Soon Tom started to lose it. At the poultry plant, he fell madly in love with a Hispanic woman who was married and wouldn’t be with him. To calm his frustrations, he bought a motorcycle, a boat, and a new truck. He grew out his hair and beard. Finally, he quit his steady job at the plant. “My life was changin’. I started thinkin,’ is this all there is? I like to have fun, I wanna go out and have some fun.” He joined a motorcycle crew and met a woman named Diane who had recently divorced her second husband. They started having an affair, and Tom told Patti he was leaving her.
During this time, he job-hopped. He sold vacuum cleaners, worked at a printing company, did construction, built cabinets. “There wasn’t a lot of stability in my life,” said Tom. “I went from job to job. If I could get a raise from another guy, I went with that job. If it didn’t work out for me, I’d get another job with somebody else.” He and Diane launched a construction cleaning business together in Oakwood, Georgia, called J & D Cleaning (J stood for Jim, the name he went by at that time). But after a few months, it all fell apart—his relationship with Diane, the business, his family. The patterns of his childhood were resurfacing. He took off to Atlanta to get away and sort out what was happening to him. Patti was angry and told him his sons wanted nothing to do with him, even though his son Jay later said the opposite was true; they asked about their father constantly. Soon he moved to a double-wide trailer in the woods near Dahlonega, Georgia, with a friend he knew from his military days. He wanted to escape.
Tom didn’t hear from his family again for some time until his 15-year-old son, Jay, called him unexpectedly. It wasn’t good news—his adoptive mother, Mayonie, had passed away. “My son called me and said ‘Dad, are you sittin’ down?’ I said, ‘Well, hang on, let me sit down.’ That’s when he said, ‘Your uncle Billy called and—your mom just died.’ They found her dead. She was gettin’ ready to go to church that Sunday mornin’. She was by herself, in her slip, slumped over in the bed. The doctor said that she didn’t feel a thing, it just happened. And so I was tore up. I didn’t really care anymore, I just—that was a tough time for me.” Although they had a difficult relationship, his mother showed more affection for Tom as she aged. His father had died 10 years earlier from a heart attack. Tom felt completely alone in the world.
Tom had always been a substance user, mostly alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana, but he’d always felt in control. He’d never been interested in hard drugs. But something had changed. He used whatever substance he could get his hands on, including crack. He had inherited significant wealth from his mother—about $160,000, 15 acres of land with an oil well on it, and a couple of houses. But within a year of his first hit of crack, it was all gone. He and his roommate spent about $1,000 a night. Every last penny of his inheritance went to his addiction. “After I started, it was over. It was done,” said Tom. “I didn’t think I was gonna make it out of that. I didn’t care. It grabs you and you don’t care about anythin’ but that high. You’re not thinkin’ straight. Within a year, I’d done spent everythin’.” Patti, his brothers, and his remaining friends stopped talking to him. Patti told him never to contact her or his sons again.
After the money was gone, Tom went to Atlanta to try to find work again. He worked odd jobs but spent whatever he made on drugs or booze. It was there that Tom became homeless for the first time. With no money to pay rent, he slept under a big oak tree behind a bar. He had no blankets, only a jacket. “I huddled up against the tree to get away from the wind,” he said. “There was a lotta homeless people down there. You’d see ’em, pushin’ grocery carts with whatever cans they could find, sleepin’ over hot air vents in the sidewalks.” Tom never thought he’d be one of them. He had hit bottom.
24. “ON A MUDDY LOCATION, SOMEWHERE IN NORTH DAKOTA”
For months, I tried and tried to get permission to visit an active well—a few companies laughed in my face. After pulling some strings, a friend was able to get me onto a drilling operation across the border in Montana, but not on a location with Cindy Marchello’s crew. One night, however, after I had known Marchello and Mana Kula for over a year, Kula said he could sneak me in. “But you can’t get out of the car,” he said. If anyone asked, I was to tell people I was an engineer. It was more likely for a woman on site to be an engineer.
I nodded and tried to hide my excitement.
