Chasing the Boundary: Boom and Bust on the High Prairie

Once again, the story begins with fire, some primeval attraction to light in the darkness. A time-lapse video looking down at the nighttime earth, courtesy of astronauts in the International Space Station spinning some 250 miles above. Civilization stretched out like campfires, cities shining in the dark, great webs of light marking our dubious progress across the dim globe: the golden Nile dangling down Egypt, glittering island flecks in the Philippine Sea, Italy and its boot, the Holy Land glowing against the black Mediterranean, the floodlit border between India and Pakistan. Meanwhile, unlit places hold their vast dignity: the Amazon basin, the steppes of Eurasia, the deserts of Africa, the south Indian Ocean. Green auroras play across the thermosphere. Lightning sparks the clouds. Across the United States roll the wide fields of the republic: the dazzling eastern seaboard, the dark of Appalachia, the twinkling townships gridding the plains. And there—to the west of the Great Lakes (blank in the night) and over the bright shoulder of Minneapolis–St. Paul—a strange bloom. Like a city but bigger, more diffuse. No central pinprick but countless tiny suns. A region smeared with light. Once you know what you’re looking for, you can’t miss it as the camera swoops over—but what is it? Nothing was there seven years ago. This is a new shining star of the north—the blazing rigs, equipment, settlements, and gas flares of the North Dakota Miracle, a.k.a. the Oil Patch, a.k.a. Kuwait on the Prairie, a.k.a. the Bakken Oil Boom, U.S.A.

The phenomenon had been covered in the news, by the networks, on the radio, and in the glossies: North Dakota was a new kind of promised land. This was no ordinary boom. In 2013, North Dakota’s real gross domestic product grew 9.7 percent, easily beating the national average (1.8 percent). Meanwhile, the personal income of a North Dakotan rose 7.6 percent, the greatest increase in the country—a distinction the state has boasted for six of the past seven years. Per capita personal income was second highest in the nation, after Connecticut. This wasn’t just a few fat cats getting richer—there were jobs. North Dakota had the lowest unemployment rate for the fifth year running, at 2.9 percent, and joblessness was even lower in the oil counties (at 1.6 percent). The national average was 7.4 percent. Taxes on oil and gas production had allowed the state to sock away $2 billion in savings.

And so the people came. In 2013, North Dakota was the fastest-growing state, increasing its population at more than four times the national average. Williams County, which includes the city of Williston, in the middle of the Bakken oil field, was the fastest-growing county in the country with a population of more than ten thousand. And while the country as a whole is aging, North Dakota is growing younger, thanks to an influx of twenty-and thirtysomethings migrating to the state. In fact, North Dakota is changing so quickly that the director of the U.S. Census Bureau made a special research trip in May, nine months after his confirmation, to wrap his head around the miracle. His finding: “The growth was truly like nothing I have ever seen.”

And so for many the summer of 2014 was a time of brave promise. The boom had carried North Dakota through the last recession and beyond. As the state looked toward its 125th birthday—in November, though to be celebrated in August, because even North Dakotans don’t want to party in that kind of cold—its populace was in the grip of a spirited flurry of civic-minded activity: games of birthday bingo, a wagon train, cowboy poetry, military encampments, living history, a “125th statehood anniversary shoot,” appearances by a “nationally renowned” Teddy Roosevelt impersonator, roughrider days, rodeos, geocaching, quilting, a two-state book club (both North and South reading Dakota: A Spiritual Geography), and music of all kinds, including a newish track, “North Dakota”—Now we’re from a town you’ve probably never been / We’re from the north, but we’re not Canadian—from the homegrown pop-country teen sister act, Tigirlily, described on their website as “optimism personified.”

But not everyone was optimistic. Not everyone was cheering. The narrative had somehow gone awry. Did the boom offer promise or peril? Men were murdering women and rumored to be raping other men. Prostitutes and strippers flocked in from out of state. Cartels were moving meth and heroin. Citizens were killing themselves at an alarming rate. Trucks were crashing, trains exploding. People weren’t just disappearing—they were vaporizing. A Facebook page called “Missing Persons & Property from the Bakken Oilfield” offered a litany of loss: dogs, trailers, mothers, minors, fugitives, tools, trucks, more dogs, equipment, ATVs, snowmobiles, and men, men, men.

So I went north in late July of that anniversary summer to see what was going on.

There isn’t much to the Bismarck airport. A Triceratops skull sits in a glass case on the way to baggage claim, evidence of the state’s rich fossil life. Down the escalator stands a banner ad for a pipe company founded in Dubai. The man ahead of me harasses the kid behind the rental counter about the price of gasoline: “But ya’ll are pulling it out of the ground up here!”

The Bakken Formation is a layer of 360-million-year-old rock that stretches some twenty-five thousand square miles across the U.S. and Canada; it is the largest continuous oil accumulation assessed by the United States Geological Survey. About two-thirds of it lies below North Dakota, in the northwest corner of the state. Its discovery dates to the 1950s, but only very recently have rising oil prices and new technology—such as hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling—made extraction feasible. In 2006, North Dakota ranked ninth in domestic oil production. Now it’s number two, behind Texas. Republican Governor Jack Dalrymple has compared his state to a “small OPEC nation”—and, indeed, it now pumps a million barrels a day, more than OPEC members Qatar and Ecuador.

Within minutes of leaving the airport, I cross the Missouri River. The speed limit soars to seventy-five miles per hour as I skim across the prairie. Grasslands rise and fall to the horizon, a land without trees. Clouds cruise overhead like battleships, casting shadows on the highway. The wind buffets the hills, bending the grass in waves, a choppy green sea. Thanks to a wet spring, the wheat crop is about two weeks behind, but a cool summer has the farmers hopeful. Hay bales dot the fields, great strips of the prairie rolled up. The grass takes on many shades—neon, avocado, mint, olive, shamrock. Unbeknownst to me, I have been living back home in a monochrome of green. I see an oil train to the south. The radio plays an ad—truck drivers are needed.

Here’s another way to understand the pace of the boom: In 1951, North Dakota got into the oil business. It took thirty-eight years to produce a billion barrels, and twenty-two years to barrel a billion more. Its third billionth barrel, which arrives in 2015, will only have taken four years. Crude oil production quintupled between 2007 and 2012.

Currently, there are more than ten thousand wells operating in North Dakota—a number that could quadruple in the coming decades. The month I visited, more than 190 rigs were actively drilling new wells. A Bakken well requires more than two thousand truckloads of equipment and material in its first year, after which oil and water need to be hauled—in and out—for the life of the well. The state’s infrastructure is unprepared for such traffic: highways are cracking, potholes and litter abound, and dirt and gravel roads are kicking up so much dust they’re smothering crops and animals. (Ranchers have reported cattle dying of dust pneumonia.) Since 2008, crash fatalities have more than doubled in oil counties, while severe injuries from truck accidents are up 1,200 percent.

In many parts of the state, drivers “wave” at each other—just two fingers raised off the wheel, less a gesture of overt friendliness, I think, than some sort of existential affirmation (“I see you, you see me—we both exist in this vast, empty landscape that threatens to argue otherwise”). But this gesture dies as you drive north into the Bakken, where trucks are many and time is money. I’ve never seen such industrial traffic: trucks hauling sand, storage tanks, pipes, tractors, earth-movers, even other trucks—countless “oversized loads.” Signs at the edge of the highway point down dirt roads to the oil rigs. Tanker trucks whip up clouds of dust so thick it looks like smoke. My rented Corolla shudders when the tankers pass. Going down a hill, I’m sandwiched between two semis hauling enormous trailers jacked up at what looks like a perilous degree. One in front, one behind—they start to squeeze me in.

The Bakken is a tight oil play: roughly two layers of black shale with a silty band of sandstone/dolomite sandwiched between, where the shale oil collects. (The geologist who discovered and named the Bakken, in the 1950s, compared it to an Oreo cookie.) The formation is deep (about two miles belowground), thin (only some 140 feet thick, with an even thinner middle layer), and relatively impermeable, meaning the crude does not flow easily. That said, last year the United States Geological Survey doubled its estimate of the total amount of undiscovered, recoverable oil in the Bakken and the Three Forks Formation just below it to 7.4 billion barrels (as well as 6.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas). This year, a more bullish oil executive put the estimate of recoverable oil at more than four times that amount.

South of Williston stands a twenty-foot-tall head of Abraham Lincoln plopped down in an RV park by a developer from Brooklyn, who turned his back on Big Apple real estate in favor of the Bakken, where he told a reporter last year he was making a 100 percent return on his investments. In 2013, the number of housing units in North Dakota grew the fastest in the country at a rate of 3.1 percent. But it’s simply not enough—the influx of people has fast outstripped available housing. In three years, the population of Williston has grown 41 percent to 20,850—though some unofficial estimates put it at nearly three times that. At the beginning of 2014, Williston boasted the highest average rent in the country for an entry-level, one bedroom, seven-hundred-square-foot apartment, which went for $2,394 a month—or nearly $900 more than the same space in New York City. Hotels, which are being built all the time, fill up. Since the boom, people have been living in campers, cars, and trucks—even through the impossible winters. Small-time “slum lords” rent out any open space to RVs and campers, despite substandard septic and electrical service. Some workers choose to commute hundreds of miles: two weeks on and one week off—when they fly or drive home. Others live in company housing known as “man camps,” basically small cities of modular barracks—rows and rows of identical prefab trailers with plenty of food and flat screens, but no guests, guns, or alcohol. I pass three man camps in a row on the way to my hotel. The nearest camp, built in seventy-five days for workers from companies such as Halliburton, offers 415 beds in one of two floor plans: a “VIP/Executive Room” and a “Jack and Jill” model (with a shared bathroom)—though here it’s all Jacks and no Jills. There are some nine thousand such temporary units in Williston alone.

The sign says WELCOME TO WILLISTON, N.D., BOOMTOWN, U.S.A. I am staying a few miles north of town at the Dakota Landing, a residential hotel that opened less than a year ago and caters to oil workers. (Its tagline: “Where tough guys sleep like babies.”) It offers 240 rooms, twenty-four-hour food, a cafeteria, a bar/lounge, pool and ping-pong tables, business and fitness centers, block heater hookups in the parking lot, an indoor boot room (with lockers), and packed lunches to go. It’s costing me about $175 a night after taxes—not bad for this town, although given that the average occupant is more of a resident than an overnighter, it’s hardly a bargain at more than $3,800 a month (at the weekly rate). Across from the parking lot, an oil rig is going up.

The idea is relatively simple and ingenious, from an engineering standpoint. First, drill a well. As the well is dug, the wellbore is encased in cement to secure the pipe and prevent the seepage of fluid (into, say, local groundwater). Once the target depth is reached, the well is “completed.” Methods vary. In some wells, a “perforating gun” is lowered, firing off shaped charges that blast small holes through the pipe and into the layer of rock. Other wells drop plastic balls down the shaft that open mechanical sliding sleeves in the pre-perforated liner, revealing strategically spaced holes. Whatever the case, the target rock can now be hydraulically shattered. A mix of water, sand, and chemicals is injected at such high pressure that it forces open fissures in the rock. When the liquid is removed, the particles of sand left behind keep the fissures open, allowing oil and gas to enter the well. Working backward, multiple sections of pipe can be “fracked,” with a temporary plug closed after each stage is completed. When the last section is finished, the plugs are removed and oil and gas can flow to the surface.

Fracking is particularly effective when it is coupled with horizontal drilling, which allows you to drill down and then sideways through a single rock layer. This horizontal tail—often up to two miles long—can then be fracked in multiple sections, vastly increasing exposure to the oil-rich rock. Think: instead of dipping a chip into a bowl of seven-layer dip from above to get at the guacamole buried below, what if you could dip your chip sideways beneath the surface, swiping through the entire layer of rich green stuff?

There are Slavic accents behind the counter at the Dairy Queen, where my combo meal costs a surprising eleven dollars. Sticky-faced kids run around eating ice cream. In the park across the street, skate punks with ripped shirts, dreads, and dyed hair roll up and down a ramp in the golden early-evening light. Some of the younger ones enter the restaurant. Once they’ve got their cones, they go outside and stand next to some high school guys who are smoking. When the older kids aren’t looking, the youngsters study how to exhale. A trio of Latinos in blue overalls lingers over dinner. The line for the drive-through stretches across the parking lot. A guy in jeans and dusty boots walks by, a gallon jug of water in each hand. A kid on a bike pops a wheelie. A baby kicks his high chair while his grandmother spoons him soft-serve. A beautiful summer Saturday night in a town on the American plains.

There have been heinous crimes. Last December, investigators say a Bakken oil speculator ordered a successful hit on a Washington state businessman who owed him two million dollars. (The triggerman was caught with a to-do list that read “wipe tools down” and “practice with pistol.”) In 2012, two Colorado men on crack abducted a beloved Montana schoolteacher out for a jog, strangled her, bought a shovel at the Williston Walmart, buried the body in a shallow grave, and then returned the shovel. An extensive, well-armed, Williston-based meth ring calling itself “the Family” was broken up after it tried to beat one of its members to death. On the nearby Fort Berthold reservation, a sixty-four-year-old woman and her three grandchildren were killed by an intruder who—high on meth—slit his throat in front of the police (a fourth grandchild survived the attack by playing dead). Meanwhile, down in Dickinson, a twenty-four-year-old Idaho man looking for work broke in and raped an eighty-three-year-old woman in her home.

Locals decry the influx of migrant workers, calling them “oil field trash” and “rig pigs.” In the past five years, federal prosecutions have nearly tripled in western North Dakota. The FBI opened an office in the Bakken, which the DEA has identified as a “federal High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area.” The ATF and Bureau of Indian Affairs have increased their presence, too. “Operation Pipe Cleaner.” “Operation Winter’s End.” The arrests pile up. Between 2005 and 2011, calls to the Williston police department more than quadrupled; in nearby Watford City, they increased nearly one hundred times. In a North Dakota State University study released last year, one officer said, “I think one in every five people that I deal with has drugs on them.” While I’m in Williston, a headline reads “DEA Watching North Dakota.”

