The New Wild West

by Blaire Briody

  The trailer was tidy. Will’s crayon drawings were posted on the walls. A cut-out paper butterfly was taped to the window, framed by handmade curtains. Egg cartons and children’s books were tucked into an alcove above the couch. Next to the window behind the couch was Chelsea’s sewing machine. I slid into the kitchen table bench, padded with a faded leaf-print cushion. The foldaway table was held up by one leg and wobbled as I leaned against it. A few flies buzzed around the room. Chelsea opened the refrigerator, and it was filled with pantry items and canned goods. The fridge didn’t work, she said, so they used it for storage. They kept a small refrigerator outside for cold items.

  Chelsea explained that she and her family had slowly been adjusting to living in a small space together. At their house in Kentucky—where they had multiple rooms and a huge backyard—it was easy to find an empty room, close the door, and not speak to anyone. Here that was more difficult. “Not having alone time is something that’s really hard for me because I’m very much an introvert,” she said. “There’s nowhere to kinda hide and regroup. There are times Jacob comes home and he’s exhausted and I’m like, ‘You have to sit here and watch this child for a minute. I have to go into the bedroom and just be alone.’”

  Jacob was trying to stay sober, and avoided hanging out with his coworkers because most of them drank heavily. His coworkers were also recent transplants to North Dakota, and many were first-generation immigrants from Mexico. “It’s safer that way,” Chelsea said. “We just kind of stick to ourselves and do family stuff.” But since his coworkers lived in the same trailer park, it was difficult to avoid them completely.

  Chelsea hadn’t made any friends yet, but she hoped to find other women she could connect with. On her trips to nearby New Town, the largest town on the reservation, she’d chat with two older ladies who worked at the post office, and she followed the Williston chapter of a group called Oil Field Wives on Facebook. She also began blogging—for her personal website and for a national site called Real Oilfield Wives. She wanted to share her experience because there was limited information online about what it was like to live in an oil field camper with a family. She hoped she could show other moms it was possible to raise a well-adjusted kid in such conditions.

  In her first post for Real Oilfield Wives, “Our Camper Life: An Introduction,” she told the story of their journey to North Dakota. Her writing was breezy and positive. “Jacob has been working in North Dakota as a roustabout for about eight months now, so we are fairly new to the oil field lifestyle,” she wrote. “He really seems to have found his niche and I’m so very proud of him! I am so grateful for the freedom our oil field lifestyle has afforded me so that I can work on my own projects and home school my son.… I hope you will join me as I chronicle our family’s adventures with camper living, home school, and life in the North Dakota oil patch. It may be an unconventional lifestyle, but it works for us and I hope you will enjoy reading all about it!”

  Subsequent posts included recipes and camper-living tips. There was also a post on the “not so fabulous things about living in an oil field camper,” like dealing with dust, small spaces, and camper repairs. It was one of the few negative posts, though toward the end she included a positive note. She wrote that she “wouldn’t trade [camper life] for the world,” if it meant being with her family.

  On Fridays she posted a photo called “This Moment,” inspired by another blogger, to capture a single moment that she wanted to remember from the week. A “moment” from the summer of 2013 was a photo of Will. He stood in a gravel lot with wind-blown prairie grass behind him. In his tiny hand, he held a string. On the other end was a plastic bag, suspended in the air and puffed up from a breeze. Will had made himself a kite.

  On the blog, Chelsea didn’t delve too deeply into her personal life or the politics of being connected to the oil industry. “I just don’t quite feel comfortable getting into the politics of it yet,” she said. “It is such a touchy subject. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle.” Her personal politics leaned toward liberal, and she tried to be environmentally conscious in her everyday life. She believed you could be both while staying affiliated with the oil field—although being an environmentally conscious liberal was quite unconventional in the area, especially for an oil field family. She argued that Jacob and his coworkers tried their best to avoid spills and protect the environment. Sure, there were a few bad apples, but for the most part, she believed people followed the rules.

