And all these changes happen while the rest of the country is in the midst of a deep recession. In hundreds of cities and towns across the country, families lose their homes and jobs. They have to pack up their dream home, the one they planned to pay off in 20 years. They gently box up their pictures and sell the furniture purchased on credit. They move into their parents’ homes or rent apartments; others sleep in their cars or motel rooms, hoping their poor luck is only temporary. But many reach the lowest point they can imagine, and they know something has to change. They desperately want a way to return to the life they once had. They begin looking for a way—and a place—to start over.
4. TOM STAKES
Tom Stakes had arrived.
He felt triumphant. After two days, driving 1,300 miles, and a sleepless night at a truck stop in South Dakota, he was weary but energized. He had driven north along Highway 85, “the road to opportunity,” as the mayor of Williston called it, past the multicolored bluffs and plateaus of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, past oceans of wheat fields, past RV parks that popped up along the prairie horizon, and past a giant white statue of Abraham Lincoln’s head on the side of the highway. He crawled through a traffic jam in the smaller oil boomtown of Watford City and accelerated past 18-wheeler trucks filled with crude oil when the road widened. He finally pulled into Williston around 4 p.m.
It was a hot, early summer day in 2013 and the town of Williston, North Dakota, wasn’t much to look at—a consistent cloud of dust filled the air, semi trucks were at every turn, and its downtown looked depressing with dilapidated brown-and-beige buildings from the 1950s and 1980s. But Stakes didn’t come here for the town’s looks—he came here for a job. The day was full of possibility. With only $20 left in his pocket, Tom Stakes was ready to start his new life.
His first stop: the bar.
Stakes drove his old white Chevy pickup down Main Street to the first one he saw, K K Korner Lounge, a dive bar known by the locals as KK’s. It was located a block from the train station and across the street from two of Williston’s strip clubs, Whispers and Heartbreakers. Stakes felt immediately at home in KK’s—$1.50 beers, dim lighting, 1980s jukebox, green felt pool table, smooth mahogany bar speckled with water stain rings, and a backlit Budweiser sign in the corner flickering from a dying bulb—it was the type of bar he knew how to make friends in.
Stakes is an ex-preacher from Louisiana with long wispy white hair and a thick beard reaching past his neck. He’s a man who can make friends anywhere—usually in bars, and while he’s walking down the street, he might yell “Hey, how ya doin’!” or bum a smoke from a stranger and instantly become friends. Maintaining friendships, however, was more difficult for him. Stakes had friends all over the country—at a rehab center in New Mexico; at his former church congregation in Kenbridge, Virginia; on the streets of Atlanta, Georgia—but he no longer spoke to any of them. On the drive up to Williston, he picked up a hitchhiker who was headed the same way. The man had lived in Williston and told Stakes the best parking lots to sleep in where the cops wouldn’t bother him.
At KK’s that afternoon, Stakes asked everyone he met if they knew about available construction work, but they all shook their heads no. He walked around the corner to the day labor agency, Bakken Staffing, and registered to work.
That night, he slept in a well-lit parking lot across from Bakken Staffing and near the bars. The lot was flanked by a chain-link fence and, during the day, was used by employees of the National Guard. There were other men sleeping in their vehicles as well. They lined their cars up against the fence and draped clothes or blankets over windows to keep passersby from peering in.
The next morning, Bakken Staffing sent Stakes out on a job where he lifted and heaved furniture up four flights of stairs for eight hours. The work was hard on his 58-year-old body, and he quit after one day. “I was like, aw, man, this is too rough on me. I can’t keep doin’ this,” he said in a singsongy Louisiana drawl. A few days later, he was offered a job sanding and staining a deck, but it was only for $10 an hour, the same wage he made back in New Mexico.
But Stakes wasn’t deterred. He had a good feeling about Williston. He was already chummy with the owner of KK’s, who went by “Shorty,” and the bartenders were beginning to remember his name. Stakes hadn’t had a stable home for more than 20 years—but maybe he was finally home.
