The New Wild West

by Blaire Briody

  Back home in Kentucky, Chelsea often worried about Jacob. She was unable to reach him for days at a time. Jacob worked long hours and tried to check in with Chelsea and Will when he could, but it was difficult. Cell phone reception was spotty. Jacob didn’t have an internet connection in his trailer, so they could rarely Skype or email.

  Chelsea and Will struggled to get by without Jacob. Will missed his dad terribly. “He was having separation anxiety,” Chelsea said. “Every morning, without fail, he would cling to me. There was never a good morning when I dropped him off at preschool, and it wasn’t getting better. He was scared to be separated from his family.” Chelsea missed Jacob too and didn’t want her son to be so far away from his dad. Chelsea liked their life in Kentucky—she had a full-time job, friends, a house, and their family just a few hours away in Indiana, but it wasn’t the same without Jacob.

  In April, Chelsea’s job at the lobster company took a turn for the worse. The company was headquartered in Canada, and she said that the managers began blaming their shortcomings on her. They would call and ask to speak to her male colleague instead of her, she recalled, even though she had seniority. She felt disrespected and unsupported. At the same time, Will’s separation anxiety worsened. Every day Chelsea fought with him about attending preschool. He would cling to her legs and cry, and she’d have to pry him off. She hated feeling like a single mother. She wanted to homeschool Will and help him adjust, but even with Jacob’s higher salary, it would be a struggle to make the mortgage payment and cover Jacob’s living expenses on his salary alone. If she quit her job and stayed home with Will, she would need to sell the house.

  Their home was a 1,560-square-foot house built in 1931 on a quarter-acre lot. Chelsea was proud of the property and called it her Walnut Cottage, named after the street it was on. Though the house was far from her dream home, the roofline reminded her of the Creole Arcadian cottages she loved in New Orleans. In 2010, she had saved enough for a down payment and secured the loan by herself to be a first-time homeowner—a huge accomplishment in her mind. At $80,000, it seemed like a smart investment at the time, but the neighborhood was dicey, and during the recession it got worse. Middle-class families moved out and drugs took over. The value of her home didn’t plummet, but it also didn’t improve. By 2013, Chelsea hoped the market had recuperated. She talked to a real estate agent who thought she might be able to sell it for $100,000. Chelsea reasoned that if it sold, she and Will could move in with her parents or Jacob’s and visit North Dakota more often. She decided to put the house on the market.

  As she waited for potential buyers, she reached a breaking point at her job. In May, she gave her two-week notice and thought more seriously about her next step. She wanted more help taking care of Will. They could move into her parents’ house, but her relationship with her mother was strained. Why not move to North Dakota for the summer? she thought. The summer weather wasn’t bad, and they could be together as a family again. They could live in Jacob’s trailer, or maybe find an apartment or a house to rent. Even though Chelsea loved Louisville—a city she’d been in for over 14 years—living in North Dakota sounded exciting. She liked travel and adventure. How bad could North Dakota be? She pitched the idea to Jacob. He agreed—it was lonely in the trailer. He’d been living in North Dakota for seven months, had no plans to leave, and wanted his family closer to him. His roommate agreed to move out, and Chelsea and Will began making arrangements to move to North Dakota.

  The problem was, the house still hadn’t sold. After Chelsea lowered the price, a few people looked at the property, but no one made an offer. Not knowing what else to do, she decided to vacate the property temporarily, hoping to sell it later. She sold their six chickens and rooster, pulled up her garden, gave away knickknacks and furniture to neighbors, and began packing. Jacob came home for vacation and planned to help Chelsea drive back to North Dakota.

  On May 13, 2013, Chelsea and Jacob filled their 2004 Mitsubishi Outlander and piled belongings high on top of the car—a rolled-up rug, a plastic bin on top of a cooler, bags of clothes—all strapped together on the roof. Will and their 75-pound dog, Thor, a Great Pyrenees, crammed in the backseat. Chelsea looked around the empty house one last time and locked the door. She posted a photo of their packed car on Facebook with the caption: “Westward, er, Northward ho! Covered wagon is ready to go!”

