She cried herself to sleep most nights because she missed her family and felt out of place. One night, when one of her grandchildren was sick at home, her daughter Elizabeth called her in the middle of the night to ask her advice. Her grandson was hysterical and took the phone. Marchello sang him lullabies and tried to soothe him. “I’ll be home in a few weeks, baby. This big work isn’t gonna keep me away for too long,” she remembered saying. By the time she hung up the phone, she only had three hours before she needed to leave for work. It killed her that she couldn’t be home to comfort her grandson. “I thought, I’m 1,000 miles away. What the freak am I doing?”
Sometimes immediately after a shift, even though she was exhausted, she walked along Williston’s only bike trail by the river to decompress, still wearing her greasy coveralls and steel-toed boots. She often considered giving up and going home. “I will never be tough enough for this job,” she remembered texting Elizabeth one night after work. Elizabeth replied: “Then you need to be smart so you can come home.”
Being smart meant earning enough money to pay her debts and get back on her feet. Her goal was to cover her bankruptcy bills, build credit, and maybe even buy her own home. Her first paycheck for one week of work (40 hours at $14 an hour plus 10 hours of overtime) was about $800. Back home, there were entire months when she hadn’t earned $800. This was her chance to get ahead. “When things got tough, I kept thinking about my kids and how much they needed me,” she said. “Because even though my kids are big, I’m still a single mom. I’m the only backup person they have.” She also hoped to find love again one day, but wanted to wait until she was financially stable to become seriously involved with anyone. Never again did she want to depend on a man for money and allow him to control her life.
Every day, she felt herself becoming physically and emotionally stronger. Her “pec muscles were getting a serious workout,” she told Jennie. It was easier to pick up tools and lift heavy machinery than when she first started. She was also learning how to manage her strengths and weaknesses. She didn’t compete with the guys on the heavier jobs but figured out how to move her body in a certain way to create more torque or haul chemicals in a more efficient way. Though she constantly felt others on the crew doubted her abilities, she was becoming more confident in herself. She wrote to Jennie: “Boss made me mad a couple times but I bit my tongue. He kept taking tools away from me. He doesn’t do it to the guys. I’ve decided to be LOUDER tomorrow and stick up for myself.”
After two weeks of training, she passed the trials, and Halliburton sent her to receive her commercial driver’s license, or CDL, a symbol that the company was investing in her. Not everyone made it that far. Marchello was glad to be moving forward, but she also felt exhausted. This was just the beginning.
At CDL school, Marchello had more challenges. She remembered one of her teachers, an older man in his 70s, telling her, “There’s only been two girls to come through this school and they didn’t pass.” Marchello knew it was going to be a difficult three weeks of working with him. In June, she wrote on her Facebook wall: “Why o why.… 5 more days of CDL School. This had better be worth it. I’m too old for this crap! I will refrain from adding any of my man-bashing thoughts.”
When she returned with her CDL, she was once again assigned to the same crew as Kenney. One of the supervisors was furious he’d been given a woman on his crew, which typically consisted of 18 men. Although the supervisor told Kenney to mentor Marchello, he pulled Kenney aside and whispered, “Don’t teach her anything because she’s only here for a lawsuit.” He didn’t think Marchello would last long. Kenney regularly heard guys talking behind her back about how she was a worthless addition to the crew or making inappropriate comments about her body. “Most of the guys on the crew treated her like she was … unwanted,” Kenney said. Sometimes the supervisor told her to shadow another guy for the day, so she did. Eventually she found out that she was being passed around as punishment. If the supervisor was mad at somebody on the crew, he’d say, “You’re on the shit list today and you get the girl.”
One of the toughest challenges for her was learning how to back up a semi truck. Marchello had passed a series of tests in CDL school but still had difficulty on site. Setting up the equipment required maneuvering the semis into tight positions. Many times her coworkers yelled and screamed at her while she was backing up, which only added to her nerves. Later she found out members of her crew had made bets about who would be the first to make her cry. They paid one guy $150 to see if he could harass her to the point of tears. “Every time you were on shift, we made bets,” a coworker told her months later. “I’m talking thousands of dollars. I’m talking about company men involved.”