The night we left, I met Kula at the man camp. Marchello was at the trailer, and she wished me luck. She advised me to use the restroom before I left—she had endless stories about the difficulties of being a woman on location and needing to go. There was supposed to be an outhouse on every location, but sometimes it wasn’t there, or it hadn’t been cleaned in months. “If it’s dark, I crawl under the truck,” she said.
Kula never slept well the nights his crew worked on location. Even though a man named E, a trusted childhood friend of Kula’s, was supervising the crew that night, Kula still worried something might go wrong. His worst fear was an accident occurring on site that he could have prevented. Kula needed to pick up a flash drive on the site tonight, but he also wanted to check on his crew and make sure everyone was safe.
We left camp a little after 7 p.m. and stepped into Kula’s heavy-duty pickup. We planned to drive two and a half hours to the well site, which was located somewhere in the Killdeer Mountains. Kula was also giving a ground hand, Chris, a ride out there. Chris was from Arkansas and had worked at C&J for almost a year. He’d recently returned from working in Saudi Arabia’s oil fields. He wore a white bandana around his head and called me “ma’am.” Kula and Chris sat up front and I squeezed into the narrow backseat next to a case of water bottles, a lunch pail, and a hard hat. A Polynesian lei hung from Kula’s rearview mirror.
Chris chewed tobacco while we drove, spitting into an empty water bottle, and Kula talked about the constant driving they did in the field. Though his crew mostly worked in North Dakota, C&J had offices all over the country. Departments were sometimes short-staffed and needed help from crew members in other states. Recently, Kula and Sam drove from Texas to Oklahoma, then back to North Dakota, then to Pennsylvania. Then Kula headed back to Utah for his days off. After one day in Utah, C&J called and needed him back in North Dakota. Kula drove to Williston, looked at the problems, decided he couldn’t fix them, and turned around and drove back to Utah. The entire ordeal added up to nearly 6,000 miles—some 85 hours on the road within a few days.
We drove past Theodore Roosevelt National Park as an orange sun slid below the horizon.
“Did you miss this?” Kula asked Chris with a mischievous smile.
Chris laughed. “Yeah, well, it’s better than Saudi. It was a lot of false promises. It sounded good on paper, until you got over there.” Recently Saudi Arabia had been recruiting more U.S. oil and gas companies and their workers in hopes of using fracking technology to exploit its own shale reserves.
Kula had written directions on a tiny scrap of paper. He pulled it out of his pocket to check that we were headed in the right direction. We sped along a dirt road at about 40 miles an hour, leaving billows of dust behind us. We passed hay bales, grazing cows, and a farm tractor. Soon we turned onto an unmarked dirt road. I had no idea where we were.
After another 45 minutes, Kula said we were nearing the well location. He slowed down in the middle of the road and pulled the truck into park. “I gotta take a leak,” he said, opening the door and leaving it ajar. He stood in front of the door and faced northwest, looking over an open field of prairie grass, to relieve himself.
Chris exited the passenger-side door and faced northeast. He relieved himself as well.
I stayed in the backseat. I had used the restroom at a gas station over an hour ago and needed to go again. But there was no way I was joining them.
We continued on to the well location. Large halogen floodlights cast a harsh white light onto the dirt clearing. About a dozen metal trailers lined the site, and two dozen oil storage tanks and heavy trucks surrounded the well. Nearby was a
giant spool the size of a small house that held tightly wrapped coil piping. It was connected to a reel house, a small metal box where the operator sat, with a CAUTION HIGH PRESSURE sign in front. A crane towered nearby. The well was owned by Petro-Hunt LLC, a company from Dallas, Texas.
Kula pulled up to a group of men standing by an outhouse and rolled down the passenger window, amplifying the roar of heavy equipment. A pungent smell of rotten egg, from H2S gas present at a well nearby, wafted into the car. Sam, who had been at poker night, stuck his head in the window: “You guys bring something for us to eat?”
Kula apologized. The crew hadn’t eaten anything since that morning, and he had forgotten to pick up food. Chris exited the truck and walked over to the outhouse to smoke a cigarette. The smoking area was only about 150 feet away from the active well. Kula invited me into the front seat, as long as I kept my head down and didn’t tell anyone that I was a journalist.