Admission to the Williston Basin Speedway is fifteen bucks, ten if you’re military. You hear it before you see it—a steady roar punctuated with the percussive POP! of backfires. In the family area (“no alcohol or profanity allowed”), a weathered old woman with burgundy hair squints to see the track. Elsewhere, guys strut around in sunglasses even though it’s 8:30 at night. Everyone’s T-shirt announces something: a sports team, a car, a beer, or, in the case of one woman, that she’s one of the “Bakken bitches.” A guy in jean shorts wears a black tee with a MasterCard logo over which is printed “Sex with me: priceless.” He walks hand in hand with a little girl in pigtails. On the track, two brothers from Minot are battling for first and second. The announcer plays hockey with them both: “They won’t back down from a fight—even with each other.” The concession booth sells a six-dollar “taco in a bag.” Something fried stinks up the stands; they’re burning the oil. Everyone is drinking silver buckets of iced blue cans of Bud Light. I’m not sure if one can even buy a single beer. Wedge-shaped cars with bright decals scramble and slide around in circles, throwing dirt. Over the PA, they play the Macarena. Some of us dance. The guy behind me—ribbed undershirt, neon shoes, blue ball cap, hand towel dangling from his back pocket—barks at his driver: “Come on!” The scoreboard counts down the laps. Faster and faster, going nowhere. Clods of dirt hit the fence. The noise is tremendous. Twenty-three machines pass us like peals of thunder. We feel it in the metal stands; we feel it in our guts. We shout at the cars, which deafly drive on. The roar crescendos and just when we think we can’t bear it—it dies, just a bit, as the cars wing around the far side. We’re on the last lap. The bouncing kid next to me has all of his fingers crossed. Down the row, a toddler’s ears are covered with pink zebra-striped earmuffs; the baby’s in the stroller next to her are not. We are choking on dust and diesel in this cathedral of the internal combustion engine and the fossils that fuel it. A checkered flag—the roar subsides. We clap politely for the winner, who came from behind at the last minute. Water trucks come out and spray down the track, a brief intermission. At the beginning of the next race, a driver spins out and crashes into the wall. Cars ram into each other, belching fumes. Two tow trucks race over. The announcer says, “I think he’s done for tonight.” The guy behind me blames the water trucks. He shouts, “A little too much water, guys. But, hey, we like it wet!”

Fracking requires great amounts of water—at least some two million gallons for the initial fracturing—that must be trucked to the well. Worse, Bakken wells typically require an additional six hundred gallons of freshwater a day to flush out salty precipitation and maintain the oil flow—which means a well could suck up another 6.6 to 8.8 million gallons in its three-to-four-decade lifespan.

North Dakota is one of the driest states in the country.

The “fracking fluid” itself is made of water, sand, and a proprietary mix of chemicals that companies are reluctant to disclose but usually contains a noxious brew of formaldehyde, benzene, acids, and volatile organic compounds. (The goal: kill microorganisms, prevent pipe corrosion, and increase fluid viscosity.) The majority of fracking fluid is absorbed deep underground, where it supposedly stays well below the water table. Ten to thirty percent returns to the surface.

Some of the surface “flowback” may be recycled (to frack more wells), but the majority of the wastewater—which now contains salty groundwater that can be naturally radioactive and contain heavy metals—must be hauled away, treated, diluted, or dumped into deep disposal wells. In the Bakken, bringing up a barrel of oil produces about a barrel and a half of briny wastewater. Wastewater is stored in open-air pits or tanks near the well—another potential source of groundwater contamination.

The idea of fracking isn’t new, just improved upon. In the 1860s, Civil War veteran Colonel Edward A. L. Roberts patented a “petroleum torpedo” filled with black powder (later nitroglycerin) that—when exploded at the bottom of a well—vastly increased production. In the 1930s and ’40s, other methods were developed to fracture the rock, including acid, steel bullets, and a “hydrafrac treatment” gel (a chemical mix of crude oil, solvents, and sand).

On December 10, 1967, as part of “Project Plowshare,” the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission lowered a twenty-nine-kiloton nuclear device 4,240 feet down a natural gas well outside of Farmington, New Mexico. The device, named Gasbuggy, detonated with nearly twice the power of the Hiroshima bomb. It was the birth of nuclear fracking. Two years later, a forty-kiloton device was exploded down a gas well twice as deep in Rulison, Colorado. And in 1973, three bombs of thirty-three kilotons each were exploded nearly simultaneously at varying depths down a single well—like a string of firecrackers—outside of Rifle, Colorado. In each test, the nuclear blast vaporized the rock, creating a short-lived but, in my imagination, terrifyingly beautiful spherical cavern of molten glass some 150 feet in diameter that quickly collapsed into a tall rubble chimney. Nearly instantaneous boom and bust.

In all three tests, the target layer was widely fractured; greater amounts of gas were indeed “liberated,” but the gas was radioactive—and unusable—every time. Today, the sites bear historical markers and, in some places, small parking areas at surface Ground Zero. The Office of Legacy Management monitors the land. The fact sheets for each blast state that the Department of Energy does not plan to remove the radioactive contamination deep underground because “no feasible technology” currently exists.

Even if the theory holds—and today’s hazardous fracking fluids stay trapped below our drinking water—wells frequently fail for a number of reasons, including human error. Well casings—those barriers to seepage closer to the surface—often aren’t cemented properly, which is part of what led to the blowout of the Deepwater Horizon. Studies suggest as many as 10 percent of all well casings leak.

Five minutes on the Facebook page “Bakken Oilfield Fail of the Day”—endless photos of trucks in the ditch, machinery upended, jerry-rigged equipment, workplace accidents, fires, and ridiculous wrecks—is enough to reduce anyone’s confidence.

The Bakken has become a known resource play. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a Bakken well—wherever it is drilled—will predictably produce for decades. As long as oil fetches more than fifty or sixty dollars a barrel, the well will turn a profit. Companies can drill more than one well on a single surface location, or pad, producing certain economies of scale (the drilling rig doesn’t need to be disassembled between wells, for instance). Drill. Change directions. Drill again. Last year, writer Richard Manning quipped in Harper’s, “This is no longer wildcatting; this is plumbing.”

The 1974 Safe Water Drinking Act regulates the injection of hazardous materials underground. It is the Environmental Protection Agency’s best weapon for protecting our drinking water. In 2005, language was inserted that stated the term “underground injection” excluded “the underground injection of fluids or propping agents (other than diesel fuels) pursuant to hydraulic fracturing operations related to oil, gas, or geothermal production activities.” This provision is known as the “Halliburton Loophole.”

At the breakfast buffet in my hotel, two TVs are turned up loud, one on CNN, the other on Fox. Most men eat in silence. Biscuits and gravy, hash browns, eggs, bacon. Pink yogurt and a bowl of chopped fruit go untouched. There are lots of boots and overalls, many dirty from last night’s shift. I heard people coming and going in the halls all night. What must be company men and management types tuck their shirts into khakis. It’s Sunday morning, but everyone is rushing off to work. A man says, “I’m just saying it’s like the Tower of Babel. You got everybody speaking all kinds of language. You just gotta speak English.” His buddy responds, “Willie for President!” The crawl on the nearest TV mentions a toxin found in the drinking supply of Toledo, Ohio. Four hundred thousand people are without water. I catch a strong whiff of gas every time I turn on the tap in my bathroom, but it’s probably my imagination. Then again, there is more than one well across the street. The talking head on Fox says, “People will make bad choices. You just have to let them learn the consequences.”

Last December, Jacob Haughney, a laconic bearded guy with a pierced lip and a knit cap, posted a video to YouTube called “Check this out. Funky water in North Dakota.” In the video, he deadpans: “Hey, what’s up. My name is Jake. I work in the oil fields out in North Dakota and I just found out something about our tap water that we bathe in and use to brush our teeth and shit. And, uh, it’s pretty weird. You lemme know what you think.” He turns on a bathroom faucet and sparks a lighter next to the stream of water pouring down the drain. Suddenly he jerks his hand back as a column of fire erupts—fwhoomp—then flares out. The water continues running. He reaches back in with the lighter. Whoosh—it happens again. He laughs. “I know. Really weird, right?”

A drizzly Sunday morning, religious programs on most of the airwaves. I pull up to a neon-pink shack in the parking lot of a motel. Terse guys in trucks roll up to windows on both sides. “What can I get ya, hon?” asks the “babe-rista” at Boomtown Babes Espresso, who wears red panties/short-shorts and a bright pink bra under a see-through white tank top. (The stand’s Facebook page posts pictures of women in fishnets, thongs, and Day-Glo outfits below suggestions like, “Come try a blended White Chocolate Butter rum mocha from Brandi . . . It’s an orgasm in your mouth.”)

Today’s babe-rista is alone in the shack, and she’s in the weeds. The line backs up in both directions. “I’m sure you get this all the time, but can I take your picture?” She poses for the camera, then goes grimly back to pouring. I hand over four dollars for the coffee, which is too hot and too sweet. Without my having to offer, she keeps the change.

The next day, I visit C Cups Espresso, which—though tamer in dress—nonetheless represents my last foray into erotic coffee. I pay three dollars for my large “D Cup” of drip. From my lowly Corolla, I can barely reach up to the window, which is clearly meant for the cabs of taller trucks.

After Alaska, North Dakota is the most male state in the union. In McKenzie County, which includes Watford City, south of Williston, the workforce is 77 percent male. On backpage.com the ads for Bakken escorts refresh themselves daily (“Upscale, classy, and nasty,” “U pick UR price,” “MADAM ROSE WILL BREAK YOU,” “free dinner dates w appt 1 hr or longer”). Posts on Craigslist read “Miss homemade cooking/baking while working in the oilfields??,” “Rent a Housewife,” and “Bikini/Lingerie Cleaning.” This summer, the Justice Department’s Office on Violence Against Women announced a $3 million special initiative for the Bakken aimed to increase the prosecution of violence against women, as well as to support the survivors of such crimes.

At one point, a guy walks through the lobby of my hotel with a shirt that reads, “Ask for the sausage,” with an arrow pointing down. The woman at the front desk says, “That’s a terrible shirt,” as he walks right by.

The First Lutheran, Gloria Dei Lutheran, Good Shepherd Lutheran, and West Prairie Lutheran Churches of Williston are gathering at Harmon Park for the tenth annual Summer Sizzler for worship, food, games, music, and fellowship. A posted sign reminds everyone that there is no camping in the park. I sit at an empty picnic table in front of the band shell. Many people have brought their own chairs and umbrellas. Next to the PA system stands a large wooden cross crowned with sharp thorns. Behind us, they’re blowing up the bounce castles, three of them, as the choir hallelujahs to the accompaniment of a piano, drum set, and red electric guitar. They sing, “We are all children of the highest,” as the sun breaks through the clouds. The pastor takes the mic to ask everyone to please leave the bounce castles alone until after the service. He wears an orange T-shirt that reads, “God’s work, our hands.” We sing, “All are welcome in this place,” as I am joined by two white-haired old women, whose pleasant perfume wafts my way.

According to the New York Times, one in six North Dakota wells had an “environmental incident” in 2013. A color-coded online map built by an independent cartographer shows the hazardous spills in North Dakota from 2000 to 2013. The northwestern quadrant is bathed red (oil), purple (saltwater/brine), and yellow (other hazardous materials). Many spills occurred along the banks of Lake Sakakawea, a giant Missouri River reservoir outside Williston that supplies drinking water to much of the state. A smaller cluster—of some four hundred spills—occurred in the southwest corner, just outside the town of Marmarth, where there was a short-lived boom before the Bakken took off.

I flip through the incident reports, full of stark language and times, dates, and coordinates. Most often, the contact information seems to lead to an address in Texas.

Today’s gospel comes from Matthew, chapter 14, verses 13 to 21—Jesus and the loaves and fishes, a story of prodigious bounty, about having enough for all. The offering will go to world hunger. Little blond children come forth and sing, “Jesus made it more than enough to feed the hungry world.” There is a skit with adults dressed as kids that involves a Darth Vader mask, a green light saber, mud pies, and a woman in pigtails; it seems to be largely ad-libbed and goes a little too long. There is joke about lutefisk, but the highlight of the skit comes when the “daughter” sings a silly song that goes, “Give me gas in my Ford, keep me trucking for the Lord.” “Hallelujah!” some of us shout.

On September 29, 2013, a farmer outside of Tioga was harvesting wheat when he saw crude spewing some six inches out of the dirt. What he discovered was 20,600 barrels of oil spread across the equivalent of seven football fields—one of the largest onshore spills in U.S. history. The cause: a quarter-inch break in a twenty-year-old underground pipeline running to a rail yard. Cleanup could cost more than $20 million and stretch into 2017. So far, the San Antonio–based company responsible, Tesoro Logistics, has not been penalized. The farmer told the Associated Press, “We expect not to be able to farm that ground for several years.”

As I listen to the familiar Bible story, I notice something new. The disciples start with five loaves and two fish, and—after feeding more than five thousand people—they end up with twelve baskets of leftovers, which is far more than they started with. Suddenly the verse seems less like a parable and more like a warning—there are times when you get much more than you asked for.

Since 1776—when recorded observation began—Youngstown, Ohio, had never had an earthquake. But one year after a well began disposing of wastewater from Pennsylvania fracking operations by pumping it deep underground, the town recorded 109 quakes. The seismic activity traveled east to west along a fault line leading away from the well, and coincided with disposal operations. (There were lulls during holidays, when the well was closed.) After a 4.0-magnitude quake shook Youngstown on New Year’s Eve 2011, the disposal well was plugged.

Fracking and wastewater injection have been linked to thousands of quakes across Oklahoma and Texas. In the three decades before 2008, Oklahoma averaged two quakes a year of magnitude 3.0 or greater. By the beginning of 2015, it averages two a day. So far this summer, in the first half of 2014, Oklahoma is the state with the most earthquakes. (By year’s end, it will see 585 quakes—about three times as many as California. The next year’s count: 907.) In May, the U.S. Geological Survey warned a bigger quake—magnitude 5.5 or greater—could hit soon. Earthquake insurance is booming. Oklahoma currently has some nine thousand wastewater injection wells.

