Hidden America
ALSO BY JEANNE MARIE LASKAS
The Balloon Lady and Other People I Know
We Remember: Women Born at the Turn of the Century Tell the Stories of Their Lives in Words and Pictures
Fifty Acres and a Poodle: A Story of Love, Livestock, and Finding Myself on a Farm
The Exact Same Moon: Fifty Acres and a Family
Growing Girls: The Mother of All Adventures
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Publishers Since 1838
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2012 by Jeanne Marie Laskas
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Published simultaneously in Canada
The following chapters have previously been published in GQ, in different form: “Underworld,” “Hecho en América,” “G-L-O-R-Y,” “Traffic,” “The Rig,” and “This Is Paradise.” “Beef” was previously published in Smithsonian, in different form.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Laskas, Jeanne Marie, date.
Hidden America : from coal miners to cowboys, an extraordinary exploration of the unseen people who make this country work / Jeanne Marie Laskas.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-101-60056-6
1. Working class—United States—Social conditions. 2. Working class—United States—Biography. 3. Working class—United States—Social life and customs. 4. Manual work—Social aspects—United States. 5. Subculture—United States. 6. Laskas, Jeanne Marie, 1958—Travel—United States. 7. United States—Description and travel. 8. United States—Social conditions—1980– 9. United States—Social life and customs—1971– I. Title.
HD8072.5.L37 2012 2012025457
305.5'.620973—dc23
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
To Alex, Anna, and Sasha
AMERICAN mouth-songs!
Those of mechanics—each one singing his, as it should be, blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his, as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his, as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat—the deck-hand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench—the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song—the ploughboy’s, on his way in the morning, or at the noon intermission, or at sundown;
The delicious singing of the mother—or of the young wife at work—or the girl sewing or washing—Each singing what belongs to her, and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—At night, the party of young fellows, robust, friendly, clean-blooded, singing with melodious voices, melodious thoughts.
Come! some of you! still be flooding The States with hundreds and thousands of mouth-songs, fit for The States only.
—WALT WHITMAN, FROM LEAVES OF GRASS, 1860 EDITION
CONTENTS
Also by Jeanne Marie Laskas
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
INTRODUCTION
UNDERWORLD
Hopedale Mining, Cadiz, Ohio
HECHO EN AMÉRICA
Migrant Labor Camp, Cherryfield, Maine
G-L-O-R-Y
Paul Brown Stadium, Cincinnati, Ohio
TRAFFIC
Air Traffic Control Tower, LaGuardia Airport, New York, New York
GUNS ‘R’ US
Sprague’s Sports, Yuma, Arizona
BEEF
R.A. Brown Ranch, Throckmorton, Texas
THE RIG
Pioneer Natural Resources Oil Rig, Oooguruk Island, off the Shores of Alaska’s North Slope
SPUTTER
I-80, Exit 284, Walcott, Iowa
THIS IS PARADISE
Puente Hills Landfill, City of Industry, California
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
The idea for this book began forming in a coal mine, about five hundred feet underneath Ohio, when I was rolling through pitch-black darkness on a “mantrip,” a small, squat, topless train car. My hip was wedged into the back of the miner next to me, my feet propped on somebody else, all of us tangled together, ducking low to avoid scraping our hard hats on the impossibly low ceiling. A pinpoint of light shining from my hat revealed little beyond a ramshackle system of posts and beams keeping the entire operation from collapsing. This is not a place for people, this is not a place for people, this is not a place for people, I thought, in rhythmic beats roughly in time with the clunk and clatter of the mantrip.
Everyone imagines going down when they think of a coal mine, but the real surprise is going in. The tunnel took our little knotted group farther and farther inside the earth, a mile, two miles, eventually about six miles away from the elevator shaft that had dropped us down. When the mantrip stopped, we rolled off it and righted ourselves and stood up—sort of. The ceiling of the mine was just five feet high. We were now at the face of it, where, bent over like broken saplings, the guys worked ten-hour shifts digging coal.
I tried to take the situation in stride, as you might, politely, when visiting a neighbor’s sadly dilapidated home, or when listening to a child scratch out a tune on a violin; but the combination of the darkness, the six-mile commute away from our only escape hatch, and the fact that the earth all around us was bleeding deadly methane that could with the slightest encouragement explode—all of these aspects combined to steal from me any sense of decorum. ARE YOU FREAKIN’ KIDDING ME? is what I said, many times over, in those first few days of a months-long journey in and out of the mine. “They should make the ceiling higher!” I said, stupidly. “It’s like the size of a small city down here; they couldn’t put another stinkin’ elevator in?” Eventually, I just kept saying, “Dude, this is ridiculous.”