Sam watched Chris walk away. “Dude, look at those shiny boots,” he said to Kula. “Damn, he is a greenhorn!”
A man named Nick approached the truck to say hello. He seemed surprised to see a woman in Kula’s truck and introduced himself. Kula told Nick I was a friend. I stayed quiet, not wanting to lie about what I was doing there. Nick nodded, but I wasn’t sure if he bought it. He didn’t ask any more questions, though.
After Nick walked away, Kula said to me, “Man, I hate for Nick to see you. He’s a good kid and a smart kid, but he’s trying to move up. He’s got a big mouth. If I hear anything tomorrow, then I’ll know who it was.”
Kula drove around the site and explained what was happening: The crew was currently pressure testing the well before they “went down the hole” with pipe. If there was too much or too little pressure as the pipe made its descent, the well could explode and kill everyone on site. Crews were always dealing with extremely high pressures. “That’s why everyone is behind that line,” said Kula, pointing to a group of workers standing off to the side. “Something could fly out if there’s a leak.”
Engines whirred and metal banged in the background. There were many types of tanks and liquids on site: a nitrogen tank, two tanks for flowback water, a half-dozen tanks of fresh water. Kula showed me the reel house, or the “dog house,” where the coil operator sat and controlled the speed and direction of the coil tubing and monitored pressure levels.
Almost every job on a well site was contracted out, which insulated the big oil companies that owned the well from liability. If an accident happened on site, small companies like C&J were typically stuck with the fines and legal proceedings, while the owner could often walk away from any responsibility. At the site that evening, there were at least six independent-contractor companies at work—frackers, coil tubers, water haulers, tool guys, crane operators, and flowback hands, who monitored how many barrels were coming back out of the well and alerted the team of any leaks or clogs.
A man’s voice came over Kula’s radio. “We got 2,000 pounds on the line,” he said, referring to the pressure level at the well. “Let us know when you want us to open.”
“We’re moving on to get one barrel out,” someone replied, meaning one barrel should return through flowback if everything was working properly.
“Got it.”
“This is the life of a coil tuber,” Kula said. “It’s a lot of hurry up to sit and wait for hours and hours, days and days.” Many times, the crew arrived to the site ready to go, but the fracking crew hadn’t finished. “Today they weren’t ready,” said Kula. “But we’ll rig everything up and get as far as we can.” Kula guessed they’d be done the next night, if nothing went wrong.
“I don’t know where our safety guy is. He’s supposed to be out here,” Kula said. “We’ve got to be careful. Before there was just one OSHA oil field guy coming around, but they put more money into it because of all the deaths around here. You got more of them running around. If they show up on site and you’re not spaced out, you’ll be fined. Our equipment is supposed to be 100 feet away from the flowback tanks,” he explained. They usually eyeballed the 100 feet, he said, or a ground hand walked 100 steps to measure the distance. At Kula’s former company, Cudd, his crew stationed a pump too close to the well, and it was fined $25,000, he said.
“When I was first out here, it was harder for me to trust my guys to do what I know they know how to do,” Kula explained. “I used to come and sit here till the job was done. There’s a lot of factors you have to watch. You have to watch everything closely because if you have one screw-up, it could be a big disaster. A lot of times the flowback crews are so green, you’ve got to constantly watch them.”
One mistake new workers often made was not measuring the gas levels. They’d see the flare burning and think everything was fine, but they weren’t monitoring exactly how much gas was spewing from the well. There could be a gas leak and no one would know. “Gas is heavy so it’s sitting there and anything can ignite that gas,” said Kula. “That’s how locations blow up and you kill everybody on the location. That’s why it’s hard to sleep when I know there’s a lot of green people on location. It’s nerve-wracking. You triple-check everything. If you keep doing that, you’ll be safe. But it’s like anything you keep doing over and over—it gets so redundant, then you get relaxed, and that’s when something happens.” Kula had been lucky in his career so far—he’d never seen another man or woman die on site.