We offer prayers of intercession for all those in Iraq, Syria, Israel, and Palestine. We pray especially for “those in the oil industry who are far from their families.” All are welcome to take communion; gluten-free bread is offered in the center of the three stations. I receive a blessing after dipping a hunk of bread into a chalice of wine held by a man with a giant belt buckle. The lines are long; things are a little informal outdoors. My neighbor, Marilyn, and I laugh as the band gets a bit jazzy with “Jesus Loves Me!” We strike up a conversation. She graduated from Williston High School in 1956; the pavilion is named for a beloved music teacher of hers who directed the city and high school bands for over fifty years. She wants me to know about the state’s 125th anniversary celebration; she’s pumped about that. She complains about the crowds, the construction, the dramatic spike in rents. But in the end, she insists, “I was born and raised here—I won’t let them run me out!”

Last December, scientists at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union presented a study that suggested using fracking boreholes as a way to dispose of nuclear waste. Deep shale is impermeable to water. Theoretically, the heavy toxic slurry—which would remain radioactive for some hundred thousand years—would seep steadily downward toward the earth’s core. Other scientists remained skeptical. Fracking fluids dumped into deep disposal wells have migrated back to the surface.

After the service, the congregation bounces in the castles (at last!), tosses beanbags, and eats hot dogs, burgers, chips, cake, popcorn, and cotton candy. A rockabilly duo sings praises to His name, but I leave before the main act, a western band. On my way to the parking lot, I watch some skate punks ogle the buffet. One gets halfway to the spread before losing his nerve.

The Fort Berthold Indian Reservation was created in 1870. Over the years, the Arikara, Hidatsa, and Mandan people—collectively known as the Three Affiliated Tribes—have conceded land, often under coercion, to the railroads, the government, and the massive flooding necessary to create Lake Sakakawea. One-twelfth its former size, the reservation now occupies a million acres in the western part of North Dakota and contains 414 wells on trust and fee land, which account for nearly a third of the oil produced in the state.

Over the recent Fourth of July weekend, a pipeline spilled twenty-four thousand barrels of so-called “saltwater” (a nebulous industry term for briny wastewater) onto the Fort Berthold reservation. Officials said the spill, which went unnoticed for some time, stretched nearly two miles, scorching vegetation and soaking into the ground. Many feared the spill had reached a bay that fed into Lake Sakakawea, the tribes’ source of drinking water, but the EPA stated the spill had been stopped by beaver dams. A year later, radiation in the soil measures eight times the background level. Fracking saltwater can contain oil residue and chemical by-products and is estimated to be ten to thirty times saltier than seawater.

And Abimelech fought against the city all that day; and he took the city, and slew the people that was therein, and beat down the city, and sowed it with salt.

—JUDGES 9:45

In the Bible, Abimelech is an illegitimate tyrant of great ambition who usurps the throne by killing sixty-nine of his half brothers. As his power grows, he attacks his own city and slaughters his own people. In the end, he is dealt a mortal blow when a woman drops a millstone on his head.

“Bakken pollution catches everyone by surprise” is a headline that ran in the Bismarck Tribune on October 23, 2009.

In early 2011, in order to protect its state industry against federal environmental regulation, the North Dakota legislature introduced House Bill No. 1216, a nine-line, ninety-four-word emergency measure stating that “hydraulic fracturing is an acceptable recovery process in North Dakota.” “Acceptable” meant legal—and safe. The bill passed the house and senate with a combined vote of 138 yeas to one nay.

“Where there is no vision, the people perish” is the motto that appears atop the banner of the Williston Herald. The front page also lists the North Dakota rig count, which this morning stands at 194. Last week, the EPA opened a criminal investigation office in Bismarck, which it hopes soon to staff permanently. Before that, the nearest environmental detective was more than five hundred miles away.

I drive the streets of town. There are some lovely one-and two-story brick or wood houses with tidy lawns and maybe a new boat in the driveway. Other areas are not as nice, with chain-link fences, KEEP OUT signs, and busted windows.

On the east side of town, a man holds up a SLOW sign as trucks crawl past the entrance to what was a warehouse. A train whistle blows—we’re next to the tracks. Men in hard hats and orange vests go about their business among blocks of rubble, burnt barrels, bent steel, the listing skeleton of a building, twisted heaps of who-knows-what. A charred tower looms overhead. An orange windsock blows perfectly horizontal; I breathe in a wet-charcoal smell laced with a strong chemical tang. Something smolders inside the pile, drifting smoke across the ruins. I peer over a flimsy fence at pools of oil-black water. From a fire hydrant across the street, a thick yellow hose snakes beneath the fence, leaking water onto the pavement.

Two weeks ago, just after midnight, the Red River Supply storage facility exploded into flames. The smoke rose hundreds of feet into the air, and though the wind was blowing away from town, a half-mile area was evacuated and the FAA delayed flights for six hours at the airport. The company stored dozens of chemicals, including drilling fluids, soil and dust products, and proppants, most of which burned. It took officials more than six hours to alert the public of any possible danger.

Two little kids with buzz cuts ride their bikes past me. It’s hot; the blue bulbous Williston water tower seems to shimmer in the distance. The chubbier kid lags behind. “Where are we going?” he whines. His friend replies, “Up your ass and around the corner!” as he speeds off into the rec center parking lot.

Amenities offered at the Williston Area Recreation Center, a $70 million, 234,000-square-foot angular and soaring steel-, stone-, and glass-sheathed complex that opened in March and is said to be the largest such rec center in the country: four tennis and basketball courts, a turf soccer field, batting cages, a two-hundred-meter track, an Olympic-size swimming pool, three birthday rooms, an indoor playground, child-sitting six days a week, meeting rooms, a patio, an overhead track, a weight room, a cardio area, a spinning room, two water slides that loop outside of the building, a “teen area” (TV, pinball, table hockey), a golf simulator, a kiddie pool, an instructional kitchen, an ice rink, racquetball courts, and a water park, which includes a lazy river, a surfing simulator, and an oil derrick spouting water, beside which dance three playful orange-and-yellow flares.

Fracking the Bakken releases both oil and natural gas. Natural gas is cheap and not easily shipped—given the lack of pipelines—and so companies focus on the oil, which can be moved by rail, while burning off the gas at the wellhead. In other words, it is cheaper to waste the gas than to sell it. The process is called “flaring.” North Dakota wells burn off about 30 percent of the gas they capture—far, far more than wells in the rest of the country, which flare less than 1 percent. (The worldwide average is believed to be less than 3 percent.) In April, North Dakota wells burned off $50 million worth of natural gas—enough to heat more than 1.5 million homes—and more than twice the amount consumed in the state that very month. Such flaring releases more CO₂ than a million cars would in the same period. Companies can flare for a year without paying taxes, after which a waiver can be applied for (and usually is granted). The state loses about $1 million a month in gas tax revenue. At the beginning of July, the state announced new flaring targets—only 23 percent by next January, dropping to 10 percent by 2020.

In a YouTube video called “Lighting a cig in Williston,” uploaded in 2012 and seen a mere 214 times, one guy holds the camera and laughs moronically as another guy in sandals and shorts shambles over the wall of an earthen pit and approaches a roaring flare.

        CAMERA GUY: We’re lighting a fucking cigarette off a fucking flare.

        SANDALS GUY (whining): There’s no way—it’s so hot.

        CG: DO IT! Pussy! [He giggles as his “friend” leans closer to the flare.]

        SG (shuffling back a few steps): Ah, it’s so hot!

        CG: Did you get it?

               Suddenly, the flare explodes, sending a fireball rolling across the pit. SG makes guttural noises and retreats toward the camera.

        CG: Oh, fuck! [Laughs maniacally. The camera shakes to reveal he’s sitting in the driver’s seat of a truck.] GET IT!!!

        SG: No! [Unintelligible grunting.]

        CG (wheezing): Oh, fuck.

        SG (scrambling out of the pit): I swear they just turned that on full blast.

My first night in town I saw them from the highway: twin pillars in the dark, flickering brighter than any other lights on the prairie. I followed a dirt road for about a mile before coming to the two flares. One burned taller and with a bright-blue base. Some flares roar like jet planes, but that night the sound—a loud whoosh—came in waves: stronger, as the fire burned brighter and higher, then receding and softening. A chorus of crickets tried to sing above it. Mosquitos swarmed, but I stood and listened. I thought of the view from space. I’d come to see this. The noise reminded me of something I couldn’t put my finger on. Later, trying to fall asleep to the Doppler whine of trucks, it hit me—the flares sound just like the sea.

Seagulls soar above the Walmart parking lot—curiously out of place, as if they’ve lost their way like the rest of us—as I inch my car through the throngs of shoppers pushing carts filled with water, ramen noodles, sports drinks, and the like, a prodigious bounty of quick-fix nutrition. A car alarm goes off as I pull past a sign that reads TOWING ENFORCED AT ALL TIMES. Two years ago, Walmart kicked out everyone living in its parking lot, dozens of men in tents, cars, and RVs, some of whom had been receiving mail at 45 Walmart Parking Lot, Williston, ND.

To some, Williston represents the freest of markets, unbridled supply and demand, an anarcho-capitalist dream. If prices are high, so are the wages. In 2012, entry-level jobs on a rig paid about $66,000, while oil-field workers earned, on average, $112,462 a year. This summer, staff jobs at Walmart start at $17.50 an hour, nearly two and a half times the federal minimum wage. On the day I visit, I pass a man holding a cardboard sign reading HELP ME—U.S. VET.

Just some of the jobs advertised in the Shopper, Williston’s ad pages, on July 31, 2014, an issue that stretches seventy-six pages: hot shot driver, corrections officer, building inspector, heavy equipment operator, staff engineer, social worker, water resources technician, diesel technician, lot person, dispatcher, belly dump driver, workover rig operator, pusher, carpet cleaner, janitor, pumper, roustabout, saltwater disposal operator, shop hand, chemical yard driver, receiving clerk, bookkeeper, insurance agent, collections specialist, drilling superintendent, machinist, substitute teacher, seventh-grade football coach, activity aid, slick driver, winch driver, scoreboard operator, service hand, and game official (all sports).

I get to the library right at 2:00 p.m., when it opens. A card thumb-tacked to the lobby bulletin board lists the red flags of human trafficking. (“Has an adult boyfriend, owns expensive items they could not afford, has bruising or branding tattoos, uses slang like wifey, daddy, or the game.”) There is a number to call. To the left of the circulation desk, a dozen men stare blankly from the wall—color mug shots of local “high-risk” sex offenders (with addresses and aliases). The library is quiet, just the drone of the lights and the tapping of men browsing the internet. Guys on laptops and phones are spread around the periphery, using the free Wi-Fi. A starburst quilt hangs on the wall. I wander past the new books to a shelf of local newspapers. I scan the headlines: “‘Isolated’ Incident: Bacteria Found in Water Samples”; “1 in 7 Private Sector Jobs Tied to Oil, Gas”; “Missing Girl Found Safe in Williams Co.”; “NDSU to Fund Work to Reduce Dust”; “Housing Booms as Needs Grow in North Dakota Town.”

I trade my driver’s license to a young librarian for a copy of the Williston Herald, which is kept up front. I have to wait for today’s paper. When it’s finally my turn, I read the lead story on the front page, which begins, “A thirty-eight-year-old Williston man is being held on $2 million bond after being arrested for two separate cases involving human trafficking and sexual imposition.”

“Charged with a serious felony? You need serious help!!! The job of the State’s Attorney is to get a conviction. Shouldn’t you have an aggressive and experienced legal professional protecting your rights? Our office has helped countless numbers of people stay out of jail and move on with their lives . . .” begins one print advertisement I saw in Williston.

While I read the paper, a man approaches to sign up for a computer. The young librarian tells him the wait will be an hour and a half. “Already?” he asks as he puts his name on the list. The library has been open for thirty minutes. The young librarian leaves him to make her rounds warning the men who have five minutes of computer time left. She wears moccasins and is polite but firm. You can only use the computers once a day. Guys keep adding their names. A woman in rainbow tie-dye rails against the library’s policy of not giving cards to people living in trailers. She has her daughter with her. The librarian remains calm in the face of mounting frustration. The woman slaps something down on the counter. The librarian sighs, “I’m sorry, honey. But this ID is for West Fargo.” On the desk sits a thick binder of local job and housing information, from which a guy pays twenty cents to photocopy a page.

Later, a librarian explains to a man how to apply for a card. When she’s done, she helps another man at a computer terminal find some tax forms online. Next he tells her he wants a map of Texas. He speaks quietly in broken English.

The librarian says, “You want to print a map?”

The man nods.

“Are you looking to get there?” She raises an eyebrow. “From here?”

Again he nods, and they switch places. He fidgets in a long red-and-white striped shirt that nearly reaches to his knees, as she prints driving directions from here to somewhere, anywhere in Texas.

Leaving the library, I see the man standing in the middle of the parking lot looking lost, no car in sight.

A sunny afternoon in the park—the skate punks are out in droves. Tough kids, scrawny kids, they hang in, around, and off of a beat-up blue truck. One in a bandanna swings a yo-yo. Most wear ripped black tees, though some go shirtless. They saunter up and nod, many without boards, just a tribe checking in. Mothers don’t give them a second look as they lead screaming toddlers past them to the parking lot. There might be some shady stuff going on behind the dumpster.

Two disheveled fortysomething men sit in the central pagoda, surveying the park. One guy does push-ups while his buddy heads to the bathroom. Like me, they have nowhere to be. I feel awkward just sitting in the park, given the mug shots in the library.

A black truck drives up, and the skate punks flock over. I approach two that hang back, a guy and girl sitting atop a ramp and petting a small red dog between them. She has blond hair streaked pink and a nose ring. He has short sandy hair, dark jeans, and a black Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirt that I almost find hard to believe. They’ve lived in town for three years. I ask how it’s going.

“A lot of kids don’t like the new kids,” the girl says. “They’re mean to them.”

