The New Wild West

by Blaire Briody

  “I don’t really remember,” said Bergeson.

  “You sang ‘Wild Thing,’” Stakes said. Then he began singing. “Wild thing! You make my heart stink!”

  “You made my wiener stink,” Bergeson said in monotone. “You gave me everything.”

  Stakes laughed. “This guy don’t drink much,” he said, gesturing at Bergeson. “I get up at like five o clock in the mornin’ and I got to have two or three shots jus’ to get bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. They think I’m an alcoholic. The way I do it ever’body says, ‘Oh hell, he drinks that shit straight!’ I said, ‘Well, it’s what you get used to I guess.’ ’Cause in the mornings if I don’t drink somethin’, my skin starts to crawl.” Stakes moved his fingers up his arm. “Oh yeah, I’m addicted. I start gettin’ sweaty and clammy, and my skin starts crawlin’ on my back. Fuck, it’s like I’m going through DTs or some shit. But once I’ve had two or three drinks, I’m good. Then I go through the rest of the day and come home and drink.

  “My boss told me, ‘One thing I ask, Stakes. What you do after hours is your own business, but do not drink in the mornin’ before work. But there’s been a time or two where I stayed up most the night and drank and he smelled it on me. He said, ‘You been drinkin’?’ I said, ‘Nope, not this mornin’. I did all night.’” He laughed.

  Stakes’s boss, Westerman, had brought homemade chicken and rice soup to the camper the previous night and picked up DVDs for Stakes. Stakes watched The Angriest Man in Brooklyn, starring Robin Williams, on his mini DVD player. “Yeah, ever’body looks out for ol’ Tom. I’m jus’ an old fart. The smell that won’t go away,” Stakes said. He showed me the books he was reading. Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers, Affliction by Laurell K. Hamilton, about zombies, and a couple of western novels from North Dakota author Louis L’Amour. He bought them each for a nickel at the thrift store downtown.

  The novels helped him escape. When he was arrested in May, the guards let him pick out a novel to read in the cell. It kept his mind off the alcohol detox he was going through. “I sat there and concentrated on that damn book and tried not to think about drinkin’ somethin’,” said Stakes. “Not think about what I was feelin’.”

  Stakes often thought about his old bartender friend, Shorty, detoxing in jail before he died. Two more people from the bar had died recently. There was “little short Jeff,” who allegedly died when he left his gasoline generator running in a garage and asphyxiated from the fumes. Then a friend of Bergeson’s and Stakes’s named Steve reportedly fell down the stairs at his house and broke his neck. Bergeson said there were rumors that someone had pushed him. The tally of friends who had died this year was up to four. “I don’t know what’s going on in my life,” Stakes said. “It’s a crazy world.”

  Bergeson said he almost died a year ago when his roommate stabbed him.

  “It wasn’t me!” said Stakes, holding up his hand like he was swearing on the witness stand. Then he giggled. The vodka bottle was more than half empty now, and Stakes wasn’t slowing down.

  When Bergeson first arrived in Williston, he lived in an apartment closer to downtown with a roommate. One night, an argument escalated. The roommate pulled out a knife and stabbed Bergeson in the face, stomach, and back. “I hope he’s dead, I think he’s dead, I’m glad he’s dead,” he said as he stood over Bergeson. Bergeson later discovered that the man had served time in prison for strangling his wife to death.

  “We live a strange life,” said Stakes, pulling a cigarette out of a Marlboro pack. He took a long puff, blowing the smoke toward the fan to keep it away from me. The smoke dispersed and filled the small trailer.

  Bergeson heard another story about three men dying on an oil rig. “The pipe shot out of the ground and skewered one guy,” he said. “That’s a scary job. I don’t care how much they pay ya. Ain’t no job worth dying for.”

  “They’re dyin’ at jobs all the time,” said Stakes, then he began coughing again. A deep, guttural cough that sounded as if 40 years of cigarette smoke was trying to escape his lungs.

  “If someone said, I’ll give you a million dollars, but you’re going to die over this thing?” Bergeson asked.

  “I’d do it!” said Stakes. “Jus’ let me live to be 90 first.” He laughed.