  Chelsea also refrained from blogging about the trailer park drama she experienced on almost a daily basis. The culture at their park was proving difficult to adjust to. They’d recently had trouble with their neighbors, who worked in the oil field as well. A rule at the trailer park was owners had to keep dogs tied up, which Chelsea followed diligently with Thor. But other residents disobeyed the rule. Dogs would approach Thor and Thor would lunge at them. Her neighbors berated her for Thor’s behavior. “They really didn’t like us,” she said later. “But they were the idiots that should’ve obeyed the rules.”

  She ranted about the situation in a Facebook post:

  In the past 48 hours I’ve been gossiped about so loud I could hear it … had my dog threatened with a knife and otherwise been made into the bad guy because people let their dogs off leash and they run at my dog who, of course, fights back. Yet still I go out this morning and there are dogs running all over the damn lot with no leash. Kiss my lily white Kentucky ass, folks. I am NOT the bad guy because you can’t follow the rules! Next time I won’t break up the fight your dog picks and I’ll just let my dog eat yours. OVER IT!

  In addition to dog-related squabbles, her next-door neighbors were often rowdy and drank late into the night. Chelsea called them “drunken preschool children.” They’d sometimes circle their trucks together, drink beer, and listen to loud music. There was also drug use in the park. Jacob once found a meth pipe in the bathroom of a man he worked with; the man sometimes holed up in his trailer for days without emerging. Chelsea didn’t like leaving the camper after dark. “There are murderers out there, there are people that disappear, there are Mexican drug cartels,” she said. She kept her .38 revolver in the trailer and was glad to have a big dog like Thor.

  Despite her reservations, during our visit Chelsea was positive and hopeful, with a we-can-do-this! attitude. She missed home, but Jacob was making good money. Their rent was affordable and their camper was paid off, which wasn’t the case for many of her neighbors. She considered their camper to be in the mid- to lower range. “We got a hell of a deal,” Chelsea said. “I try to remind myself that when I see some of the behemoths with dishwashers and laundry facilities that I sometimes lust after.”

  She explained there was a Fuzion camper in the park, a luxury RV that starts at around $85,000 new and could easily go up to $110,000 with all of the upgrades and features, such as a surround sound stereo system and a gas-burning fireplace. It cost more than their home in Kentucky. She walked by the RV when the blinds were open and saw a big-screen TV in the living room and little flat-screen TVs in other rooms. “I’m, like, we don’t even have a TV!” She chuckled. “What’s so weird out here is the appearance of wealth. Where we’re from, if you’re making that kind of money, you’re driving a Mercedes, a BMW, a Porsche. Out here, it’s not that flashy. People drive a huge truck, get a boat, or get a camper that’s twice the size of ours.… But then you get these people who take out a loan to buy a trailer and get in over their heads. They can’t make ends meet and they have to go home because they didn’t play it smart.”

  With many local residents receiving $50,000 to $100,000 a month in oil royalties and plenty of oil field workers making over $100,000 a year, some people didn’t think twice before plunking down $100,000 in cash for a luxury camper. Pockets of wealth were being created all over the region. By 2010, the average income in the county where Chelsea lived had doubled to $52,027 per person, ranking it among the richest 100 U.S. counties per capita—counties that included Ne
w York City and Marin, California. In 2012, about five millionaires were made every day in North Dakota, or some 2,000 a year, according to one researcher’s calculations.

  Back at Chelsea’s trailer, Will approached me to show off his stuffed elephant. “See the twunk?” he said, holding it up. “Elephants pick food up with their twunks and put them in their mouth.” He squished the elephant’s body in half as he pushed on its trunk, then ran back to his mom.

  Chelsea stepped outside to smoke a cigarette; the screen door slammed shut behind her from a gust of wind. Will watched her leave. As soon as she was out of sight, he went up to the wall and licked it, then giggled and ran back through the trailer to his room. Chelsea heard the commotion and came inside to check on him. “Ya-hoo!” he yelled, running past her.

  She shook her head. “He does this many times a day.” Will mostly played indoors, but sometimes he rode his bike and played in the dirt outside. Once he built a fort using camper chairs and a blue tarp. But Chelsea made sure he stayed close and she could watch him from the window.