Trying to be helpful, the guy adds, “You know, the changes and all.” Public-school enrollment increased 12 percent in the past year.

The girl says, “But now that I’ve been here three years, it’s okay. There are some nice people in this town, I guess.” Behind her, someone bangs on the hood of a truck.

I ask, “So do you like living here?”

The kids let the question hang for a minute while the guy picks at his arm, before giving me the answer of any teen, anywhere. “Fuck no.”

The week I left for North Dakota, a Williston man pled guilty to tying nooses around his ex-wife and son and dragging them behind his SUV. Reportedly, he meant to snap their necks, saying, “You know what I do with liars.” The boy asked, “Mommy, are you going to miss me?” After a short distance, the man’s current wife put a stop to the shenanigans. The couple recently had been arrested on a meth charge. Two days later, there were reports that two men in a black Silverado fired a shot at a seven-year-old girl on her bike, who escaped with minor injuries and a flat tire.

I head to dinner in my hotel cafeteria. As I go down the line, I ask for shrimp, fettuccini Alfredo, green beans, and corn bread. The server asks, “That all?”

One breakfast I saw a guy load his tray with an everything omelet, biscuits and gravy, sausage, bacon, two pieces of pecan pie, and three slabs of French toast. He told those of us in line, “I was working all night keeping the lights going. It’s time to get my eat on!”

DUE TO OVERWHELMING RESPONSE WE’RE BACK TO DETECT YOUR RISK FOR STROKE IN LESS THAN TEN MINUTES reads a flyer from an outfit in Iowa that was going around Williston when I was there.

The room is loud with guys scarfing down food and chatting about work. The table behind me discusses pipe fittings, before talking shit about someone named Sweeney who moved back to “Colorado or Alabama or Texas or something.”

One man says, “He didn’t know shit when he put in that pump jack.”

Another adds, “We could have saved everyone some time, put that shit up right.”

The third gets the last word. “What we have there now is an old-fashioned clusterfuck.”

The men sit in groups segregated mainly by age. No one sits with me. Someone shouts, “Don’t tell me karma’s not real. That shit’s real as fuck.” He then discusses a playful fight between two guys named Big Steve and Little Steve, which started with someone shooting a rubber band and ended up with a screwdriver in the eye.

Monday evening in the hotel lounge, which consists of four round tables and as many stools before a bar. A guy walks up and tells the bartender, “I took my laundry somewhere else, since you wouldn’t do it.” She laughs and says, “I’ve got eight loads already.” She wears glasses and a ponytail, and has a tattoo on her forefinger just past her knuckle. He says, “Okay, I’m gonna take a shower and come down for a beer.”

These men are doing difficult and dangerous jobs. Oil and gas workers are 7.6 times more likely to die than workers in other industries—and oil and gas workers in North Dakota are more than six times more likely to die than roughnecks across the country. The state has the highest rate of on-the-job deaths in the U.S., more than five times the national rate.

        BARTENDER: What’d you do today?

        DEEP SOUTHERN MUMBLE: Fixed a tractor and got all these boys stocked up for two weeks.

        BARTENDER (singsongy): Because you’re getting ready to go!

        MUMBLE: I’m gone in the morning.

        BARTENDER: Hallelujah.

        MUMBLE: I just hope they don’t fuck it up while I’m gone.

Catastrophic well accidents—blowouts, getting crushed or caught in machinery, etc.—are only part of the worry; occupational hazards abound. A toxic oil-based swill known as drilling “mud” cools and lubricates the bit and helps remove the cut rock; exposure causes lesions. Fracking fluid usually contains a number of carcinogens. Workers involved in the flowback operations have been shown to have high levels of benzene in their urine. Wastewater pumped from the well can emit hazardous concentrations of hydrogen sulfide, a lethal, often-odorless gas. Noxious vapors waft from tanks and open-air pits. In 2012, a North Dakota oil worker was found dead on a catwalk above a storage tank, poisoned by the concentration of petroleum vapors. (In a statement, Marathon Oil said, “Our analysis and testing of the location following the incident indicated no apparent equipment malfunctions or other abnormalities.” The company settled out of court with the man’s family.)

“They got the string fucked up. Sent the wrong part from Minnesota. We’re only like 150 feet from bottom. The whole thing’s already 320 joints.”

“You get the rig fixed?”

“Took all fucking day.”

“Still getting paid.”

“Yep.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

Two years ago, after conducting a study across five states, federal officials cited another danger: inhaling the fine sand used for fracking. “Frac sand” can cause the incurable lung disease silicosis, as well as cancer. Air samples at wells consistently exceeded healthy guidelines; nearly a third of the samples were ten times over the occupational limit.

At a table behind me, four older, dressier guys have been drinking round after round of doubles—at least six, by my count. Crown Royal, Captain Morgan, well vodka, and whiskey mixed in an assortment of water, orange juice, Coke, and Diet Coke. At least one guy has a German accent—a bunch of international good ol’ boys. One of them shouts across the lounge, “Hey, Kruger, don’t let her put too much ice in them drinks.”

A man with a pierced lip has had it with Cedric. “He’s gonna find out just what kind of asshole I am,” he tells me. The bartender sighs sympathetically: “Cedric, Cedric.” The guy can barely stand it; he’s practically vibrating. “I’m gonna cut his hours down to eight a day, five days a week. See how he likes that!” How many are they working now? “Twelve to fourteen a day and it’s going to go to seven days a week.” He shakes his head. “Me in my forties, the other guys in their fifties. Shit. You got old-ass fuckers who can outwork all them youngsters.” I nod, and he says, “They come in at four in the morning. Four a.m.!” I don’t know exactly what he means—should they be going to bed sooner or getting to work earlier?—but we’re full-on ranting now: “The other day Cedric was drunk as a skunk. I’m gonna start running that shop like Joseph fucking Stalin!” The old roughneck sits down, deflated. “Okay, shit, just a fast beer,” he tells the bartender. “I gotta work tonight. Three-thirty is gonna come pretty damn quick.”

For about a year, the bartender has been spending six weeks at the hotel, then two weeks back in California, where her mom lives. She confides that in three months, “give or take,” she’ll be moving to either Dallas or Fort Worth, where she has more family. The hotel has become part of a national franchise, which is bringing in its own management team. “The owners don’t want anything to do with the place—they just want to stay away and collect their money.” A lot of people are quitting or leaving. “Change is coming,” she assures me.

In the stairway, an older man is hunched over his phone, mumbling, “Hey, hey there. I hear you, brother. It’s hard.” I step around him. His eyes are closed; he doesn’t look up. I’ve noticed a lot of guys on their cells in the parking lot; either they need to smoke or get air or they’re sharing a double and want a little privacy. Meanwhile, the room across the hall seems to be having a party. I hear guy’s voices, hip-hop, and the sounds of PlayStation.

One day I walk the downtown in all its boomtown contradiction. Around the corner from the sushi place (where “a touch of California atmosphere almost makes you forget you’re in Williston”) stands an old quilting supply store. Next to a hair and tanning salon, a sidewalk sign offers GUNS & AMMO. Under a peeling awning, bridal dresses line the dusty window of a store that also advertises 50% OFF LAWN AND GARDEN. An upscale cooking store, some junky antiques, an ad for hot stone massage, windowless bars that look like bunkers, a Hallmark store.

The retail scene is rather sedate at the one-room JCPenney department store, which opened in 1916 and today is offering early back-to-school specials, despite its older clientele, a couple of whom power-chair themselves along the aisles. I buy a shirt that’s been marked down five bucks. The clerk looks a little bored and uncomfortable in a turquoise button-down and a white-and-black striped tie. He’s in high school and says, “You got an accent that’s new to me—where are you from?” He moved here from Mississippi with his stepdad, and his accent is no slouch, either. He’s been here a month and likes it so far. “I was real glad to get this job,” he says. “Where I come from, they pay $7.25 minimum wage, so $10.26 sounds pretty great to me.”

Later I see that one of those windowless bars—which, from the outside, seemed too seedy to enter—is for sale for a cool $1.5 million.

They’re tearing up the bottom of Main Street, so it’s tough getting to the train station on the south end of town. An earthmover sits motionless in the middle of the road. The streets are once again dirt, like a real Wild West town. A sign hangs over the boarded-up K. K. Korner Lounge, which online comments swear is named after the owners and not a hate group. Everyone knows the town’s two strip clubs down by the Amtrak station—Whispers and Heartbreakers—neither of which I can bring myself to enter, despite the fact that the latter is getting a new coat of white paint. These are the first establishments you see when you step off the train. Next door is the No Place Bar, which welcomes bikers and today has a pink-and-black baby stroller abandoned out front. On the side of the Salvation Army, across a small parking lot, someone has put up a giant billboard of the Ten Commandments.

Between 2008 and 2012, the number of cases of gonorrhea in the western half of the state rose 72 percent. Chlamydia was up 240 percent.

One o’clock in the afternoon and there’s a guy sleeping in the shade of a stunted tree outside the train station. The landscaping smells of urine. In the small waiting room, a TV plays loudly as a train scrapes down the tracks. They sit on seats and on their bags—young, old, with kids, without. They’re waiting to head west on the Empire Builder, which is already an hour and a half late. This summer, oil trains have been wreaking havoc with Amtrak’s passenger service, with delays averaging three to five hours and sometimes stretching into the double digits.

Around Williston, the homeless population hovers around one thousand; there is no city shelter. The town is prioritizing infrastructure, such as roads and sewers. The Salvation Army has bought hundreds of men bus and train tickets back to where they came from. The town has a newly elected mayor. Last winter, as a city commissioner, he opposed a church organization’s plan to use a National Guard armory as an emergency shelter. When he announced he was running for mayor, he told the Williston Herald: “My approach is: the number one priority is the people that live here.”

Higher up Main Street, on a door leading into a newer-looking but nondescript building, a handwritten sign announces that the Bakken Club will be closed for breakfast and lunch this week and won’t open for full service until four o’clock. That’s a few hours away, but it’s not like I could eat there anyway, or take advantage of its wine list, airport shuttle, event space, business center, or plan room (where I could store my maps and blueprints), because, according to its website, the Bakken Club is “a limited-membership Social and Business Club, Bar, and Restaurant for individuals with a long-term, vested interest in the region”—which certainly isn’t me. I’m a transient, just passing through, so I’m left peering in at the swinging saloon doors, deer-antler lamp, and Andy Warhol–esque silkscreen of a cowboy Clint Eastwood.

Open-mic night at J Dub’s, one of the local spots, where trophies from state dart competitions hang above the bar and I can see five flat screens from my seat. A sign on my table advertises stand-up comedy every Thursday—I am five weeks too late to see Dustin Diamond, a.k.a. Screech from Saved by the Bell. A twentysomething shuffles up. The bartender says, “Ready for the day to be over?” The guy nods and she talks him into some elaborate shot of at least four ingredients. He downs it and wanders into the back, where they’re setting up the open mic, about which my table ad suggests: “Leave your heart on the stage.” I ask the waitress if the entertainment is any good. She gives a conspiratorial shrug: “Depends what you like,” implying the negative. Then she laughs. “Naw, you never know.”

In the back, a bearded guy in a newsboy cap is busy getting ready. He drops a cymbal, and the audience laughs, surly. He must be the emcee. White shirts glow under the black light. A waitress appears in a short polka-dot dress, tattoos crawling up her shoulders and neck. George Strait is playing, loud. Forty-five minutes pass and the guy has assembled a drum kit, that’s it. A country cover of Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls” comes on. The man in sunglasses at the table next to me is unexpectedly moved. He bellows, “Chuuuug it!” His friends don’t respond. The emcee sits at the foot of the stage, scribbling in a notebook. The flat screens show preseason football and Ultimate Fighting. Everywhere, men beating each other up for money.

Last December, in a late-night scuffle, a thirty-one-year-old man from Mississippi died after being run over in the parking lot of J Dub’s. After spending six days tracking down the driver, the police searched his cell phone and found a text from one of his passengers: “Dude, that guy passed away last night. WTF we should really do something. I feel terrible.”

At breakfast, one of the cafeteria TVs is tuned to cartoons, though there are no kids in sight. Multicolored dinosaurs are dancing as they ride a train into the past.

I go to check out, and a guy in a red sweatshirt is talking to the receptionist. It’s 9:30 in the morning, and he has a beer in his hand. When I approach the desk, he tells her, “I’m going to go see where the boys are.”

I’m surprised at my bill. As I reach for my wallet, I realize that I, too, am part of the boom.

My drive to Watford City takes an hour and a half, a forty-five-mile death march of traffic through nearly constant construction. I pass a Dodge Ram with what looks like a giant tractor tire tied to its roof. Two days earlier, I was driving outside of Williston when suddenly a truck tire bounded across my lane. I swerved, going seventy, and the tire hurtled into a ditch. Ahead, a blue Silverado was pulled into the median, bare axle showing. Leaving town, I saw the truck still slumped by the side of the road. Yesterday, I watched a cement mixer abruptly start lurching across two lanes of highway, forcing everyone to slam on their brakes. No one even bothered to honk. Signs on the highway exhort PASS ON THE PASS.

The flares are big this morning; more rigs are going up. RV cities sprout in fields, the vehicles packed tight, nose to nose. On the outskirts of Watford City, a man camp marches its rows of trailers into the prairie. I keep my eye on a mean storm brewing in the distance. Weather here is no joke—the hail can kill a calf. On Memorial Day, a tornado ripped through a nearby trailer park, injuring nine people. Two oil workers shot a harrowing video that made the national news. The 120-mile-per-hour funnel passes within one hundred feet of their car, where the men eventually seek shelter. They laugh helplessly while the twister blots out the sun. Debris smacks their window as the funnel sits above them, spinning an angry red. One of them giggles, “Dude, where do we go? We’ve got nowhere to go!”

