Culture Clash in the Southern Prairies

Always talk to people, especially when it's hard

Another right-wing preacher. Why not rock-n-roll? There was no service here to play podcasts on my iPhone. It was 2010, and streaming was a luxury for the cities. Radio was the entertainment for the rural southern country. Bible banter and conspiratorial ravings dominated the airwaves.

I hit scan. The radio looped through the frequencies and stopped on the same voice. Xenophobic vitriol. I’ll listen. I’ll run into his fans someday and it might help to know how they think.

In those days, I traveled the country for business. My three-week trip came to an end, and I was driving from Bryan, an oilfield town in the middle of nowhere Texas, back home.

I stopped for a bite at a pub in Louisiana, in the middle of another nowhere north of Shreveport, at an intersection of a numbered state highway and a town street. Like the last few, I expected the pub to smell of beer, feet, and sweet. But it was clean and bright, with a varnished wrap-around wooden bar and a pineapple chicken sandwich on the menu.

I sat next to a man on the side of the bar with a few open chairs, ordered a beer, and opened my laptop to finish the day’s business.

“You in oilfield?” the man asked.

“No. Well, doing contract work for an oilfield service company. You?”

“Yeah. Roughneck. Putting pipe in the ground when drilling, or capping the pipe on the fracking jobs.”

He was taller than me on the seat, with strong, wide shoulders, a bit of belly fat, a thin beard, a sun-weathered neck and face, and knuckles scraped from slipping wrenches. He could be thirty but looked older; the hot southern sun had already scorched his youth.

I asked why he asked, not much about me says oilfield. He closed the lid of my laptop with his finger and pointed to the safety sticker. After completing the required company safety training, I earned one, as everyone must before heading to the well site.

“Been to a well?” He asked.

“A few times, we are collecting safety telemetry data.”

“Good stuff. The pipe blew on a frac-job a few weeks ago. Killed a guy.”

I heard. The oilfield is a dangerous place for roughnecks — people like him. They do the heavy lifting: guide pipes, turn wrenches, fix things in the heat. Their soiled, fire-retardant Nomax suits dart around the site but stick close to the well hole at the center of the action. When a pipe joint blows from ten thousand pounds of pressure, they catch the death wave with their bodies.

Roughnecks ignore people in clean Nomax suites — people like me. To them, I am another cubicle rat who is there to make lives harder with a new safety rule, useful in litigation but impractical in a field, or worse — another invented efficiency to make them work faster. But I was not a corporate. I was a contractor nobody, which made me ok with him.

His crew was capping wells and drilling two new sites in Texas, some miles away. Here in Louisiana was the closest open hotel. Such are the times of the oil boom; people pour in to work in the fields in the years of high oil prices, and there is nowhere to stay.

During the boom, oil towns are busy places. Every parking spot is taken at breakfast by pickup trucks backed into stalls under diner signs for “Nancy’s” or “Diego’s.” The crews flood in early, eat, and head to work in the Texas prairie. But then the boom burns itself out. The local overproduction, OPEC, or the Russians flood the market and crash the prices. The streets empty of trucks, diners empty of people, and buildings lose their signs. Only a crisp letter outline of “Nancy’s” on the faded red wall tells you that something used to thrive in the building.

A few years later still, another boom comes, and “Nancy’s” is now “ Susy’s, a new sign on the same red wall, covering most but not all of the old paint outlines, a tail of an old A or a Y poking out, adding to the mosaic of the boom and bust.

“So, you Russian?” he asked me.

“Not for a long time. Accent that obvious?”

“Not as bad as my boss’. Our crew chief is Russian. They bring them here to show them how shit is done, then send them back to the Siberian oilfield. Tough guy. Always says how it is. No filter. Fair, but a slave driver.”

I wondered how both things could be true at the same time but said nothing.

We drank beer and told oilfield stories, talked of gripes, heat, Nomax suites that bake you alive, bosses who don’t care, and crews that always whine, except his Mexicans. They work and chatter and work. Half his crew were — the solid guys. His name was John, by the way.

He asked for my story but lost interest when I mentioned college. Does not get college, he said. He went to the army to get away from home and the oilfield, but after Iraq, he ended up back where he started.

“How was it there?” I asked.

