The New Wild West

by Blaire Briody

  The Duke study was a game-changer for DeVille. She carried copies of it everywhere she went. The day after it was released, she brought the study to an Army Corps of Engineers meeting in Mobridge, South Dakota. “This is proof that pipelines are not safe,” she told them. At a tribal council meeting about a pipeline that would cross under Lake Sakakawea, she handed over the study, and the council members seemed to finally listen to her. More tribal members, particularly the youth, were joining her efforts to fight pipelines on the reservation. Native Americans at Standing Rock launched a global protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016, with thousands of people, including DeVille, mobilizing to stop the pipeline from crossing the Missouri River nearby.

  Though the Standing Rock protesters were making headway and gaining momentum, at Fort Berthold, 150 miles north, daily spills continued even after oil prices fell and drilling activity slowed. And the protesters’ demands to stop the pipeline from crossing under Lake Oahe wouldn’t prevent the pipeline from crossing waterways elsewhere in the state, including those on Fort Berthold. In the summer of 2016, the Army Corps of Engineers approved the portion of the Dakota Access Pipeline that crossed the Little Missouri River, eight miles from DeVille’s home in Mandaree.

  34. CHELSEA NIEHAUS

  Litha Carole Freya Niehaus Klipsch was born on July 3, 2014, at 9 pounds, 11 ounces. She had two middle names and a combined last name from both her parents. Jacob made it home in time for the birth. He coached Chelsea through labor at their home in Louisville, Kentucky, with two doulas and a midwife present. A few days later, he returned to North Dakota. Chelsea was left alone with a four-day-old newborn and five-year-old Will.

  In the middle of December that year, on one of my trips to North Dakota, I called Jacob and asked if I could meet him in Skunk Bay.

  He and I planned to meet at his trailer after the workday. I followed his directions and drove through Mandaree, past signs Lisa DeVille posted that read RESPECT MOTHER EARTH and WATER AND AIR IS LIFE. PROTECT OUR FUTURE GENERATIONS, then 20 more miles to Rabbit Road, where he said his trailer was located. I saw his blue Ram pickup, so I knew I must be in the right place, but I barely recognized Jacob’s trailer—it was the same one I visited when I met Chelsea over a year ago, but it looked completely different. For one, it appeared abandoned, and debris was scattered everywhere—almost like the inhabitants tossed all of their belongings outside and left in a hurry. Kitchen items were strewn across the frozen mud—utensils, bowls, plates caked with mud, a rusted mini fridge. Nearby, there was a dead plant, a black mound of trash bags, and a ripped awning blocking the front door. My foot crunched on an empty container of tobacco chew, and I almost tripped over a piece of wire as I walked over to the trailer. The trailer’s windows were plastered with particle board, and duct tape sealed the vents to keep out the wind. Ten yards away was a plastic blue tricycle, turned over in the snowbank and missing a wheel. Was that Will’s tricycle? I wondered. Was this the right place?

  At that moment, I saw Thor. The Great Pyrenees bounded over and greeted me excitedly, panting and licking my hand. His leash was hooked to a wooden shipping box, a makeshift doghouse.

  I returned to my car, cranked up the heater, and waited. I had arrived early, and Jacob was late coming home from his shift. Frozen, crusted patches of snow blanketed the ground. The wind whipped and whistled past my car window, and I didn’t see another human being for hours. After about two hours, a young woman in a gray hoodie and pajama pants stumbled out of her trailer and walked over the frozen mud. She eyed me suspiciously as she walked by. She approached another trailer, opened the door, and it banged shut behind her. I never saw her reemerge.

  At one point, I needed to use the restroom, so I drove over to the bar, the Rooster, with plastic palm trees out front. It looked closed, but I figured I might as well knock on the door to see if anyone was inside. I knocked and knocked and there was no answer. I squeaked open the door and saw a woman in her late 50s with tan and wrinkled skin sitting at the bar. There was no one else in the room. She wore a tank top even though it was below freezing outside. She stared at me and didn’t say anything.

  “Hi, is there a bathroom in here I could use?” I asked.