How to find flares in Watford City: Take Main Street past the big apartment blocks going up, still wrapped in Tyvek, and follow the road until it dead-ends at a dirt intersection. Wind the empty grid of rutted clinker roads that leave your tires red, stair-stepping closer and closer to the flames, many of which are visible for miles. Watch out for the enormous trucks lumbering past—they’ll edge you over to the side, where sharp rocks might pop your puny tires. Pass new-looking yield signs posted at the dusty intersections of barren roads with long, hopeful names like 128th Avenue NW. When you’re done looking at flares, pull up to a rig.

The storm is off to the north; the wind is blowing in. I smell wood smoke and burning plastic. Towering over the prairie, the rig is orange, blue, and white and lit brightly even in the day. A field of hay bales rings the well pad. The smell of gas is strong, like when you spill some at the pump, but far more powerful. There are rows of tanks and lengths of pipe. Something emits a high humming sound. Men come and go on the platform. No one looks my way. A large sign gives the name of the company and a three-digit rig number. After watching for a while, my head begins to hurt and my throat feels gummy. I get into the car and roll up the windows.

Watford City celebrated its centennial about a month ago, but it’s only recently come into its own. The houses are more modest, a little shabbier than in Williston. This is a much smaller city, more boots and cowboy hats on Main Street, more unpaved roads in town. But developments are cropping up on the fringes: off the highway, to the south, and over by the airport (which is slated for a $2 million expansion). Construction is everywhere. A $59 million medical complex has broken ground. The First Lutheran Church is nearly done adding a big wing. A new high school will be built this year, next to a planned $57 million events center. At the current high school, home of the Watford City Wolves, a colorful electric sign announces new-student registration for grades six to twelve started yesterday at 9:00 a.m. A girl crosses the parking lot with her mom, who is carrying pieces of paper. In Watford City, one in four children is homeless, meaning he or she fits the federal definition, which includes those living in a hotel or RV. That comes out to 263 kids.

The city’s official population is close to twenty-eight hundred, but this summer the police department estimated that temporary residents pushed the actual number to somewhere between six and seven thousand. In June, the mayor of Watford City told the Bismarck Tribune, “It’s not good for families to live in RVs.”

Five miles south of town, just off the highway where you see the grazing horses, down the dirt road, and past the toddler scrambling up the hill and the trailer offering ten-dollar hot and ready pizza, they rise before you like some postapocalyptic city, a gathering of the faithful ready to make the final stand: eight insulated, climate-controlled hangars, each holding eight bays with room for three RVs per bay—a total of 192 vehicles—plus outdoor pads for another seventy RVs, some of which might be on the waiting list to move inside. The brainchild of two Minnesota builders, the North Dakota Indoor RV Park offers tenants electric, sewer, water, and propane hookups; halogen lights; fire and carbon-monoxide detection; a hanging electric heater; laundry service; and two parking spaces outside each overhead door. Rent runs from $1,000 to $1,200 in the warmer months, depending on the size of the bay, plus an extra $250 a month in the winter. Outdoor spots cost $750 year-round.

The morning I visit, most bays are closed—everyone is at work. The speed limit is five mph. A sign says SLOW, CHILDREN PLAYING, but I don’t see any—just a bald guy walking a poodle in the gray morning drizzle. Satellite dishes sprout from the sides of the hangars. The road ends in front of big yellow dumpsters. A food truck wrapped in an ad for a drilling-pipe company is serving some guys coffee. The office is open, but no one is behind the counter, on which a notice reminds people to sign up for the group email. The common building offers a couch, some seats, two arcade games, two pool tables, a treadmill, a bike, a dartboard, a kitchenette, and some vending machines. A TV plays Scooby-Doo, but the hangar is empty. Lined face-up on a wooden table between the mailboxes are a Jackie Collins romance novel, a thriller by David Baldacci, and two copies of the King James Bible.

Later, when I call, the guy tells me that they’re full right now, but he can put me on the waiting list. “Things open up all the time,” he says, hopefully. “People come, people go.”

In January, a Louisiana man took shelter in a Watford City dumpster. A few months earlier, he had biked down from Williston with his last twenty dollars. That night, he burned two blankets, his boot liners, and a scarf, but it wasn’t enough. He burrowed under trash as his body went numb. Two and a half days later, he managed to crawl out and get himself to the gas station nearby. Someone drove him to the emergency room. He awoke in a Minot hospital with both of his legs amputated below the knees.

Overall, the state estimates that some 45,463 people are living in temporary housing in the western half of North Dakota. That comes to one in five people.

This month’s deposit into the state’s Legacy Fund—which collects 30 percent of the oil and gas tax revenue and can’t be accessed until June 2017—was the largest so far: $112 million.

In April 1886 at a creek southeast of town, Theodore Roosevelt caught up to three thieves who had stolen his boat. The president-to-be put them under citizen’s arrest and walked them for thirty-six hours through the mountains to face the sheriff in Dickinson. All over town I keep seeing Watford City’s own sheriff and his muddy white truck. His fellow officers seem to be out in force, too. I watch them pull someone over. The man does not look pleased. In 2009, Watford City had eighteen arrests for DUIs. Last year, they had 254.

That night, I will spend an hour trying to find dinner. The girl at the pizza shack won’t sell me anything (“Oh you don’t want to wait. It’ll be a long time”); a table for one at Outlaw’s Bar & Grill will be at least forty-five minutes. I’d sit at the bar, but it’s packed. Across from my hotel, Outsider’s Bar & Grill will be similarly swamped. In the first quarter of this year, taxable sales in Watford City were up more than 31 percent.

The Watford Hotel is swanky, for the region. A lot of business seems to be getting done here, as evidenced by the number of Bluetooth headsets and the guy in the men’s-room stall who was on a conference call. The bar boasts plenty of dark wood, plus paintings of buffalo and cowboys. Patrons wear jeans and blazers, pearls and polos, a pair of shiny wingtips, golf-wear from a Flagstaff club. A well-heeled woman of a certain age drops a hundred on a thirteen-dollar bill.

A bunch of junior-executive types crowd the bar: Andy, John, Matt, and JT. They’re getting drunk in a jolly, enthusiastic way. Andy—belted khakis, preppy plaid shirt, glasses, hair thinning, in his thirties—is their leader, at least in volume. I peg them for analysts in town checking on their investments.

“Were you on that call?”

“Oh, yes, we had some issues with that drilling manager, but we addressed those.”

JT orders a margarita on the rocks. Everyone discusses his frequent-flier miles. Andy is the big winner, natch. The new guy tries to suck up: “Andy, got any interesting projects?” which leads Andy to opine on the fate of the company, vis-à-vis his place in it:

The biggest thing at the company is revenue. So naturally I get a lot of attention. . . . We’re constantly asking ourselves, “Where do we want to be, and how do we want to grow?” . . . It’s all revenue and sales, revenue and sales . . . synergy . . . focus on your niche—that’s how you gain market share . . . Brant and I were in Louisiana last week having dinner with a client, and we straight up told him, “We have the most sophisticated systems in the business. You know that, we know that” . . . Low-hanging fruit, that’s what I tell them. . . . Who should run sales? Certainly not Larry! . . . Teams, that’s the key. . . . What Brian said was so profound: “The one who does best, that guy should be in charge.” And he wasn’t even talking about me! But he was right. . . . And that tells the whole story with regard to our revenue issues. . . . Who owns the customers? Nobody owns the customers! But you’ve got to own them . . . it is what it is what it is. . . . In a week, I knew more about their business than they did. . . . The only thing they do is suck up some oil and sell some drums. Whoop-de-do. Bunch of small-time operators. . . . You’ve. Got. To. Figure. Out. What. Part. Of. The. Branding. You. Want.

Finished with his monologue and his beer, Andy asks the bartender if she has Rose’s Lime. She does. He orders a gimlet—“Do you know what that is?” She doesn’t. She works at two bars. Her brother is a mixed-martial-arts fighter, so she’s keeping one eye on the TV, which, like most oil-patch bars, shows a UFC bout. “It’s okay,” Andy loudly assures her. “Just give me Ketel One on the rocks with Rose’s Lime.” Andy’s protégé learns fast. He leans in: “Can you make me a mojito?” The bartender’s face is blank. Then she tells him, “No mint.”

Andy keeps at it. He asks for a filbert in his drink, which he says is how Errol Flynn drank them “back in the forties.” The bartender just ignores him, but someone else takes the bait: “What’s a filbert?”

Andy and his crew work for an environmental company. They’re HAZMAT guys. They have a landfill four hours from here, but they do business in Wyoming, Texas, Colorado, all over. They service the rigs, dispose of drill cuttings, handle salt control, and so on.

As the night wears on, the guys argue over who is picking up the tab. Andy likes to pay for a stranger’s drink, saying, “One for me and whatever my friend is having over there.” The friend often doesn’t know he’s a friend. That’s how Andy starts talking to a guy in a T-shirt, a Minnesota hauler who owns his own truck, a belly dump operating out of Dickinson. The guy says driving is a lot of hard work—too much, maybe. He’s older than Andy, who starts to explain the ins and outs of his own business, saying, “We have a lot of fixed assets.” The trucker says, “Uh-huh.”

Andy offers to set him up with a local guy named Brant, because Andy, it turns out, lives in Massachusetts. He gives the trucker his card. As the trucker decides what to do with it, Andy turns his head and announces to the room, “Maybe I’ll have one more and then cash out.”

And that’s how the boy kings of the Bakken talk when they’re sitting at the bar.

A few miles outside of Killdeer, a bluebird flies into the hood of my car—thwack!—and flips up over the roof. In my rearview, I see it lying motionless on the highway. I ponder this omen as I roll up and down hills, passing empty grasslands, flares, falling barns, a pad with three tall wellheads and another rig going up nearby.

N.D. OIL ATLAS SOLD HERE is a sign on the door of one of the gas stations in Killdeer, which is also running a clearance sale on their “I love crude women” T-shirts ($9.99). Meanwhile, the billboard in front of the high school (home of the Cowboys) reads NOW HIRING. BUILDING MAINTENANCE. BUS MAINTENANCE. $60K PACKAGE.

On the way down to Dickinson, the rain picks up. Off to my right, a sign: PUBLIC SALTWATER DISPOSAL. Later, closer to town, I pass another disposal site—rows and rows of tanks. Somewhere, thunder booms. In the past two months, three saltwater storage tanks have been hit by lighting, leading to fires that lasted for days. The corrosive water is stored in tall fiberglass tanks—which last longer than metal, but also burn better. The saltwater itself is a combustible stew of brine, oil residue, and gas vapor. The most recent fire, next to a truck stop between Williston and Watford City, spilled 118,146 gallons of brine and spilled or burned 27,258 gallons of oil. There are more than 440 such saltwater storage locations across the state.

Dickinson, officially a city of some twenty-one thousand, is roughly the same size as Williston, though of course both figures would balloon if you added temporary residents. The number of babies born in Dickinson has tripled since the boom began. Jobs on the night shift of McDonald’s come with a $300 signing bonus. My WPA guide to North Dakota from 1938 assures me, “The town is still young enough to retain much of the friendly atmosphere of the early West.”

A Craigslist ad from two weeks earlier, titled FREE ROOM (DICKINSON):

Free room for casual hook up. All utilities and most food will be covered. Good sized bedroom. W/d in unit, attached garage. I’m a average looking 24 year old who owns his own home. Must be a single woman between the age of 18–30. Send photo with reply. Please.

On the west side of town, I walk past condos and attached one-story new-construction homes with mud-caked trucks in the driveways and garbage bins pulled to the sidewalk. A two-bedroom, two-bath unit in one of the condos on this street is listed for sale at $205,000, below average in this town. The condo offers thirteen hundred finished square feet. Two girls ride a big wheel up and down the sidewalk. This seems like it would be a great neighborhood, a place of upward-trending dreams, except that directly across the street, behind a chain-link fence and a few struggling and widely spaced saplings, none of which have leaves, a pump jack vigorously nods its head up and down.

After three years of monitoring air pollution around drilling sites, the Colorado School of Public Health found that people living within half a mile of a fracked well were at an increased risk for cancer. Last fall, the chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson, joined a lawsuit opposing the completion of a water tower that would enable fracking in his neighborhood outside of Dallas.

Every time I drive under the tracks that stretch over the main street in Dickinson, there is an oil train parked overhead. The black cars just sit. After a few days, it begins to feel like there is a single massive train stalled to the horizon. (I look, but cannot see an end.) All over town—in my car, in my hotel, wandering the streets—I hear the train blow its long, loud whistle. I learn to read the cars. A white stencil might identify the DOT-111 tank cars as belonging to a leasing company from St. Charles, Missouri, or Littleton, Colorado, or Chicago, Illinois, or Hamburg, Germany, but they could be rented to anyone and they could be going anywhere. They all bear the red diamond-shaped 1267 placard—petroleum crude oil on board. I become something of a rail fan, but the trains don’t move, and so I’m left watching a trash fire burn beside the tracks. When I sleep, I see the long black worm wake and start to crawl down the line.

Hidden behind a green grassy hill southwest of town, the Bakken Oil Express terminal connects to the southern main line of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe. Oil trains run in twin loops, curling under a road and around earthen berms through some 55,000 feet of rail. In one corner, large white drums painted with the green BOE logo store up to 640,000 barrels of crude. Dusty tanker trucks lumber down the dirt road past the sign to the Dickinson Trap Club and into one of twenty-two bays, where their contents are siphoned off. The facility can load two trains at once. A sixteen-inch pipeline stretching thirty-nine miles north to Killdeer just came online last month. It can deliver 165,000 barrels of oil—the equivalent of 825 tanker trucks—every day. Men walk back and forth as trucks enter and exit. The trains clank and hiss. DANGER—NO TRESPASSING. ALL VISITORS MUST CHECK IN AT THE OFFICE. RESTRICTED AREA. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. WARNING: YOU ARE UNDER VIDEO SURVEILLANCE. An American flag blows in the breeze.

