Hidden America Page 18

  Jeff will ride bronc tonight. On the one hand, it’s an honor to be the bronc rider; on the other hand, it’s what you give to the young guy with no kids and no wife. Just, well, in case. Jeff is pleased to be the bronc rider for the R.A. Brown Ranch. It gets his name out. It’s something to put on his cowboy résumé.

  They will take separate trucks, Donnell alone in his, because the others know better. Donnell can easily turn a five-hour trip into a ten-hour trip. Easily. He likes to visit. He likes to stop and chat with customers. Today he’ll pass out sale catalogs and hang posters of Turbo at sale barns, feedstores, anyplace that looks good. He has a roll of tape in his truck.

  Soon he is alone on Highway 183. A pickup approaches in the opposing lane and he raises two fingers, waves. He will do this over and over again, every truck he sees, until he reaches a town with too many to greet. Then, on the other side of that town, he will wave again, truck by truck. On and on it goes: he drives, waves, gets his eyes locked on the horizon.

  All the investors have said yes, have given their approval of the plan to clone Revelation. Sometimes Donnell wishes one of them had said no. Sometimes he does think that way. Sometimes it’s easier when God takes choices away from you. It’s up to Donnell now, up to him to call the cloning lab and pull the trigger. He has not yet done so.

  His dad said, “No.” Actually, his dad said, “Nah,” as in, why in the world would you spend all that money on some dumb clone? It’s funny. Because his dad is the tinkerer. The one who always wants to try awesome new things, and Donnell is the one clinging to good, conservative sense. You’d think their positions would be reversed.

  But here’s his dad’s point: A better bull is on the horizon. Something even more amazing than Revelation will come along, so put your faith and your prayer and your energy there. In the future. Not the past.

  It’s a tough one for Donnell to get. He’s a cowboy. A cowboy holds on to tradition, to history, to all that is known and correct. It’s good to look forward, of course it is. But it’s hard to look forward when the past was so perfect.

  He may still decide to clone. He may not. Instead of idling, stuck in the mud of indecision, he tries to think: Revelation plus AbiGrace. The top Red Angus Bull. He has the semen. The top Red Angus cow. He has the eggs. And now he has the resulting embryos in sixteen surrogate cows. Next spring, when the calves drop to the ground, he’ll see what he gets. He’ll see.

  Anyway, right now, he wishes he thought to bring a staple gun. That was dumb. Because tape won’t stick to a corkboard. And that’s the only place here at this particular feedstore where he’s allowed to put a poster. And there are no extra tacks. Other posters of other cattle are using up all the tacks. And he isn’t going to take another man’s poster down; he is not a man to take another man’s poster down.

  He needs a staple gun, so he finds a Super Walmart and pulls in. He parks the truck. He has on the spurs he heroically won riding bronc at the 1989 Texas Ranch Roundup rodeo. He has on his fancy embroidered shirt. He again notices a splotch of dried mud on his starched jeans. He again takes out the knife he keeps clipped to his belt, unfolds it, and scrapes that mud off. He reaches into the back of his truck, grabs his hat, the handsome black felt one he brings out each fall. He puts the hat on his head, positions it low, walks tall, and listens to the gentle jingle of his spurs.

  In this way, all dignity and elegance and fight, a cowboy enters Walmart on an October afternoon full of steam, the way of sun after rain.

  THE RIG

  Pioneer Natural Resources Oil Rig Oooguruk Island, off the Shores of Alaska’s North Slope

  TooDogs is on the run. “Catch me later,” he’ll say each time I approach, and then he disappears for a day. There are not a lot of places to hide. This is a six-acre island, 250 miles above the Arctic Circle, a few miles off the shore of Alaska in the Beaufort Sea—nothing but white ice, ghostly steam, cold steel. The temperature outside is 38 degrees below zero, and now the wind is kicking up.

  “Hey!” I say, finding TooDogs upstairs in the camp smoke room, where he’s leaning, peering out a window. Outside, snow blows horizontally, a curtain of weather obscuring his rig, Nabors 19AC, standing tall on the other side of the island, about a half a football field away, lit up in the darkness. It’s a royal-blue and yellow tower, platforms and blocks of machinery stacked high over the hole where the drill enters the ocean floor. TooDogs, the “toolpusher,” built the rig. A toolpusher is a guy who builds a rig, runs the drilling operation. I’m not yet sure how he earned the rig name TooDogs. Some say it’s because he can get as angry as two dogs fighting; some say it’s because he’s part Blackfeet Indian and there’s an old joke about a boy of similar origin named “Two Dogs Fucking.” (He spells it TooDogs, not TwoDogs, because, he says, “that looks like shit.”)