She stopped him. “And who collected on the bet?”
“Nobody,” he replied. “Not one person. I knew every time they were having that conversation that no one was going to break you.”
In addition to facing direct insults, there were subtle ones as well. Even the men who were kind to her didn’t always trust her with equipment, or blamed her for things that went wrong. Other men avoided her for fear that gossip would travel back to their wives that they were spending time with a woman at work. She wondered if some men were trying to force her into quitting. One day she walked over to her assigned semi and the windshield wiper arm had been broken off. The truck had already passed inspection for her trip, so she figured it must have happened recently. When she started the engine, the radio blared at full volume and heat blasted out of the vents. She couldn’t adjust them because the knobs had been pulled off.
Her experiences on the bus also weren’t improving. One day, a guy they called Mincoff was preparing to draw on a sleeping coworker’s face, and Marchello woke up the coworker before Mincoff could do anything. He was furious and came up to her with the marker in his hand and snarled, “I can make you disappear.”
“Well, my ex-husband couldn’t do it in 28 years, so good luck with that,” Marchello snapped back.
A few weeks later, even though she was sitting in the back trying to stay out of the way, a half-full Gatorade bottle came flying across the bus and hit her in the eye. It came from Mincoff, though he allegedly wasn’t aiming at her. Afterward, she walked up to where Mincoff was sitting, shook the bottle in his face, and said, “I can make you disappear.” Then she threw the bottle in the trash can. He stopped harassing her after that, but she had a black eye for a week.
Most of the fracking locations they went to had a portable toilet or two, but they were rarely cleaned and were used by hundreds of men. She dreaded going to the restroom and at first removed her coveralls behind the Porta Potty before entering to avoid dragging them on the disgusting floor. But after a couple days of this, she noticed a group of guys watching her remove her coveralls. She had clothes on underneath, but it still gave her the creeps. From then on, she began removing her coveralls inside the restroom, carefully maneuvering in the small compartment to avoid touching anything.
She also stopped wearing any makeup or nail polish. One day, however, she returned to work after attending a wedding in Utah and forgot to remove the nail polish she’d worn. While she was duct-taping cardboard over a bin with the help of a male coworker, he suddenly reached over and began touching her hand. She pulled away, confused. She looked down, saw her nail polish, and quickly put her gloves back on.
* * *
Though Kenney had a wife and family, this didn’t stop him from being flirtatious with Marchello. At first, the two didn’t share a living space. The Halliburton man camps were full, so the company put Marchello in a hotel, and Kenney lived in a company-rented apartment building.
Kenney often asked Marchello if she wanted to go for drives. He’d tell her how much of a friend she’d become. He started bringing her cookies while they were out on location. She appreciated his kindness and friendship, but at times worried he was developing feelings for her. He came around when he wasn’t needed just to spend time with her. Then she recei
ved notes under her hotel room door. “I like your butt” was scribbled in messy handwriting. The note was written on scrap paper from Halliburton equipment labels, so she was certain it was from a Halliburton employee. Another note scared her. “If you had been here I would’ve come into your room,” it read. Based on Kenney’s behavior toward her at work, she suspected it was him, but she couldn’t be sure. (Kenney continues to deny it was him.) She didn’t want to falsely accuse him, and she didn’t believe management could do much about it anyway, so she stayed quiet. “I didn’t want to cause trouble,” she said.
Soon space opened up for her to move into a man camp called Target Logistics, located north of Williston. The huge, 1,000-person camp was practically a mini-city where multiple companies housed workers. It was surrounded by a gate with a full-time guard, and workers weren’t allowed to have any visitors, including spouses or children, and no drinking, drugs, or roughhousing was tolerated. Besides a few housekeepers and cooks, Marchello counted only eight women employed by Halliburton living at the camp, most of them engineers or warehouse coordinators, and they were all housed together in one trailer.