In the early hours of July 6, 2013, an unattended oil train parked on an incline outside of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, began to roll backward, eventually reaching sixty mph before it derailed outside of a popular nightclub. The runaway bomb was carrying nearly two million gallons of Bakken crude. The resultant inferno stretched hundreds of feet into the sky. Flames erupted from drains, sewers, and water pipes, torching homes from the inside out. Fire and oil shot half a mile into the river. Manhole covers exploded. Observers felt the heat a mile away. A summer shower most likely saved the town, but even at a quarter-mile’s distance, raindrops hitting an open umbrella turned to steam. Forty buildings burned and forty-seven people died, five of whom seem to have been completely vaporized.

To move oil across the country, you essentially have two choices: pipe or rail. While smaller pipelines might gather oil from nearby wells and transport it short distances, there are no major high-volume transmission pipelines servicing the Bakken. Most of the oil leaves on trains. The month I visited North Dakota, the CEO of one major energy-supply company spoke stridently on the advantages of rail over pipeline, citing the flexibility to respond to unpredictable shifts in production and market demand. Addressing the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s annual conference, he said, “Despite skepticism, rail may actually be the safest mode of transportation of crude.”

Later that fall, both environmentalists and some Bakken CEOs will speak against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. The former will argue it would be devastating to the ecosystems and public health along its route—and increase our investment in oil. The latter will simply call the pipeline irrelevant. Why risk years of hassle and expense, not to mention tie their own hands in terms of where they can move their product, when a train can deliver oil anywhere in the U.S. today?

From 2008 to 2013, rail transportation of crude increased 45-fold in the U.S. Bakken crude is tanked through many cities, including Chicago, Kansas City, Albany, Cleveland, Buffalo, Oklahoma City, Portland, Philadelphia, Sacramento, Fort Worth, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Seattle, and St. Louis. One estimate found more than twenty-five million Americans living within the one-mile “blast zone” of a potential train explosion. Since the Canadian disaster, Bakken oil trains have crashed near Aliceville, Alabama (the amount spilled is unknown, but somewhere near 750,000 gallons; the fire burned for a day and could be seen for ten miles); Casselton, North Dakota (four hundred thousand gallons of oil spilled, twelve hundred people evacuated); and Lynchburg, Virginia (three hundred people evacuated). Trains spilled more oil in 2013 than in the preceding forty years combined.

At the end of 2013, Lynn Helms, North Dakota’s top regulator and director of the Department of Mineral Resources, told lawmakers, “Rail has really saved our bacon in this whole business,” and announced plans to put together a white paper “to dispel this myth that [Bakken crude] is somehow an explosive, really dangerous thing to have traveling up and down your rail lines.”

After the Casselton wreck—some eighteen days later—Helms backtracked, telling reporters he was misunderstood: “Maybe what got to people was the word myth. Sometimes they are proven true or false. . . . What we need to do is do the science, collect the facts, and see where that takes us.”

Conventional crude oil is hard to burn—and rarely explodes. In January 2014, after witnessing the fires caused by recent derailments, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration warned that Bakken light-sweet crude might be more flammable than traditional heavy crude. A month later, the Wall Street Journal revealed its own analysis, which found Bakken oil boasted a higher vapor pressure and a greater concentration of combustible gasses than samples from other wells worldwide. The following month, the Canadian Transportation Safety Board cited the oil’s low flash point (on par with unleaded gasoline). Two months after that, the North Dakota Petroleum Council, an industry trade group, released its own study, finding nothing out of the ordinary.

The most likely culprit: volatile gasses (such as ethane, butane, and propane) that are not being removed at the wellhead, a practice common in other areas of the country where similarly gassy crude is being fracked out of shale. Even in a deregulated, “pro-business” state such as Texas, companies have to strip volatile components from the oil, prompting one Houston industry man to tell Reuters this year, “It’s a little like the wild west up in the Bakken, where everybody gets to do what they want to do.”

Most of the Bakken oil is shipped in the DOT-111 tank car—those ubiquitous long, black barrels originally designed in the 1960s and known for decades to be unsuitable for transporting dangerous material. Less than half an inch thick, with easily punctured ends and poorly protected valves, the cars have been called “soda cans” and “ticking time bombs” (the latter by Senator Charles Schumer from New York). Despite widespread concern—the National Transportation Safety Board has been calling to replace or retrofit them since 1991—more than seventy-eight thousand substandard DOT-111s remain on the rails. Which means seven hundred thousand barrels a day of volatile oil leave the Bakken in outdated, unsafe cars that will travel, on average, some sixteen hundred miles throughout the greater United States.

At the end of July, the U.S. Department of Transportation proposed new guidelines for trains carrying Bakken oil—reduced speed limits, better breaking technology, and a two-year phase-out of DOT-111 cars (unless they’re retrofitted to comply with new safety standards). The report included an analysis confirming that Bakken crude “tends to be more volatile and flammable than other crude oils.” The proposal was open to public comment for sixty days, during which environmental groups called for stricter regulations—and the DOT-111s to be taken off the rails immediately. The oil lobby advised against “overreacting,” calling the two-year timeline “unfeasible” and foretelling widespread economic disruption and a $45.2 billion cost to consumers.

Four months later, a North Dakota state commission passes a standard that—starting in April 2015—requires companies to remove some of the volatile gasses before moving Bakken crude to market. The North Dakota Petroleum Council, along with the largest oil producers, protests the expense as being unnecessary. Environmental critics complain that the process doesn’t go far enough—the oil won’t be “stabilized,” as it regularly is in Texas, but merely treated using existing equipment that isn’t as effective. Furthermore, the standards won’t specify where the oil must be processed—at the well, the rail yard, or other locations before shipping—and will simply create another problem: a large volume of extracted, highly combustible liquid that must still be shipped by train. Meanwhile, new federal guidelines give the industry until 2025 to replace outdated cars, and even supposedly “safer” non-DOT-111 tankers (containing oil with a lowered vapor pressure) continue to derail—and burn.

The month I’m in North Dakota, the news breaks: the United States has surpassed Saudi Arabia to become the top oil and gas producer in the world. The summer of oil! The long fever dream of energy independence! But this global dominance most likely cannot last. The production of shale wells drops more quickly than conventional wells. To sustain the current million-barrel-a-day output, some analysts say the Bakken would need to drill twenty-five hundred new wells each year. Iraq—with its conventional oil deposits—would only need about sixty, and the wells could break even if prices dipped as low as twenty dollars per barrel. We have to work so much harder to get our oil out of the ground. In the end, there is only one sure thing in the Bakken. At some point, the oil will run out.

I enter the museum. On a table a placard explains:

What is the origin of oil? The organic material that is the source of most oil has probably been derived from single-celled planktonic (free-floating) plants, such as diatoms and blue-green algae, and single-celled planktonic animals, such as foraminifera, that lived in our ancient past.

In other words, bury organic matter under layer and layer of rock, add pressure, heat, and, say, millions of years, and you might strike it rich.

Above the placard stands a one-sixth model of a T. Rex. In the next room, a giant Stegosaurus skeleton lies articulated in a bed of sand, as an Allosaurus stalks the ledge above. A Thescelosaurus lumbers past a downed Triceratops, who happens to be named “Larry.” The bones of an Edmontosaurus slumber peacefully. Another fifteen-hundred-pound Triceratops skull sits on a block. Most of us wander Dickinson’s dinosaur museum’s modest exhibit hall in silence, as requested by a sign near the entrance. The reverential spell is broken when a boy shouts, “Wow, Dad. That was worth the trip!” Meanwhile, a little girl in a Frozen T-shirt considers a model of a prowling Velociraptor. She fixes her grandmother with a serious look. “Good things these things are extinct.”

Here’s how remote some of this highway is. Outside of Amidon, south of Dickinson and just beyond the Bakken boom in the southwest corner of the state: two bikers down, sprawled out on the southbound side of the two-lane road, both in leather, one with blood on his face. A third biker grimly walks up and down, picking pieces of metal and plastic off the highway. The sheriff is here, but the accident is recent. I’m the first car stopped in my direction. Slowly, a line grows behind me. After a while, the sheriff waves on traffic, and I inch around the bikers, who still lie face up. Thirty minutes down the road, I pass an ambulance racing to the scene.

Last November, a plastic pipeline broke on the Montana–North Dakota border, spilling seventeen thousand barrels of saltwater that flowed nearly three miles, eventually entering Big Gumbo Creek, south of Marmarth. Soil was removed and the creek flushed with fresh water. (The incident report ends, “Follow up when snow melts.”) In April, a pipe leaked 560 barrels of saltwater and chemicals into the Badlands north of Marmarth. Two months later, a rancher downstream reported he was still waiting to learn from the oil company, Continental Resources, Inc., what was in the water. He had lost several new calves and cows. The spill occurred in the Little Missouri National Grassland, near the boundary of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, which sits atop the Bakken. The grasslands, managed by the Forest Service, are home to more than six hundred wells; flares are visible just beyond park borders. There has been talk of drilling within the park’s seventy thousand acres, which inspired Roosevelt’s own environmentalism and which many consider “the cradle of conservation.”

To get to Marmarth, skirt the edge of the Little Missouri grasslands, where wildfires and lightning can ignite veins of underground coal that smolder for decades, releasing smoke and fumes that warp the junipers into telltale columns. Head south to Bowman, North Dakota, where herds of bison graze, and follow the train tracks west out of town. The road drops into the Badlands just outside of Marmarth, where the green grass gives way to brown buttes and burnt outcrops and cell service dies. Once you cross the Little Missouri River, you know you’re there.

When I arrive at the bunkhouse—at the end of Main Street, next to the tracks and a railroad sign that says MARMARTH, despite the fact that there is no depot and the trains don’t stop there anymore—it’s empty. In 1907, the president of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad named the budding town after his granddaughter, Margaret Martha. To call Marmarth a ghost town is to do a disservice to the 125 good souls who live there, but the town has lost a lot since 1920, when its population stood at 1,318. Today, empty lots and abandoned buildings line the streets. Beside the Mystic Theater (built 1914) stand two old metal jail cells, one door swinging open. The Barber Auditorium, its pediment stamped 1918, remains boarded up. Painted on the entrance to the Cactus Club: STAY OUT.

Marmarth has always been a place for hunters of some sort. Theodore Roosevelt shot his first grizzly to the west of here and his first buffalo to the north. He was searching for solace after losing both his wife and mother on Valentine’s Day 1884. The town experienced an oil boom in 1936, and my WPA guide mentions a nearby well pumping an unusual crude: “apparently high in gasoline and kerosene content, very light, but darker in color, and with a somewhat different odor.” Today, there are flares and pump jacks outside of town, but it’s not like up north. Five years ago, it was hard to get a room at the bunkhouse—Marmarth was crowded with roughnecks as older wells were overhauled with new secondary and tertiary recovery techniques designed to increase the pressure and flow, but things have calmed down since. That is not to say the town has remained unchanged: its elementary school (prekindergarten through eighth grade divided between three classrooms) will open a $1 million addition this fall, funded in part with a no-interest loan from the county’s oil and gas royalties. Eighteen students are expected to start the new year. The nearest high school is twenty miles away in Montana.

On the afternoon I arrived, the single sign of life was a white oil-company truck parked in front of the town’s only bar, the Pastime Club & Steakhouse, where a bartender might ask a stranger, “Are you a bone picker?”

Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History and the man who named Tyrannosaurus rex, wrote in 1909: “The hunter of live game, thorough sportsman though he may be, is always bringing live animals nearer to death and extinction, whereas the fossil hunter is always seeking to bring extinct animals back to life.”

“Ready to go back in time?” the guy sitting beside me says, rather dramatically. He’s from Long Island and is also an amateur. We’re in a dusty Suburban pitching itself headfirst down a sharp slope into the Badlands. Through the cracked windshield I see a moonscape eroded out of the prairie: a mottled topography of red, brown, black, yellow, green, and gray studded with naked buttes—the sediments of the sea, silt and clay deposited and then worn down, epochs later, by water and wind. In places, the buttes are scorched and collapsed by burning coal turned into ash. Nonnative sweet yellow clover has choked out the prairie grass that usually grows between the desolate washouts and draws; in parts, the clover stands waist-high. Above, sparse thickets of cottonwoods, maybe a green ash, a few ponderosa pines. Below, baked beaches where alien outcrops of rocks bloom in strangled, man-sized shapes. A landscape of hard eternity, home to rattlers, bull snakes, prairie dogs, pheasants, foxes, coyotes, pronghorns, bobcats, mule deer, minks, and ever-thirsty toads. My companions and I are dressed in paleontologist chic: tan pants, wide-brim hat, long-sleeve button-down, boots, bandannas. As our vehicle lumbers down the hill to the desolate floor, we pass a rock layer known as the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) boundary, a thin line of tan clay beneath a band of coal that pinpoints the “sudden” geological moment when the dinosaurs disappeared.

These aren’t the Badlands of South Dakota, which are thirty million years younger and far more popular. These are the Badlands that in 1864 Brigadier General Alfred Sully of the U.S. Cavalry, busy marauding against the Sioux, described as “hell with the fires out.” Nearly one hundred years later, John Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley:

I was not prepared for the Bad Lands. They deserve this name. They are like the work of an evil child. Such a place the Fallen Angels might have built as a spite to Heaven, dry and sharp, desolate and dangerous, and for me filled with foreboding. A sense comes from it that it does not like or welcome humans.

I am part of a team digging up a juvenile Torosaurus, a relative of the better-known Triceratops. Officially, I am a volunteer member of the Marmarth Research Foundation, a scientific nonprofit dedicated to fossil education, excavation, and curation. Why are we here? For the state’s other boom. North Dakota in general—and Marmarth in particular—has found itself in the middle of a modern bone rush.

The dig site has been worked for six weeks over three summers. I set my pack where someone previously found a dinosaur skull. There are no clouds and no shade. We’re digging through layers of sandstone and clay with chisels and hand picks, looking for signs of any remaining fossils: hard “rocks” with suspicious bony bands or marrow holes, or even just chunks of ironstone that might indicate we’re in the right area. Ting! Ting! Ting! go our hammers and chisels as we carve small benches into the face of the butte. Hitting bone sounds different—stop scraping then. The ground is littered with hard red-black mineral balls called concretions (damned fossil look-alikes!). We find nuggets of bright-orange amber, which one of us collects in a medicine bottle, hoping to turn them into jewelry. We dig into yellow spheres of soft, smelly sulfur. We hit a layer of “veggie matter,” and turn up delicate specimens of leaves, mainly Dryophyllum. The rock usually cleaves along the plane of the leaf; on one side is an imprint, or image, and on the other is the leaf. (Look for the faint raised ridge of a stem.) We unearth thick mats of spongy organic matter, the veins of the plants perfectly articulated. I hit an ancient tree branch reaching through the rock; the wood is flecked with shiny dark cubes that smudge my fingers black. “What’s that?” I ask. Someone replies, “Charcoal, of course,” and I think of fossil fuels.

