car and was drawn like a magnet to a big sign that said: I DRILLING. The sign pointed toward a small shop called Covers & Camo that I soon learned specialized in custom truck-seat covers, its windows bedecked with stickers, shirts, and displays, all professing love for the pursuit of gas and oil. Inside, wearing a big straw hat and a T-shirt sporting the same words that adorned the sign outside, was George Burnett, the affable, slightly manic owner. I talked to George for a while and was surprised that his business really had nothing to do with drilling.
“I was working retail up in Montana in my twenties,” he said, “when the Juice Guy came to town. You remember the Juice Guy? He gave these seminars and had these infomercials about the benefits of juicing. Well, I loved what he was doing and wanted to bring the same passion to my work. I worked for him for a while and then went to work for myself.”
His own passion, it turned out, was to become a kind of Tony Robbins of seat covers. George had opened his first shop, called Mr. Trim Seat Covers, back in Provo, Utah, a decade ago. But then the economy started to crater and no one could afford trucks, let alone covers for the seats of trucks. A friend told him about Vernal, where economic prospects seemed to be moving in the opposite direction from the rest of the state and where the latest boom would mean not just plenty of trucks but truck owners with plenty of money to spend. Business was slow at first but then, calling upon his Juice Guy training, he found his gimmick: I Drilling! He put up his signs, made his T-shirts, and suddenly he was the talk of the town, everyone honking their horns when they drove by his shop. Only a few drivers gave him what George called “the single-finger salute.”
After we finished chatting, I browsed for a while, taking in the large wall map of the United States with pushpins for every active rig in the country along with a state-by-state tally. Texas still led the oil league by a wide margin, with 933 rigs, but I noted that North Dakota and Pennsylvania were on the rise, with 203 and 85 respectively. Utah had only 39.
THE OIL PROGRESS PARADE IN VERNAL, UTAH, 1953.
I was confused by the small number of rigs, but when I asked my host about it, he explained patiently that an active rig and a well site are quite different things: a rig drills for oil that a well site will continue to extract. In fact, though the number of rigs might seem small, just to our south there were 2,477 producing wells, with thousands more expected to open up soon.
George then turned from the map and pointed to his pride and joy, an old photo that he’d had blown up and made into a poster. The photo showed three women in hard hats and one-piece bathing suits riding on a truck bed that featured, along with the women, an undeniably phallic ten-foot-tall wooden oil derrick with black papier-mchè oil gushing out of its top. The black-and-white photo was from 1953’s Oil Progress Parade down Main Street in Vernal, an event that George, in his genius, had exactly re-created the previous summer, right down to the derrick, one-pieces, and vintage truck. Hundreds of people had come out to cheer. It had been both a display of civic pride, and, I suspected, an in-your-face challenge to those few left in town who ob
jected to oil’s dominance. At the top of the list of the event’s funders was Halliburton.
For all the town’s riches, there was some fear that boom was becoming bust before their very eyes, with oil prices falling and natural gas suddenly abundant. The town suffered from Dakota envy, understandable given the numbers on George’s wall. If a bust was coming then it wouldn’t be the first time. Since its initial boom in 1948, Vernal has been riding these waves up and down, the boom of the 1980s crashing hard and then rising to crash again in the early 2000s. During those hard times no matter how the town ed oil, it hadn’t ed them back. There were no oil parades during that bitter span of almost two decades, when the money that the town had grown used to had flown back to Texas. If a lesson was to be learned, it was, it would seem, one of caution, but as soon as oil returned the town threw itself back into its big arms. That was the W. boom, including a last-minute gift of three thousand more leases, which then turned into the Obama boom, and continues on to this moment. It was this recent boom that they had come out to celebrate at George’s parade last summer. But for all the bunting and cheers, they had learned to be wary. Did oil really them? They had been burned before.
I thanked George and walked next door. From Covers & Camo to the Dinosaur Brew Haus is less than a fifty-yard walk, and I was about to learn that not everyone in town was quite as gung-ho about oil as my new friend George. The place was bustling as I jockeyed my way through the crowd and ordered a beer called Hop Rising. My working method as a writer over the last few years has boiled down to the first line of a joke: A man walks into a bar. I’d found this a good way to take a town’s temperature and, sure enough, before I’d had two sips I was listening to a tall, bearded man, an obvious energy apostle, describing the joys of fracking.
“What the eco types will tell you is that it contaminates the water,” he yelled over the bar’s din. “But if you know anything at all about it you know that the water’s here. And the gas is here.” He held one hand down low and another up higher to illustrate.
I listened to him for a while, saying little, and then he got bored with his own proselytizing and moved on. Almost immediately I found myself talking to the next guy down the bar, who turned out to be a geologist. Though he, too, worked in the oil fields, he was skeptical when I told him the theory I’d just heard about the distinct levels of gas and oil.
“That’s great,” he said. “But just ask that guy one question: ‘What happens if there is an earthquake?’” He didn’t seem to be predicting an earthquake as much as tweaking those in town who spoke with the fervor of certainty.
After a while the crowd thinned out a bit and I took a seat near the wall. It was then that I began my education in the relative diversity of Vernal’s citizens. Above me was a picture of a raft in the middle of some impressive rapids and next to it another picture, this one of a rugged man, gray at the temples, obviously a river guide, in front of a scene of craggy rock and whitewater. Then, eavesdropping on the table next to me, I learned that there were still people who had been drawn to Vernal not for oil but for water.
I introduced myself to the table full of river guides, telling them I was a writer and that I was specifically interested in ways that the oil companies had curried favor with the town and its citizenry. There were hoots of laughter, and soon they were trying to outdo one another.