  “I’d be like, give me the money first, then I’d get outta there. Flee the country,” Bergeson said. They both agreed that construction work, though not exactly safe, was a better option.

  There was a knock at the door. Bergeson opened it and a man with a wide-brimmed hat, leather jacket, and cowboy boots walked in. He introduced himself to me as Richard, tipped his hat, and called me “ma’am.” Stakes had met Richard that morning. He was standing outside the bar trying to find a ride home when Richard walked by. Stakes paid Richard $20 to drive him home.

  Richard had arrived in Williston a few days ago from Oklahoma. He was a “third-generation roughneck,” he said, and, at 51 years old, he’d been working in the oil field for 16 years—in Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Texas and on an offshore rig on the Gulf of Mexico. “This ain’t my first rodeo,” Richard said with a southern drawl. “It’s my third oil boom, and this is the only time I’ve had trouble gettin’ a job. I filled out so many damn applications. I feel like I just wrote a book. Nobody wants to hire me ’cause I got too much experience.” Richard slept in his truck, hiding in an old junkyard downtown to avoid the police. “I look like another piece of junk,” he said. “There’s a bunch a crackheads down there. I gotta sleep with a gun in one hand. And the skeeters’ll drag ya off and kill ya.” Stakes had offered him a parking spot outside their camper so the cops wouldn’t bother him.

  Richard leaned against the kitchen counter. He declared that Williston’s boom was about to go bust. “All dem boys on the drillin’ rigs who went and bought $40,000 cars are about to get a rude awakenin’,” he said. “This is just another oil boom to me. There’s jobs here, and in the middle of a recession, ever’body flocks here. But people like me who ain’t got a lot of money, can’t pay rent that’s thousands of dollars, and then they arrest ya for sleepin’ in yer truck. It’s the same ol’, same ol’. Just like the ol’ gold rush.” To save money, Richard liked to hunt for his food. “If it can’t swim fast enough, run fast enough, fly or slither fast enough, it’s food,” he said. He wanted to set up some snares by the lake to catch wild turkeys, but he was worried there were too many children around.

  Stakes looked around the trailer, the cigarette dangling from his lips. “Rich, can you hand me that bottle?”

  Richard looked on the kitchen counter, but there was no bottle.

  “Rich, Rich!” Stakes yelled at him, not realizing Richard had heard him and was already looking. “Dammit, I know you can hear me. Where’d that damn vodka bottle go?” Stakes stumbled around the camper, picking clothes off the chair, looking for his vodka bottle. He finally found it behind his chair and sat back down, taking another swig.

  Stakes stared out the window and flicked his cigarette butt into a glass flower vase. “I drink, I carouse, I’m old. I lived a hard life. I’m turnin’ 60 soon, how far am I gonna get?” He let the question hang there for a moment but continued before anyone could respond. “This is it—this is my last shot at life. Ten more years, I don’t know if I can even live that long. But I can still drink a bottle of vodka. That’s one thing I can do,” he said as he put the Silver Wolf bottle to his lips.

  29. CHELSEA NIEHAUS

  A few days after I visited Chelsea Niehaus, the family’s trailer’s sewage hose had a leak. They needed to replace the hose with sturdier PVC pipe. She and Jacob spent an entire day trying to install the pipe with no luck. Will wore Jacob’s hard hat and made a pretend blueprint out of construction paper. He declared himself “project foreman.” Jacob spent the afternoon smoking and cussing, working to connect the trailer to the sewage disposal hole with PVC pipe. It didn’t take. In the meantime, they had to manually empty sewage from the toilet’s holding tank. “The whole exercise has been exception
ally frustrating for Jacob since a large part of his job involves putting together metal pipe,” Chelsea wrote on her blog. “At the outset of the project he made the comment that if he couldn’t put this together easily he might as well go work at McDonald’s. I think he’s ready to go work at McDonald’s now. Ah camper life. Never a dull moment!” She posted a photo of Jacob sitting next to the camper with pipe in his lap looking dejected.