  She shook her head. She told me there was an outhouse up the hill. She pointed to a small cement dwelling tucked between two trailers. “It should be open,” she said.

  After I used the restroom, I realized I had forgotten to bring anything for dinner, and the closest place to buy food was more than 40 minutes away. I dug through my car and found a box of Cheerios I’d purchased earlier in the week. I munched on the cereal as I waited.

  A few minutes before 9 p.m., after sitting in my car for five hours, Jacob arrived. His own pickup truck didn’t run, so he’d caught a ride with a coworker. He wore a black T-shirt, a beanie over his scraggly hair, and dirty jeans and had a bushy beard that grew in every direction. He apologized for his tardiness and invited me in. We stepped over the awning and the trash bags to get to the front door. Inside, the trailer looked equally unrecognizable. A large bag of Pedigree dog food spilled out into the hallway. The dimly lit room was filled with what appeared to be mostly trash—plastic bags, empty cardboard boxes, clothes hangers, and medicine bottles scattered about. An overflowing trash can was in the corner by Will’s old bunk bed, and a large propane tank blocked the pathway. Clothes, towels, and more plastic bags were piled high on the couch—a laundry basket teetered on top. The only remnants that indicated Chelsea and Will had ever lived there were a paper printout Chelsea pinned to the wall listing “5 Reiki Principles”; Chelsea’s handmade curtains, now faded and dusty; a milk-carton birdhouse that Will made; and handwritten notes on construction paper that were strung along the window. I asked Jacob what the notes were about—he explained that before Chelsea and Will left, they had all written down what they were thankful for. “Being able to pay the bills,” wrote Jacob on one square. “All of us together,” wrote Chelsea on another. “Pumpkins,” wrote Will.

  Jacob immediately pulled out a bottle of whiskey, poured himself a shot, and threw it back. He pushed aside some clothing for me to sit on the couch. He sat on the steps to the master bedroom. He pulled out a cigarette and let it dangle from his lips. A smoke detector with a low battery beeped loudly. A dog—most likely Thor—barked outside.

  I asked to use the restroom. Inside, dust and grime lined the sink and floor, and empty water jugs filled the bathtub. The overhead light was broken. The door barely shut from the junk in the hallway so I moved a few items out of the way and held the door shut to give myself privacy.

  Jacob was not the most talkative person and mumbled the answers to most of my questions. He told me he had no running water because the pipes had frozen. He typically showered at a truck stop in Watford City, but ever since his truck broke down last week, he didn’t have a way to get there. It had been at least a week since his last shower. “This will be my third winter living like this. My tolerance is higher than most,” Jacob said, chuckling. “Most people up here live like this—because the money goes home.” Jacob usually ate food from gas stations or grilled meat on his electric skillet and microwaved potatoes. Most of his neighbors were undocumented immigrants from Mexico. He didn’t want me to write down their names. They looked out for each other. “When the wind rattles and you’re out in the middle of nowhere, it can be a little scary,” he said, throwing back another shot of whiskey.

  He was still working for Oilfield Support Services, Inc., which was contracted by Marathon Oil. He typically left the camper at 5:45 a.m. and returned by 8 p.m., but his crew was putting in extra overtime to boost production numbers before the end of the year. Tonight he’d worked on a well site installing flow lines—the pipes that funnel the gas, water, and oil out of the well. The oil was piped into storage tanks, the saltwater to wastewater tanks, and most of the gas was flared into the atmosphere.

  Oil prices had recently fallen, but Jacob didn’t seem worried. “They’re gonna get all
of the oil,” he said. “It’s just a matter of when.” Many of his coworkers talked about heading to Texas, where costs were lower to produce oil and “not everything’s gonna break on you in the wintertime,” said Jacob. He considered heading south as well but planned to stick it out in North Dakota for the time being.

  I asked if he ever frequented the Rooster and he said he’d been a few times, but he tried to stay away. “I have a past history of problems, you know.”