  Chelsea was glad to be able to home school Will. Staying in the camper with him all day was tough sometimes, but she didn’t see any other options. “I don’t want to send him to any of the reservation schools … I’ve not heard good things about oil field workers’ children going to reservation schools, so I’m a little leery of that.” The reservation schools weren’t ranked high, and she didn’t want him to be singled out as a newcomer oil field kid.

  She felt that many people on the reservation didn’t want her or her family there. We looked out her camper window at the row of trailers and prairie grass beyond. “I get it,” she said. “These people came into your town—they’ve invaded your space. But you know, let’s grant each other a little grace.”

  22. PASTOR JAY REINKE

  One day, in May 2011, as Pastor Jay Reinke was holding his office hours at the church, a man walked in and asked to speak to him. The man told Reinke he’d been sleeping in his car. “I just can’t do it anymore,” the man said. His name was Stuart Bondurant and he had come to Williston from Rawlins, Wyoming. By the time he arrived in town, he had only $20 left to his name. He’d applied to jobs for three days, but despite having a commercial driver’s license, no one seemed interested. He’d spent his remaining funds on gas and had a few dollars left for a slice of pizza at Pizza Hut. When he looked up from eating his meal, he saw Concordia Lutheran Church in the distance. He knew churches sometimes helped people out. If nothing else, maybe someone there could tell him about a homeless shelter or give him a free meal.

  When Bondurant walked in around 1 p.m., Reinke told him to sit down, and they chatted. Bondurant said he was considering giving up and going home to Rawlins, but he didn’t know what he’d do there either—plus he didn’t have money to make the trip. Reinke felt for the man. He remembered saying “You know what? I probably shouldn’t do this, but we’ve got floor space here. Why don’t you just sleep on the floor tonight? Then you can keep looking for a job tomorrow.” Bondurant agreed. He rolled out blankets in the TV lounge down the hall from Reinke’s office. That night, alone in the church, he went into the dark sanctuary room, sat in the pews, and prayed. He prayed that the Lord would watch over him and keep him safe. He prayed for guidance. Was coming to Williston the right decision? So far, the locals seemed angry at him for being there. He’d received dirty looks at restaurants and grocery stores. When he went to wash his clothes at the laundromat called Bubba’s Bubbles, the attendant muttered: “We don’t want your kind here. You’re dirtying up the machines.” He wondered if he should’ve stayed back in Rawlins.

  The next day, after Bondurant put away his blankets and left the church, he went across the street to apply for a job at the Airport International Inn. To his surprise, he was hired as a maintenance worker at $16 an hour, significantly more than he was making back in Wyoming. The job, however, didn’t offer housing, so Bondurant returned to the church. Reinke agreed Bondurant could sleep at the church for a couple weeks until he saved up enough money to afford his own place.

  About a week later, word got out that Pastor Reinke had someone sleeping at the church. A friend called Reinke and said he knew of another man who needed a place to sleep. “Would he be able to stay [at the church]?” his friend asked. Reinke agreed. What harm could come of it? he thought. It seemed like the Christian thing to do. He had no idea of the floodgates he’d opened.

  * * *

  In early 2012, Walmart had had enough. Managers worried they were scaring away customers. They had stopped allowing overnight parking but had difficulty enforcing the rule. They’d tried giving stern warnings, they’d tried calling the police to hand out tickets, but the people kept coming. Every night, there’d be a new set of pioneers who had recently arrived in town. Evidence grew of prostitution, drug use, and theft in the parking lot. In February, Walmart hired a security guard to patrol the lot at night and, in cooperation with the city, announced every car would be towed if it remained there past closing hours. The next morning, for the first time in nearly two years, the parking lot was empty.

  Meanwhile, Pastor Reinke agreed to allow more and more men in his church. Nearly every day another man knocked on his door. “People just started gravitating to the church,” said Reinke. He had a soft spot for the men—he lent them money when they needed it, and he gave a few men he trusted, like Bondurant, keys to the church and asked them to keep an eye on things when he wasn’t there. He even invited some men to sleep at his house with his children, two of them teenage girls.

