THE GOOD HAND
A MEMOIR OF WORK, BROTHERHOOD AND TRANSFORMATION IN AN AMERICAN BOOMTOWN
Michael Patrick F. Smith

Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2021

Copyright © Michael Patrick F. Smith 2021

Michael Patrick F. Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following:

Excerpt from ‘Love Poem to a Stripper’ from You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense by Charles Bukowski. Copyright © 1986 by Linda Lee Bukowski.

Used by permission of HarperCollinsPublishers

Excerpt from ‘Talking Hard Work’. Words and Music by Woody Guthrie.

Copyright © Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. (BMI)

Excerpt from ‘Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way’. Words and Music by Waylon Jennings.

Copyright © 1975 UNIVERSAL—SONGS OF POLYGRAM INTERNATIONAL, INC.

Copyright Renewed. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC

Illustration here © Jacob Thomas

Cover photograph: © Mr Doomits/500px/Getty Images

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008399436

Ebook Edition © January 2021 ISBN: 9780008399450

Version: 2021-01-11

Dedication

For my brothers and sisters:

Ryan, Matthew, Megan, Kate, and Shanon

Epigraph

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

—GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Raising the Derrick

Book One: Boom

Rain

Pithole

DK’s

Fathers of Men

Boomtown, USA

The Flop

A Picnic

Homes

The Dream

Seeking

Jesus

Curse of the Starving Class

Day Labor

Brooklynites

Searching

The Last Shot

Sakakawea

Hired

The Finals

Songs

The Safety Man

Roosevelt and Me

Book Two: The Patch

Day One

Huck Gets Bounced

Comings and Goings

Day Three

The Asylum

Shoulder to the Wheel

A Surprise

The Third of July

Independence Day

Ride

Huck Rolls Some Trucks

Jack and Diane

The Fifth of July

Railhead

Jesse’s Blues

The Wildebeest

Huck Falls in Love

Wilder

Days Off

The Lost Pages

Just Fine

The Rockaways

Glendive

Huck and Blood

A Night on the Town

Huck and Mr. Hyde

Magic

The Viking

The First Pick

The Harvest

Book Three: The Good Hand

Twelfth Night

Huck Gets Busted—Again

Triples

Yeah Buddy

Frog

The Hides

Buffalo Skinners

Wolfish

The Woodshed

Complicit

German Pride

Railhead in Winter

A Voice Mail

Brothers

Rosalie

Jack Comes Back

The Cold

The Side of the Road

Charley, Huck, and Me

Sun Dogs

Supper

Olhouser’s Farewell

A Series of Close Calls

Links in the Chain

Boomtown Earth

Sunsets

Call of the Wild

The Beginning

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

RAISING THE DERRICK

Like most people who rely on oil for nearly every aspect of their existence, I didn’t know anything about a drilling rig. I pulled off my hard hat, wiped my forehead with my forearm, and looked across the work location, trying to take it all in. On a mud-colored scar in the land cut flat two hundred yards across, trucks coughed diesel, cranes farted smoke, and dust turned to mud on the faces of men toiling under bright sunlight. The rig was half in pieces—giant square chunks of steel, littered across the dirt. I had no idea how it went back together. I adjusted the inside strap of my hard hat—what had the roughneck called it? A “brain bucket?”—and set it back on my head. It was my fifth day in the oil patch. I had yet to make a hand; I didn’t even know what it meant to “make a hand,” and I had no idea how vital that idea would become to me. I was a greenhorn, what most oil patch guys call a “worm,” a headless, legless, brainless thing, good for eating dirt and shutting the fuck up.

I had just left the shit box. The plumbing wasn’t functional yet, so the bathroom consisted of a trailer with a bare lightbulb, a toilet, and a mess of flies. It was 99 degrees outside the trailer and probably 120 degrees inside the shit box. Standing twenty feet away from it, I could smell the stink carried on the breeze.

In five days of work, I’d clocked over seventy hours of heavy manual labor. My neck and shoulders were stiff, my arms, legs, knees, and ankles battered and sore. My hands ached, and my head felt foggy from lack of sleep. Over the past several weeks, I had been crashing on a filthy flophouse floor, in a room I shared with several other migrant workers. The stress of the oil field work, combined with the stress of this living situation, aggravated a twitch under my left eye. It felt like my face was shorting out.

That morning, I’d made the mistake of thinking about giving up. The thought had wormed its way into my brain, and now I couldn’t seem to shake it. I was bone-tired, afraid, and nauseous.

There were many ways to get hurt on location. Or die. Exhausted men operated heavy machinery, trucks thundered past, heavy objects flew through the air—steel swinging steel around on cables, hooks, and slings. You could go blind. You could lose your hearing. You could lose a limb. A rod could snap, and bam: instant lobotomy. One hundred thirty-eight oil field hands had been killed in the United States the previous year. I looked around. I could see it happening to me. My breathing sped up, and my stomach knotted. I tried to take slow steady breaths.

Dragonflies buzzed around. I walked through a row of pickup trucks, across the dirt patch and toward a pile of wind walls—thin metal sheets some fifteen feet across. A wind wall does exactly what it sounds like it should do. On the high plains, with no trees or mountains to stop it, the wind is fierce. Even in the summer, gusts of northern air can all but knock you down. The walls protect against that. They make it easier for men to work the floor of the drilling rig, two to three stories above the dirt.

I was twenty yards from the crane and maybe thirty yards from the base of the rig. I squinted up into the sun. A wind wall, attached to the crane by four metal chains on the crane’s whip line, dangled in the air above the rig’s floor. A crew of roughnecks, strapped into harnesses and wearing heavy work boots, guided the wall down, set it carefully in place, and, after lumbering along the edge of the floor, swung their sledgehammers at large metal pins to attach it to the rig.

When the wall was connected, the crane operator reeled in the whip line. It swung in an arc above the men, away from them and toward me. With the precision of a bullet hitting a bull’s‑eye, the chains came to a sharp stop directly in front of me, the hooks suspended at the level of my chest. I gathered them into my hands, sliding the fasteners into eye hooks welded onto the corners of the next wall, then I looked back to the operator. He sat in the cab, blue Oakley sunglasses and beard slapped across an inscrutable expression. I waved a hand, and he gave me a nod. I stepped away from the pile, and another wind wall flew up into the blue.

