WORK by Paul Crenshaw
Here’s a thing that astonishes me: in 1962, at age 14, my great uncle Doyle June and his twin brother Big Nose went west to work in the oil fields of Oklahoma. Where I’m from, Arkansas near the Oklahoma border, going west was not a new thing. Thirty years earlier great storms of dust moved east and thrashed the crops from Kansas to South Texas, destroyed little villages and small towns on the plains, wrecked the already-wrecked economy of the time, and sent families sailing west through what must have looked like war-torn land, gouged and gutted by grains of earth.
Close to thirty years afterward, in the late ’50s, Doyle’s family were itinerant farmers. They started in California in spring, driving north from Arkansas in a 1950 Chevy, 10 of them, mother and father and eight children, 2300 miles, to pick strawberries. From California they worked north into Oregon and Washington as the weather warmed, then headed south again in the fall to pick cotton in Texas and Arkansas and Missouri. Long rows spread out before them, and long days. In the October mornings the first frost had fallen, but the days grew hot. I imagine Doyle’s father stopping to wipe his brow, to scan the land ahead of him, to see how much work lay ahead. His wife worked beside him, an infant slung across her back. Those children old enough to walk worked as well, warned to keep up as they moved down the rows.
In Oregon they rented a one-room house. There was one light overhead, an uncovered bulb swaying on a bare chain, and 10 cots, though they slept little, for at night, after picking all day, they moved the irrigation systems in the dark. In Arkansas one room of their three-room house was full of corn. The other two rooms lay thick with bodies at night, mother and father in one room, all the children in the other. I’ve never seen the house, but I imagine it with no running water, gaps in the walls that let the cold in, a dirt floor. Ten siblings, or eleven – one lost in childbirth or infancy, cholera, maybe, or tuberculosis. No heat but a wood stove. And for the uneducated – Doyle’s family – no work. A bit of carpentry here, maybe, day work if it could be found, but mostly nothing until spring and the trip back north.
But west held hope, so Doyle’s father lit out in the late ’50s. He’d heard rumors of work where a man could make his fortune in the oil fields, barons born overnight, and for three years he lived in Oklahoma and sent money back home. By ’62, Doyle and Big Nose, fourteen and following in their father’s footsteps, went west as well. Here I imagine Doyle and his brother standing on the porch steps of their falling-down house in Western Arkansas, only a few miles from where he lives now, in a house his late wife died in. It is morning, the sun just appearing, and already hot. Their father – a man I never met, though in my mind he looks like Doyle does now, hair whited out and thinning, skin weathered from a life under the sun, eyes grey as wind, wearing jeans and a vaguely western shirt – has come home for the weekend. He stands sipping coffee. He peers westward, as if to see where his sons are going, though he already knows. He nods once, and it’s settled. He knows that for people like him and his sons work is the only way to make it in this world, so on Sunday afternoon he loads them in the car and they drive west.
That’s the real story. But I tend to romanticize what lies in the past. For me, their journey begins at the edge of town, Doyle and Big Nose, hitching west. In my mind they catch a ride with a farmer in an old green truck that rattles and thumps down rough-hewn roads until the farmer can take them no further (he has his own work to get to), though he wishes them luck, shakes his head as he drives away, leaves them standing in the sun at the side of the road with their thumbs out. They stand skinny and awkward and far too young, their clothes worn, calluses and cuts covering their hands. As the sun climbs higher they catch a ride with a traveling salesman or a trucker, a man who taps his thumbs on the steering wheel in time to remembered music.
The land slowly changes. The hills of Western Arkansas flatten themselves into plains. They watch barns and churches pass out the window, watch the great swath of land unravel before them. Rows of corn and cotton and wheat swish past out the window. But they’ve seen enough of farms, are heading farther west, into the sunset, the lengthening day.