  Jacob talked about the home birth of Litha. “It was wild. I didn’t pass out when Will was born, but they say that guys will just fall on the floor. I can see how,” he said. “There was a white light around everything, in that one little moment.” He planned to travel to Louisville for Christmas the next week. The past two years he had stayed in North Dakota over the holiday. “I’m not missing any more Christmases,” he said. “That first year sucked. I stayed here and drank my sorrows away—or whatever the cliché is.”

  After an hour, I bade him good-bye. He told me to be careful on the icy camper steps and poured himself another shot.

  When I told Chelsea I’d visited with Jacob, she sighed. “I’m so sorry for whatever horrible mess you walked in on.”

  35. CINDY MARCHELLO

  At first, Cindy Marchello didn’t have a crew at her new company, Cudd. She was stuck doing grunt work at the yard. Curtis Kenney’s crew included Mana Kula and the other Tongan guys. Though Kula and his crew didn’t hang out with many white guys, Kenney snuck his way in when Kula was short on men for a job and Kenney tagged along. Kula eventually took a liking to him. He made Kula laugh. He nicknamed Kenney “the cracker” because he was the only white guy around. Other times they called Kenney an anorexic, albino Tongan, which Kenney took as a compliment.

  To Marchello’s surprise, Kula and his Polynesian crew were friendly to her when they saw her in the equipment yard. They treated her like an equal and would stick up for her when other men didn’t. She discovered many were also from Utah, like her. She offered to help them with odd jobs, such as rebuilding one of their pumps, which she had learned how to do at Halliburton. When their crew was on a well location, hours from any town or grocery store, she drove to the location with pizza for everyone. “I didn’t say ‘Please let me on your crew,’ but I also know how politics work,” Marchello said later. “If you need somebody, you’re going to call somebody you like.”

  Her efforts eventually paid off, and she became close friends with Kula and joined his crew. With the camaraderie of the Polynesians, Marchello felt more like herself. She joked with the guys more, impersonating the Wicked Witch’s laugh from the Wizard of Oz. “You and your little dog too!!” she’d squeal, sending everyone into a fit of laughter. “To be part of that group, especially up here, was way different,” Marchello said later. “You have a family. You have friends—they’re your buddies.”

  But at the same time, Marchello began having more issues with Kenney. The man camp they lived in was one long trailer with about 60 rooms, most with two beds. Marchello had her own room because she was the only woman. Kenney somehow obtained a key to her room, and she found him lying in her bed when she came back from her shift one day. She yelled at him to leave and asked to have the lock on her door changed. But even after her lock was changed, Kenney still found ways to access her room. She sometimes came home and found evidence he was there, such as his favorite beers or soda discarded in the trash. Every time she confronted him about it, he acted like it was no big deal and she was overreacting. In his defense, Kenney admitted he had a key to her room, but he said other employees did as well. He claimed he only entered her room to drop off or pick up something.

  When she worked on well locations with him, she’d nap during her breaks in one of the semi trucks parked on location. She’d lock the doors and crawl into the sleeping cab, but when she’d wake up, Kenney would be sleeping next to her. She had no idea how he got in; she assumed he found an extra key. Most of the guys, even Kula and her Tongan friends, laughed off Kenney’s behavior. They figured it was harmless flirting and Marchello seemed to enjoy Kenney’s company at times, so they thought maybe she reciprocated the affection.

  “Curtis was infatuated with her, and wanted to be around her,” Kula said about Kenney and Marchello’s relationship at Cudd. “He would text and call her all the time, and try to get together with her. But there’d be times I’d hear her tell him to stop and then she seemed to lead him on. Marchello would complain about Kenney, then afterward she’d be on the phone with him, or text him back.”

  Marchello argued she was nice to Kenney only because Kula liked him and she wanted to support Kula. She vehemently denied she ever had feelings for Kenney, a married man whom she described as a “dweeby mouse.” “I finally quit over it,” she said. “I didn’t know how to fix it.” On her job application, she wrote “hostile work environment” as her reason for leaving.

  After she left Cudd in August 2011, she went to a company called Killer B Trucking where she worked as a sand coordinator for $18 an hour. She was in charge of overseeing the frack sand trucks and monitoring the sand as it went into the well. The position was more solitary since she wasn’t part of a crew, but she enjoyed the responsibility. Other, male, sand coordinators seemed to receive the choice jobs, but it didn’t bother her much at the time.