The miners responded to my commentary with bored expressions. A flat gaze. An exhausted double blink that had a language all its own. It was a look that held the evocative message that would ultimately keep me in its grasp and set me off on the nine separate journeys over a t
wo-year period that form the foundation of this book.
What is the matter with you? those miners seemed to say. How is it that you know nothing about us, our lives, this world?
Here was coal, a $27 billion industry, the fastest-growing energy source on the planet. And here were the guys who dug it. Every time we flip on a light switch, we burn a lump of coal. My daily life was intimately connected to these people—dependent on them—and yet, up until my time in that mine, I knew nothing about them or their world.
It was humiliating. It seemed wrong in some inexplicable way. In writing Hidden America, I wanted to make that wrongness explicable. I wanted to connect my life to the people who make it livable and, maybe, reintroduce America to some of its forgotten self.
Who are the people who pick our vegetables, grow our beef, haul our stuff to the marketplace, make our trash disappear? Moreover, how did that become such a difficult question to answer? It seems to me we used to know the people who made our lives livable. We were more than likely related to them. In a preindustrial America, and in a small-town America, there was Uncle Charlie with his cows, Cousin Mike coming by with his truckload of hay, Aunt Sarah and her basket of lima beans, and, of course, the milkman. The raw material and the labor of the everyday had personalities associated with them, as well as culture and history.
That’s all gone now. We live in cities, suburbs. We are busy. We expect electricity, a temperature-controlled environment, food, speed, and minimal inconvenience (i.e., not a stinky horse) in getting from here to there. We expect somebody to take our garbage away and do something with it so we don’t have to think about it. We expect the shelves in our malls to be stocked with the things we need, when we need them. We have work to do, papers to sign, mortgages to make. We are civilized. We don’t meet the cattle whose briskets we eat, we don’t know the shape or the color of the hands that pick our lettuce, peaches, or celery. If the disconnect between us (the people who demand) and them (the people who supply) says anything about us, it’s probably not flattering.
And yet, in Hidden America I am not advocating for some so-called simpler time, all of us chopping our own wood to fuel the stove, wringing the necks of chickens in order to feed our kids, gathering wheat, rolling oats, spinning cotton or wool. As anyone with a flat-screen knows, the simpler time is now, and I’m all for it.
Instead, I’m inviting America to steal a glance into these worlds, some hugely complicated industries, some tiny and private contributions, to wander with me and consider the everyday anew. Everything you know about America—all the history, all the politics, all the lessons from all the economic indicators, all the arguments from the red states and the blue—is irrelevant when you are sitting in a coal mine, or staring at a radar screen showing thousands of airplanes flying at once, or wrangling five hundred pregnant Red Angus cows beneath a blazing hot desert sunrise.
—
SOME MONTHS AFTER I left the coal mine, I was about 250 miles above the Arctic Circle, a few miles off the shore of Alaska in the frozen Beaufort Sea on a man-made island where the temperature hung around minus 45 degrees. I tilted my fur-lined hood in such a way as to deflect the wind as I listened to a guy talk about a stuck drill bit, making no mention of the fact that his mustache had turned into a bristle of ice. The small society of workers I got to know on that frozen island—where no one left for weeks and sometimes months at a time—enacted a drama underscoring the intensity of America’s thirst for oil, of course, but also gave me insight into a certain kind of love, a brotherhood born of survival, and allowed me to witness private acts of heroism in combinations that shifted, yet again, my relationship to the everyday conveniences of modern life.
I went to Los Angeles County, California, where I tumbled atop a mighty machine rolling down steep cliffs of garbage nearly as high as the coal mine in Ohio was deep and pondered the quietly brilliant work of American engineers who fifty years ago set out to conquer the physics of trash, a conundrum so vast as to become philosophical: trash is matter, and matter never leaves. You can change its form, move it from here to there, plop it into the ocean, burn it, bury it, but it will always be with us. The people who manage trash became, to me, weirdly spiritual.
The aim of my research presumed that the people of Hidden America wanted to be known, a naïve miscalculation that occurred to me only as I discovered those who were indifferent to it, and, most notably, those who didn’t want to be known at all. I lived in a migrant worker camp in Maine and set out with the workers before dawn to the blueberry barrens and learned about the lives of the people who pick our food. They had come from Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and points far south of the border; some were documented, some were not, and most of them lived in shame in the shadows, hiding, violating our laws as they toiled in the fields, picking the very berries with which I’ve long topped my Shredded Wheat each morning. Now that I know these people, I don’t approach the table in the same way. Now there is personal gratitude, anger, frustration, and responsibility.