We are excavating what is called the Hell Creek Formation: a bed of sandstone, siltstone, and mudstone deposited sixty-five to sixty-seven million years ago by rivers flowing to the long inland sea that stretched north–south across what is now North America. The formation contains the last of the dinosaurs before they went extinct.

The Bakken is about eighty-five hundred feet beneath the Hell Creek Formation—and some three hundred million years older—but geologists say the oil was formed (cooked, as it were, out of the shale) at about the same time as the dinosaurs roamed and died. That is, both treasures being hunted and hauled out of the ground of North Dakota—the oil and the dinosaurs—are roughly the same age.

We carry our own water here; at least three liters a person. Water is precious, the subject of great conversation. What comes out of the tap in the bunkhouse gives out-of-towners the runs, so we pack big recycled plastic bottles filtered by reverse osmosis. In June, a pipeline spilled two thousand barrels of saltwater eight miles southwest of Marmarth, where the stream of pollution ran for about a mile, before soaking into the earth.

Lunch time: we sit in the holes we’ve just dug and throw our apple cores right off the hill. Eight hours of chiseling goes by surprisingly fast, despite the unrelenting sun and dust. At the end of the day my back is wrenched and my hands are sore. Tyler, our leader, who is not with us today, found a Triceratops right over the next gumdrop butte. We spend forty-five minutes searching but never find his excavation or the trace fossils leading up into the hill. We prospect around the base of the buttes for fallen bone fragments. We sift through the slopes of giant anthills, where the industrious diggers bring up fish scales, teeth, tiny pink vertebrae, and other fossils blocking their tunnels. We are ghouls with good intentions, looking for signs of death. Out here, everything crumbles, falls apart. The Badlands don’t preserve—they erode—which is why we find no modern bones, only age-old buried ones. The most recent corpse I come across is a desiccated bull snake. The silver sage smells wonderful when we brush against it, but the sudden whir of a grasshopper might make a nervous prospector jump, were he wary of rattlers. I take a picture of what I think is the K/T boundary on a high butte looming over us—between two gray rocks, an ominous band of coal, marking the lands below as belonging to the dinosaurs.

A dusty blue truck pulls up to the bunkhouse. A thick suntanned guy in his twenties walks in the door. He’s been here since April, when he came up from Arkansas. He was hoping to drive a truck—“and not look like this at the end of the day”—but they gave the job to someone with more experience. When we shake, his hands are black with grease and dirt. (A sign taped to the bunkhouse washer says ABSOLUTELY NO!!!!!!! GREASERS IN THE WASHER OR DRYER. —THE MANAGEMENT.) The guy works maintenance for a company that lays concrete all over the state. He spent two weeks working on an intersection outside of Williston, where he lived in a man camp. “I fucking hate Williston,” he says. Now he’s part of the crew building the new airport outside of Bowman. He’s in charge of his own repair truck; it’s better than working in Arkansas. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go get cleaned up,” he says. “I’ve got some drinking to do.”

Nearly every night at 4:00 a.m. the Burlington Northern Santa Fe rolls past the bunkhouse, just feet from our front door. I wake to the train—first the loud, breathy blast of the whistle, then the clacking and creaking of tank cars trundling by.

The Marmarth Research Foundation is the brainchild of paleontologist Tyler Lyson, a thirty-one-year-old Marmarth native and Yale PhD who just finished a postdoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in D.C. and will be taking the post of Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science this fall. The MRF digs on private land, mostly ranchland belonging to Tyler’s family. His father, Ranse, is a retired oil production foreman, and when I email Tyler out of the blue expressing my interest in oil and fossils, he invites me to dig, saying, “Sounds like an interesting idea: two very different ways that the past is enriching our state.” I’m onboard after signing an agreement not to reveal GPS coordinates or scientific information that might aid “fossil poachers.”

Tyler is a dino-hunting prodigy. A restless, bearded live wire who often says “right?” (rhetorically) and can scamper up a butte like a mountain goat, he found his first fossil (the jaw of a duck-billed hadrosaur) at age six and got himself hired as a guide by a professor from Alabama when he was in the fifth grade. He has a particular expertise in turtles, and one of his finds includes a turtle “graveyard” that has yielded more than a hundred shells and three new species. This spring, Tyler was part of a team that announced the discovery of Anzu wyliei, a new five-hundred-pound, eleven-foot-long, feathered-but-flightless beaked dino-bird with a crested head and razor claws, something akin to crossing an emu with a reptile, and nicknamed in the press “the Chicken from Hell.”

His biggest discovery, however, has been “Dakota,” the sixty-seven-million-year-old, four-ton Edmontosaurus he found on his uncle’s land in 1999 when he was only sixteen. Painstakingly unearthed over the next seven years, “Dakota” revealed itself to be a rare “dino-mummy”—a fossil with nearly all of its bones, ligaments, tendons, skin, and scales preserved. The subject of a TV special and books for both adults and children, “Dakota” has traveled as far as Japan, though currently it is on display at the newly expanded North Dakota Heritage Center in Bismarck, which in a few months agrees to donate three million dollars to the Marmarth Research Foundation for the right to permanently display the fossil—which might explain, in part, that confidentiality agreement.

We’re working a tight site. Tom, our field coordinator, says, “There just aren’t enough places to get at it.” It is the four-hundred-pound Thescelosaurus jacket we’re about to flip over. A jacket is the excavated rock around a fossil that has been covered over with foil and then swaths of burlap soaked in plaster. A jacket might contain many bones—here, maybe twenty or so, Tom guesses. For support, we have built a wood frame and plastered it to the top. (“We’re all getting plastered in the Badlands!” is a joke I’ve heard four times today.) Once we’ve carted the plaster block to the lab, someone will likely prep it—cut it open and painstakingly sift through it—over the winter, which is the equivalent of a rush job. Scientific priorities change over time, and one of the volunteers tells me that some museums have jackets they’re still only getting to from the 1800s.

We’re caught between the butte and some bones sticking up from the ground we don’t want to disturb. A film crew came by earlier and shot about three hours of us chiseling and plastering for a NOVA documentary. We waited for them to leave before trying to flip the giant jacket. We contort ourselves into odd positions—all hands on the jacket, feet placed with care—and heave together on a three-count. Once started, you have to keep the block moving—just watch your fingers and toes. A miracle: no earth falls out from the unplastered bottom. We carefully shave a foot or so off the top of the jacket, which then weighs a more manageable 150 pounds. We plaster a thin topcoat, and the next morning we gingerly set the jacket on a burlap stretcher hung between thick poles—like some great beast caught on safari—and then carry it up the hill and onto the truck. We drive back to the lab on a red clinker road built by an oil company that had no luck with its well.

On a Monday night at the Pastime—where a painting of a pump jack hangs above the pool table, the jukebox plays Waylon Jennings alongside Katy Perry, and a sign behind the bar advertises all-you-can-eat crab every Friday from five to nine—the bartender might charge out-of-towners anywhere from fifty cents to a dollar more for a bottle of beer, bringing the total to an even three bucks. A few locals bend over their drinks. The bar can be rough, but not tonight. I’ve already heard of one legendary fight at the Pastime: a troublemaker brought up the topic of “liberalism” and “open-minded thinking” and the resultant brawl spilled out into the street and down the block into the bunkhouse, which, since that night, has had a lock on its door.

At a high-topped table sits a very tattooed French palynologist, who studies ancient pollen and spores and whose samples will help date the Hell Creek layers. The NOVA film crew (a British director, a cameraman, a boom guy) has ordered a pizza from Baker, Montana, which will arrive in an hour. When the director of the Smithsonian Natural History Museum walks in the door and buys me a beer, he tells me he has been coming to town for the past thirty-four years. “You could dig here forever,” he says. “It’s raining dinosaurs.”

The MRF lab has enough jackets stored away to last for years. They rest on huge wooden pallets in the warehouse and line the metal shelves against the walls. Others are secreted away in locations around town. A field coordinator named Stephen picks a rock from an open jacket and points to a nearly invisible line less than a millimeter thick winding its way through the stone. “Look—fossilized skin from a Thescelosaurus.” I nod and pretend I see what he sees. The man knows skin; he’s one of the ones who prepped “Dakota.” This piece was collected at least a decade ago, before Stephen came onboard. The jacket we just hauled out of the Badlands sits on a wooden table. There’s a chance Stephen will be taking it home with him to Michigan at some point.

The collection room is a crypt of wonders that diminishes the casual visitor: such impossibly large bones—what giants left them behind? Femurs out of The Flintstones, a Triceratops horn longer than my arm. I ponder a number of turtles huddled in situ in stone, like some half-buried suicide pact. Barb, ten years at MRF and my guide for the tour, points toward the back: “In these cabinets is arguably the world’s best collection of turtles.” She’s right and she’s wrong: sure, there are drawers and drawers of shells, heads, and tails—not to mention a fully articulated turtle foot that’s so beautiful I almost want to cry. (Most turtle species cross the K/T boundary—that is, they didn’t die out in the global event that doomed the dinosaurs.) But the cabinets contain countless other finds: fearsome claws from bird-beasts, delicate reed-like tendons, sly and sinister dinosaur beaks, a massive tail that was smashed in battle and then healed, the vertebrae fused.

When I leave the lab that night, another preparator also named Stephen is bent over a magnifying glass, picking away at a massive Triceratops vertebra with a miniature pneumatic jackhammer called an air scribe. He’s been working on this bone for three years. He says, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? These parts here”—he holds up the swooping sides—“rise up like wings.” In the next room, Barb is running the air abrader, her hands in a big glove box—like a scientist fighting an infectious disease—as she blasts a giant bone with baking soda. The fossil looks beautiful, as if settled in snow. Giant air compressors whir as she picks away the past, one grain at a time.

On my way out, I stop by the tabletop sandbox, which is filled with red garnet sand and used as a soft space to puzzle out how fossils fit together. Two big pieces of a hadrosaur tibia stand upright, as if growing out of the sand, while next to them someone has carefully laid out a handful of turtle fragments. There is something unexpectedly touching about the twenty-odd chips of shell arrayed in an incomplete oval, the central mound of red sand ready—ever hopeful—to cradle the bones.

Later, I will ask Tyler, “Why turtles?” He tells me they have a rich fossil record—they’re as common as leaves. He’s captivated by the evolution of their bodies, how they lock their ribs into a shell (“It’s one of those features that appears exactly once in earth’s rich history, like the bird feather”). But what stays with me is this: “You find dinosaurs here and there, but turtles are pretty continuous through time.”

A cartoon on the lab’s bulletin board shows the “Causes of Mass Extinctions.” The Cretaceous period is ended by a meteor, the Pleistocene by a change in climate, and the Age of Man by an “act of stupidity”: a caveman bangs a hammer against a bomb that seems to be resting on oil drums. On the bomb is written: GOD IS ON OUR SIDE.

“Ebola: What You Need to Know”; “Gaza Crisis Brings 9/11 Flashbacks”; “Surgeon General Calls for Action to Reduce Skin Cancer Rate”; “Suicide Bomber from U.S. Returned Home Before the Attack”; “Race to Find India Landslide Missing”; “NATO ‘Unprepared for Russian Threat’”; “Six Dead in Nigeria College Blast”; “Drug-Resistant Malaria Widespread”; “Why Do Americans Not Buy Diesels?”; “Midwestern Waters Are Full of Bee-Killing Pesticides”; “White House: Ignoring Climate Change Will Cost America Billions”; “U.S. Oil Exports Ready to Sail”; “Should America Keep Its Aging Nuclear Missiles?”; and “Winds of War, Again” are some of the headlines I read late one night while in Marmarth.

In some ways, this moment feels particular, transitory, just a sliver in time. Though it seems unlikely (if not impossible) to me, many interested parties believe impregnable pipelines can be built, water will be recycled, flaring curbed, the earth protected, and safe and spacious cities will arise on the plains. But something about this summer feels endless, eternal. The question is not so much How did this happen? but Why do we always find ourselves here?

And then, while I’m in Marmarth, the opposite thought occurs. This is it. We’ve reached the brink, we had our chance; our turn is over.

On a dig, one might talk about Victorian pianos, brewing beer, maple syrup, Cretaceous vegetation, or modern sand channels, but most often the work is done in silence—save for the tink of hammers and chisels and the incessant scraping of awls and knives. The mind veers from the micro to the macro; if you’re not careful, you might get whiplash. You’re chiseling away with a short knife at a few inches of tough, barren cliff all morning when out pops a piece of amber and suddenly you remember you’ve got your nose pressed up against a window looking sixty-seven million years into the past. According to the female volunteers—some of whom prep fossils for this country’s major museums—dino-digging remains something of a boys’ club. But if paleontology might be conducted with a certain macho swagger, hunting for fossils is fundamentally humbling: again and again, you end up feeling so small. Where do I stand on this colossal, shifting earth? As alien as this landscape seems to me today, what sends my mind spinning is to think of it then—flat, warm, and wet, lush with ferns and vegetation. A humid coastal plain. Pretty much the opposite of the Badlands around me.

And these bones! Not only do they dwarf us, but these creatures lived so long ago. How do we measure ourselves—and our species—in geological time? A half blink, at best. Once again—why are we here? What could we ever contribute to science, that incomplete story we tell about ourselves? Paleontologists dwell in uncertainty and failure; they’re always saying, “We just don’t know” and “In fifty years, we might understand a little more.” These few feet of excavation, a couple of centimeters of carefully prepped bone. To dig is to be constantly confronted with your own pitiful insignificance.