AT LUNCHTIME, I sat in the back of the work van and ate cold Chunky soup out of the can. Bobby Lee sat with the driver’s seat kicked way back, his boots up on the dash. He wore a Resistol brand Diamond Horseshoe cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes. At one point the hat had been the color of pearl, but it was beat to shit, dirty, greasy, and floppy—incongruent with his studied look. “Now you know why gas is so expensive,” Bobby Lee said.

I stared out the window of the van. The work site was cluttered with tractor trailers, pickup trucks, forklifts, a hydraulic crane, a lattice boom crane, rows of stacked piping, giant metal structures, and crews of men.

No one was even drilling for oil yet. Everything I saw out the window—the trucks, the cranes, the men—was there because a previous well had been drilled to completion. And so we had shown up, Diamondback Trucking, to take the rig—the mechanism that extracts oil from the well—apart and load it onto haul trucks to bring it here, to a new location, where it was being reassembled over a new drill hole.

The previous day, Bobby Lee had handed me a sheet of paper to sign. In the mornings, we had safety meetings. We stood around with the roughnecks; somebody talked over the day’s plans, and we all signed a paper. I had never read the paper, but when Bobby handed me this page I thought it looked like all the others.

“Didn’t I sign this already?” I asked him.

“It’s a new one,” Bobby said.

“Okay,” I said, putting my name across it.

“And when I hand you something,” Bobby continued quietly, “don’t ask any questions. Just fucking sign it. And smile.”

He watched me silently until I faked a smile.

“And like it,” he told me. Then he breezed away.

Bobby Lee was like that. When a roughneck rushed up to him hollering about a problem, he raised his hand slowly, palm down, to eye level.

“Do you see my hand?” Bobby asked.

“Uh, yeah.”

“It’s not shaking,” he said.

That same day, a crane operator asked Bobby if he should get started on something.

“Did I tell you to start something?” Bobby spoke so quietly that he forced the crane operator to lean in.

“No,” the operator replied.

“Do your job,” said Bobby. He lit a cigarette, and then he walked off. The crane operator sat back in his seat and spit dip into an empty soda bottle.

Bobby Lee looked like Don Johnson. He wore blue jeans, cowboy boots, and a Western-cut blue denim shirt with a pack of USA Gold cigarettes in each breast pocket. He stood out, because on location everybody else looked the same. Faces hidden behind shaded safety glasses, heads covered by hard hats, the men wore fire-resistant jumpsuits with metallic stripes down the sides. They smoked, chewed dip, or spit sunflower seeds. They wore the same goatees, mustaches, or beards, dirt on their faces and dust in their teeth. They sweat and they cursed, and when they saw my green hard hat—I was a literal greenhorn—they identified me as a dumb fuck. But I couldn’t tell any of them apart. Throughout the day, they appeared in bright sunlight in front of me, shouted a few words, and then disappeared back into the dust.

“I just started last week,” a fellow greenhorn yelled at me over the din of a truck. “They don’t tell you how to do anything. I don’t know why. They’d save a lot of time if they told you.”

“Don’t stand there. Hand me that hook,” a truck driver hollered at me. I handed him the hook, and he turned his back to me completely. I stood there for some time staring at his back. Then, unsure of myself, I walked off.

One guy told me to watch out for the crane operator I was working with. “He’ll hurt you,” he said solemnly.

“Can I throw this chain to you?” a dude asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“You ready?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You ain’t ready,” he said, and he threw the chain at me.

I thought of what the Safety Man had told me: “You’re gonna be able to tell your grandkids you moved rigs across the Bakken Formation at the height of the North Dakota oil boom.” I thought about how much money I was going to make.

On my first day, I had teamed up with another field hand, a young, muscular guy with braces. We rigged a twenty-foot-tall steel structure, called a derrick stand, to a gin truck. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll just say right now that a gin truck is a big truck with a small crane on the back. It acts somewhat like a tow truck. We wrapped the chains from the gin truck around the steel structure and stepped away from it.

The driver pulled away, dragging the thing behind him. I followed.

“Don’t stand under that derrick stand,” the driver yelled at me through his window. “That’s a dumb fucking obvious thing you shouldn’t do. If it tipped you wouldn’t get out from under it. How long you work here?”

“Today,” I yelled back to him.

“Well, don’t stand under the fucking stand.”

I stepped away. The gin truck driver, a white-haired oldster with a handlebar mustache and a cranky voice, later approached me. “You started today? Well, I’ll tell you when you do some dumb fucking shit you obviously shouldn’t do.”

“Please do,” I said.

“I will. I’ll let you know when you do dumb fucking obvious shit.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“YOU DON’T WANT to see that?” It was Bobby Lee again. Lunchtime, and I’d fallen asleep in the van. I blinked my eyes open, wiped a string of drool from my mouth, and looked out the window. The company hands were raising the derrick.

I climbed out of the van and stood beside it in the dust. The derrick is the tower that supports the network of pipe that is inserted into the earth for drilling. It gives a rig its height and makes a drilling rig look like a drilling rig. In the process of putting a rig together, the derrick is assembled horizontally, then hinged to the drilling floor, and raised on that hinge by braided steel cables spooled around a steel drum called the draw works. When erect, the derrick, like the mast of a ship (it is sometimes called a mast), sits atop the rig, directly above the drill hole, or well. The derrick on this particular rig, Sidewinder Canebrake 103, when completely raised, would stand over 160 feet in the air.

I watched the derrick pivot slowly upward. Behind it hung a vast swath of perfect blue sky. I took out my phone and recorded a video. I was bearing witness to the beginning of a process in which men would wrestle oil, one of the modern age’s most precious materials, from shale deposits buried deep in the earth.

Oil was once thought to have mystical properties. In western Pennsylvania, the cradle of American oil exploration and production, Native American shamans from the Seneca tribe used the strange black substance in ritualistic healing exercises. They also used it to cauterize wounds and seal canoes. White men caught on, mixing what they called rock oil with liquor and selling the drink as a cure-all. The snake oil salesman was born.

In 1859, in the town of Titusville, Pennsylvania, near the home of the Seneca, a self-titled “Colonel” Edwin Drake drilled the world’s first working oil well. Refined into kerosene, oil came to replace whale fat as the world’s primary illuminant. Kerosene became “the light of the age.” It literally made the day longer. And it made money. Oil was dubbed “black gold.” A rush began. Oil City grew out of the muddy banks of Oil Creek, and the planet experienced its first oil boom.