  That evening, they made it to Chicago and spent the night in a Super 8 motel. The next day, they drove through Wisconsin and Minnesota. They hoped to make it the rest of the way that evening, but they were running behind. Unsure of what condition the camper was in, Chelsea didn’t want to arrive at the trailer park late at night. Would there be places for them to sleep or prepare food? Jacob wasn’t known for keeping a tidy house. He told her he’d cleaned to prepare for their arrival, but still, she feared the worst. They stopped in Fargo for the night, slept at another Super 8, and drove through North Dakota the next day. Despite her worries, the mood in the car was hopeful and jovial. Will sat in his car seat and played “I Spy” with Chelsea during the long stretches of fields and farms. Thor put his head out the window to feel the wind on his fur. In the early afternoon, they finally pulled up to the J&J Lot trailer park in New Town.

  Road-weary and exhausted, Chelsea stepped out of the car to survey her surroundings. The lot looked different without snow covering the ground, though a few melting patches remained. The lot was now covered with red-tinted sharp scoria gravel that could cut a person’s feet if they wore sandals. As Jacob had promised, he’d straightened up the trailer’s interior. Chelsea tried not to notice the grime and dust that covered the surfaces. Nothing some scrubbing wouldn’t fix, she thought. It would do. She felt triumphant. They had arrived at their new home.

  6. WILLISTON

  Before I arrived in North Dakota, I had nightmares of the horrible things that could happen to me there. I read everything I could about the region’s oil boom and heard stories of how women were targeted in the “oil patch” region. One night, I dreamed I was walking through a dark trailer park, past rows of four-wheeled dwellings parked on dusty gravel ground. Men sat on camp chairs around an open fire drinking beer. The night was pitch black. A dog barked in the distance. As I passed the men, they stopped talking and stared at me, watching my every move. I quickened my pace, feeling my breath shorten. I reached the end of the line of trailers and kept going, the flicker of fire light dimming behind me, the voices fading into the distance. For a moment I felt safe, as if I had skirted the danger. Then I heard footsteps behind me. I picked up my pace and broke into a run. But a man caught up to me. A muscled arm wrapped around my neck and the man’s voice ordered me to drop to the ground.

  I jolted up in bed, the terror of the moment still fresh. I looked around my Brooklyn apartment. I could hear the distant rumble of the train and the faraway siren of a police car, but otherwise everything was quiet. Safe. Peaceful. Why did I want to leave?

  Although I lived in an “up-and-coming” neighborhood in Brooklyn and had traveled to higher-crime cities in Haiti and Nicaragua, I never lived alone in these places. Especially alone in a rickety trailer with a questionable lock on the front door. Headlines like these graced major newspapers and websites and added to my uneasiness:

  AN OIL TOWN WHERE MEN ARE MANY, AND WOMEN ARE HOUNDED

  WEARING SKIRTS IS DANGEROUS IN INDIA AND NORTH DAKOTA

  HUMAN TRAFFICKING A PROBLEM IN NORTH DAKOTA

  My boyfriend hugged me tightly before I boarded the plane to San Francisco, where I’d start my journey to the Dakotas. “Be careful,” he said, kissing my forehead. After arriving in California, my typically peaceful, turn-the-other-cheek dad gave me brass knuckles in the shape of an angry-looking pit bull to attach to my key ring as a parting gift.

  I then drove over 1,500 miles to Williston, North Dakota, in my dad’s tiny 1999 Chevy Metro hatchback. I started from my parents’ house in Mount Shasta, California, and spent five days heading northeast, through Idaho, Wyoming, an
d Montana. My parents wanted to help me get there, partly out of goodwill but more likely out of fear for my safety, and they pulled their 2001 pop-up trailer behind their car as they followed me on the freeway. My cousin Bill was writing a book about national trails and tagged along as well. Over five days, we passed through wheat fields, cattle pastures, and ghost towns; swerved around tumbleweeds; descended into canyons; crossed slow-moving rivers; and slept in one-factory towns and flat, sprawling cities. During driving breaks at truck stops and $39-a-night motels, I’d occasionally mention my final destination to people. Most had never heard of Williston, but as I got closer, that changed. “You’re going to the oil patch?” one man asked, sounding shocked. “I hope you’re bringing a gun.” Later, when I was traveling outside of Williston, the owner of a campground, a blond woman wearing a snug tank top and thick nail polish, told me to watch out for pimps there. “I heard they come through town and kidnap women,” she whispered in my ear as I checked in.