The camp had a massive cafeteria where everyone lined up to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Marchello hated the group meals. “Men would look at you like you had no clothes on,” she said. “If you sat by yourself, guys would flock around you like flies. It was awful.” This was also the camp where men stole her underwear out of the washing machine. She began taking all her laundry home to Utah on her days off, stocking up on extra underwear and bras, or trekking to the local laundromat. Because several companies were there, she didn’t know whom to complain to when incidents happened. Even if she did complain, she didn’t think it would matter. “There was nobody there who cared,” she said.
* * *
Marchello lasted in Halliburton’s frack department for about four months. For reasons she never entirely understood, she was transferred to Halliburton’s warehouse, where a number of other women worked. She guessed it had something to do with her supervisor, who never seemed to like her. They had argued one day. He claimed she was too hard on one of the new male hires, who quit. Marchello disagreed. She became so angry, she kicked the side of her supervisor’s desk. Upper management soon told her she would no longer be working in frack and she was transferred to the warehouse.
Marchello was furious and upset, but at the same time, she realized she could have easily been fired for losing her temper. She posted on Facebook after the incident: “EMOTIONS. It would be wonderful if I were capable of learning the lesson life keeps throwing at me. Although I am angry at myself for not being tough enough to endure, I am pleased with myself. I bit my tongue instead of getting fired. I have given up the quest of expressing myself in intense situations without crying. I guess I’m old enough now to say, ‘suck it up boys, I’m gonna cry. Deal with it.’”
At the warehouse, there was a woman named Sarah Carpender, and she and Marchello became fast friends. Carpender had four young kids at home. For Marchello, the warehouse work was mundane. She cleaned hundreds of coveralls and hung them according to size, sorted through equipment, and logged inventory. It was a cut in pay since she didn’t work overtime, but she liked the consistent schedule.
After a few months, however, the warehouse hired a new employee. The new guy and Marchello didn’t get along. He threatened her, saying he would “cut her throat” if she didn’t follow his orders. He berated her for her work performance and complained to human resources about her. She tried to speak up about his behavior, but her supervisors didn’t believe her. Most of them assumed he was a nice, jovial guy. Carpender believed Marchello but didn’t feel comfortable getting involved. Marchello worried about her safety around him and avoided being alone with him.
At the same time, she was frustrated that she’d been at Halliburton almost a year and still hadn’t received a raise. She made $14 an hour and discovered new guys with no experience were starting at $16 an hour. She asked her boss in upper management for a raise, and he said no. She remembered arguing with him: “But why are you hiring them for more than you hired me?” He replied: “I have 400 guys standing outside that door. If you don’t want this job, they do.” Other former crew members told her Halliburton was notorious for denying raises. The only way to make more money was to transfer companies. Kenney had recently left Halliburton and was now working at a company called Cudd Energy Services, which focused on coil tubing operations, and told her they had an opening. The position was for a nitrogen pump operator. She didn’t think she had a chance. “Coil tubing is like the Rolls-Royce of service companies because they are paid a higher wage. It’s very unusual for a new person to go into a coil job,” she explained. But she applied anyway. To her surprise, she was hired. She sent in her resignation to Halliburton.
On Marchello’s first day at Cudd, Kenney had a surprise for her. She arrived at her room in the man camp and there was a pink-and-purple comforter on her bed with Disney princesses on it and a sign on the door that read THE CAMP PRINCESS. She shook her head, crossed out the word PRINCESS, and wrote QUEEN.
31. PASTOR JAY REINKE
I met Pastor Jay Reinke one Sunday during the summer of 2013 when I showed up to his church service. I was late, so I slid quietly into one of the pews in the back. Reinke stood behind the pulpit and wore the traditional black clerical shirt and white tab collar. The Lutheran sanctuary had stained glass windows, and quotes like EAT, DRINK, AND FIND ENJOYMENT IN THE TOIL hung on the wall. Members of the congregation filled about half of the sanctuary, and most were middle-age or elderly. I counted six young men who I guessed were Overnighters. One man with a buzz cut sat with his arms crossed and dozed off during the service. Another man with long hair and a scraggly beard sat stoically and watched the pastor.