It is strange to think of industry containing magic, but even in our current age of reason, it is hard not to think of oil as containing properties that, although also destructive, can only be described as utterly fantastic. Oil, refined into gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, makes cars drive, planes fly, and ships sail. It powers submarines and spacecraft, sends shellfish to Colorado, medicine to Liberia, and soldiers and supplies to war zones around the world. It powers our school buses and gunships, ambulances and tanks. But it does more than transport us. It heats our homes. It illuminates our nights. We eat off it. Petroleum is contained in the glaze on our china, the finish on our tables, the linoleum on our counters, the tile on our floors. It wraps around us in the fabric that clothes our naked bodies, in the jewelry that adorns our necks and hands and fingers, in the balm that soothes our cracked lips, in the makeup that defines the contours of our faces. And it is inside of us. The syringes and the pills that deliver medicine into our systems are made from petroleum. Synthetic ammonia, derived from a process using refined oil, is an essential ingredient in fertilizer. Without it, farming on an industrial scale would not be possible. It is in our food. We eat it. Oil is so prevalent in every aspect of our existence that it has become all but invisible to the vast majority of people who need it simply to live.

And the people whose job it is to extract it from the earth? A group of them approached me. Dirty faces, goatees, and dark safety glasses.

“You ever been turtle fucked?” one of them asked. I braced myself.

“No,” I said.

They shrugged and laughed and kept walking.

“Why don’t you show him?” one asked.

I stood in the dirt and watched them move away from me. A rush of wind tore across the work site, peeling up a layer of dust and pushing it through the greasy machines, where it dissipated in reams of waving western wheat grass. My body was coiled tight, blood pounding through my brain. I took a deep breath, let the air fill my lungs and loosen my limbs. I spit on the ground and got back to work.

BOOK ONE
BOOM

Okemah was one of the singingest, square dancingest,

drinkingest, yellingest, preachingest, walkingest,

talkingest, laughingest, cryingest, shootingest, fist

fightingest, bleedingest, gamblingest, gun, club and razor

carryingest of our ranch towns and farm towns, because

it blossomed out into one of our first Oil Boom Towns.

—WOODY GUTHRIE

RAIN

I’m driving across North Dakota in a red Chevy Blazer with my belongings piled in the back. It is spring. Rain pours from the sky, spills down the grassy buttes, and empties into the twists and cuts and curves in the land. The land is full of water, lakes called “kettles.” The kettles churn in the wind, splash and slap against the macadam of the highway. The few trees by the side of the road are swallowed up to their ankles. The prairie can’t hold all the rain, just like the town of Williston, North Dakota, can’t hold all the men pouring in looking for work.

My Chevy threads its way south down Route 85. I see rows of RVs and unhitched house trailers set in muddy parks. I pass “man camps,” columns of prefab housing that shelter out-of-town workers. On my right, my eyes linger on a junkyard swollen with wrecked cars and pickup trucks. I clutch the steering wheel with both hands and feel my own vehicle shiver from the gravitational pull of an 18-wheeler barreling past me down the narrow ribbon of highway. Tractor trailers rumble by, semis careening toward twilight. I drive past frack sites, drilling rigs, pump jacks, and flares. Everything I pass is born, lives, and dies all on the power of that slick grease that now flows so sweet, so crude from the ground beneath those wet fields of prairie grass stretching into the horizon.

It is May of 2013, and I am joining what some say will be the biggest oil boom in American history. The road into Williston is full of cars with out-of-state plates: Montana, Idaho, Washington, Tennessee, California, Texas, Florida, and more. The drivers look like me: white men with tousled bedhead and lean, hungry visages, their faces lined by sun and work—or else by the distinct lack of it. Everybody is new, kids on the first day of class, unsure where they are going or how they are getting there. Through windows smeared by spattering rain, I see their worldly possessions, likely all of them, piled in the backs of dented station wagons, junker cars, and rusted-out trucks.

At a stoplight, a man hops out of the truck in front of me and runs back toward my SUV. Tall and thin and almost comically desperate, he asks for directions before I can get my window rolled down.

“I just got here, too,” I tell him through the glass.

WELCOME TO WILLISTON, ND, the sign reads. BOOMTOWN, USA.

PITHOLE

The boom spawned by the Drake Well in Pennsylvania in 1859 was modest compared to what happened six years later, fifteen miles south of Titusville, in a hilly area of near-unbroken wilderness where, as one story tells it, a spiritualist using a witch hazel stick “doodled the rod” and divined the location of a rich vein of liquid greenbacks, only feet below the ground’s surface.

That well, known as the United States Well, would set off a bonanza comparable to the California Gold Rush. Within months, hundreds of derricks sat drilling within a few cluttered square miles. In 1865, the Civil War ended and thousands of men, including a surplus of veterans, flooded the valley. The area’s population grew from fifty scattered souls to upward of twenty-thousand bodies within a single year. The wilderness was razed and, like a mushroom that grows overnight, a city was born. It was called Pithole.

Now North Dakota, like 1860s-era Pennsylvania, has boomed. Williston sits near the center of the Bakken Formation, a subsurface rock unit bigger than the state of California, and one of the largest contiguous deposits of oil and gas on the planet. The gourd-shaped Bakken Formation underlies the soil of North Dakota and Montana and stretches into the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Advances in drilling technology—horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing—have turned this massive though previously unrecoverable shale deposit into a river of sweet crude grease. During horizontal drilling, a joint is inserted at the end of the drill bit, making it like a bendy straw. Hydraulic fracturing is an application wherein sand, along with a chemical stew called “salt water,” is pumped through the drill head at pressures high enough to crack the strata surrounding a well. These technologies allow drillers to reach reservoirs that, until recently, would have been inaccessible. As of 2013, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) put the amount of recoverable oil from the Bakken at a mean estimate of 7.4 billion barrels. In layman’s terms, that’s a lot of fucking oil.

These technological advances along with the state’s lax regulatory environment and a spike in worldwide oil prices combined to make investment in oil exploration in North Dakota incredibly attractive to wildcatters. They put the straw in the milkshake and started to suck. The rush to the region followed.

Oil field contractors began moving into North Dakota just as the working class of Middle America found itself unemployed. In 2008, the economy cratered, the housing market collapsed, and the price of oil peaked at $145 a barrel. With no houses to build, framers had nothing to frame, painters had nothing to paint, roofers had nothing to roof. The cost of silver and gold dropped, and miners had little to mine. The Great Recession flipped nationwide migration patterns on their head. While constricted economic circumstances led to the majority of Americans “battening down the hatches,” and sticking close to home, the flood of workers into northwest North Dakota looked like a modern Grapes of Wrath.

