Sometime in the 1950s, an oil
and gas boom hit Big Piney, Wyo. I was 12, and I remember the
excitement of seeing new kids in school, big trucks on the dusty
roads and lots of people in the cafés and on the streets.
I remember summer evenings when my dad loaded us into the
pickup – mom, my two sisters and me- to bounce up to the pasture
where an oil company was drilling on our land. At the huge derrick
we piled out, and dad went over to talk to the crew. We heard
descriptions about coming out of the hole and changing bits, and we
learned that each crew was four men- three roughnecks bossed by a
driller- and that there were three crews every 24 hours bossed by a
man called a tool-pusher.We heard about mud and
“frack-ing” and all kinds of words meaningless to us.
The roughnecks were often college kids trying to earn good money
through the summers.Dirt-smudged, wearing greasy clothes and
hard-hats, they seemed rakish and proud of themselves. They glanced
sideways at my sister Betty, a pretty teenager.
I
remember that dad would stand with his hands on his hips and watch
and listen to the pounding of that rig, and when we started home in
the truck, he’d say, “I don’t need to be rich,
but there are just some things we could do if we had a little extra
money. Like, I’ve always wanted to take you all to
Ha-woy-a.Things like that.”
Hawaii, he meant, but
that was how he said it: Ha-woy-a. Later, when the well was
pronounced a dry hole, I remember dad’s disappointment:
“The oil is there, they say. It’s just that it’s
in the sands.They don’t know how to get at it.Someday,
maybe.”
So we never got to go to Ha-woy-a. But be
careful what you wish for, as the saying goes. Sure enough,
somebody found a way to bring the oil up through the sands, and
today Sublette County and much of southwest Wyoming are in another
boom, bigger than we could ever have imagined.In fact, Sublette
County has some of the world’s richest natural gas and oil
reserves.
Last summer, I visited my sisters, who still
live in the county. We took a bag of sandwiches and a thermos, and
we drove out of Pinedale into the Pinedale Anticline, along the
Green River and through the spider web of gravel roads where there
used to be ranches. We wandered along the ridges of the mesa and
the Jonah Field until we finally ended up in Big Piney.
We tried to remember who used to own this ranch or that one, who
used to live where, whatever became of that family. It was hard,
because now it all seemed like an industrial zone with hardly any
people.
Our dad had been a progressive businessman, a
rancher who knew that progress is not without peril.But he could
never have visualized the impact of development on the sparsely
populated Green River Valley; he could not have imagined entire
sections becoming quadrants of rigs, noisy pumper stations,
pipelines, roads and bright lights.
In that earlier boom,
dad worried about the rough crowd that followed the oilfield work
and the pressures it brought to our little town. As a school board
member and a legislator, he saw the need for affordable housing for
teachers, and he was instrumental in the school’s purchase of
land to build housing for teachers near the schools. He worried
about booze and car wrecks and wild characters, but he could not
have foreseen methamphetamine, air pollution, water pollution or
rural sprawl. He was interested in wildlife for its own sake, but
could not have imagined conversations about
“habitat.”He would never have visualized recreation as
an industry or the base for an economy.
Dad would have
been fascinated by the technologies of directional drilling, global
positioning and computerized databases. Knowing how hard a Wyoming
wind can blow, he’d have been ready and eager for
wind-powered energy. What he wouldn’t have approved of is a
self-indulgent nation that consumes non-renewable resources without
a backward glance.
Lots of people have by now “gone
to Hawaii” on the mineral wealth of Sublette County.
They’ve left behind those who struggle with the immediate and
future impacts of this latest boom. And all the jobs, from school
board member to county commissioner, still need doing to keep this
place alive. The problem is that so few people are left to keep the
community alive and pick up the pieces when this boom inevitably
fizzles.
Mary Flitner is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). She
and her husband are ranchers in Greybull,
Wyoming.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