They eat lunch at a broken-down diner where coffee costs less than a quarter and everyone drinks it even at midday. I don’t know what they thought as they looked out the dusty window at the cars streaming west. They knew the work that waited for them; they had worked all their lives already. Ahead was only work of a different nature. Better, perhaps, since it would pay more money.
They stand outside the diner and catch another ride, this time with a soldier heading for Fort Sill or a vacuum cleaner salesman or a man with a Bible in the front seat big enough to choke a mule, who whistles while he drives and tells them of Jesus Christ. In the late afternoon the trees stunt themselves to scrub brush. The horizon stretches westward and the shadows of the car grow long behind them. And toward darkness, near the panhandle, what they’ve come in search of rises from the earth.
This seems to me as it must have happened, now, with the weight of years behind it. They reached Western Oklahoma late in the evening, saw the pumpjacks eating at the earth, saw the derricks rising from the plains. Night had fallen and the crews had lined the derricks with lights and, I suppose, they must have felt some sense of hope for the future – that here, on these fields that had once been destroyed by forces of the earth, was work, and work meant hope to poor kids raised in cotton fields, who lived in houses filled with corn where snow fell through the gaps in the walls in winter.
Even at 14, skinny kids with big noses could work in those fields where the rigs ran day and night. The second great Oklahoma oil boom had started a few years before, in the mid-’50s, and the drills cut everywhere into the earth. Survey crews roamed the back roads looking for more land while everywhere the rigs went up. Pipeline trenches furrowed the flat land and when Doyle and Big Nose started working I imagine they must have thought they were men making a living in the same way men who found work in the California farm fields or factories in the ’30s must have felt.
They went to work on a pipeline crew as general laborers. They sandblasted the pipes and painted them or wrapped them with anti-corrosion material. They carried pipe fittings, aligned the huge pipe lengths into place, held them while the welders sparked and soldered them together. They tore down fences or other obstacles in the pipeline path, cleared brush, dug ditches. Occasionally fires broke out on the plains from the welders and they fought the fires.
There were six or seven men on each crew: one or two general laborers, a backhoe/dozer operator, a foreman, a crew leader, a welder, a walker who went behind them inspecting what they had buried, and a surveyor who carried his tripod and plotted the pipeline path. The crews changed so often Doyle no longer remembers the faces or names of most of the men he worked with. Younger men often quit after only a few weeks, or a few days. Older men found other things to do.
The work was hard, the men harder. On good days, when it wasn’t raining or snowing or the horizon hazed thick with heat, they laid two miles of pipe a day, working 16-hour days. Doyle once quit a job because the shifts only ran 12 hours. “I wouldn’t take a job I couldn’t work at least 16,” he told me once, and even now, in his 60s, he finds it hard to sit still – any time spent not working is a missed opportunity. They started before the sun came up and quit long after it had gone down. When they were too far from home to drive back for the night, as they often were, they slept where they could find room. Sometimes they slept in the back of a truck or cab of a backhoe, fights often erupting over these spots protected from the cold. Other times, if they were lucky, a motel might be near, and, if there was room, for all the motels were full with so many oil men in the state, they slept 7 or 8 to a room.
Some nights they were so tired they could not sleep, hurting – especially those first few weeks – so fiercely that even to move pierced the skin and scraped the tired bones together (the joke is that pipe-layers have long arms, stretched by the things they carried; the other joke is that pipe-layers know how to lay pipe, that other parts of the body become stretched as well). They’d wake in the morning, if they had been able to sleep, and already feel the long day ahead, joints stiff and muscles screaming, and there must have been, in my imagining, times they did not want to continue.
The long hours and harsh conditions shaped them – many of the men were as rough-hewn as the land on which they worked. For initiation (I do not know if this ever happened to Doyle, as I never thought it appropriate to ask) the younger men, those new to the crew, would be painted with axle grease, all down the chest and into the private areas. Axle grease is almost impossible to get off skin without using turpentine or gasoline – things that burn, especially on sensitive parts. Kids with long hair – this was the ’60s, and not an area of the country that identified or sympathized with the counterculture movement – would have their heads shaved with straight razors by the older men of the crew. They worked all day and drank all night. Doyle and Big Nose did not drink, but others on the crews often drank for 5 or 6 hours after the 16-hour day, slept for 2 hours, then rose to do it all again.