We move to a possible hadrosaur site just below a ridge with a 360-degree view of the Badlands. Is there a duck-billed herbivore buried in this cliff—or enough of it, anyway, to make our work worthwhile? Within two minutes of brushing soft dirt, I find a reddish-orange rock. I put it on my tongue, and when it sticks, I know: I’m French-kissing a fossil! (The porousness of the bone clings to the surface of the tongue like an old, hard sponge. The sound the rock makes as you pull it away—like softly peeling an orange—is a deep, visceral thrill.) Most likely the piece eroded and tumbled down from a larger chunk of bone, and so with a scalpel and brush I chase the dinosaur into the hill. But in the end it eludes me. We find only broken bits of tendon or perhaps a small rib. I put my piece on a short pile of bone, and we pack our gear and climb back up to the truck.

After a week of digging in the field, I find myself walking through town, unconsciously scanning the side of the road for fossils, studying the bigger rocks and imagining just where I would put my chisel to break open their secrets. At night, the Milky Way careens brilliantly overhead, looking like a band of stubborn sediment in the sky.

On my last day, we go prospecting in an area no one has searched in a decade. We agree to meet at a distant butte around lunchtime. On the ground we find hunks of frill—the wide bony plates that flared out the back of ceratopsian heads—plus scattered sections of vertebrae. I pick up a nugget. “Chunkasaurus,” says Antoine, the French palynologist. “A big, exploded dinosaur.” Later, I will see a naked rib sticking right out of a hill. I will pick up a square of crocodile scute, or fossilized armor, plus a shard of turtle shell and two small, broken dinosaur bones. One of us will find a stone Indian knife, a long right-handed blade that fits perfectly in your palm with grooves for your fingers. Someone else comes across a coprolite—a fossilized piece of shit. We will walk some eight miles in one-hundred-degree heat, marking the GPS coordinates of anything worthwhile.

Not long after splitting up, I climb to the top of a tall butte, where I run into Antoine again. Antoine lives in Paris. He carries a shovel to dig trenches from which he takes careful samples—he then dissolves the rock layers in acid and studies the organic remnants under a microscope. The ancient spores and pollen help date and describe the environment. At breakfast this morning someone called Antoine “an extinction guy,” meaning he studies the K/T boundary, when the dinosaurs died off.

Today he has been searching for the boundary layer, but, alas, no luck. He scrapes at the cliff, frowns, and says, “The story here is complicated.” He just came across a rattler in its hole, so we double back around the butte. We scan the horizon, but there is no sign of our group. They’re crawling somewhere in the craters below us. We hunker down in a sliver of shade to eat lunch by ourselves, and I ask Antoine about his work. He tells me a lot of scientists study the late Cretaceous right up until the extinction. It’s popular: there are dinosaurs, drama, and death. But he’s curious how life clawed its way back from the devastation. He takes a bite of his sandwich and tells me, “I think that is where the interesting story lies.”

The K/T extinction event—now more properly known as the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K/Pg) event, though the more recent name hasn’t really stuck—wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs and ended the Mesozoic Era. When I was growing up, what killed the dinosaurs was a subject of great debate. I remember picture books filled with hypotheses (volcanoes, continental shifts, natural selection, and so on). Science has since solved that mystery in spectacular fashion.

Some sixty-six million years ago, a six-mile-wide asteroid—speeding in low from the southeast around forty-five thousand miles per hour—crashed into the Gulf of Mexico right off the town of Chicxulub on the Yucatán Peninsula, sending up unimaginable amounts of flaming dust and debris that scorched the surface of the earth before darkening the skies and bringing about an “impact winter”—in essence, causing a change in atmospheric composition that led to a change in climate that led to trouble for those on earth. Firestorms. Earthquakes. Mega-tsunamis. Shifts in ocean chemistry. Mass extinctions as years of darkness and cold gave way—as the particles settled out of the atmosphere, many falling as acid rain—to centuries of intense global warming (from the CO₂ blasted into the air). The event is at once spectacular and familiar. Three-quarters of the species on earth eventually died in the fallout.

You can change a climate from without, say via flaming asteroid, or you can change it from within, say via the steady combustion of fossil fuels. If getting oil out of the ground is hard on the earth, burning it is worse. That is, one way to consider the Bakken is as a site of local hemorrhaging, the symptom and symbol of a greater, far more devastating disease. Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have pumped 365 billion metric tons of carbon into the air by burning oil, coal, and gas. Atmospheric CO₂ is up 40 percent, and we are on track to double the preindustrial level in the next thirty-five years. (Meanwhile, concentrations of methane have already doubled.) As we know, greenhouse gasses warm the planet. By 2050, temperatures might rise as much as seven degrees. As Elizabeth Kolbert writes in her book The Sixth Extinction, “This will, in turn, trigger a variety of world-altering events, including the disappearance of most remaining glaciers, the inundation of low-lying islands and coastal cities, and the melting of the Arctic ice cap.” She also points out that the oceans absorb a fair amount of this CO₂, which makes them more acidic, or poisonous to life.

Geologists employed by Pemex, a Mexican oil company, originally discovered the Chicxulub impact crater. Already an ever-growing fleet of ships is fracking the ocean. The wastewater is treated and—supposedly harmless—dumped into the sea. “Deep Water Fracking Next Frontier for Offshore Drilling” is a headline Reuters runs while I’m in North Dakota. According to the article, the “big play” is a formation called the Lower Tertiary in the Gulf of Mexico, which just happens to be the layer of rock on top of that earlier, more fateful big boom.

In a few months, I will cross the Gulf of Mexico, leaving from Texas and passing deepwater drilling platforms before sailing near, but not over, the Chicxulub crater. I will stare out at the ocean—dark blue to the horizon in every direction, the black depths below—and I will shudder to think that our clumsy actions have the power to raise the temperature, by even a single degree, of these endless waters that bathe us.

The K/T event was not the planet’s most cataclysmic upheaval. That distinction goes to the far older Permian–Triassic extinction, a period 252 million years ago also known as “the Great Dying,” when 90 percent of all species on the planet died out. It’s the only time the insects were killed, too. The planet grew incredibly hot; sea temperatures might have risen as much as eighteen degrees. The world nearly wiped itself clean. The exact feedback mechanism is still being debated—Siberian volcanism, global warming, ocean acidification, the melting of frozen methane, the production of hydrogen sulfide—but most scientists think the dying began with the release of greenhouse gasses.

The catastrophic volcanism that many believe triggered the Great Dying is thought to have released less carbon annually than we humans currently emit into the air.

Convert the heat our emissions add to our planet into something more visibly spectacular: imagine four hundred thousand of the atomic bombs that scorched Hiroshima detonating every single day.

Today, long-frozen methane in the Siberian permafrost is warming—and then exploding. Formerly trapped gas is also being released along the coast, where methane plumes bubble to the surface of the sea (in concentrations ten to fifty times greater than normal). Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse driver than carbon dioxide.

When I was in North Dakota, the internet was abuzz about a mysterious giant crater that suddenly appeared on Russia’s Yamal Peninsula. The crater, which was spotted from a helicopter by oil and gas workers, was thought to have been formed by the ejection of underground methane melted out of the permafrost. The past two summers on the peninsula had been unusually hot. More large craters will continue to be found. Yamal translates into “end of the world.”

When I think of extinction, I picture something gradual. But that isn’t how it happened for the dinosaurs—and it’s not what’s going on today, speaking in geological time. The day before I left for North Dakota, a study titled “Defaunation in the Anthropocene” came out in the journal Science. The gist: we are in the midst of the earth’s sixth mass extinction. The culprits: do I even need to say? The study points out that since 1500, a total of 322 species of terrestrial vertebrates have become extinct. Those that have survived our ever-growing presence have declined 25 percent in population. Earlier that spring, a Duke study revealed that plants and animals were going extinct at a thousand times the rate they were before humans appeared. Some twenty thousand species currently hang in the brink.

The pace seems to be quickening. A month after I returned from North Dakota, the London Zoological Society reported that over the past four decades the world’s wildlife population had been cut in half. Rivers have emerged as a particular killing zone—freshwater animals are down 76 percent. Meanwhile, turtles—which handily survived the K/T event—have been reduced by 80 percent. In about the same span, the human population has doubled.

The larger animals aren’t repopulating; smaller animals are taking over, a pattern borne out by other extinction events. Today that means rodents, who help spread disease. Wheels within wheels. All I can think of is that we should have known it was coming—the meek shall inherit the earth.

Of course, the Bakken boom will slow—if not go bust, at least partly—as oil prices fall from the summer of 2014 to the beginning of 2016. During the downturn, Saudi Arabia keeps its production high—glutting the market—in what most consider to be an effort to cripple U.S. shale production. In the Bakken, small operators get squeezed out; the number of active drilling rigs plummets. Oil-field fatalities rise, perhaps due to companies cutting corners. North Dakota no longer boasts the lowest unemployment rate. The governor calls for budget cuts; the state announces it will no longer offer free vaccines to children. (The Legacy Fund cannot be tapped until 2017.) Many newcomers leave, if they’re able. Rents drop. In Williston, Walmart lowers its hourly wages, while Heartbreakers, the town’s last strip club, closes. (It reopens as a gay bar.) Downtown storefronts and apartments stand empty. A developer tells Reuters, “It seems like people are on the fence, waiting.”

Nevertheless, the U.S. remains the top oil and natural-gas producer in the world, as drillers prove more flexible than imagined, cutting costs and pumping more oil to stay afloat. Production in the Bakken never falls below a million barrels a day. By mid-2016, the price of oil crawls back up to $50 a barrel. An industry analyst tells the Wall Street Journal that that price should signal an industry-wide “all clear,” as companies weigh whether to complete more wells. On the campaign trail in Bismarck, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump promises to slash environmental restrictions and unfetter the fossil-fuel industry. The candidate has called global warming “bullshit.”

Meanwhile, climate scientists warn the tipping point is closer than we think. Energy production in the U.S. is leaking far more methane than previously calculated—potentially offsetting recent reductions in carbon-dioxide emissions. The year 2014 is the hottest ever recorded, until 2015 breaks the mark by the largest margin yet.

My last night in Marmarth and we’re racing to Mud Buttes to beat the dying of the light. A stretch of Badlands just out of town, Mud Buttes is one of the best places in the world to find the primary markers of the K/T boundary, to put your finger on the moment of impact. We speed down a gravel road as Tyler lists off the physical evidence, debris thrown from the crater that shows up in rock layers worldwide: iridium (a dense metal rare on earth but common in asteroids), spherules (glassy beads of once-molten rock, similar to what I saw at the Trinity site in New Mexico), and “shocked” quartz (the mineral’s crystalline planes deformed under great pressure—a phenomenon first noted after nuclear testing).

The sun sinks lower, turning a mushroom-shaped cloud on the horizon a stunning pink and lending our errand an even greater sense of apocalypse. But the mood in the truck is buoyant; some are drinking beer, excited to be nearing the end of something. A fingernail moon hangs in the darkening sky. Flares burn in the distance; others snarl in pits by the side of the road. We jump out of the car and scamper across the Badlands, heading for the butte. As he runs, Tyler calls back, “This ecosystem is thirty to forty thousand years before the rock falls.”

Later, Tyler will say: “You want me to tell you about the survivors? After the rock hits, it sends out a thermal pulse, so at least a good chunk of North America gets fried as things come flying back in from space. Everything gets sent up into the atmosphere. Months up to maybe a year of varying degrees of darkness. The cold—that’s what I think largely kills the plants. And anything that relies primarily on plants is shit out of luck. Anything that’s big—over a meter, roughly—goes extinct. So that pretty much takes care of all dinosaurs. The largest land turtle. The largest alligator. The big things in the ocean.”

Tyler squats before one of several trenches dug out of the butte. He points to a lighter stripe of red-tinged rock beneath a band of coal and says, “This is the actual boundary, right here.” Antoine talks us through the layers: the spherules, which landed first, because they were heavier; then the “shocked quartz,” followed by the iridium anomaly. I run my finger along the boundary, rich with cosmic dust and melted chunks of Mexico that rained down on North Dakota. A line not many fossils cross, those few centimeters marking the end of an era. Tyler reaches in. “Age of dinosaurs,” he says, then raises his finger a fraction: “Age of mammals.”

“If you have a slow metabolism, you’re better able to survive. If you’re small, you’re better able to survive. And if you’re living in the water, or burrowing, you’re better able to survive—things like crocodiles, some lizards, and turtles. A lot of the big animals get taken out. But then they are rapidly replaced. It opens up all these niches. And mammals very, very quickly take over.”

Some of us walk to the edge of the butte to watch the sun set. But Antoine’s not finished. He moves his hand up the rock face. Annihilation: the planet’s been scrubbed free of animals—not many fossils here. Then comes a sharp increase in fossilized fern spores—known as the “fern spike”—as these plants were among the first to recolonize the seared landscape. Higher up, he wrestles a chunk out of the butte. At last, a sign. “Look. Do you see what those are?” I do not. Brown coils wind through the black-flecked rock like thick strands of spaghetti. After a pause, he tells me: “Worm burrows.”

My mind tunnels inward. I think of family and friends back home, lives left in the rearview. I think of rigs going up and men breaking down: in stairwells, in parking lots, in temporary trailers. I think of those who know the land and those who just rent it. I think of fires, water, and the hard, cracked earth—and the part of us that longs to break it wide open. I think of what this looks like from space, or from the other end of eternity. I think of things buried, the bones left behind. I think of long sacrifices and short-term gains. And, finally, I think of my daughter, her love of dinosaurs, how I haven’t spoken to her or my wife all week except over email and text, since I was beyond cell service, beyond a lot of things, really. How will I tell them what I saw in North Dakota?

The air grows cooler. A few lowing cattle climb the butte above. From somewhere unseen, a bird chirps twice, then stills—the song of a survivor, a distant dinosaur relative. Soon, we’ll be gone, but for now we linger on the edge as silence falls across the Badlands, and the sun sets on this world, and the last one, and the one that is to come.

2014–2016