BOOK REVIEW/Heather Seggel

Life in the Wild Fracking Upper Midwest

There’s a moment at the end of Great American Outpost: Dreamers, Mavericks, and the Making of an Oil Frontier (Public Affairs Books) when author Maya Rao reflects on a bit of cognitive dissonance brought on by her reporting. As Washington correspondent for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, she was covering Bernie Sanders campaign rallies with some regularity, while the reporting for this book took her deep into North Dakota’s oil country. She notes that many of the populist left wing’s talking points — $15 minimum wage, eliminating college debt, ending mass incarceration, rebuilding the middle class — were actually achievable to some degree in the decidedly free-market world of the Bakken shale. The only hitch in the scheme is the volatility and instability of the product in question; while she was there the boom did not go bust but underwent major corrections, and the ever-growing network of pipelines began to displace truckers from many of the most coveted jobs.

Rao rides along with men whose duties are a matter of life and death in ways you might expect; climbing a catwalk to open a tank and check the oil inside, many are overcome by the fumes emitted. No less than nine workers have died in falls or other accidents performing the same function, three of them in North Dakota. But simply driving the trucks is also dangerous when the weather is subzero and you abruptly find yourself on a dirt road because creating infrastructure has been continually postponed. When people rushed to the Bakken shale to frack themselves rich, they gave no thought to housing, either; people nearly froze to death sleeping in their cars, and Rao visits a community of trailers and storage container homes located on the site of a landfill. A subsequent housing boom brought more jobs, but workers were transient for the most part; efficiency suites tended to fare better than actual homes, with outrageous rents to match the outsize pay.

North Dakota’s oil boom carries echoes of the Gold Rush, and the tendency for morality to become eely in the face of so much money is evident here as well. Workers looking to take on a high-paying job and escape old habits often blew through six figures once they found how readily available drugs were. A woman Rao met who was working as an exotic dancer was later revealed to be a major drug trafficker, and two of the men she spent time with turned out to be convicted sex offenders. With so much real grit and grime to choose from, it’s comical when TV producers come to town and try to gin up stories; not only do they consistently get things wrong, the townspeople are by that time so jaded that they’re openly elitist about which networks they’ll talk to.

Tanker trucks full of oil or the toxic saltwater residue of fracking made the roadways dangerous and further edged out locals who felt their hometown being taken away from them, but pipelines were hardly a simple solution. The environmental impact of spills and leaks on land and waterways is drastic; saltwater renders the land barren and unable to be planted on, not a risk one wants to take where food is growing. High-tech monitors keep an eye on things, but not when nobody turns them on; a months-long leak was missed this way, destroying a beloved creek on one family’s property. Companies found to be at fault cut checks freely and fail to understand why hard feelings persist for those whose livelihood and legacy are tainted.

This is just a fraction of the material Rao covers, finding poetry in the cycles of growth and abandonment, and empathy for two sides unable to truly see or understand each other’s motives. Great American Outpost captures the can-do spirit of bootstrap America at its best, but also accounts honestly for the trails of harm such pumped up opportunism so often leaves in its wake.

Briefly Noted, But Delicious:

Paleo for Unicorns: Eat the Patriarchy (Elly Blue Publishing) is a cookbook. A small hardcover with photos on nearly every page, it’s also very much what a bookseller would call a “gift book.” Author Amy Subach describes it as “anti-authoritarian, anti-doctrinarian, anti-inflammatory, open-minded, and accepting.” She offers a rough outline of the what and why of paleo-style eating, acknowledges that most of the marketing of it is bunk, then shares recipes that will get you thinking, along with stories about parenting and car-free living that are suffused with charm. This decidedly carb-friendly reader enjoyed the view of life in Portland free from self-referential parody that it offers, as well as new ways to think about health and wellness. A good pick for a new graduate or someone embarking on life changes, dietary or otherwise.

Heather Seggel is a freelance writer living and working (and looking for more work, though preferably not in fracking) in Mendocino County, Calif. Email heatherlseggel@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2018

Populist.com