Kula and most of his crew were from Tonga or another Polynesian island. They came to North Dakota from Salt Lake City, Utah; Spokane, Washington; and Monterey, California. Many had grown up together or had a connection to Kula’s family. First it was just a couple of them, but then someone’s brother or cousin or nephew was laid off and wanted a job in the oil field, so Kula found an opening and the crew grew.
Around camp, they were called “the Nation.” Kula and the Nation had built up a reputation as being one of the best coil crews in the state. People sometimes called them “the ghost crew” because they were incredibly efficient and worked so hard that no one ever saw them at the equipment yard. They were always out on a job. Kula didn’t trust a lot of people in the oil field. He told me how a good friend had betrayed him a few years ago in an attempt to take over his job, so Kula chose the people he worked with carefully. At C&J, only a few non-Polynesian workers had become friendly with the Nation. One was Scott Morgan, the young man I had met the first time I met Marchello—though he typically worked alone. He was in a different department and didn’t have the same schedule or supervisor as the rest of them. Then there was Matthew Anderson, Marchello’s son-in-law. Like Marchello, Anderson was a devout Mormon who didn’t drink—a strange concept to most of their coworkers. Anderson was married to Marchello’s youngest daughter, who lived back in Ogden, Utah, with their four young children. Anderson applied to the oil field around the same time Marchello did. They shared a trailer at the man camp, but he was back in Utah this week. “We can share living facilities together because his wife doesn’t care he’s living with another woman,” joked Marchello. There was also Curtis Kenney, and I realized quickly that he was not popular with the group, but Kula liked him. And since Kula called the shots, he stayed. Then of course there was Marchello, the only woman. Since most other crews in the oil field were young, white, and male, they were like a crew of misfits.
As the night progressed, more players fell out. Kula knocked out both Kenney and Tui with a full house. I took Marchello out with a flush. Then it was down to me, Kula, and Sam. I stared at my dangerously low stack of chips and figured this was the last hand I could play. My first two cards were a jack of diamonds and a five of diamonds. Not great, but it could be worse. I pushed all my chips to the center of the table. Kula, whose stack of chips was much higher than mine, matched me. A 10 of hearts, a 3 of clubs, and a 7 of diamonds came down first. Didn’t help me much. Then a three of hearts. Still nothing for me. Finally a queen of spades came down, and Kula and I flipped over our cards. He had a pair of fives. Also not much, but it beat mine. I was out of the game. Kula beat Sam a few hands later.
Marchello announced that it was her bedtime and said good night to us. The guys wanted to play another round. My photographer and I glanced at each other and he nodded, so we both scooted closer to the table. Kenney gnawed on the end of a baguette, and more beers came out. Without Marchello there, the guys became rowdier. Kula asked if we wanted to see a trick. He gripped a Bud Light can in his palm like it was a kid’s toy, put it up to his mouth, and made one swift jerk with his head. The top of the can ripped open. A perfect cut. My jaw dropped. The top dangled on the side of the can, held on by an inch of aluminum. Kula saw my look of shock and threw his head back and laughed, shaking the trailer.
Suddenly there was a loud snap, and everyone looked at Kenney. He had fallen to the floor. He stood up and dusted off his jeans. “My chair broke,” he announced. The guys hooted and slapped their knees, collapsing into fits of laughter. Kenney fixed the chair as best he could and sat back down, but he was now three inches shorter than before. His chin barely cleared the table.
Kula asked which football team I rooted for. I said I didn’t watch football often but if I had to pick, it’d be the 49ers. As another round of cards hit the table, he said, “Hey, Blaire, you remember losing to those two fives?” referring to the hand we played earlier. “I do. It was just like watching the 49ers play the Super Bowl. They didn’t quite make it.” He laughed again.
One of the Tongan guys prepared more drinks, mixing whiskey and Mountain Dew. He couldn’t find enough cups so people handed him their empty Bud Light cans. Kula had already ripped the lids off most of them.
Kenney asked me why I wasn’t drinking one of the whiskey–Mountain Dew concoctions. I told him I was driving. “If you want to stay here, we have an open trailer. I’m in 37 and there’s nobody in the trailer next to me,” he said.
