Hidden America Read online

  There is no alcohol allowed anywhere on the Slope. A person getting caught with it will be run off for life, no questions asked, no second chances. Everything here is flammable. One mistake and you could blow the place up. When an oil field worker boards the plane in Deadhorse to go home, he will more than likely order as many drinks as the flight attendant permits. Many of the younger guys I meet say they don’t stop drinking for two weeks, until it’s time to get back on the plane for the Slope. Many of the older guys I meet have spectacular addiction-and-recovery stories they try in vain to impart to the younger guys.

  After their twelve-hour shifts, most of the people on Oooguruk eat and go to bed. “There-is-no-where-to-go,” they keep pointing out. They’re tired. The company had a pool table in the camp for a while but tossed it after no one used it. I never see anyone in the movie theater. I learn of parties, such as they are. Guys gather in the dining hall for ice cream, or chocolate chip cookies they nuke for twelve seconds.

  For a lot of guys, home is harder than the Slope. I hear this story over and over again. Somewhere along the line, an endless loop of anguish sets in: the Slope is an escape (from home) which many speak of longing to escape from (to go home), only to discover they need to escape (from home.)

  It is certainly not the case for everyone. There are plenty I meet who are building satisfying careers here: engineers and geologists, medics and computer technicians, people who speak of learning to bracket their lives into manageable two-week chunks.

  But it’s the people on the front line, the roughnecks working the rig, who command the most notice. (Nearly all the people on Oooguruk are subcontracted by other companies. The roughnecks work for Nabors Alaska drilling company.) “Roughneck” is a specific term for a job on the rig crew, one rung up from roustabout, but also a generic term used for anyone who survives the job and graduates to pit watcher, derrick hand, driller, toolpusher, company man. In the same way a general will always think of himself as a soldier, a roughneck is a roughneck is a roughneck no matter how high he climbs in the hierarchy of a rig. “It’s the same anywhere you go on the Slope,” a guy on the construction crew tells me. “The roughnecks think they’re the shit. They parade around like this whole place is about them. We put up with it because they’re the ones getting the oil. If they don’t get the oil, we all go broke.” Perhaps, then, there is a kind of indulgence; roughnecks are allowed to be, maybe even expected to be, eccentric and tough: in and out of prison, Harley guys, hard-hunting guys, men who strut their badass selves for all to fear.

  Of course, there is also the need for a certain amount of guts.

  A rig is an unforgiving steel tower, rife with peril: stuff turns, fingers get lopped off, arms, a couple of years ago a leg. That was over on Nabors 14E, where TooDogs was punching wildcats into the ice. Tim, a roustabout, couldn’t see through the steam in the pit room that night, couldn’t see where he stepped: into an auger that sucked him in. TooDogs reached, grabbed, but it was too late. Both legs sucked in, the guy up to his hips in the machinery, screaming, not knowing his left leg was already cut off, the right wrapped around the auger shaft. It took rescuers seven hours to cut him out. TooDogs held him. Gently wiping his forehead, talking to him the whole time like any dad would talk. They jammed a stick in his mouth for the final cut, flew him out of there to the hospital, eight hundred miles away in Anchorage.

  Roughnecks live terrible shit like that, the kind of constant shit that can bond a man to another for life, like combat soldiers who easily shrug off each other’s madness.

  —

  AT BREAKFAST ONE MORNING I run into Kung Fu, who brings his Bible here each day, opening the doors of his makeshift church for fellowship.

  He is a clean-shaven man with an enormous bodybuilder’s chest he displays proudly beneath a tight white T-shirt. He has full sleeves of intricate tattoos: eyeballs, crosses, shamrocks, skulls, peacock feathers. Today he’s wearing an American flag bandanna, and he’s drinking his pre-workout stimulator, a vitamin concoction his mom cooks up in her health food store in Fairbanks.

  “Love should be the only motive in what we do in the name of the Lord,” he is saying to Stubbs, who has joined him.