  Not everyone here has a rig name. Having a rig name is neither a sign of notoriety nor longevity nor respect. Some guys, like Turtle and Kung Fu and Brain and TooDogs, are simply destined.

  “You hear that?” TooDogs says, leaning his head toward the window. “Brrr. Brrr. That’s torque.”

  He’s a burly guy, a Weeble that wobbles but won’t fall down, at first glance kind of a clone of so many others here: mustache, wire-rimmed glasses, cap, Carhartt coveralls, bedroom slippers. About ninety people live out here on the ice, nearly all men, some of whom wander around in their pajamas, since it’s a twenty-four-hour operation and maybe they’re just popping out of their rooms to brush their teeth. No boots are allowed inside camp, a snug set of frozen trailers holding glorious heat, and fresh food that’s trucked in over the ice roads once a week, and two beds to a room, and stalls of clean showers.

  “You know what time is for?” TooDogs asks me.

  “What it’s for?” I ask.

  “It’s to keep everything from happening all at once,” he says.

  I look at him, nod politely. He drags hard on his cigarette.

  “Can you imagine the alternative?” he says, and for the first time I notice that his eyes are a deep steel blue, there is a white scar snaking between them, and the saying on his cap reads: HUNT HARD . . . IN ALASKA. He makes his eyes big, and his face gets red, and the scar appears whiter. “The alternative?” he says. “BOOM!”

  Now I’m staring at him.

  “What?” he says.

  “I guess I never thought of it that way.”

  “It’s something to remember when your stuff gets cluttered,” he says. “You know, when the stuff in your head gets cluttered?”

  He says his stuff has been pretty cluttered this hitch. A tangle of thoughts—family, money, work—clogging up his mind. He says it’s no big deal. He says it’s all workable. “Sometimes I just think my give-a-shit spring is about to bust.”

  He looks out the window, listens again to the torque, the growl of motors trying to spin the drill bit through rock. “The hole’s talking to us. It’s tight. Tight. Brrr. Brrr. I can’t believe it.”

  I suggest he take me over there, tour me around, and show me what’s going on. No one goes to the rig without TooDogs’s permission. “I’ve been asking for days,” I point out.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” he says.

  I tell him I’m getting bored with the chase.

  “You just have to learn my traplines,” he says.

  “Traplines? This is a rig reference?”

  “Traplines,” he says.

  “Oh, it’s a fishing term,” I guess.

  “Traplines!” he says. “Like a trapper has a trapline?”

  “Wait, we’re talking about hunting?”

  “It’s just an expression! Jesus, woman. Gawd!”

  “Please show me around the rig,” I say.

  “Tomorrow,” he says, and he tells me he has to get going, says good-bye, and heads out of the smoke room. I follow him, three steps behind, as h
as become our practice.

  He has lived in this camp, on and off, for two years, ever since the island was built. How do you build an island to put an oil rig on? You wait until the ocean freezes. You can’t dig water, but you can dig ice. Dig to the bottom and excavate a foundation, about eleven acres in all. Find a source of gravel—in this case, a pit ten miles away—because you need a lot of it. Crews built ice roads and started hauling. They kept hauling, 20,000 truckloads, traveling a total of 400,000 miles, the equivalent of about sixteen trips around the world. They had to hurry. They had to get it all done before the ice roads melted. They dumped gravel, dumped and dumped, sculpted a six-acre rectangle out of it, then got to work on a retaining wall: more gravel—8,000 sacks of it, weighing 13,000 pounds each—one on top of the other, bam, bam, bam, a barrier to fight back the summer sea. They had to hurry. They had to connect the island to shore, six miles away. They dug a trench, a crazy-long trench, in which a subsea flow line would carry oil. It cost $500 million to build this island, not to mention the brawn of constantly revolving crews of as many as six hundred people working in temperatures cold enough to kill.

  I have listened to engineers explain all this, and overall it has been hard not to look at them and think: My Lord, America needs oil.

  For his part, TooDogs is not overly impressed. “A rig is a rig,” he says.

  I am still three steps behind. I have learned it is the only way to keep his attention, or what little of it he offers. “Sometimes it’s best to just turn the thinking off,” he says. “Cut-and-dried. The best way to live is cut-and-dried. Just make up your mind and move forward.”