* * *
Tom Stakes was one of hundreds of men arriving in the city that summer with few resources and no plan for housing. Some called themselves financial refugees, fleeing from the ashes of the Great Recession. The mayor estimated 20 new people arrived to town every day. Williston became known as the town the recession forgot. It had one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country, at 1 percent, whereas places such as Yuma, Arizona, and El Centro, California, had over 20 percent unemployment. Since the collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers in 2008, the labor market had lost 8.8 million jobs, the most dramatic loss since the Great Depression. By 2011, 14 million people were unemployed—nearly half of whom had been out of a job for more than six months. Some 4 million people had lost their homes and more than 7 million Americans slid into poverty between 2008 and 2011. In the labor market, men had been disproportionately affected—three-quarters of those 8.8 million jobs lost in the recession were lost by men. The traditional male-dominated industries of manufacturing and construction were crumbling.
Thus, America’s downtrodden set their sights on Williston. City officials adopted the American Dream narrative into their marketing strategy. Their town was “saving” people from recession-torn America and providing them with a fresh start. Of course the city wanted only the “right” kind of people to come to Williston—people who could buy the $400,000 homes being erected all over town and who could boost the city’s budget shortfall. What it didn’t want was more vagrants.
“People hear of this, and say ‘I’m going up to Williston. They’re giving money away,’” said Williston’s mayor, Ward Koeser. “But then they come and have mental health issues. They’re not employable, and we’re not set up to handle vagrants and people living on the street. Before we never had it because of our winters. We don’t have a social services network to deal with it.”
Most newcomers would arrive to town with no plan for housing and quickly realize there was nowhere to go. Williston’s hotels were full. The campgrounds were full. There was no hostel. There were no available apartments. There was no homeless shelter. Recent arrivals without a car pitched tents in a park across from the public library. Before long, the park was filled with two dozen tents every night. The tents were mostly occupied by men, but a few women and children slept there as well. Soon complaints from neighbors poured in. They objected to the noise, the rowdy, intoxicated men wandering around, and the trash and alcohol bottles strewn across the lawn. The city had recently upgraded a nearby playground with a teeter-totter in the shape of an oil well pumpjack for nearly half a million dollars, funded by oil companies; no locals wanted to take their children anywhere close to the park. People started calling it a “tent city”—only unlike the tent cities of the recession, these inhabitants had jobs.
After the city shut down the park encampment, some tent dwellers moved to a clearing across the railroad tracks near a wide, slow-moving tributary of the Missouri River, a section of town where few locals ventured. Others holed up in apartments, sleeping 6 to 10 people in a room. Newcomers with cars were the lucky ones—they’d drive around looking for a quiet parking lot with a restroom nearby. Walmart’s lot had become the most popular. The store typically permitted overnight parking at most of its locations across the country, and it was never a problem in Williston before the boom. A few traveling trailers and long-distance truckers might park there, then head out the next morning. But in 2011, Williston’s Walmart parking lot began to resemble a RV campground.
By early 2013, the number of individuals without a home (which included those sleeping in cars, tents, and trailers with no operating
utilities) had grown to 2,069 in the state, a 200 percent increase since 2008. Of the documented homeless in North Dakota, 88 percent said they had come to seek employment. Despite the growing problem, Williston decided against building a homeless shelter—officials worried that if they built a shelter, more people from all over America would come. “People in Williston were forced to be transient,” said Joshua Stansbury, who helped run the local Salvation Army. “They spent their last dollars getting up here and had nowhere to go.”
Tom Stakes was one of them—he’d have to find a job soon if he wanted to survive. But like the many American dreamers who came before him, Stakes refused to believe he might not make it in an oil boomtown.
5. CHELSEA NIEHAUS
The first time Chelsea Niehaus saw Williston, North Dakota, was from the window of a train.