I thanked him but declined his offer.
Suddenly his tone changed. “Only Cindy can get away with this ‘whiny and tired’ shit. You think I’m being a jerk? When you’re having fun, you just stay and have fun.”
The room fell silent, and everyone looked at Kenney.
Kula butted in. “No women are allowed at any of these man camps anyway.”
I smiled politely and thanked Kenney again for the offer but told him we needed to head back to our trailer tonight.
But Kenney continued, slurring his words a little. “I’d volunteer to let them share my room.”
I wasn’t sure if he was talking about me and my photographer or women employed by C&J. Either way, my skin crawled at the thought, and I tried to change the subject. I asked the group if they ever missed having more women around. Kenney said no, and explained that having women on the crew was inconvenient if one had a wife. “We’re all married, and when Cindy come to the crew, it really put a damper on things.”
“Inconvenient for Curtis,” joked Kula. “Speak for yourself, buddy. We don’t have a girlfriend here at work.” The guys laughed.
“They’re just plain, flat jealous,” said Kenney.
“Because if we were to say anything to Cindy, Curtis would be pissed. He wouldn’t let us look over at her,” joked Kula.
I was quickly catching on that Kenney and Marchello had known each other for a while. I couldn’t tell if anything had happened between them. An affair? Harmless flirting? A crush? I later learned Kenney’s relationship with his wife, Anna Marie, was complicated—she had Parkinson’s disease, and one reason Kenney stayed in the oil field was to pay her expensive medical bills. But there were also rumors Kenney had cheated on her, though he later denied them. When I later asked him why his wife didn’t move out to North Dakota, he replied: “Housing is too expensive, and she wouldn’t see me anyway,” referring to how many hours he was away from the man camp. “And girls by themselves aren’t safe here,” he added.
The song changed. Fergie’s voice played out of the iPhone speakers, “You got me trippin’, stumblin’, flippin’, fumblin’, clumsy ’cause I’m fallin’ in love,” and Kula dealt another hand. Finally around midnight, my photographer and I announced it was time for us to go. Kenney made another offer for us to stay there, but again we told him we had to leave. Kula had won most of the money, but I came away with $20. I told Kula next time I’d take his money. He threw his head back and laughed.
19. CINDY MARCHELLO
Cindy Marchello was a lot of things before becoming an oil field worker. She had been a cab driver, a paralegal, an acupuncturist, a farmer, a cheese factory worker, a nylon factory worker, a cook for a hunting camp, a waitress, a wagon train reenactor, a Tupperware salesperson, a healer at Native American powwows, and a long-distance hiker on the Pacific Crest Trail. But for much of her life, she was a stay-at-home mom, raising a houseful of children and married to a man named Richard for 28 years.
Cindy was born in 1957 on a farm in Twin Falls County, Idaho, to Earl and May Marchello, and she could skin a pheasant by the time she reached first grade. The farm was 10 miles from the nearest town, with fields of alfalfa, sugar beets, and grains. Every morning, she, her sister, and two brothers woke up at dawn to start chores. Cindy took care of pigs, cows, and chickens and, when she was eight, drove the tractor. She hated wearing dresses and from an early age she was treated more like a lesser son than a daughter. “My older sister is quite girly, so she did chores in the house but she didn’t do
outside stuff,” said Cindy. “Then my brothers were rather spoiled. They didn’t help with dishes or take out the trash. So, I did. I got up in the morning to milk cows before I went to school, and I milked cows when I came home from school.”
They lived in a rickety farmhouse with no foundation or insulation, and the structure was often infested with moles. They had no telephone, and only one channel in black and white came in on the TV. The entire family would sit around the TV and watch whatever was on—Christian evangelist Billy Graham, soap operas, the Western series Bonanza. Cindy loved The Wizard of Oz when it aired, and she walked on the top of the fences around her farm just like Dorothy did in the movie. Her family made their own bread, soap, and clothes and canned vegetables from the garden. “We were always gardening, always pickin’ somethin’, weedin’ somethin’, cannin’ somethin’,” she said. They used a ringer washer to do laundry and hung their clothes outside, even in the winter.