  The first sign I saw for Williston was near the Montana–North Dakota border. I began to see traces of the oil boom: A pumpjack on the left, bobbing hypnotically in the sun. A train pulling hundreds of shiny black tanks of oil rumbled by us as we waited at the stoplight. Finally I saw the North Dakota state welcome sign. A green rectangle with NORTH DAKOTA in large letters sweeping across it. Underneath the letters was a tiny black-and-white headshot of Teddy Roosevelt and “Welcome to the West Region.” The sign was located in a grassy ditch with a muddy stream nearby. A semi hauling pipes rumbled by. Popcorn clouds lumbered above me. I took a photo of the sign and we continued on. Williston and my new home were 30 miles ahead.

  7. CINDY MARCHELLO

  One of the first people I met in North Dakota helped ease my worries about feeling outnumbered—her name was Cindy Marchello. An oil worker from Utah, Marchello had no problem standing out in a crowd of men. When she walked onto an all-male fracking site, if you didn’t notice her, you’d likely hear her voice. “What are you looking at?” she’d yell at a male worker if he stared at her for longer than she liked. “I’m old enough to be your mom!” If that didn’t work, she’d ask, “What’s your wife’s name?” while hacking up a wad of spit and projecting it toward him. If the man kept looking, she’d threaten to throw rocks.

  Marchello is a 56-year-old grandmother with wispy blond and gray hair, pale skin with rosy cheeks, and a short, curvy figure. She once visited a dusty well site surrounded by cornfields and heard a man’s voice hollering over the loudspeaker: “Woman on location, woman on location.” Everyone noticed her that time.

  As the only woman on her crew, Marchello lived at a “man camp” called Rough Rider Housing on the outskirts of the 250-person town of Trenton, North Dakota. Trenton had no grocery store or library. It used to have a rickety gas station and a convenience store, but the building burned down. A handful of women lived in town, but most stayed locked in their homes or trailers, waiting for their husbands to return. Marchello said she liked living in this man camp better than others because she had a small kitchen here. Her first man camp had shared eating quarters and a communal laundry room. Men flocked around her as she ate supper, and someone stole her underwear out of the washing machine. “It was the last time I did laundry there. I bought enough socks, underwear, everything, so I could go two weeks without doing laundry,” she said. “I never owned so many bras in my entire life.” She looked up at the fluorescent light in the small living room of her mobile trailer. “That man camp was really hard for me.”

  Most oil field workers in North Dakota lived in man camps—barracks for oil workers that look more like prisons or shipping container yards instead of employee housing. By 2013, an estimated 25,000 people in western North Dakota lived in such camps. Marchello’s current camp housed about 200 men, but she avoided anyone who wasn’t on her crew. “If you smile at them, they think you’ll spread your legs,” she said.

  I had seen Marchello in a video called Lady Roughnecks in North Dakota Man Camps on CNN.com, one of the few national news organizations reporting on North Dakota’s oil boom in 2012. In the video, she sat cross-legged on a twin bed. She wore jeans and her blond hair was down to her shoulders. She waved her hands around wildly as she explained her job and what it was like to live in a man camp. “What would I say to women? You can do it! You can do whatever you want,” she said as the camera panned to heavy trucks pulling into a shop.

  I emailed her Gmail address, “barefootbones,” to introduce myself and she wrote back immediately. She said she’d happily meet me and couldn’t wait to talk with another woman. She explained that she sometimes went weeks without spotting another female. She missed how clean they smell, she told me later. The previous summer, she went camping in Yellowstone and visited the women’s bathroom. She didn’t want to leave because it smelled like fruity shampoo and perfume. A woman tried to move out of her way, and Marchello stopped her and said: “I’m sorry, you just smell really good.” The woman didn’t seem to understand.