  After 18 years together, Jacob and Chelsea had finally decided to marry. They had their ceremony on Saturday, September 28, in Deadwood, South Dakota, five and a half hours from the trailer park. They found their wedding officiant from an advertisement in a shop window. Her name was “Reverend Faith,” and on her website, she touted her services next to photos of herself on a motorcycle. Jacob’s parents were the only wedding guests, and they all stayed at Black Hills Inn & Suites. The ceremony was held by a creek outside the hotel. Chelsea wore a red dress with spaghetti straps and a shawl draped over her shoulders. She had a red pendant around her neck and red Indian jewels on her forehead. Jacob wore a bolo tie borrowed from his father. To celebrate afterward, they dined at a casino.

  Two weeks later, Chelsea discovered she was pregnant. She woke up in the middle of the night and had a feeling she couldn’t explain. “I just knew,” she said. “I was like, oh my God, I’m pregnant.” In the morning, she found an old pregnancy test in the camper, and sure enough, it was positive. She was excited—she and Jacob had talked about having another baby, but they didn’t expect it to happen so soon.

  Meanwhile, Jacob’s job at DuCon wasn’t going well. His boss wasn’t booking work for the company, and one day he disappeared completely. After the wedding, Jacob found a job with a new company called Oilfield Support Services, Inc., another roustabout maintenance company. In November, Jacob’s boss gave them less than 24 hours to pack up the camper and move it over 60 miles to another location on the reservation called Skunk Bay.

  Skunk Bay is a remote summer camping and boating resort on a picturesque cove of the Missouri River and in the midst of the North Dakota Badlands. The closest town, Mandaree, was 40 minutes away, though it only had one small convenience store and a registered population of 596. There were no gas stations for miles, and the nearest hospital was more than an hour away in Watford City. Chelsea was glad to leave the rude neighbors of the Parshall trailer park, but she worried about how remote the new location was, especially now that she was pregnant. She tried to prepare as best she could for the move; it was not a location where she wanted to forget anything.

  On moving day, to get to their new camper location, they had to drive past Mandaree, a town of withered homes, junkyards, and mobile trailers. They then turned down an unmarked dirt road and drove for about 25 minutes, swerving to avoid potholes. They passed sweeping views of the Missouri River with its stark blue water, curved through canyons and cliffs with layered multicolored rock. They drove past abandoned farmhouses that leaned from the wind, a flat metal road sign pockmarked with bullet holes, and the Wolf Chief Recreation Area, considered a “native grasses sanctuary.” At a vista point turnoff was a sign with faded, peeling wood. Carved into the wood was a quote from when Meriwether Lewis visited the area in the early 1800s: “This scenery, already rich, pleasing and beautiful, was still further heightened by immense herds of buffalo, deer and elk, which we saw in every direction feeding on the hills and plains. I do not think I exaggerate when I estimate the number of buffalo which could be comprehended at one view to amount to 3,000.”

  Beyond all this, speckling the barren, moonlike landscape was oil well after oil well, a cluster of them around every bend. Most were being actively drilled or fracked. At the end of the dirt road was a bar called the Rooster, the only business at the Skunk Bay resort. During the summer, the owners hosted bands and parties, but the bar was all but deserted after Labor Day. It had icicle Christmas lights hanging on the awning year-round. Out front next to picnic tables stood four electronic palm trees—in red, green, and blue—an odd choice since the closest palm trees to Skunk Bay were hundreds of miles away.

  Once there, they took a right on Rabbit Road. They passed a mobile home with tires placed on the roof to keep the sheet metal from blowing away and the words SKUNK BROTHERS spray-painted on the siding. They maneuvered the camper down a steep hillside to their small lot at the edge of a cliff. It took them nearly an hour as dusk fell over the landscape. They dented the underside of the camper in the process. There were only about 10 other trailers parked out there. At night when the sun went down and the 360-degree panorama of stars appeared, at least 50 methane gas flares were visible on the horizon.

  Their new location was eerily beautiful, but they again had no water, no Wi-Fi, no laundry facilities. Chelsea woke up to daily morning sickness, the weather turned colder, and she was miserable. “I hated living in that camper,” she said. “I wanted to go home.” She didn’t want to have her baby there. The overcrowded hospital in Watford City was too far away, so she prepped to return to Kentucky. Jacob planned to stay in Skunk Bay for the winter, and they would transition to a long-distance relationship again. “I was ready to go back to Kentucky and lick my wounds and start over,” Chelsea wrote on her blog.