  A few members of the congregation began to feel frustrated with the men sleeping in their church. There was sand on the pews during Sunday’s worship service, and the men’s restroom smelled. Men talked on cell phones outside. Some families who had attended the church for years stopped coming, and the church’s neighbors started to complain.

  “One night we saw a cop handcuff someone out here, and I just don’t feel secure anymore,” a neighbor, Donna Sieg, told the local paper. “I’m forever locking my doors and carrying my pepper spray with me, and I just don’t feel comfortable in my own little neighborhood anymore.”

  “You got this cold-hearted response from everybody when they knew you weren’t from the Williston area,” said Bondurant. “It was not a very nice congregation. They didn’t want nobody there and made you feel so unwelcome. You’d leave church feelin’ like you were trash.”

  Reinke overheard locals complain about the influx of new people—if newcomers weren’t planning to move their families to Williston and settle there, they said, they shouldn’t come at all. Reinke was angry when he heard this: “I thought, ‘We should be grateful they’re here to work. Let’s build whatever community we can while they’re here. They’ve got families. They’ve got a home they’re trying to save. What are people supposed to do? They’ve got to survive.’”

  Many locals were simply angry their town was being taken over. Crime was increasing. Statewide, homicides were at the highest level in nearly 20 years. Rapes were at the highest level ever, according to data going back to 1990. And there were 2,872 drug-related arrests in the state, up 64 percent since 2002. In 2012, the NorthWest Narcotics Task Force, which covered the oil patch area, confiscated more than $85,000 in methamphetamine. And alcohol was a factor in more than half of the deadly traffic accidents in the state that year. Headlines on the front page of the Williston Herald in 2012 included “Man Robbed at Gunpoint,” “4 Arrested on Kidnapping Charges,” “Man Shot in Williston,” “Two Arrested on Burglary, Drug Charges,” “Man Jailed for Indecent Exposure.”

  Then there was Sherry Arnold, a 43-year-old math teacher and mother of two from Sidney, Montana, who was out jogging west of Williston early in the morning of January 7, 2012, when she was abducted and murdered by two men from Colorado. The men had traveled to the area to look for work in the oil industry and were using crack cocaine during the attack. Her body was found in a shallow grave near Williston two months later.

>   The gruesome crime shook the area and received national attention. Locals began to fear any single man with a mysterious background arriving in their town. Women talked about feeling afraid to go out at night. Licenses to carry concealed weapons in the county increased. “It’s because of the oil boom and all the money the people have,” Andy Anderson, owner of Scenic Sports & Liquor in Williston, told the Associated Press. “People, even some little old ladies, are buying a lot of handguns and piles of Mace and stun guns because of the crime.”

  Soon after the incident, the Williston Herald editorial staff decided to print a full list of registered sex offenders living in the county—their number had doubled in the past 16 months. “Williston and Williams County is not the same community it used to be. We all know that,” the article stated.

  Evidence of sex trafficking and prostitution in the area added to the uneasiness. Ads for female escorts in Williston filled Backpage.com, like “Riley,” 22 and from Hawaii, who “always aimed to please.” And “21-year-old Megan,” who claimed to be “fetish friendly.” Rumors spread about prostitutes targeting man camps and truck disposal lines, where truckers would sit and wait for hours to unload oil field waste, to find new customers. Williston resident Gloria Cox stopped letting her 13-year-old grandson walk anywhere alone because of the child trafficking rumors she heard.

  Police departments in the area felt overwhelmed and understaffed. The Williston Police Department went from receiving 6,089 calls for police services in 2009 to over 17,000 calls in 2012. Before the boom, Williston’s local jail, built in the 1950s, could house only 37 people and rarely filled up. A $14.5 million expansion in 2008 increased its capacity to 112 beds. The facility was expected to last five decades, but as soon as it opened in 2009, the jail was already full. Many inmates were there awaiting sentencing from the backlogged courts. The region lacked mental health services and alcohol and drug treatment programs. There were no psychiatrists in Williston. Scott Busching, the county sheriff, told the Williston Herald: “We simply let people out of jail that probably should be here.”