It was a cold morning in December 2012. Chelsea was traveling with her three-year-old son, Will. They had been on Amtrak all night, boarding in Indianapolis and transferring in Chicago. It was in Chicago that Chelsea noticed groups of oil field workers on the train with their industry-logo baseball caps and duffel bags. Chelsea and Will were two of some 54,000 passengers who rode this overnight train to the Bakken every year, a number that had more than doubled since the boom began.
They were there to visit Chelsea’s boyfriend and Will’s father, Jacob Klipsch. All three of them had lived together back in Louisville, Kentucky, but Jacob now lived more than 1,300 miles away. Instead of sleeping next to Chelsea in their four-bedroom, two-bath house, Jacob slept in a run-down camper—a 2004 Century Skyline fifth wheel—on a Native American reservation.
Chelsea held Will’s tiny hand as they descended the steps to exit the train. She wore a sweater and a long wrap skirt with thermal underwear underneath, but she was not prepared for the cold when it hit her. She spotted Jacob standing at the train station, waiting for them. She hardly recognized him. His face was covered in a thick, fuzzy beard. She had never seen him with so much facial hair, but she liked it. He was beginning to look like a true oil worker, she thought.
Jacob hugged them and helped take their luggage from the porter. Chelsea sensed something different in him. He seemed more confident and secure as he talked excitedly and animatedly about his work. She hadn’t seen this side of him for a while.
For this trip, Jacob didn’t want them roughing it together in the trailer with his roommate, so Chelsea, Will, and Jacob planned to stay at the Super 8 Motel for $150 a night, one of the cheapest hotels in town. They hadn’t traveled or stayed in a motel together since Will was a baby, but on this trip they could finally afford to do so without much worry. Jacob was making $19 an hour and about $6,400 a month with overtime pay—more money than he ever had in his life.
The excitement of their reunion didn’t last long, however. As they drove away from the train station, Jacob broke some bad news to Chelsea—he had received a DUI the month before, and his court date was coming up. Chelsea didn’t know how to react. She wasn’t particularly surprised. Jacob had struggled with alcoholism for years, but she had hoped his time in North Dakota would teach him more responsibility. She was tired from her travels, so she swallowed her anger at hearing the news. She was determined to have a good trip together as a family.
Over four days, Jacob, Chelsea, and Will explored Williston and the surrounding area. They drove the 20 miles out to Lewis and Clark State Park on the upper edge of Lake Sakakawea, one of the largest man-made lakes in the world, with more than 1,200 miles of coastline—longer than the coasts of California and Oregon combined. The state park was named after the two explorers who camped there in 1805. A thin sheet of snow covered the prairie. Chelsea could see specks of light illuminating patches of land and realized they were all drilling rigs. Everything about the landscape was foreign to her—she’d never seen a sky so expansive. “God, it was flat … and the sky. It went on forever,” she recalled. “I felt like I’d been flayed open for the whole world to see because there was nowhere to hide.”
At night the temperature reached into the single digits—a bitter cold that seeped into her bones. They drove out to New Town, North Dakota, to see the trailer where Jacob lived. At his trailer park, about 20 old campers lined the dirt lot, dusted with snow. Trash and rusted equipment were strewn about. Jacob’s musty Century Skyline fit right in. New Town was located on the edge of the Native American reservation, an area that had struggled with poverty for years. Chelsea was shocked at the desperation of it all. “It didn’t feel like America,” she said. “People living in campers with no water—I couldn’t believe people were living this way in 2012.”
Of Williston, Chelsea wasn’t particularly impressed either. “It was a wide spot in the road with a Walmart,” she said. Chelsea didn’t know how long Jacob wanted to stay there, but she was excited they might not struggle financially anymore. Even taking such a trip to see him—with the costs of train travel, food, and the hotel—felt like a luxury. Jacob seemed in his element. She hoped maybe the DUI had taught him a lesson.