  He has toured me around certain areas of the camp this way, often pretending I’m not here. I throw questions up at him; he halfway turns his head and halfway answers, then offers tidbits as if to tease entrance into a complicated mind. “I’ve been married for twenty-eight years,” he says. “We didn’t speak for a lot of years. Resentment. Could be. Not on my part. I was an asshole.” He says he’s a loner, a person who hides, deals with the world only in manageable chunks. It seems an unlikely analysis when I watch how loved he is here, how all the guys depend on him, how he’s the glue holding so much of this operation together, a fact he readily if regretfully recognizes. “I’m the dad,” he tells me. “I’m the mom. I’m the jailer. I’m the bail bondsman. But mostly, I guess, the dad.”

  We zoom down the stairway, squeaky clean and bland beige like so much of this place. On the whole, the camp has the cozy feel of a college dorm, or perhaps the too-cozy feel of a submarine. The extreme temperatures make the outdoors nearly as inaccessible as the deep sea. You have to pile on about twenty pounds of arctic gear just to walk outside, where the only thing waiting is darkness. Always darkness. We are so high atop the globe the sun doesn’t shine for fifty-six days in the dead of winter, and this is February, mid-death. Madness is a topic of conversation in the camp. How to avoid it. How to bring other guys out of it.

  I follow TooDogs toward the dining hall. We pass the loud, uproarious sound of a fiddle playing “Come All Ye Fair and Tender Maidens” spilling from behind the bedroom door of the man they call Kung Fu. Some people like the music, some complain it sounds like a dying cat, but nearly all appreciate the calming effect the fiddle playing has had on Kung Fu.

  TooDogs quickens his pace. There is a sneaky quality to his walk, a slinking. I ask him how old he is. “Just turned fifty,” he says.

  I applaud him for answering a question so directly. “That was really good.”

  “Shut up,” he says.

  We come upon Turtle in the hallway, a small, fleshy kid with the constant appearance of someone who hasn’t quite woken up. “It sucks being young,” Turtle announces. “Do you know my feet are actually still growing?”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” TooDogs says.

  Turtle has brassy orange hair, a messy mop matted down on one side, sticking out on the other, and so very . . . orange. He’s a roustabout, basically a janitor, the lowest worm on a rig.

  “Did you clean your room?” TooDogs asks him.

  “That’s my plan-forward for tonight,” Turtle says.

  “You have to clean your room and you have to bathe, Turtle,” TooDogs says.

  “Did you know Jason is not married to a black stripper named Onyx?” Turtle says, “and he does not have a pole in his garage for her to practice dancing with?”

  “Yeah, I knew that, Turtle,” TooDogs says. “I knew that.”

  “He had me believing that for an entire year,” Turtle says. “A year! I hate him. I don’t know why I’m even friends with him.”

  “Go clean your room,” TooDogs says.

  “It sucks being young,” Turtle says.

  “I am going to bed now,” TooDogs says. “I am going to my room, and I am going to shut my door.”

  —

  THE ISLAND IS NAMED OOOGURUK, an Inupiaq word meaning “bearded seal,” an animal plentiful on the shores of Alaska’s North Slope. The Slope is where the Trans-Alaska Pipeline starts, where the crude gets pumped up from more than a mile inside the earth, then gets sent on the eight-hundred-mile journey south to Valdez, Alaska, where the pipeline ends and tankers come and load the crude up and deliver it down the coast. There, in places like northern Washington and Long Beach, California, it gets processed into the fuel America now so grudgingly remembers makes the world go round.

  People have known for thousands of years that oil was abundant on Alaska’s North Slope, a vast tundra, flat and treeless, on and on and on, from the foothills of the Brooks mountain range to the Arctic Ocean, an endless, unchanging landscape bigger than Idaho. For centuries, native Eskimos cut blocks of oil-soaked tundra from natural seeps to use as fuel. In the 1920s, explorers arrived and began poking holes. In 1968, they discovered Prudhoe Bay State No. 1, the largest oil field in North America and one of the largest in the world, and a year later the adjacent Kuparuk field, the second-largest. Today, five of our ten largest oil fields are on Alaska’s North Slope, where twenty-four separate fields pump out about 16 percent of our total domestic oil supply.