Desperate for bodies to work the rigs, North Dakota’s oil field companies gained a reputation for offering good pay, benefits, signing bonuses, per diems, and housing to any dude who could make the trek to town and swing a hammer when he got there. Men from all corners of the nation poured into the region looking for jobs. The population of Williston nearly tripled between 2008 and 2013, rising to roughly thirty thousand, with most estimates not accounting for job seekers sleeping in their cars or crashing in trailers and flophouses. Some estimates put the number closer to fifty thousand, others higher still. Between July 2012 and July 2013, one new person arrived in Williston every three hours—eight new people each day.

Who were these people? Men who flooded into Williston, spilled onto the streets, and poured in and out of bars, taking on the very attributes of the resource they had come to extract. Far from the delight of their children, far from the comfort of their girlfriends or wives, far from the comradery of brothers and fathers, or the caring of sisters and mothers, boots tottering on this ragged edge of America, so close to falling off the flat earth, with no money in their pocket and no friends for a thousand country miles.

Who were they and what were they running from? What was I running from?

I hit Williston with almost $3,000 in cash and about $2,500 in credit. You could say I was boomer rich, but in most ways, I was like everyone else. I didn’t foresee a long future in the oil and gas business, but neither did plenty of other guys. Williston was a tool, and we were using it to extract money from the oil companies in the same way those companies were using us to extract oil from the earth.

Perhaps the most concise explanation can be found in an old joke I pulled from Smith Dalrymple’s 1914 humor book From Pithole to California:

Where is the best place to go when you are broke?

Go to work.

All I knew was that I was driving into a city whose population was, as one oil field hand would put it, “ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag.”

It was a modern-day Pithole.

DK’S

DK’s Lounge is a square, windowless brick building that, from the outside, could pass for a bomb shelter. It sits on an access road off the main strip surrounded in every direction by parking lots and squat one- and two-story buildings the color of dust. Inside is a cavernous, open-room casino dressed in dark velvet like a porn shoot from the ’70s. The place is huge: the main room holds a circular bar, some pool tables, and a handful of blackjack tables. I brush past a guy on my way to order a drink.

“Excuse me,” I say.

“Is it Feel-Me-Up Thursday already?” He is thin and craggy with a ton of pomade in his slicked-back hair. He watches me order a beer from a young bartender in heavy makeup and a tight, low-cut top. “Am I a pervert to stare at her cleavage?” he asks.

I shrug off the question but offer him a smile.

“My old lady is a pain in the ass,” Pomade says. “She’s hot for a forty-year-old, though. You could open a beer bottle on her ass.” He actually whistles. “She’s studying criminal law in South Dakota. Wants to become a cop. With my record!” he says. He leans back against the bar, swills his beer, and looks around the room. “Thing is, she’s gonna be able to get shit on everybody. She’ll wanna be a Goody Two-shoes for a year or so, but I’ll make a dirty cop out of her. You bet. I’ll turn her into a dirty cop.”

He smiles, relishing the thought. “I spent six years in prison in Pittsburgh,” he says.

I’ve always had great admiration for scoundrels and I’ve found, throughout my life, that they are drawn to me. I’m a good listener, and I’m not quick to judge. Until I’ve sussed out a situation, I keep my mouth shut. The boom, I am to realize, is like the first day of high school or college: everyone is new and hungry for comradery. I can use this to my advantage. I need a job.

A couple seats down from us, a guy in a Pirates ball cap invites himself into the conversation. The two of them talk baseball, and I listen. After another beer and some more bullshitting, I tell them that I am looking for work, and they give me my first inside education on boom economics, oil field jobs, and the kind of people who work them.

Pomade is an electrician. He works two weeks on and one week off. On weeks off, he drives to South Dakota to see his old lady and their nineteen-month-old daughter. He also has a son in Pennsylvania who is twenty-six. His son is married with kids, so Pomade has grandkids older than his baby daughter. “But that’s life,” he shrugs.

Ball Cap is a truck driver. Or about to become one. “Just started today,” he says. He is pushing fifty, and he’s been unemployed for some time, living off his wife’s income in Wyoming. This will be his first trucking job, hauling water and sand to frack sites from 4:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. for fourteen days straight. He then gets a week off and returns to work the night shift. It will continue like that, with days and nights flipped upside down and a week off in between, for as long as he holds the job.

“I’m only making sixteen dollars an hour,” he says, “but I get a guarantee that I’ll be paid for one hundred and ten hours each week. And they promise I’ll never work more than eighty hours a week. So it’s a big win.” This doesn’t make any sense to me, but the companies in Williston are hard up for workers. I will learn that bizarre math is not uncommon in the oil field. “And,” Ball Cap tells us, “I get paid for forty hours on my weeks off.”

“What about overtime?” asks Pomade.

“Time and a half after forty,” says Ball Cap.

“Double time?”

“With that many hours it doesn’t even matter.” Ball Cap takes a slug of beer. Pomade nods in appreciation.

A pair of women sit at the end of the bar. They are the only women in the joint except for the bartender. Costumed in dyed hair and heavy makeup, big earrings, and long fake fingernails, they sip colorful drinks and speak quietly to each other. Pomade gives them a sideways glance. “Thing is, you start making eyes with them and thinking they like you, but they’re just sizing you up for money,” he says.

Ball Cap takes his hat off and then puts it on backwards. He says his buddy was recently given two hookers as a gift for his birthday. “Twenty-six hundred dollars,” Ball Cap says. “That’s the kind of money that’s up here. He had them all night, too. All night. From nine p.m. to nine a.m. They were out at the bar, hanging out together.”

“I like hookers,” says Pomade. “I’ve done a lot of drugs with hookers.”

“All night,” says Ball Cap. “His friend got him hookers for his birthday!”

Pomade nods in appreciation. “His friend is a good man.”

I’m out of cash and trying to stick to a budget, but I don’t want to leave. I stand for a while with nothing in my hand. Ball Cap notices and buys me a beer. I’m the only one without a job. “And besides,” he says, “they’re only three bucks for happy hour.”

Pomade pulls a photo of his daughter out of his wallet. “It kills me to be away from her,” he says.

“Oh, I know,” says Ball Cap looking suddenly miserable. He shows us his phone’s screensaver, a picture of two kids, ages five and six. “I just talked to them,” he says. “They don’t understand I’m gone. They think I’m hiding in the basement. They said, ‘We can’t find you.’” He looks at Pomade, then at me, then sheepishly back at his phone. “I play hide-and-seek with them,” he says.