Technically, companies weren’t supposed to have more than two new workers, or greenhands, on a crew. But the rule was often overlooked to expedite drilling, explained Kula. Having a crew full of new workers was particularly common among smaller service companies. “They just hide it,” Kula said, talking about his experience working with many oil companies. “They give them red hats because people aren’t going to check.” A red hat signifies more experience. “At a certain point, they don’t care. They just want to get the job done.” Many companies handed out bonuses for finishing a job ahead of schedule.
Kula saw a man wearing a hard hat walking in the direction of his truck. “Is he coming over here?” Kula asked. It was the company man, he explained. Kula didn’t want him to see me. The company man oversaw the entire operation—from drilling, to fracking, to completion. He was also an independent contractor hired by the larger oil company, but he was in charge of what happened on the site. Marchello called them big babysitters. They typically sat inside a mobile trailer and watched everyone work.
“We’ll go back over here,” Kula said, and drove to the other side of the well. I slid lower in my seat.
The radio crackled. “You guys got any coffee over there?” a man’s voice said.
“I can go check. We have a coffee maker in here,” someone replied.
“There’s a lot of chewin’ and a lot of coffee out here,” said Kula. “You get into a lot of bad habits.”
Kula opened the truck door and yelled over the loud hum of equipment. “Sam! Sam!”
Sam came running up to Kula’s truck.
“What are we doing here?” Kula asked. “Are we getting ready to go in the well?”
“Yep,” Sam replied.
As he walked away, Kula said, “He’s one of the hardest workers here. He’s ready to be a supervisor. He knows how to run all the equipment here—down to the fine details—but his English is not that good. I feel bad for him. We’re trying to teach him.”
A few minutes later E, Kula’s good friend and the supervisor on site tonight, approached the truck. E needed printer paper located on another well site a half hour away. Kula agreed to drive him there.
E jumped into the backseat.
“Has everything gone okay?” Kula asked.
“Yeah,” said E. “There was a lot of safety meetings so it took forever.”
We drove down a dirt road and the rotten-egg smell from H2S gas became stronger. It was nauseating.
“Oh, sorry, that was me,” Kula said. He and E laughed at the joke. “Makes you want an egg sandwich, doesn’t it?” Kula s
aid.
“It’s okay, we won’t die until tomorrow,” E joked.
“You want to use the bathroom here, Blaire?” Kula asked, laughing.
Kula suspected a well nearby was leaking. E said he felt close to passing out when the crew drove past it earlier. “I was like, dude, I’m outta here. Good thing the wind wasn’t blowing our way.” H2S could escape during the drilling process, but it was especially potent around large volumes of stagnant oil. Deadly clouds could sit in holding tanks, pipelines, and semi trucks. In 2013, a 24-year-old rig hand died after he inhaled a cloud of gas from a broken pipe. I covered my mouth as we drove by, but I knew that without a gas mask, it was pointless.
Around 1 a.m., Kula and I headed back to the man camp. I yawned and dozed off during the drive, but Kula seemed alert. He chewed on sunflower seeds to stay awake. He used to guzzle energy drinks, he said, but they only made him crash. He also sometimes sang along loudly to Bob Marley. For this drive, he simply talked a lot, telling me more about his family. Kula hadn’t dated much since he separated from his ex-wife. His first year working in North Dakota, he only spent 10 days back at home. Kula had considered moving his children to North Dakota, but he didn’t think he’d see them much with his busy work schedule. “I hope to eventually move my family to a place where I’m working,” he said. “But they know that this is what we have to do, what I have to do, for our family.”
25. TOM STAKES
The week after the campground closed for the season, I called the Andresen family. They were living in the woods a few miles from the campground. Tom Stakes was still with them. I attempted to find the location, but after driving 30 minutes on a dirt road and finding no one, I eventually turned back. Soon they had to leave there too. A wildlife management ranger came by and gave them a $100 ticket for illegal camping. The family decided to return to Utah, and Stakes bade them farewell. Soon the cell phone numbers I had for the family stopped working. I never saw them again.
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