  A person can’t just drive around the North Slope, visit the locals, stop in at a burger joint. There are no locals, no burger joints, no houses, no cities, no churches, no billboards advertising radio stations playing hit songs. The gateway to the oil fields is the town of Deadhorse, where the airport is, and where security restricts passage to anyone but the 3,500 workers who fly in and get bused to camps in rotating hitches that can last anywhere from two weeks to six months.

  It took nearly a year for me to gain access to the Slope. The corporate giants who control the fields—BP, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil—are famously private about what goes on up here. Rarely do stories of Alaska’s oil emerge unless there is a freak accident to talk about, usually a spill. “At a smelly site just off a gravel road,” wrote a reporter for USA Today in August 2006, “workers in oil-drenched coveralls tote vacuum hoses and thick towels across a patch of blackened tundra. A lone caribou grazes in the distance.” It was a bad year for BP, when a dime-size hole in the pipeline caused by corrosion sent nearly 5,000 barrels of crude spilling out across the snow, and so of course there was a lot of news coverage of stinky oil and filthy workers sucking and slogging. It was indeed hard not to side with the winsome caribou—to project onto it all manner of gloomy thoughts about the greedy nature of the human race. And so that conversation goes.

  Pioneer Natural Resources—the company that built the island where TooDogs is in charge of the rig and Kung Fu plays the fiddle and Turtle fake-hates Jason for lying to him about being married to a stripper named Onyx—allowed me to come to the Slope to have a different conversation. Pioneer is the first independent operator to produce oil on the Slope, a market cornered by the three majors for its entire history. In many ways, it represents a glimmer of economic hope. Everyone knows the oil up here is runn
ing out; production is declining 6 percent a year, down from an all-time high of 2 million barrels a day in 1988 to 700,000 today. But everyone also knows the oil isn’t really running out—it’s just a lot harder to get to. It is a common story in the saga of natural resources, whether you are talking coal or gas or oil: The big companies suck out the easy, vast reservoirs, and then in come the little companies nimble enough to pick away at the leftovers.

  The ongoing debate over whether or not we should be drilling for oil in Alaska, onward to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the east—from the environmentalist perspective, from the thirsty SUV perspective, from the climate change perspective that has us all debating a whole fossil fuel shift in paradigm—typically leaves out one factor: We are drilling for oil in Alaska, every hour of every day for the past thirty years, drilling in some of the most extreme conditions on earth, where the windchill can easily reach minus 98 degrees, so cold that you have to leave your pickup running twenty-four hours a day or you’ll never get it started again, where it is pitch-dark for nearly two months each winter, where people live without families, without homes, without access to so much of what most of us think of when we think of what it means to be human.

  Who are these people, and how do they get the oil out of the ground? It seems, on its face, an embarrassingly simple question, and maybe that’s the point. Crude. Petroleum. We process it into gasoline, asphalt, plastic, fertilizer. We fill up our cars with it, drive on roads made of it. We use it to make all those soda bottles and all those Baggies holding our lunches, the foam in our mattresses, the padding in our running shoes. The vegetables we eat are protected from bugs by it. We travel because of it, drink out of it, sleep on it, wear it, eat it, whine about how much it costs, argue about it, hate needing it, love it, kill for it. It is our most ubiquitous natural resource, the juice that made the past century possible. How we get it in the first place would seem to be a fundamental building block in our understanding of what it means to be a citizen of the world. And yet here is an industry and a culture that is as alien to most of us as the moon. An abstraction. It’s not like steel towns, or farming communities, or fishing villages, or any of the places where local industry and economy and culture bleed into and inform one another. There is no county fair exhibiting North Slope rigs, no crowning of an Arctic Oil Queen, no famous country music song celebrating a guy’s heroic deeds on the tundra. There is no blending of Alaska oil field culture with anything resembling real life. Workers go home to Anchorage or Fairbanks or Dallas or Mobile, Alabama, or Jackson, Mississippi. You can live anywhere and work here, and when you go home your wife and your kids and your neighbors will have no idea what you are talking about. They will never see where you work unless they get a job here and become part of the invisibility. Even in Alaska—where oil accounts for 90 percent of the state’s revenue—there are no souvenirs, no postcards, no talk on talk shows about what’s going on up on the Slope. The situation wouldn’t be so odd, perhaps, if we really were talking about the moon, where presumably nothing actually happens. But here is the stuff, the fuel, we’re so thirsty for, and here’s where people are fighting the worst kind of elements to get it. The longer I stayed on the Slope, the more I wondered how we can be so disconnected from people we’re so connected to.