The women at the bar get up from their seats, scan the room for eye contact, and then move slowly through the lounge and toward the door. It was impossible to tell while they were seated, but standing it is obvious that one of them is a little person, barely four feet tall. We watch the two of them as they weave their way through the crowd of men. Pomade has his eyes on the small one. He squints at her and a low murmur of appreciation leaves his throat. “Mmmmmmmmm,” he groans.

A drunk at the bar stumbles up to us. He wears a black T-shirt and a nose ring; he has a shaved head, a thick beard, and gauges in his ears, and he wants to talk about drills. He wants to know what drills we think work best. He looks me in the eyes and wobbles. I don’t have a favorite drill. Pomade is game, though. They debate the torque on DeWalts. Ball Cap wanders off to play blackjack.

The bar grows louder and drunker, and happy hour ends. I finish my beer and say goodbye to the men. I’ll never see any of them again.

It is drizzling as I step outside. I turn up my collar and take a few steps into the parking lot when I’m startled by a group of drunks who explode out of the door behind me. “Goddammit, Chris, you better put your dick away!” shouts the loudest of the group in a high-pitched simulacrum of a woman. His friends double over themselves in laughter until another guy does his impression: “You guys are eighty-sixed!” Together they holler, in a shambling, liquid unison, “Put your dick away, and get the fuck out of here!” I walk across the street to my Chevy, parked behind a Super 8 Motel, and watch the drunks stagger to the next closest watering hole, the rear of the Vegas Motel’s lounge. They pour themselves into it, and the door slaps shut behind them.

An old-timer stands on the sidewalk wearing a red trucker’s cap and blue jeans pulled up to his tits. He is with a ruddy-faced kid, who barely looks twenty-one, and they are both in their cups. “Where’s the entrance to the bar?” the old man asks. I point to the front door of DK’s. He stares across the street and blinks several times trying to focus.

“Where you coming from?” I ask.

“I don’t know a goddamn thing about anything around here,” he barks, dismissing me with a wave of the hand. I watch him nearly fall over in the middle of the road as he and the kid stumble into the building on the other side.

I climb into the driver’s seat of the Blazer. There is a six-pack sitting on the passenger side. I’d bought it earlier and left it there. I think for a moment, then twist open a beer and take a sip. My hand is trembling. Am I scared? I take stock. Yeah, I’m scared. But the beer tastes good even if it is a little warm. Whatever calms the jitters, cowboy. I take a big swallow and wipe my mouth. Then I start driving downtown. It is raining, and the beer washes my throat like the rain washes the streets.

FATHERS OF MEN

I arrive at J Dub’s Bar & Grill, a sports bar with wood paneling and exposed brick walls set just west of the train station. In the bathroom, there are fist-sized holes in the drywall and steel plates bolted above the urinals. I slide up to the bar and order a cheeseburger and a beer. A big guy sits down next to me. He is young with an open red face. He says hello, then smiles and lifts his cap to reveal a sunburn that ends an inch below his hairline. Above it, his skin is alabaster white.

“So I gotta keep my hat on,” he says, allowing a shy grin. He asks me how long I’ve been in town.

“Today,” I tell him. “You?”

“I just walked here from the train station,” he says.

We shake hands. His name is Buck, and he is from Missoula, Montana. He is the first friend I make in Williston. We will never become close, but for a short while our lives run parallel. We are both new to town. We need jobs, and we both face the ticking clocks of diminishing bank accounts.

Missoula Buck is anxious to start looking for work. It is Friday night, and he doesn’t want to wait until Monday morning. “I struck out for work once to make something of myself, but my friends abandoned me,” he says, “and I was homeless for a few months, living out of motels in Elko.”

“Elko, Nevada?” I ask.

“There’s a lot of work in the mines,” Buck tells me. “Well, there was before they raised the mine tax. Now everybody’s leaving.”

“You were a miner?” I ask. He shrugs and tells me he did it for a while.

I tell him I am sleeping in my vehicle, and he gives me a concerned look. “It’s packed to the gills where I’m staying,” he says. “I dropped my bag off before coming here to eat. I’ve got my own bed, but a couple of brothers share a mattress on the floor at my feet. I’ll let you know if it changes.”

I nod and thank him. He seems genuine, even a little green. “I worked as a supervisor of the meat department in a grocery store,” he tells me. “I figure I can always fall back on that. I checked in with a local spot, and it sounds like they might need somebody. Baggers there make fifteen dollars an hour.”

A young man sits down to my left and politely orders a beer. He’s got a ruddy, sunburned face, and when I nod hello, he holds me for a moment in a pair of steady blue eyes. “What’s your work?” is the first thing he asks.

“I’m looking for work,” I tell him.

“What are you trained to do?”

“Nothing,” I say.

He works on the pipelines as a welder’s assistant. “Drove out to the job site this morning,” he tells me with the slightest trace of a smile, “but they didn’t need me ’cause of the rain. I get twenty-six dollars an hour for the drive plus a per diem of a hundred bucks a day. So I got one hundred and fifty-two dollars today. Just for waking up.”

“Sounds pretty good,” I say, and Buck, next to me, agrees.

“Gravy,” the welder’s assistant says. There is a deliberateness to him, from the way he talks to the way he sips his beer. He says he’ll be working from spring to fall in Williston, and then heading back to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where he works, like Buck once did, as a miner. “It’s warm underground,” he tells us. He talks about Coeur d’Alene, and in his eyes, the lakes shine and the forests shimmer.

He is living in a trailer north of town now, “next to my brother’s trailer.” That gets us talking about family. The welder’s assistant laughs telling a story about his dad beating him with a belt. I grunt in acknowledgment.

“My dad whipped my ass, too,” Buck says.

“I bet,” says the welder. We all chuckle a bit.

“You ever been hit by a braided belt versus a solid leather belt?” Buck asks.

“Oh yeah,” says the welder.

“There’s a difference!” says Buck.

“Gotta say I prefer the braided.” The welder smiles.

“Any day,” affirms Buck. I listen and nod along.

“Once,” the welder tells us, “my daddy had me pull a switch from a cherry tree. Boy, that was the most painful whipping.”

“Them branches got snap,” I say.

“I know all about switches,” Buck says, “and all about soap. My dad’d make me wash my mouth out with soap. For cussing, you know. Once, he made me eat the soap, chew it, and swallow it. I got so sick. I tasted soap for days!” Buck laughs, and we laugh along.