  “You’re a preacher,” Stubbs is saying. “You’re going to be a real preacher someday! I’m telling you, man—”

  Kung Fu thinks he is taking care of Stubbs, and Stubbs thinks he is taking care of Kung Fu. Stubbs has worked on the Slope for twenty-two years and he has been sober now for about a year and a half, a fact he attributes in part to TooDogs, who always forgave him after prison, always welcomed him back—but mostly to Angela, the first woman in his life who didn’t steal his money. Kung Fu is not nearly so far along on the sobriety plan, but Stubbs is helping. When he’s home in Anchorage, Stubbs will call Kung Fu at least once a day to make sure he’s still sober. He also checks in with Zack, the derrick hand, and he also calls Turtle to see if he got dinner, which he usually didn’t, so he drags Turtle over to his house for chicken.

  Bible fellowship is ending and I wait quietly for the two to finish prayer.

  “That-is-the-shit,” Stubbs says. “Man, you got it going on.”

  “Amen,” Kung Fu says, and Stubbs heads off and Kung Fu takes a swig of his pre-workout stimulator, smacks his lips, and then leans in to tell me a secret. “You must listen,” he says. “I’m serious.” He tells me to never, ever log on to www.infowars.com from my home computer because the site contains top-secret information about the enemy and the enemy will know I’m onto them if I use my home computer.

  I ask who the enemy is and he blinks, as if changing channels. He smiles wide, shows me his teeth. “That to me is probably one of the most incredible things I have,” he says. “All my natural teeth.”

  I ask him about the Slope. I ask him why he came to the Slope.

  “It made me a new man,” he says. “I was leading a hard-core whopper-stopper lifestyle. Like, for instance, you’re looking at $180,000 worth of plastic surgery. I ended up getting jumped by an outlaw gang. I won’t name any names. I was going to open a strip club, Lords of Liberty Motorcycle Militia, bikes and guns and strippers, and then in the back I could have my meth lab right there. That was my dream.”

  Instead, he got a chance to get a Slope job two years ago. It was something of a divine rescue. He got the name Kung Fu almost as soon as he arrived. He would walk around doing sword kicks, dive rolls, just spinning all over the place in that way he has of trying to expend excess energy. It was a little weird, but not so unmanageable in the hallway back at camp. But on the rig floor? He started going all kung fu over there too. It upset Andy, who is stressed out enough just trying to make sure his young roughnecks keep the casing connections going without getting themselves killed. You can’t have a guy out there doing flying scissor kicks. You just can’t.

  “Dude,” Andy said on the phone to TooDogs, who was over in his office at camp. “We have to do something about Kung Fu.” It was not the first time the two had had the conversation. TooDogs went over and saw for himself, saw the ninja performance, saw all the guys just staring at the karate dude going apeshit with his act. TooDogs walked onto the rig floor, stared at him with those steel-blue eyes. “Kung Fu,” he said. “Come over here.” Kung Fu did as he was told.

  “What the hell are you doing?” TooDogs asked him.

  “I want to be Spider-Man,” Kung Fu answered.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I had me a dream about yon derrick,” Kung Fu said, in a fake Irish brogue. “I wish to climb the derrick, because derrick hand is my destiny. Can I be derrick hand?”

  TooDogs stood speechless for more than a moment. He looked Kung Fu long and hard in the eye to see if there was anything in there, anything in his brain to work with. Kung Fu had already been run off three rigs. It would be easy enough to run him off this one.

  And whatever TooDogs saw, he s
aw. If there is one force that drives TooDogs, it is a kind of cavernous compassion, a well of empathy that never seems to empty. Maybe because of all the forgiveness he’s still working on getting, or maybe it’s just the way he’s built.

  “All right, my man,” TooDogs said. “You are going to be my project. You are my poster boy. I don’t know what’s tripping your trigger. But we gotta find a way to de-tune you if you’re gonna stay on my rig.”

  It is still touch-and-go for Kung Fu, who, with TooDogs’ encouragement, started bringing his fiddle to the Slope. And his vitamins and his Bible. Lately, he has been trying to rename himself “Brother Brian,” which isn’t sticking.

  In the dining hall, where Kung Fu and I sit and talk, he finally reaches clarity about life for himself on the Slope. “You get two weeks of room and board,” he says. “You wake up. Bam. Food’s ready. Bam. Clean sheets, towels. Everything’s taken care of. It’s like rehab. It’s like vacation. And then you get a fat check. It’s, like, can you believe they actually pay us to do this? I mean, come on!”