  Then one night in late fall, upon returning to her parked pickup truck, she pulled herself up into the driver’s seat and suddenly felt a thick arm around her neck. A man whispered in her ear: “I won’t leave until you scream for me.” She moved her hand to the steering wheel, hoping she could honk the horn and alert someone. She recognized his voice. He was a trucker who had targeted her before. He once asked if she wanted to go fuck behind the fracking water tank. She had yelled back at him, loud enough so everyone could hear: “We don’t have to go behind the tank, I can beat the shit out of you right here in front of all these boys.” Now his arm was around her neck. She didn’t want to think about the other things he might do to her if she didn’t get out of the truck. She remained silent, and he tightened his grip. “I bet I can make you scream,” he whispered. Though it was hard to speak, she sputtered out: “I can take your job. I can kill you. Do what you’re gonna do.” Finally, after a few tense moments, he let go and left. She immediately ran to another truck on the well site to find a coworker and spilled out everything that had happened. When she was done, the man replied, “It wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t such a dirty whore.” Marchello never officially reported the incident.

  Soon after that, she left Killer B because the company wasn’t booking enough jobs. But she struggled to find another oil field job. She went home to Utah, unsure of what to do next. She was denied unemployment insurance, so she took temp jobs at a phone solicitation company and at a cheese processing factory for $8 an hour. In addition to worrying about bills, she remembered how much she hated factory work. Her children encouraged her to stay home, but she missed her oil field paychecks. She wanted to find a way back. The glistening shimmer of black gold, with its promise of financial independence, drew her back in.

  * * *

  In Utah, none of her friends or family believed she would return to North Dakota. But she persisted. She continued to apply and interview at oil field companies. She wanted to leave the oil field on her own terms. Plus, she hadn’t accomplished what she set out to do. She wanted to buy a home. “I was still stuck,” she said.

  Marchello first heard about a company called C&J Energy Services when she worked at Killer B Trucking. The company was headquartered in Texas and had recently opened its first yard in North Dakota. She knew it was looking to hire employees.

  In October 2012, Marchello, Kula, and the Tongans applied together as a 12-member crew so they could have more negotiating power. Kula was considered one of the best managers in the coil tubing industry. If C&J didn’t agree to their terms, all 12 of them would go elsewhere. The strategy worked, and they negotiated their best terms yet—a per diem bonus f
or every day they worked on a well job, paid housing in the Trenton man camp, a three-week-on, three-week-off schedule, and all expenses covered to travel home. Marchello was given the title Pump Operator B and received $21 an hour, plus a $35 per diem. The crew would work three weeks straight, clocking in at least 12 hours a day, every day, then have three weeks paid leave. In Marchello’s case, she would make $840 a week to be home with her family. In addition, like her other jobs in oil, she’d work overtime often and be paid well for it. It was the type of package that she’d lusted over when she first applied to the oil field more than two years ago—the type of job that motivated thousands of American workers to abandon everything for the oil field. With her anticipated work schedule, she was on track to earn $120,000 that year.

  They told her she was the first woman to be a coil tubing field hand for the company, and with Kula and the Tongans by her side, she had high hopes that this job would be different from her others. Even upper management at the corporate headquarters were thrilled to include her in their “diversity” numbers, and when a supervisor from the Texas corporate office stopped by the C&J yard in Williston, he told Marchello she was a legend. “It’s especially rare for a woman to be in coil,” Marchello explained. “Women usually can’t survive frack long enough to make it into coil tubing.”

  The downside was that Kenney was coming along as well because Kenney had become a good friend to Kula. Marchello knew if she wanted to work with Kula, Kenney was part of the deal. “At that point, I needed to go back to work. I wanted oil money, and I was willing to do whatever,” she said. She told Kula she was okay with it but requested she not be on the same schedule as Kenney. Days before training at C&J began, Kula was in a car accident. He stayed with his old company and worked light duty to recover, while Marchello, Kenney, and the Tongans began working at C&J.