Their water came from a cistern on the farm, and the pipes froze frequently. To keep the pipes warm, her father placed a ditch burner, or a propane bottle with an open flame, near the pipes under the bathroom floor. “It would catch the floor on fire all the time,” said Cindy, “and over the years there was no bathroom floor because my dad had burned it out with this stupid torch thing. I was in my 20s before I realized that everybody didn’t have their pipes freeze all the time.”
Money was always a struggle for them. “We were poor farmers and we always knew we were poor,” she said. When Cindy was seven, her parents had to file for bankruptcy after her older sister, Vicky, became ill and had her tonsils removed. They had no insurance and the out-of-pocket medical bills drained all their savings.
Her parents were devout Mormons, and they took Cindy and her siblings to the Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints church every Sunday and to smaller church gatherings during the week. Her father, a large man at six foot three and weighing about 300 pounds, was always hard on her. At age 10, Cindy helped him stack hay bales in the truck. He threw six bales up to her at a time, three in each hand, and expected her to do the same. “He’d be mad at me the whole time because I couldn’t keep up,” she said. “Most men cannot pick up a bale in each hand, let alone three bales in each hand, and for him to be mad at me because I couldn’t do it? So because of that, to this day I think I’m lazy.”
She attended a school 20 minutes away that had only 16 kids in a class. In fourth grade, she learned about the oil field for the first time during a class lesson and saw a photo of an oil derrick. It looked exciting. She remembered thinking, I want to go up in an oil rig.
But by 16, her career dreams fizzled. She started dating that year, and knew she needed to find a husband soon. Almost every girl she knew married around that age—she’d been attending the weddings of her peers ever since freshman year. “If you weren’t engaged by the time you graduated from high school, there was something wrong with you,” she said. College was out of the question. She was told women could do one of four things: get married, become a teacher, become a nurse, or become a secretary—and the jobs were usually for the less-attractive girls. She chose marriage. One night, she was invited on a double date. One of her girlfriends had a crush on a boy named Don, and Don brought along his friend, Steve. Cindy and Steve dated after that. One year later, just after Cindy’s seventeenth birthday, they were married.
The wedding was in August at her parents’ house, and her mother made her dress. About 30 people attended, and for Cindy, the day was a blur. “The one thing I remember about the wedding was a guy had his pants unzipped in all the pictures. Why didn’t the person holding the camera lean over and say, ‘Zip up your pants?!’”
Soon she was pregnant. She entered her senior year of high school in 1974 five months’ pregnant, and her principal told her she wouldn’t be able to walk at graduation with her class. She explained that she wouldn’t be pregnant by graduation—the baby was due in January—but he said it didn’t matter. Being pregnant at any point disqualified her. She was angry and quit early. “I finished everything except the final test,” she said. “People say, ‘Do you have a high school diploma?’ Yes, I did everything that I was supposed to do except for that jackass.”
When the child was born, she named her Earline, but she could tell something was wrong with the baby from the beginning. Her skin was yellow, and she didn’t eat or sleep. She cried for hours on end. Cindy had cared for many neighbors’ babies and knew this much crying was out of the ordinary. She took Earline back to the hospital. “She had no gallbladder and no glands in her liver, and she had big holes in her heart,” Cindy said. Five months later, after spending much of her life in the hospital, Earline died. Cindy was heartbroken. “When my baby died, I couldn’t speak. And my mother went ballistic because she’d try to talk to me and I couldn’t answer her. But my baby had just died.”
Losing the baby was difficult on her relationship with Steve, which had always been tumultuous but now got worse. “We’d get in big ol’ knock-down, drag-out fights,” she remembered. He didn’t attend Earline’s funeral, and Cindy was furious with him. They worked on the relationship for another year, moving to Missouri and Iowa and back to Idaho in attempts to find work, but eventually she had enough. She found out she was pregnant again and wanted a better life for her unborn child, whom she desperately hoped would live. One weekend, when she and Steve were living in Idaho, her parents stopped by her house on their way to relocate to the Seattle area. She stole away in the moving truck without telling Steve. It would be the last time she ever saw him.