This exchange proves to be the first in a pattern of conversations that I have with countless numbers of men in Williston, often upon first meeting. The conversation can be boiled down to two short sentences: “What kind of work you do? Man, my dad whipped my ass!” I come to think of it as The Williston Hello.

My father was a simmering, rageful presence in my life. Distrustful of his own wife and six children, he lived like a foreigner in his own home. It was always “your mother” and “you kids”; he spit out the words, refusing ownership of his own blood. To him, kin was enemy, and this paranoia made him ridiculous. He felt left out and put upon at the same time. Being raised by my dad was like being the ward of a mentally unstable teenager.

My father’s father was a flophouse drunk, and while my dad rarely touched alcohol, he had all the attributes of a full-blown alcoholic. He was a leering, swaggering dry drunk—narcissistic, depressive, ignorant of personal boundaries, and prone to unpredictable mood swings. We lived in a ramshackle post–Civil War farmhouse built on a lush hillside on fifty acres of valley in central Maryland. The unruly beauty of our surroundings was staggering, but my old man treated the house with the respect an angry gorilla gives a cage. He pounded the walls with his fists, kicked against the plaster, slammed doors until they hung barely from their hinges. He ripped the rabbit ears off TV sets, broke the wobbly legs off chairs, and smashed plates and cups and dishes with such regularity that, as a kid, it was as if the whole world was cracked. My memories of these tantrums, like the dinner plates, are shattered.

One shard: My mother rushes the whole lot of us, my two brothers, three sisters, and me, out the front door of the house. My brother Ryan dropped his fork at dinner, and now the old man is howling behind us, the dinner table shaking from the force of his fists. We race across the overgrown green grass of the front yard and toward the station wagon, my mother urging us on like a track coach, “C’mon, c’mon, keep it up, let’s go.”

In these moments, we are completely isolated. Our driveway is a quarter-mile long, up a steep, jagged hill. Behind the house is a wide expanse of field, and then a forest. No neighbors in view.

My mother holds the car door and we pile into the back seat, the whole brood frantic—brother piled upon sister piled upon brother. As my mom slides into the front seat and turns the ignition, the old man appears framed by the doorjamb of the house. He was a boxer before he joined the army—he had a reputation as a man who could take a punch—and he moves toward us in that boxer’s stance: shoulders hunched, fists forward, strangely light on his feet. His face looks gray, overcast, and somehow calm with an anger that belies expression. He steps onto the lawn and, as the car moves forward up the drive, he starts to run toward us.

I hear my younger sister’s voice: “Oh no. He’s coming, Mom, he’s coming.”

From the back seat I watch him, his face contorted now, howling a stream of inarticulate curses, spittle flying from his chin. He is maybe fifteen feet away when his boots hit the busted macadam of the driveway. He reaches down and picks up a rock the size of his fist. “Get down!” my mother yells. “Get down!” He brings back his arm, and he throws.

He misses. Through the window of the car, I watch him stoop again to the gravel. He picks up another rock.

A FEW YEARS after I leave Williston, I will find myself glued to the radio in my truck, running late for work but unable to stop listening to Pastor Joe Ehrmann, a former Baltimore Colts defensive lineman, talk about what he calls the father wound:

I still have a father wound. A hole in my soul shaped like my father. A tremendous number of men in America and women, boys and girls, are wounded by absent dads or missing dads in their lives.

The father wound is a big issue. It particularly plays out in masculinity because men are never really sure of their masculinity.

Every man needs two things in life. One: they need some kind of father, some kind of man that’s a little farther down the road that can look back and tell us that we’re on the right path … and the second thing every man needs is some kind of brother that you can walk arm and arm as you struggle through life together.

That scar, that hole in a man’s soul the shape of his father, was a defining feature of every man I met in Williston. Men had built their lives around it. Like a tree growing around a hatchet. The father wound served as a method of communication between me and the men I met. We talked jobs, then fathers. Before women, before politics, before home, “Man, my dad whipped my ass!” It bonded us together. Because we didn’t have that man a little farther down the road, but maybe for a night, over a few beers, by showing off our scars, we could find some kind of brother.

Before I leave the bar, Missoula Buck nods his big sunburned head at me and clasps his meaty hand around mine. He gives me his number. “You can always use a friend,” he says.

I HEAD TO Bill’s Back 40. The bar is crammed with men in dirty work clothes. POW and MIA flags hang from the walls. A pop country song blares out of the satellite jukebox. It sounds like a macho deodorant commercial. I love the outlaw guys—Waylon, Hank Jr., and Billy Joe Shaver—but in 2013 bro country is at its peak. I push my way through the crowd. At five foot seven and 150 pounds, I have never been big, but I have never felt as small as I feel crossing that room. The men crowding the floor—and there are only men, or boys really—stand heads higher than me, wearing PBR- and UFC-branded caps, stained Carhartts, and dirt-smeared jumpsuits. “I’m the Red-blooded, Hardworking, God-fearing American Obama Warned You About,” one shirt reads.

I meet an Australian in a braided cowboy hat with the brim curled over. He has thick sideburns. “I won the Wolverine contest!” he hollers at me over the music.

We end up blind drunk in his souped-up pickup truck, bouncing and rumbling through the night. The evening is wet and warm. The air smells fresh and sweet like a melon just cut open. The Australian tells me that he slept in his truck when he first got to town. “No shame in that,” he says, driving me back to mine. “This is history, mate!” he shouts out the window, to the road and the prairie, the oil and the money. “The fuckin’ gold rush!”

BOOMTOWN, USA

I have just enough room to lie flat from head to toe. I can’t roll over—surrounded as I am by camping gear, clothes, my guitar—a parlor size Blueridge acoustic nestled safely in its case—books, and clutter. Light filters through the tinted windows of my Chevy Blazer. Morning. My mouth is dry, and I need to piss. I blink myself awake to the sharp voices of children. A mother and father walk past, each holding the small hand of a child. I watch them from behind the dark panes of my vehicle’s windows.

I piss into an empty Gatorade bottle, set it by my feet, and go back to sleep. When I wake up again, wrestling a hard-wired sense of shame at being seen clambering out of the rear of my SUV, I flip open the back window and unhitch the tailgate. When it drops, I slide out on my ass. Boots hit asphalt. I stretch in the hot North Dakota sun.

WILLISTON IS ROUGHLY four miles across at its widest point—from the Walmart to the Amtrak station. It looks like any ailing midwestern town … during the Carter administration. Fast-food restaurants, two-star motels, car dealerships, and box stores, depressing just to list, line the approach as I pilot my SUV down Route 2’s “Million Dollar Way.”