“Iraq? Two tours. Fine for me. Same as here: hotter, dustier, and even less to do. I was a truck driver, moving heavy equipment.”

He said he did not see much action. But it was depressing to watch kids there grow up without a future. Like towns around Texas, he said. A few kids escaped; the rest were mired in oilfield jobs and the cycle of prosperity and unemployment they brought. Maybe he will be a long-haul truck driver to get out of here for good. But then the rest of America was plain weird, so maybe not. Has he been around America? No, but he watches TV.

John pointed at the door. Another man walked in. Taller, bigger, redder than John. It was Stevo, I learned, a roughneck from the same crew. He joined John and me and fell into our conversation. He asked questions, re-told a story of their Russian crew boss, bought me a beer, and bumped my shoulder.

“Hey, Rigo!” Stevo yelled at a Hispanic man leaving the bar. “Glad you didn’t get swept up in that raid last week.”

“Not funny, amigo.” Rigo flipped Stevo a bird.

“Thanks for getting my truck running, amigo.” Stevo waved. “Good guy,” he added to us, “ his brother got shot in Juarez last year.”

“Raid?” I asked. I instantly regretted it. I knew what it was.

“Yeah. ICE rounded up a couple of busloads of illegals, sent them back across the border. Fucking no use. They’ll be back in a month. Bullshit.”

I tensed inside. What was bullshit? I thought of asking but held my breath and hoped we would go back to the easy banter.

“It’s bullshit,” John muttered. “Work in your own country. Don’t like it there, make it better.”

The two men went on, grievances trickling out. Illegals depressed wages, foreign workers took honest jobs, immigrants bought the hotels and are now gouging the prices, their fair Russian crew boss put the company before the workers — man had no clue of the southern culture and yelled at them in hoity-toity English. A casual, bored, quietly vehement flow of talking points, the same as I heard from the right-wing AM radio preacher an hour ago. The vitriol of the preacher, almost comic on the radio in its absurdity, was unsettling when spoken by these men. They said all this to each other and when to me, as if in confidence and with urgency so I would not miss an important truth were they to slow down.

I listened, stunned, unnerved. I said nothing. Confusion and fear collapsed my will into inaction.

“Hey, guys!” I finally interjected with a smile, “I am a foreigner.”

“Yeah, but we know you. You are cool. You do real work.” John bumped my shoulder. Stevo gave me a thumbs-up.

“What about the Mexicans on your crew?”

“Solid guys. Should stop speaking Spanish on the job, though. Just unsafe, don’t know what they are saying.”

“So, who are you railing about?”

“The others, you know, the migrants. They want shit for free. They should make their own country better, not come here to take what we did for ourselves.”

They switched to football, Dallas Cowboys, the “fuckface” Jerry Jones, called me a Wisconsin Cheesehead, bought me another beer. I drank it, stupefied by the incongruity of this evening. They kept up the banter, and I nodded to their comments, argued on the wisdom of sports and athletes — the greedy bastards, they insisted, except Tony Romo, who was all right. I was just another guy with a valid opinion but a wrong team. I engaged with half my mind, the other searching for an explanation.

When I was leaving, they shook my hand. John stood up, bumped my shoulder, and said, “Nice chatting with you.”

His sincerity added to the riddle of the evening. These men respected their Mexican crew mates but hated their brothers. They pitied Iraqi kids condemned to poverty but rejected families who brought them here for a chance at a future. They bought me beers, their new pal, then called for booting all like me out of their country. Then shook my hand and thanked me for the conversation.

I climbed in my car and drove north. They knew me, they said. I was no longer an abstraction but a person translated into their equal by shared beers and a conversation. To them, in the pub, I was Egor; in another context, I would be a malignant migrant.

The clashing views coexisted without dissonance in separate compartments of their minds, never touching, unexamined. I scoffed at the incoherence but caught myself in hypocrisy. I am a self-proclaimed environmentalist on a contract with an oil company. What am I even doing here? At least I am not a xenophobe. But I let them talk, did not stop them, did not walk away. Was I an accomplice?

I had two thousand miles to think. But the miles did not offer an answer. Not then. The years have. I know this — always talk to people. Somewhere among their worst, there is a good. A chat may let it grow. A wall will nurture the darkest.