She and Steve stayed married on paper for five more years before she applied for a divorce. They had lived together for a total of eight months during their marriage.
Cindy was now 19, single, pregnant, and living with her parents in Stanwood, Washington. She gave birth in July 1977 to a healthy boy and named him Ricky. At first she was sick with worry that something might happen to him as well, but after a few weeks, she relaxed. She adored being someone’s mom. Being a single mother in the Mormon community was difficult, however. Very few women in her community ever got divorced—if they were single, they were usually widows. Her hope was to find another husband quickly. “If I didn’t have any options at 16, why would I have any options as a 19-year-old single mom? I had no skills, no knowledge, no resources. I had to just figure it out.”
In Stanwood, she was hired at a local cannery and befriended an attractive coworker, also named Steve. They dated briefly, and he left her pregnant again. She gave birth to a baby boy named Matthew in October 1978 when she was 21 years old. Cindy didn’t have much contact with the second Steve when she was pregnant. She moved with her parents to Price, Utah, a tiny coal mining town in Carbon County where her parents were from. Steve stayed in Washington. When Matthew was about a year old, she traveled up to Washington with both her sons to stay with her sister and reconnected with Steve. She wanted Matthew to know his father. One rainy night, after she, Steve, and the kids went to the movies, he drove them back to her sister’s house. He told Cindy to unlock the front door and he’d be right behind her with Matthew. Cindy took three-year-old Ricky, but as soon as she got to the door, she heard Steve rev the engine and leave with Matthew still in the car. She called the police, but what she didn’t know was that Steve had already filed custody papers and hired a lawyer. She tried to take Steve to court, but to win back custody, she’d have to prove that Steve was unfit to be a parent. The judge decided in his favor—Cindy lost the case and custody of Matthew.
Devastated, Cindy returned to Utah to live with her parents. She worked as a cook at a 24-hour diner called Bob’s. One day, a large man with lush dark hair and a cream-colored polyester jacket walked in. Compared to the rough-looking coal miners and railroad workers who frequented the diner, he looked like a movie star. He was about six feet tall, muscular, clean shaven, and, according to Cindy, he resembled country music star Glen Campbell. For the next two weeks, he came in often and sat at the counter to watch Cin
dy cook. Finally he asked her out to lunch. She said yes.
His name was Richard. A Vietnam vet who had worked as an Army combat engineer, Richard came to Utah’s coal mines after working on pipelines in Alaska. Richard already had three children, ages seven, five, and three, from a previous marriage, and Cindy began caring for them. To her, he seemed like a great catch. He was smart, well traveled, and had a stable job. He was divorced as well, so he understood her situation. He was gregarious—everyone she introduced him to fell for him. She was proud to be seen around town with him, but even as she fell deeply in love with him, another side of Richard appeared behind closed doors. He had wild mood swings—one second they were talking and laughing, and the next instant there was a flash of anger. “There were huge red flags, but I didn’t pay attention,” she said later. “I couldn’t see them.”
Soon enough they were married. On their wedding night, instead of having a romantic evening, she watched the kids while Richard watched TV, and she fell asleep alone on the couch. Later he would tell their daughter Jennie that he married Cindy because “she was cute and I didn’t want to pay a babysitter.”
If Richard and Cindy’s marriage was off to a shaky start, it would only get worse. Financial troubles plagued them. Richard was laid off from the mine. They moved back to Stanwood, Washington, for Richard to find work, and Cindy hoped to reconnect with her son Matthew. But Richard struggled to hold down a job there as well. The country had slid into a deep recession. The national unemployment rate reached 10.8 percent in 1982 and 12.2 percent in Washington, the highest in the state since the Great Depression. A lot of families were out of work. Richard and Cindy mostly lived off his small disability checks from his time in the Army. They moved into an old camper with parts of the floor missing to save money and avoid paying rent. It was located on a friend’s property in a remote area about 60 miles away from Stanwood. Cindy was soon pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, in April 1982, and two years later, to Jennie. She was now taking care of six children and, on occasion, Matthew as well. Cindy legally had visitation rights to see her son, but she said that Steve sometimes wouldn’t let her see him.
The New Wild West Page 11