It is noon, and getting hot, and very sunny. John, the devoted practitioner of the impossible, is sprawled on the baked gravel near the fence surrounding an active oil well with methane-fed flames spluttering behind wild sunflower blossoms, and spies on various insects with his long lens. We are attempting to photograph a visual outline of the fracking industry, which in the last decade stood this hardscrabble prairie region on its head.
As many people already know, the recently perfected hydraulic fracturing method which allows for extraction of oil trapped in thick beds of shale buried deep underground is anything but perfect. In fact, it has an enormous potential to pollute drinking water resources, turn fertile fields into trampled arenas supporting tons of monstrously large and noisy equipment and supply trucks, fill the air with dust, produce toxic and carcinogenic waste, and forever change the way of life for hundreds of rural communities. And just the way its detractors stress the darkest side of the boom, its proponents see only the glory. New jobs. High wages. Revitalization of many dying towns where all businesses had to close and family houses have been selling for under $30,000. The promise of the anticipated profusion of cheap gas for all.
Yesterday, while rolling down a dirt road near Williston, ND, a Wild West oil boom town which tripled its population in the last decade, and where the smallest apartments rent for $3,000 a month, we met a man driving a white pickup which kicked up a fair amount of silky dust. We stopped. He stopped. Then he rolled down his window and without any prompting he proceeded to lecture us on shining virtues of the American rough and ready individualism. And according to our white pickup man, these virtues are flourishing now in North Dakota, thanks to our mineral rights laws which allow ordinary citizens to purchase these rights and extract whatever their owners are after.
"And no one can stop you here, no one!" he proclaimed, adding that in England (an obvious dig at John's not-English-but-it sounds-foreign-so-it-may-be-English-after-all accent) the state owns all such rights and can make sure no one can get his rough and ready hands near them.
He was wrong: just like in the US, mineral rights in the UK are not tied to property ownership and can be purchased separately. And recently residents across England have started receiving letters from the Land Registry, informing them that the Church of England plans to register the mineral rights to the earth beneath their properties. If approved, the claim could allow the Church to profit from fracking, even though the Diocese of Blackburn has warned parishioners in Lancashire that fracking could threaten “God’s glorious creation”.
Yet the roadside lecturer sounded as if our freedom had no equal anywhere on Earth, and only we, the citizens of the U.S., could enjoy our private Klondike if we only wished to grab it. We asked where we could see a lot of oil drilling activity and he waved his hand toward the east. "Go to New Town," he suggested. "As you drive, you will see God's gift to this country: wheat, oil, wheat, oil, wheat, oil...."
Seeing that God may be actively involved in the fracking controversy in more ways than one, we simply try to chase what we can. Right now, there are butterflies and flames. Earlier, there were wheat fields and blue plastic pipes resting on dark soil. Yesterday there were bigger flames and tall derricks nodding their mule heads near isolated farmhouses, dark shapes of oilmen servicing drilling rigs, a giant waste collection pit lined with acres of black plastic and gaping darkly in the middle of the prairie, old emergency vehicles with peeling patriotic stickers reading "SUPPORT OUR TR...." and hundreds of iron caterpillars of oil-laden railroad cars, winding slowly across golden wheat fields under the blazing blue sky.
Hot and filthy, we find a "men camp" to score a shower. Hundreds of prefab dorm boxes stand side by side, leashed to their individual propane tanks and satellite dishes not unlike dogs to their owners. The red gravel driveways are empty, as if the oilmen who reside here were forever absent, and the boxes held only dozens of their tube socks silently watching television screens. But the communal laundry room is busy, and as I enter every man comes over to help. They fetch the manager, add find some badly frayed but clean towels -- old white for me and pale blue for John -- and escort us to a clean private shower. We splash and scrub and rinse.
The men remind me of the Great Slave Lake fishermen, the Dogrib and Slavey natives we sailed and lived with while doing our first magazine story for North/Nord in 1975, and Wyoming's Jeffrey City uranium miners who saved my ass during one awful winter blizzard a long time ago and later pulled my rented VW bug stuck in a snowdrift in Red Desert, and frostbitten Alaska pipeline workers who told us about all the wildlife coming on shore in Prudhoe Bay. They are lonely, for their families and sweethearts do not usually follow them to boom towns, which are too expensive and too "hot" and too remote. A young road supervisor -- one of many drivers who stopped to chat with us --- shyly asks to be photographed playing his guitar on the back of his service pickup. Anything for company, anything to stove away this nagging home sickness which no job can fill.
I read a North Dakota job website:
North Dakota fracking jobs growth is off the charts. Right now, North Dakota and cities like Williston have become “ground zero” for those seeking employment in the fracking industry. Stories abound of new arrivals to this economic powerhouse in the Plains finding work within mere hours, and reaping large paychecks from endlessly available overtime. Plenty of opportunity awaits those willing to travel to the North Dakota landscape in search of fracking jobs, and away from the economic distress so common in other states.
I also see that most of these jobs require a high school diploma or GED and call for:
* Ability to bend, stoop and lift objects of up to 75 pounds for extended periods of time.
The website also lists typical employment benefits:
* Medical Insurance -Premium is 100% company paid for employee or family coverage.
* Teladoc - A benefit that gives employees access to a Doctor 24/7/365 for visits by phone/video at no cost to the employee, including getting a prescription written if appropriate. It is not insurance, but helps employees get the most out of their benefits.
* Dental Insurance - Premium is 100% company paid for employee coverage or 50% company paid for family coverage.
* Vision Insurance -100% employee paid.
* Life Insurance - Company paid life with AD&D policy with the option to buy up.
* 401(k) - Employees are eligible for 401(k) after 1 year of employment and 1000 hours with a company match of up to 4%.
So, if you are a high school graduate, or a dropout with your GED in hand and no savings and even less prospects, and can bend and lift up to 75 pounds repeatedly, and do not mind working up to 90 hours a week, and sleep in a prefab box next to your tube socks, and see no one you really know for months on end, this may be your chance to live an adult life, with your efforts translating into a decent paycheck. And medical and life insurance. And a sense of purpose.
Environmental concerns? The potential degradation of water, soil, air, and traditional life here, and in Pennsylvania, and in Illinois? This is for you and me to worry about. This is our job. It really is.
It is our job because we drive our cars, heat our houses, eat cheap food transported by innumerable trucks, and use the oil these men bring to the surface in thousands of different ways. And because we participate in oil consumption even when we fly or drive to Washington, DC, or Albany, NY, to protest -- wholeheartedly, and rightly -- the very abomination of fracking. And because many of us have some investments and hate to see our stocks sink, even though their robust performance is often tied to the very oil orgy we abhor but also embrace.
Perhaps because you and me do not have to bend and lift heavy objects over and over again in order to make our living, we can, instead, take on the job of making sure this new wave of extractive activities does not get out of hand. And it does matter that we argue, sign petitions, donate to environmental organizations, elect politicians who pay attention to environmental warning bells, and otherwise keep our minds alert and knowing and balanced.
And maybe this winter, after we process our pictures and look at them critically, we may throw them into the cyberspace to make our point or two. But today we just watch that butterfly trying to land on that particular wild sunflower.
The blossoms remind me that recently they turned out to be the only plausible toilet paper I could find in the arid, hard landscape. John departed with our camper, I could not wait, the ditch was there, but every plant I considered had pointy spikes and rough sandpaper leaves. So in the end the sunflower petals became my garden of Eden in the fracked desert.
© Yva Momatiuk