Being known, becoming invisible, being celebrated, hiding: these were constantly shifting objectives I confronted as I researched this book. In the control tower at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, I learned about invisibility as a goal unto itself: here was a team of technically trained soldiers caring for an unsuspecting public that needed them more than it would ever know. Only when an air traffic controller fails does he get notice; like so many characters in Hidden America, the better these people were at their jobs, the more invisible they became.
Hidden America is a look at America from the inside out, and that shift in paradigm is not a subtle one. The perspective is, in fact, the exact opposite of the view we’ve become accustomed to taking in our celebrity-driven culture. Get on TV! Make millions! Win awards! We become so familiar with the narrative we forget that there are any others happening at all.
I wondered about fame, tried to see if there was any place at all for it in a book about Hidden America. I thought about entertainment, our biggest stage, our most celebrated spectacle. The NFL generates $9 billion annually, pays its actors handsomely to run and jump and crash into each other while catching and throwing balls. Meantime, smiling cheerleaders dance on the sidelines, begging for notice. What would happen if we stopped and said hello to these folks, too? What I discovered with the Ben-Gals cheerleading squad was a different kind of invisibility, a distinctively female one. Dress identically, wear identical orange lipstick, move in identical sequence, become the same in order to become your best self. Moreover, the cheerleaders demonstrated nationalism at its most basic level, every Sunday embodying a contradiction I came to understand as uniquely American.
Sisterhood in Hidden America appeared as a slight variation of the brotherhood that became such a common theme—the value system in so many of those worlds held teamwork and support in paramount regard—while motherhood was a whole different animal altogether. A trucker named Sputter opened that examination for me, somewhere in Iowa, and hauling tractor parts with Sputter turned into a surprising personal journey.
My own political views have no place in this book, and I deliberately steered away from making pleas on behalf of anyone—undocumented immigrants, environmentalists, or other interest groups, even the progesterone-juiced cows pumping out perfect calves in West Texas. And yet, it seemed incomplete to ignore the fact that America continues to split itself into political extremes. How could I begin to make sense of that divide in a way that was consistent with the goals of Hidden America? I decided to set off to meet the people of a Hidden America I believed I had the least chance of ever understanding: gun owners. I needed to jump across the divide, full-on, and sit awhile. How, anyway, did America become a nation of some 300 million guns and 80 million gun owners? I don’t mean politically, or even historically. I mean, how? Who are the people who arm America? Who are the clerks who stand behind the counter explaining, showing, doling out firearms? I went to Yuma, Ariz
ona, and worked behind the counter at a gun store to learn. I sold assault rifles and pistols, semiautos and revolvers, while I listened and learned to speak a language I have yet to fully figure out how to translate to the people who inhabit the side of the American divide where I come from. The world of guns is the one culture in this book that remains for me the most inexplicable rabbit hole.
I could of course have gone on and on. I wonder about corn, about cotton, shipping ports, bridges and tall buildings, and about the whispers of unnamed soldiers buried beneath tiny flags. Hidden America only gets bigger and more complex the more you peck away at it and try to understand it.
—
IT IS IMPORTANT TO NOTE, I think, that Hidden America, like any book, has a sound track against which it is written and read. If America is singing right now, in 2012, the music is loud, cacophonous, all percussion and unyielding refrain:
Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself!
STOP THE WAR ON WORKERS!
AS BUSINESS LEADERS, WE KNOW WHAT IT TAKES TO CREATE JOBS. LET US EXPLAIN HOW TO PUT AMERICA BACK TO WORK.
We are the 99 percent.
Don’t tax our job creators more!
This book has no new slogans to add to the shouting, offers no charged rhetoric to the cause of the 99 percenters or the 1 percent. If Hidden America takes any position at all, it is necessarily from the sidelines, underneath, above, or inside. It speaks from these vantage points—captures the quiet, nuanced conversations that the shouting and the sloganeering drown out. Hidden America doesn’t have an argument to make. Hidden America is busy. Hidden America is tired. Hidden America doesn’t have a lot of time to sit around and watch debates on TV. Hidden America needs a beer and to get to bed. These are the people who keep America alive and ticking. The people who, were they to walk off the job tomorrow, would bring life as we know it to a halt.