“Well, there’s the fancy golf tournament,” said one. “The Annual Petroleum Invitational!”
“And the rodeo and concerts,” said another. “Oil Corp’s Country Music Explosion!”
When the laughter died down one of the group pointed up to the picture on the wall of the older river guide. He explained to me that it was a photo of a legendary local riverman, Don Hatch, but that his son John, exemplifying the town’s strange mix, had gone into the oil business.
Misty at the chamber of commerce had said that tree huggers should get out of town, but here was a table full of them, mixing easily with the roughnecks. The residents of the bar at least, if not the town, were a strange blend, and belied the cliché of oil not mixing with water.
“WHAT WOULD YOU do if you were a high school kid and had a chance to make a hundred grand in the oil fields?”
Rob Bleiberg had asked me that question four years earlier in Grand Junction: What would I do given the choices? Is it surprising that a high school kid, told he can make great money in the oil fields, drops out and takes the chance? And is it surprising that a town rushes toward the goodies that Big Oil doles out? In Pinedale, Wyoming, another boomtown, the students at the local elementary school all have new computers to go with their new school buildings. That’s hard to say no to, hard to shrug off as we go on our merry environmental way.
But if we are going to celebrate the gains, then we had better look hard at what has been lost. Property taxes and crime have soared along with employment. The incidence of rape in Vernal exceeds that of the rest of Utah, which exceeds that of the United States as a whole. At the same time, air quality has dramatically worsened, and last winter’s ozone levels in this rural county rivaled those of Los Angeles. These very real problems are counterbalanced for the citizens by the gifts the boom brings. But what happens when boom turns bust? When Big Oil leaves and the problems remain?
The truth is that I’m not sure I will ever really make sense of what I saw in Vernal. I originally went to the town in part to talk with Herm Hoops, a rafting guide who had lived in Vernal for more than forty years. But we got our dates mixed up, and while I was in the West he was back east. It wouldn’t be until five months later that I would finally return to Vernal and get a chance to shake Herm’s hand.
When I did return, right before Christmas, I would find him in the driveway of his home just outside of town. He was working on a raft and wearing shorts and a T-shirt despite the afternoon chill. Herm was a big man with a thick beard and an easy manner, and he immediately invited me into his home.
“When I take people down to raft Desolation Canyon, the single thing they talk about now is the number of oil wells they see,” he told me. “That’s not what they paid for. They paid to get away from it all. Not be in the thick of it. They say oil is good for business. Not for my business.”
He added that he now preferred solo river trips to guiding groups.
“That way, I only have to deal with one asshole,” he said.
We sat in his living room, a cozy place with a lit Christmas tree, a glass case featuring Civil War figurines, two kittens who crawled all over me, and a fine view of the sun’s late red glow on Split Mountain in Dinosaur National Monument.
“When I first came here in the ’70s it was a beautiful place. A lazy Main Street lined with cottonwoods. The old booms had faded and the two top businesses in town were agriculture and tourism. People came to see the Dinosaur quarry. People came to float on the river.”
He held out his large hands, palms up.
“And what are we left with now?”
Certainly not tourism, I thought. A tourist, like me, would be hard-pressed to find a hotel room in Vernal. As it had been in July, it was in December.
And then there were the busts. Unlike some, Herm remembered what it was like after the last one. Storage lockers of people’s possessions being auctioned off. Houses foreclosed on. He understood that we all needed gas and oil, he said, and he was not against drilling. But what was lacking, he told me, was perspective and long-term thinking. What about saving and investing the boom money? For him, the whole town was exemplified by the archetypical Vernal high school student, the one who drops out of school, lured by the chance to make money working out on the oil field, and who does make money—good money—and buys a house, a big truck, and some ATVs.
“And what happens if that job goes away?” Herm asked. “He is left with no education, many debts.”
At the last public meeting, where Herm questioned the oil orthodoxy, a boy just like that stood up and said: “If we don’t keep drilling, how will I pay for everything?”
There it was in a nutshell. Herm wasn’t trying to drive oil out of town. At the same town meeting he had merely suggested that Vernal proceed with some restraint, and consider investing its money for the future. For that he was shouted down and later received death threats in the mail.
The truth was he was simply stating what he had seen over the last forty years. Big Oil brought its gifts and its gifts were shiny and, for the most part, irresistible. But it also brought crime, prostitution, spousal abuse, and a Main Street culture that embodied the minds of the twentysomething males who came to town to work the oil fields. That and the fact that Herm had been around for many spills, had seen oil and chemicals foaming and floating down the Green River. His river.
Somehow that made him a little less giddy than most about Vernal’s prospects.
“I’ve been through it before. They come into your neighborhood. They change your neighborhood. Then they move away. And we’re left to pick up the pieces and pay the bills.”
WHILE IN VERNAL I toted a book along in my backpack, a book that, for a change, was not written by Abbey or Stegner. This was instead a collection of Bernard DeVoto’s environmental writing called The Western Paradox, and its pages practically bristled with energy, insisting on being read. The sentences, written from the 1930s to 1950s, spoke directly to Vernal today. For instance: “The West does not want to be liberated from the system of exploitation it has always violently resented. It only wants to buy into it.”
It occurs to me that to read Bernard DeVoto is to, perhaps, briefly think Wallace Stegner less original. Or, if you accept Stegner as the apotheosis of the western environmental prophet, as many now do, then DeVoto must be cast in the John the Baptist role. Regardless, Stegner grew out of DeVoto. Both sharp and aggressive, both fancying themselves realists (they were), wanting to strip away myths, they shared a vocabulary and to a certain extent a philosophy.
All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West Page 12