During the sermon, Reinke mentioned the Overnighters program. The city had recently asked him to limit to how many people slept on his floor—29 was deemed a “safe” number for fire code. “This past week has been hard,” he said. “We had to say no to 29 other people. Many don’t even have a car.” Reinke explained men of all sorts were showing up to the church’s doorstep—three Muslims and one “very nice black man from Ghana” were sleeping at the church. “I told them that life in Williston is difficult,” he said. He asked his congregation to join him in being good neighbors, and he assured them that he did background checks on the men.
After the sermon, I introduced myself. He invited me to sit down and chat during the church’s coffee hour. He explained that part of the reason his neighbors were concerned about the Overnighters was because of an African man who once stayed at the church. The man had stabbed someone at the local laundromat, Bubba’s Bubbles. Reinke had implemented background checks to help mitigate the damage. It was easy for men to lose direction in Williston, he explained. “It’s almost impossible to build community here,” he said. “It’s a very vulnerable population.”
I asked him if any women stayed at the church.
He could think of only two who had stayed there in the past: a woman from the Congo in her 30s and a girl from Somalia in her early 20s. “She was very attractive, model-like,” he said. “I could tell she was very street smart, but still. It made me nervous. An extremely attractive girl around all these guys?” He said she’d been sleeping in one of the local parks before she came to the church. The pastor invited her to sleep at his house in his parked car, but she didn’t stay long. Reinke wasn’t sure where she was now. “They’re all becoming vagrants,” he said. “If they weren’t a vagrant before, they’re becoming one here.”
It was more difficult for women to find a job that provided housing, Reinke said. And he worried about the safety of “cheap rent” situations for them—did they really trust the landlord or the other people staying there?
“Is there nowhere else for people to go for help?” I asked.
Reinke explained the Salvation Army gave out food and gas vouchers but had no way to help with housing. Th
e Salvation Army recently started buying one-way tickets out of town for new arrivals who couldn’t find a roof over their heads, hoping they’d become someone else’s problem. Reinke often spotted men smoking and drinking outside the back door of the Salvation Army’s office, waiting for vouchers. “The Salvation Army is a little bit of a—” He paused to carefully choose his words. “Not a good place. The men there are sliding downhill.”
Reinke’s wife, Andrea, sat nearby listening to our conversation. She jumped in to help explain what he meant. “I think people start to get worn out,” she said.
Reinke nodded. “People start to break down after a while. I had to tell two guys to leave this week. They were working part-time day labor for two and a half months. That just isn’t going to work here,” he said. Even if a newcomer found a job, he explained, the number of hours he or she needed to work to survive in Williston took a toll. Oil field work wasn’t easy, and not having a stable home made the job difficult to sustain. “It’s a modest-paying job when you think about all they ask of you,” said Reinke about oil field work. “It’s a young man’s game.”
I returned to the church a few nights later to attend a “neighborhood meeting” Reinke had organized. Only one neighbor showed up. She was stocky with short dark blond hair and looked to be in her early 50s. She introduced herself as Nancy and lived a few doors down from the church. Andrea Reinke was there, as were two former Overnighters, both of whom now had jobs and housing but occasionally volunteered for Pastor Reinke.
One of the former Overnighters introduced himself as Steve Tanck from St. Louis. He was 56 years old and had come to Williston in June 2012 after he was laid off from his job as a sales manager at Home Depot and the bank foreclosed on his home. Tanck heard about the church from the YouTube video and slept in his Chrysler minivan in the church’s parking lot for about a month. He eventually found an apartment above a dry-cleaning business with about 15 other people, but the city shut it down within a few months. After about a year of living in various sketchy situations—a trailer on someone’s property, a mobile home with a leaky roof and mice—he found a job at a furniture store and felt secure enough to bring his wife and daughter to Williston. They were able to find a two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment for $1,250 a month, a steal compared to other places.
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