On the final day of their visit, as dusk hit the prairie, Jacob drove Chelsea and Will to the train station. Their train was delayed so they waited in the station for more than three hours. Other oil workers and their families sat with them on blue-cushioned chairs in the small waiting room. They watched oil tanker trains pass by—the increased train traffic from oil shipments was the cause of the delay. Jacob said he would try to visit home soon but couldn’t tell her when that would be. Chelsea didn’t know when she would see him again. Finally, it was time to go. Jacob hugged Chelsea good-bye. He hugged Will, but Will was too excited about the upcoming train ride to realize what was happening. Chelsea and Will walked up the stairs to the second floor of the double-decker train. They found their seats by the window, and Will pressed against the glass as they waved good-bye.… The train chugged and hissed out of the station.
For Chelsea, the idea of living in such a place was preposterous. She missed Jacob and wanted him home.
She had no idea that in less than six months, she would be joining him.
* * *
Chelsea Niehaus and Jacob Klipsch grew up in the same town of Vincennes, Indiana, and met during their sophomore year of high school. After high school, Jacob joined the Army, then attended Indiana University in Bloomington to study political science. But in 2008, he dropped out before receiving a degree.
With $40,000 in student loans and no marketable skills he could think of, Jacob began working in restaurants and doing construction. Chelsea, who had a bachelor’s degree and an MBA from Kentucky’s Bellarmine University, worked at a company called Clearwater Seafoods, a live lobster shipping company, and made about $36,000 a year. She had hoped to use her master’s degree to find higher-paying work but struggled to do so during the recession.
She and Jacob moved into an apartment together in Louisville, Kentucky, but Jacob couldn’t find steady work, and it was difficult to make ends meet. Then Chelsea became pregnant with Will. To provide for his growing family, Jacob worked almost nonstop. By early 2012, Will was two years old, and Jacob was working three jobs. During the day, he delivered seafood for about $250 a week, and at night, he delivered pizzas for minimum wage plus tips. When he had free time, which was rare, he picked up the occasional landscaping gig. But they were still behind on their bills most months. They were fighting a lot, Jacob was drinking more, and they were tired of living paycheck to paycheck. “I’ve never been so stressed out in my entire life,” said Chelsea. “He was working himself to death, and the ends weren’t meeting. He hated what he was doing; he was hating everything. I was like, ‘Something has to change.’”
Jacob heard about the oil boom in North Dakota from a friend, then saw references about it on the news. He learned many oil companies liked to hire ex-military personnel. The industry seemed like a great fit for him. He applied online for jobs in the region while he was still at home but had no luck. Then he read that most employers hired through connections. To get those con
nections, he needed to be in town networking and applying in person.
Jacob arrived in Williston on October 1, 2012, at the age of 31, just as temperatures were dropping for the winter. At first, he slept in his truck and spent a few nights in the parking lot behind Concordia Lutheran Church with other newcomers—the church’s pastor, Jay Reinke, allowed them to stay there. Every day, Jacob went to the local employment agency, sat at one of the computers, and applied for every job. He worked day-labor shifts at Bakken Staffing while he waited for replies and was offered a construction job within the first three days. He considered taking it, but he knew the building frenzy in Williston would eventually end and he’d be back where he started. He’d come for an oil job and decided to keep applying.
After a week of applying for jobs, he was hired as an oil field roustabout at Baker Consulting, where he would help build sites, install pipelines, and do maintenance at oil well sites for $17 an hour. The first week he worked 70 hours. With overtime, it added up to $1,445 a week. If he could maintain the schedule, he was looking to make nearly $70,000 that year—more than three times what he was making back in Kentucky. Jacob bought a used trailer for $1,800, parked it in a New Town lot for $400 a month, and moved in with a coworker named Steve to cut costs. At first it wasn’t so bad, but then a holding tank that provided water to the RV park froze, and no one at the park had running water. He had to buy bottled water and shower at a truck station down the road.
The New Wild West Page 2