The city’s downtown, with a movie theater proclaiming “Our Screen Talks,” has a certain rustic charm. It is all but deserted … wide, flat streets, a coffee shop, a bus stop, a bookstore, and a billboard with the Ten Commandments displayed just outside the two topless bars at the foot of town—the perfect place for an insecure god to rage against greed and sex and killing. A traveling stripper and journalist, Susan Elizabeth Shepard, would later write of Williston that it was less than a town, “something closer to a military base or the world’s saddest campground.” She was right. I drive in circles. These first days the roads tangle in my mind like a plate of spaghetti.

I GRAB A SEAT at the counter in Gramma Sharon’s Family Restaurant. I make small talk with a plump waitress, eat chicken fried steak smothered in gravy and covered by two over-easy eggs, and drink cup after cup of hot, flat coffee. I text Missoula Buck. He tells me of a company that is hiring and gives me the name of the receptionist.

I wish him luck on his own job search. Then I drive to the library. Cars and trucks stuffed with clothes and bedding sit in front of signs that read NO OVERNIGHT PARKING. I walk past a man snoring openmouthed in the back of a hatchback before heading inside.

Big-boned white men sit alone at scattered tables like lonesome rhinoceroses, poring over job applications and hunting-and-pecking online forms. I loiter, researching job leads on the internet for as long as I can stand it. On my way out, I stop in front of a large display by the exit. It features rows of photographs—mug shots of dour, slack-jawed men staring at the camera: local sex offenders, their names printed beneath their pictures. A few years of felon-friendly, no-questions-asked hiring by oil companies has gifted Williston, North Dakota, with the highest concentration of rapists and child molesters in the nation.

I wouldn’t know the numbers until later, but the crime rate in Williston was four times the nation’s average. Since the start of the boom, assaults had skyrocketed times twelve while thefts had quintupled. Reports of rape had increased sixfold.

The playground outside the library is built to look like an oil lease with a teeter-totter shaped like a pump jack. The small park on which the playground sits was, not long before, the site of a tent city, a migrant encampment before the city evicted the squatters. Now it is empty. I sit on a bench. There is something that I can’t quite put my finger on—an unsettled feeling. My hackles are raised. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I feel it in the hollow of my stomach—something is “off.”

After I left the family farm, I spent ten years in Baltimore City. By the time I got to Williston, I’d had a gun drawn on me twice, once by a teenager and once by a kid not old enough to be called a teenager. I’d been in other thorny situations as well, and the unsettled notion I experience in Williston is something I can only compare to the anxious feeling I got taking a wrong turn off South Bentalou Street in Pigtown at dusk, or standing alone at a bus stop with a broken light, drunk one night south of North Avenue, watching two figures approach me in the dark. In Baltimore, a place more famous for its crime than its crabs, this feeling was isolated to pockets, limited to certain locations, situations, and times of day; in Williston, if my stomach is right—and I trust my gut—it is everywhere.

A drifter shits on the floor at the rec center. A knife fight breaks out in a man camp. A bouncer at a local club discharges his firearm to break up a fistfight. A man is gunned down and killed on the street outside a strip club called Heartbreakers. An eighty-four-year-old woman is raped in her home. A twenty-two-year-old man is raped in his truck. Prostitution rings, Mexican cartels, methamphetamine and heroin traffickers have descended upon northwest North Dakota. Like me they are following the money.

“I wouldn’t say it’s out of control,” Williston’s mayor tells a reporter from CNBC. “But we’re very close to that.”

Sleeping in my Chevy—in these first unknowable days—I’m particularly exposed, and every barfly and truck stop cashier I meet has an opinion as to where I should park. Not on Main Street: “You’ll get your windows busted out by the drunks.” Not too far off Main Street: “A lot of creepers around.”

I hear the same advice everywhere I go: “Be careful out there.” They say it like it doesn’t matter how careful I am. It gets weird fast: “Cartels have taken over the entire second floor of the Vegas Hotel. They’re trafficking whores,” a man tells me at Applebee’s. “Three men are ass raped every day in this fuckin’ town, I swear to God. I’m ex-police, I know!” It is strange as a man to hear that I should never leave my drink unattended at a bar, but I will hear it constantly in Williston. Someone is going to put something in it. They will. Don’t leave it here. Take it to the bathroom with you. Seriously. Stories of man-on-man rape permeate the honky-tonks and dives—everybody has heard from somebody that they knew a guy who found a guy waking up in a parking lot with his pants around his ankles, bleeding from his asshole. Years later, I’ll relay this experience to a girlfriend. “Now you know what it’s like to be a woman,” she’ll tell me, her eyes flashing angrily. I’ll nearly fall out of my chair.

In Williston, it is hard to separate the facts from the fiction. But the hyperbole has a way of creeping under your skin worse than the reporting does, and even without the exaggerations, all you have to do is take a look around. Testosterone-fueled young men are working fourteen-hour shifts at jobs that can kill them in a town without friends or family. It only makes sense that the dangerous work of the day spills past sunset as parentless white boys roar through the night in F-250s with no girls to fuck, but plenty of guys to fuck up.

“Just watch your back,” a bartender warns me. “And keep your truck locked.”

Night falls slowly in North Dakota. The sun lingers on the horizon until 9:30 p.m. in early June, and darkness doesn’t come until well past ten. I look for a place to park the Blazer so I can sleep, cruising the suburban-like web of streets off Main.

I watch the lights in the houses flick on and then off as night grows ever longer. When it is very dark, I step out of my vehicle and shut the driver’s door very quietly. I walk around to the back, drop the tailgate, crawl inside, and pull off my boots. I think of the families in the houses—husbands, wives, and children: they have jobs to work, classes to attend, property they’ve obtained, and lives to protect. I got none of that. I’m unloosed. Free, I guess. Alone, for certain. And my bladder is full. I piss into an empty bottle, but I have to stop myself before my urine fills past the brim. Tightening my muscles, I struggle to hold in my piss and not spill the bottle on myself as I screw the top back on and rummage around my camping gear for a second bottle. I fill that one up, too. With two bottles of hot piss at my feet, I lie on my back and close my eyes.

I’ve been crashing in my vehicle for over a week now. Fuck this, I think, I need a real place to sleep.