  Though “home” for Marchello was the town of Ogden in northern Utah, for 90 percent of the year she lived and worked in North Dakota. Although the boom brought Marchello here, few other women had been hired to work on oil industry crews. Nationally, 85 percent of oil industry jobs are held by men, and most women in the field work as engineers, administrators, medical personnel, or on cleaning staffs. Oil companies tout this as gender diversity in their press releases, but women hold fewer than 2 percent of the jobs beyond those positions. The gender inequality in the field has made nearby Williston—the only population hub for over 100 miles—look like a seething all-male metropolis complete with strip clubs, greasy burger joints, Coors Light chugging contests, bar fights, and seatless Porta Potties on oil rig locations. The ratio of men to women was somewhere between 6 to 1 and 30 to 1, according to varying local estimates.

  Many women in the area complained of feeling unsafe, and local statistics supported their fears. Cases of assault, harassment, domestic violence, and rape had risen dramatically since the once-sleepy region began attracting thousands of male workers. Women spoke of carrying concealed weapons when they shopped at the grocery store and avoiding the bar scene, teeming with lonely males looking for female company. Rumors were rampant about where the next attack might occur—I frequently overheard women chatting about which areas to avoid or where a friend of so-and-so was attacked while walking to her car.

  I met Cindy Marchello one night at Rough Rider Housing in late July 2013. She worked as a pump operator for an oil service company called C&J Energy Services, which primarily did “coil tubing”—a process that requires running bendable pipe down oil wells after they’re fracked to get the well to start producing oil. Her first job was at Halliburton, and she’d been working in North Dakota’s oil field since the early days of the boom in 2010. I called her to set up an interview, and she told me she was on a well location and wouldn’t be home until 9 p.m. She said to come to trailer number 40. I assumed I would meet her, chat with her for 20 minutes, and be on my way.

  To get to the man camp from Williston, I drove 15 miles and turned onto a gravel road near a water disposal site. I saw 64 identical rectangular trailers, lined in two neat rows facing each other. Dozens of pickup trucks were parked outside the trailers. Across the street were train tracks, and trains hauling hundreds of barrels of crude oil rumbled by every few minutes.

  I pulled into the camp and saw two men standing outside their trailer smoking cigarettes. Otherwise it was quiet. Each trailer looked exactly the same, except there was a small grill outside one and a rusty patio swing behind another. Weeds speckled the gravel road, and clusters of tall grass grew between the buildings. I parked my car next to two large pickup trucks, knocked on the glass screen door of her trailer, and Marchello answered excitedly, wearing an oversized T-shirt and sweats. The trailer was sparsely decorated but clean. It had particle-board cabinets and a small matching table next to the stove. On the refrigerator, a paper sign read NIGHT WORKER SLEEP
ING DO NOT DISTURB in large red letters. I sat down in a recliner and Marchello cozied up on the couch, crossed-legged. Then she started talking and didn’t stop for two and a half hours.

  “I went to work at six o’clock in the morning and I worked until midnight and I came home and I went back at five and I worked until nine o’clock the next morning,” she said, talking as fast as an auctioneer. “In the last three days, I have worked 67 hours. I am beyond running on empty. I slept in the truck for only about two hours. I texted my boss, ‘Unless God himself is ready to burn on the cross again you better not talk to me for two hours.’

  “Up here, you get more deaths. We think it’s because there are more wells and longer hours. There’s so much work, you can’t shut down in the winter. You have to work all night. So we work around the clock.”

  I tried to interject with a question, but she didn’t seem to hear.

  Marchello continued, jumping to another subject: “Drillers are a subspecies. Oil field trash—they call us that for a reason, but we each have our differences. Guys who are snubbers are just weird, guys who work on the derricks have no social skills. You’d do better in a prison.

  “All men and no families live here. A few women that are the housekeepers do live here. I don’t venture out. I don’t make a lot of local friends. I don’t especially like the cleaning ladies. A couple of them, like the ones from Montana, are quite the bar party girls. I’m not. I can’t afford to be. Because what’s she going to do? She’s going to get up and vacuum in the morning. I’m going to go drive a 100,000-pound truck. I need more sleep than that.”