  He begins laughing in a way that doesn’t seem right, doesn’t seem joyful, and then in a minute he is crying. “Oh, Brian Matthew Regan, put it away, Brian Matthew Regan! Repent! Repent!”

  TooDogs appears, holding an empty cup. All he wanted was some orange juice, but now he’s walked into this.

  “Help,” I say to TooDogs.

  “Dude,” he says to Kung Fu. He grabs hold of one shoulder and shakes him. “Dude!” But by now Kung Fu is lost in sobs.

  TooDogs sits with him and I excuse myself. “This is a rig,” I hear TooDogs say repeatedly. “This is just a rig.”

  —

  A STUCK DRILL IS NO WAY to start a hitch. Rod just came in yesterday, and he’s getting a bad feeling about this well, ODS K 33, also known simply as 33. It costs anywhere from $5 million to $20 million to drill a single well, more if you get stuck for any length of time—it costs at least a quarter million a day to run the operation—and considerably more still if you get so stuck you have to give up and cement off, leaving $3 million worth of equipment on the drill string behind.

  At this point, the bit has reached 8,491 feet, a measurement indicating distance but not necessarily depth. It’s moving—or it was moving—at about a 68-degree angle through the earth, headed toward oil, or so everyone hoped. The challenge in drilling is that so very much of it is a matter of blind faith. The tools the toolpusher sticks down the hole send signals up, information about pressure and torque and weight, all of which gets translated into numbers on computer screens, which TooDogs and Rod and the engineers back in Anchorage look at as they rub their chins and fret. The whole invisible journey is guided by nothing but a joystick.

  “The hole’s real ratty,” Rod says to TooDogs over in the doghouse. “I’d like to backream and run a walnut sweep, is what I’d like.”

  “Getting in and out, that’s what we gotta worry about now,” TooDogs says.

  “You mean on the backreaming?”

  “This hole has seen eleven-pound mud.”

  “Everything above us has seen a 10.7. It’s already swollen in.”

  “We’ll know that when we go back in and get the wiper out of there.”

  “Bottom line, right now we don’t know shit,” Rod says.

  “Can’t do shit without circulation,” TooDogs says.

  “We’re stuck.”

  You can’t drill without circulation. Think of, well, sex without lubrication. So much of drilling seems borrowed from sex, although no one ever says it. In all its phallic glory, the drill enters the earth, spinning clockwise. It squirts “mud” as it goes. The mud comes out of the middle of the drilling assembly and out into the hole—or “well bore”—the drill makes, and then back up to the surface. The mud, a carefully concocted mixture of water and gels, is the key to just about everything. Not only does it provide lubrication for the drill, but it sends the rock you’re chewing—the “cuttings”—floating up and out of the hole. Also, the mud provides pressure, keeping the well from collapsing. Think of diving into the ocean: the deeper you go, the more the ocean pushes you up. The earth works the same way: the deeper you go, the more forceful the pressure. To keep burrowing deeper, drillers increase mud weight, forcing the hole to stay open. It is a delicate balancing act. If the mud weight is too heavy, they’ll bust open the wall of the well bore and get a blowout. A blowout is when the well explodes, often taking human bodies and usually the rig with it.

  “Basically, you’re trying to fool Mother Nature,” is the way one guy explains drilling to me. “You’re trying to get in her, and she’s trying to push you out. You keep her open with your mud, and you ream deeper.”

  He draws me a picture. He never once makes the joke. Not so much as a wink.

  After more talking and fretting and coming back to the same point—you can’t do shit without circulation—TooDogs comes over to me. “Okay,” he says. “Put your stuff on, because I’m taking you back over to camp.”

  I tell him I don’t want to leave.

  “We’re fixing to start jarring. You can’t be here when we’re jarring. Now! Let’s go.”

  I put on my parka, head down the rig stairs with TooDogs, whose big, blocky body is so nimble on these steps. He leads me quickly across the yard; we go through a polar bear cage into camp, and he deposits me in the mudroom. “Stay!” he says. His face is red, and his scar is getting white, so I know he’s serious. I put on my slippers and head to the dining hall and eat some surprisingly fresh shrimp salad, feel surprisingly sad about getting run off the rig. It’s hard to leave that place, hard to miss out on the unfolding mystery of what the earth is hiding.