THE FLOP

It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the lack of light. The front room of the townhouse is dirty, and the shades are drawn. Rumpled sheets and blankets cover the couch, and an unmade mattress lies on the floor next to the front door. A third sleeping space has been thrown together against the opposite wall. Chewed dog toys and frayed, dirty rugs cover the carpeted floor. A large-screen TV blasts light and sound. People on a reality show stare out from the screen, bitching.

“Here’s the place,” says Champ. A beer fits in his hand as if his hand had been built around it. He takes a swallow. “New York! Fucking New York!” he bellows. “Where in New York you from? Brooklyn! Fucking Brooklyn. That wins you big points. I’m from Jersey.”

A bald guy wearing a work uniform and a squiggle as a frown sits on the couch watching TV. “This is Frank,” Champ says. “He’s not happy with me, bringing another guy in.”

Frank looks at me and blinks. His face is smooth like a baby’s and his eyebrows are such a light blond color that they disappear against his pale brow. I blink back at him.

“’Sup?” says Frank.

Champ plants his feet in the middle of the townhouse living room. He’s in his midthirties, but the way he commands space makes him feel older. He has the build of a bulldog, square with broad shoulders, thick arms, and a big belly. He cocks his head to the side and addresses the bald guy. “Hey, I know it’s tight. We just gotta do what we gotta do.”

He turns back to me and shrugs. “It’s better than sleeping in your fucking car, bro.”

Champ moves through the living room. His bright orange hair is spiky, cut short enough to expose the sunburn on his scalp. He wears no shirt, and his face, neck, and left arm are painted red in a classic trucker’s tan. His shorts hang low under his belly, exposing the tops of his hips. We walk past a toilet in a laundry room and into the small kitchen. Junk mail, magazines, and clothes cover the dirty table.

“Frank is from the Philippines or some shit,” he says. “The other guy works third shift. We call him Jesus.” Champ pronounces the hard J and continues, “He’s a black guy from Africa. Upstairs I got a couple Jamaicans and a mother and her son.”

We step out the back door into a small yard with a picnic table, a gas grill, and a hot tub. Champ stops. He spins around and squares up.

“No fights,” he says, making direct eye contact. “It’s okay to drink, have a couple beers, but no fights. We had an altercation a few nights ago between Frank and Jesus, but mostly everybody gets along. It’s cramped, guys are tired—they had an altercation. I was out of town, so Rickie had to deal with it. This is Rickie. She’s my girlfriend.” A woman in her midtwenties with a pretty, round face framed by black bangs sits at the picnic table, sipping a Budweiser. She gives me a smile.

Champ continues, “I had to go home to Jersey for a funeral, and they had an altercation. I came back. I said, ‘Do you fucking guys wanna leave, because I’ll throw you out right the fuck now?’ They both said, ‘No.’” He shrugs. “There’s nowhere to stay here, especially this cheap. It’s not ideal, but it is what it is.”

He looks directly in my eyes and points at my chest. “No smoking meth,” he says. “No cooking meth. You can roll a joint, but don’t smoke it in the house. It’s okay to drink, but don’t start any fights. And no racial shit. Okay? We all got to get along here. The Jamaican guys upstairs, they’re really working out. They keep to themselves. No problem with them. I can never remember their names. This guy and his mom, they got Parkinson’s or something. So don’t be freaked out. They’re all twitchy.”

“They’ve got Tourette’s or something,” Rickie says.

Champ says, “They’re real nice people.” Then, sideways, “Church people, you know?” He shrugs. “We’ve got a lot of people here. Everybody does their best.”

He walks me upstairs and shows me a small, stained bathroom—toiletries all around the sink, towels on the floor, mildew in the tub. There are three upstairs bedrooms in the townhouse. Champ and Rickie stay in the biggest room, facing the street, the mother and her son share the second bedroom, and the Jamaicans crash in the back.

I follow Champ back out to the patio and take a seat at the table with him and Rickie. Rickie asks me if I want beer or water. I take her up on the water. I know I look ragged. I can see it reflected in her eyes—the slight look of concern, the trace of maternal kindness. At first Champ and Rickie were sussing me out for danger, but they can see I’m not that. We talk about New York. “You get big points for that,” Champ says, his broad, sunburned face turned toward me, “for being from the East Coast.”

“I haven’t seen too many of us out here,” I tell him.

“We’re a long way from home, buddy.” I am 1,826 miles from home. With the exception of a cousin in Iowa, the closest person I know lives in Boulder, Colorado. One friend within a thousand miles. My experience of this circumstance vacillates wildly between an exhilarated sense of freedom, a true American road lust, and a fear so stark I feel it coil around my bones and watch it age me in every mirror I pass. This is as alone as I have ever been in my life.

Champ continues, “Rent is four fifty. It’s midmonth. So if you wanna move in tonight, it’ll be three hundred. No lease, no deposit, we’ll set you up in the living room.”

The oil boom has driven up the price of everything; but by far, the most expensive thing in town is housing. There are simply not enough places to stay. Rent in northwest North Dakota in June of 2013 is higher than rent in Manhattan. It will soon surpass San Francisco to become the costliest in the nation. One-bedroom apartments cost over $2,000 monthly. Single rooms in shared apartments cost over $1,000 a month. Some postings advertise women-only rooms for as low as $500 a month with sex as an implicit part of the deal, which is obviously out of the question for me. I had been scanning ads every day, and I’d found exactly one space I could afford.

“I don’t see that I have too many options,” I tell Champ.

“It’s better than sleeping in your vehicle,” he tells me again.

I have been sleeping in my Chevy for ten days. I thought I’d get used to it, but instead it was costing me money, wearing down my health and my nerves. I was eating out for every meal, fatty junk food mostly, and with nowhere to go at night, I was drinking too much, spending too much money on booze in an attempt to calm the nerves and sleep. I’d been washing up at truck stops, and I was growing more disheveled each day, a little less washed, a little more walleyed. I had just begun searching for work, and I knew if I was viewed the way I was starting to feel, it would be game over. Like desperate men don’t get laid, poor men don’t get hired.

I tell Champ I will take the place. I give him $300 in cash, and he handwrites me a receipt. “What’s your last name?” he asks.

I had introduced myself as Mike. I tell him my last name is “Smith” and he stops writing. He twists his neck to the side and I see the trust race from his eyes. “Are you on the run? You’re not a fucking fugitive, are you? We had one of them once. I don’t want any—”

I laugh. “If you want,” I tell him, “I can show you my ID.”

“No”—he puts his hand up and ends the conversation—“I don’t.”

He finishes writing out the receipt and hands it to me. “Well, you’re one of us now.”

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