  Chelsea and Will left North Dakota on November 13, when Chelsea was six weeks pregnant. The next day, the first blizzard of the season swept over the prairies of western North Dakota. They had barely made it out.

  30. CINDY MARCHELLO

  It was a chilly spring day in the middle of May 2010 as Cindy Marchello drove to the Halliburton yard to report for her first day of work. She had recently completed about four weeks of classes and safety training. After this training, Halliburton put new hires, known as green hats for the color of their hard hats, in “field trials,” where they worked on an active well location with supervisors to watch over them.

  Marchello was told to show up at the Halliburton bus, a company-branded school bus that took workers out to location, at 4 a.m. When she stepped onto the bus, it was chaotic, with no assigned seating. She walked to the back of the bus and recognized one other guy from her training class. She waved to him and they sat next to each other. He seemed as scared as she was. The two-hour bus ride was a terrifying place for newcomers, and especially a female newcomer. People called it “the prison bus.” Guys would throw bottles at each other, and if anyone fell asleep, which happened often early in the morning or after a 12-hour workday, men would spit or write things on the faces of slumbering workers.

  To her knowledge, Marchello was the only woman working as a frack hand for Halliburton’s North Dakota operation at that time. She heard about one woman before her—a petite, younger woman the guys talked about. But that woman had moved up into management and no longer worked on well locations. Most of the men on the bus were surprised to see a woman there. For Marchello, even though the oil field is one of the most dangerous industries in the United States, she lived in more fear on the bus than on active well locations. “The bus was probably the most dangerous place in the oil field,” she recalled. “I learned very early on to sit in the back seat so nobody was behind me.”

  When they arrived at the well location, Marchello slid men’s red coveralls (there were no female versions) over her clothing and fastened a green hard hat over her ponytail. A supervisor told her to wait by the bus for further instructions. An hour later, she was still standing there. Finally, she caught someone’s attention and asked what she should do. He told Marchello to sit by the frack tanks, a long line of steel shipping containers, each one filled with 21,000 gallons of water. She looked over to the frack tanks and saw no one there. “And?” she said. “Is there somebody over there?” He told her someone would come by eventually. She waited there by herself, but no one came. About 10 hours later, someone told her it was time to get back on the bus.

  The next day, there was a different supervisor at the well location. When the supervisor saw her in the lineup of green hats, he grumbled at one of his men, who happened to be Curt
is Kenney, and told Kenney to “get that girl out of here.” Kenney introduced himself and gestured for Marchello to follow him. Kenney had noticed her the day before. She was hard not to notice. “Every guy there knows when there’s a woman on location. I might be gettin’ older, but I’m not gettin’ blinder,” said Kenney. “There was nothing Cindy could do that wouldn’t cause attention.” Kenney had been working there for three months.

  For the first few weeks, Marchello followed Kenney everywhere. He taught her how to assist whoever was running the sand pump. They mixed sand, made from fine particles of quartz, with frack fluid before it went into the well. She’d stand by the belt and turn it on and turn it off when someone on the radio told her. Kenney taught her how to stay safe and what to do and where to stand when they had to disassemble the pump trucks and iron piping, move them to another location, and reassemble them. She’d haul hoses and pipes from the truck to the well hole and help bang iron together as they set up. She learned to operate the crane and drive the mountain mover. She kept her head down, worked hard, and tried not to draw attention to herself. “When I first got there, I felt like I didn’t belong and I was very apologetic,” she said. “I was like, I’m really sorry, I’m just trying to earn a living.”

  Every night after her shift, Marchello studied for hours to learn the terminology for the tools and procedures on the well. There were so many different types of valves and iron piping—dart valves, check valves, double swing valves, chiksan swivel joints. She practiced hand signals for operating the crane and studied Halliburton-specific acronyms. Hundreds of them. In an email to her daughter Jennie, she wrote: “I do math and vocabulary till I can’t see and fall asleep. I have to learn about fluid volumes and weight of fluid and tons and tons of specific math formulas! Math follows you everywhere … so does computer stuff.”