  Some construction guys come over to cheer me up with news of an arctic fox hanging out by the incinerator.

  “That’s cool,” I say.

  They tell me about various polar bears they had to chase off the island last fall with the dozer, about how fun it was to see them dive back into the sea.

  Soon, a distant BOOM! explodes from over on the rig, followed by a BOOM! You can hear it all the way over here in camp. Jarring involves hydraulic pistons deep inside the earth, tools in place on the drill string to help a driller get unstuck. BOOM! And thirty seconds later, BOOM! One hundred thousand pounds of drill pipe pulled up and then let loose, BOOM! Jarring is full of violence, the derrick shaking and moaning after each BOOM! I head to the smoke room, where the view is better, and wait an hour for the guys to come back, to tell me about their success jarring, their success beating Mother Nature at her foolish game of “No!” BOOM! I wait two more hours in the TV room, then back to the dining hall, the smoke room. There are only so many places to go. After four hours, I give up and go back to my bait box and try to sleep. BOOM! BOOM! All night long.

  It bothers me that no one here states the obvious. No one says, “Isn’t this kind of like sex with a girl who won’t put out?” In the same way, no one here talks about the living conditions, the crazy remoteness of the island, the cold. How can the temperatures not be a constant topic of conversation? How can “Jesus H. Christ, it’s COLD!” not be a daily exclamation?

  In the morning, I step out to greet a windless dawn. The cold is not a slap so much as a squeeze. The rig is quiet now, a hush of exhaustion. I think about limitation, surrendering to all that can never be. Soon the sky welcomes the sun, briefly cracks open with fierce stripes of red. The world, as far as the eye can see, turns pink. I think about the loneliness out here, so acute and thick. The remoteness. The aloneness. The twenty-four-hourness. Men in slippers. Constant. Shrimp for dinner. Blinking. Changing channels. Madness earned. I look out into a white sea rolling on and on to the horizon, all frozen lumps. I think about the moment the ocean froze, having simply stopped moving mid-wave.

  —

  ONE DAY I pull Jason aside and ask him what is up with the orange hair. He is pe
rhaps the least tortured orange-haired soul here, a third-generation Slope worker, thirty-three years old.

  “It was supposed to come out ‘Sandstone,’” Jason tells me. “Like the picture?” He is a boxy man with thin eyes that can’t help smile even as he pretends to scowl. “We didn’t leave it on long enough, so it came out more orange.”

  “So you guys just sat around one day and dyed your hair?”

  “Pretty much,” he says. He tells me there were six or seven of them in the room, that Brain had already shaved his off, and so had Kung Fu.

  I’m trying to picture this, and the thing is, I can. I can see these guys, a collection of misfits who so easily fit together—I can see them sitting in a room, acting like teenage girls with their first box of hair dye.

  “It was a Clairol product, I believe,” Jason tells me. “Nice ’n Easy?” He tells me his wife, who is not a stripper named Onyx but instead a hairdresser, got it for him to bring to the rig. He speaks lovingly of his wife, tells me he’s a family man with a nice house in Anchorage with an actual white picket fence, and he tells me about the hot rod in his garage he built when he was sixteen out of a ’64 Ford shortbed. He’s now rebuilding it with a nine-hundred-horsepower motor for when his oldest son, Joel, gets old enough to drive. Then he’s going to build another, out of a ’55 Fairlane, for Justin. Slope life, for Jason, is just about money. Providing for his family. The trick to survival on the island, for him, is just a matter of entertainment, torturing the gullible new kids, torturing the dude who walks around with perfect hair.

  “You know Melvis, don’t you?” Jason asks. “With the hair? Don’t call him Melvis to his face, by the way. But you know who I’m talking about?”

  The thing is, I do. There is a man who walks the rig with suspiciously pretty hair. He is a man who admits to getting highlights put in—says his wife makes him do it—which is bad enough. But the question on everyone’s mind about Melvis is: How come when he takes off his hard hat his hair springs back to its perky Elvis position, while everyone else walks around with normal, sticky hard-hat hair?