“You had to be careful in the mornings,” Doyle told me once, speaking of men still drunk, or with heads swollen from the night before. “You had to be real careful.”
The weather was as hard as the men. In summer, the plains swelter to over 100 degrees. The jet stream sucks up moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and the humidity shimmers in the distance, distorts the air and the land and all feeling in the limbs. It is the kind of heat that will knock you senseless, shorten the breath in your lungs as the drill eats into the earth, as the backhoe digs trenches, as the sun swells the metal buildings, as the work goes on. In winter arctic blasts sweep down from Canada, nothing past the Rockies to stop their headlong flight. Blizzards blank the horizons, distance on the plains erased, and once the snows are gone the spring air spins itself into existence and tornadoes howl across the grey landscape.
I often wonder how Doyle survived those days. One summer between college semesters I worked for a small concrete crew as a day laborer, raking gravel and building forms and shaping wet cement into sidewalks and slabs. I only needed to last the summer to have enough tuition to return to school, and when I finished I felt proud that I had worked with my hands to be able to continue working with my mind. But what I remember now from that time is my desire to quit at the end of every day, how I would come home to lie on the couch comatose, lights off, air conditioning tuned to frost, my skin burned and face peeled and body sore, my only consolation that I did not have to go back to work the next day if I chose not to. When I imagine the oil fields, I see only long days of work. I cannot feel the hope Doyle must have – I feel only misery. I think of a life laid out before me, each day like the last: burning or freezing, tired somewhere deep within at the amount of work that rises each morning, balls thick with axle grease. I don’t think of the hope of a better life or the hope of climbing out of poverty. I imagine only despair, and I fear something is missing in me, some inner fortitude, some connection to the past, some ancestral blood that has been diluted or drained.
The history of Oklahoma is a history of people entering, and of a land no one wanted. The first European to enter what would become the state of Oklahoma was Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, in 1542. Around the same time, Hernando de Soto crossed the Mississippi and followed the Arkansas River westward, but the expedition turned back in Western Arkansas. Coronado explored all through the southwest, eventually traveling into Oklahoma and Kansas. Like the conquistadors before him, Coronado searched for gold. When his expedition did not find the fabled seven cities of legend, they left.
In 1830, Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, giving him the power to negotiate the removal of Indian tribes from lands east of the Mississippi River to lands west of it. The Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole tribes either moved, or were moved, from their native lands to the new Indian Territory. A few of the tribes, after government pressure, exchanged grants, trading land in the east for land in the west. Those who did not move voluntarily were marched, at gunpoint, to the new land.
On March 2, 1889, the Unassigned Lands of the Indian Territory were opened to land settlers after the Indian Appropriations Act. For years, “Boomers” – men who wished to settle the unoccupied land in the territory – had petitioned the government to open it, and when they did, at noon, with a shot fired from a cannon, an estimated 50,000 people rushed in to claim the free land.
When oil was discovered in the late 1800s and early 1900s, in the period between the first discovery well and statehood in 1907, Oklahoma became the largest oil-producing entity in the world[1]. New settlers came from the east to cash in on the oil boom. Derricks sprung out of the earth like locusts, and oil rained from the sky. The populations of towns and cities erupted, and new towns sprang up with the derricks. The boom lasted until the Great Depression, when the price of oil dropped to pennies a barrel and the boom towns dried up. (A good example of this is the population of Cromwell, Oklahoma: In 1920 there was no town. In 1925 the population was 8,000. By 1930, after oil production decreased, the market fell, and the town caught fire and the oil-soaked buildings burned to the ground, it had fallen to less than 300).
In the 1950s, post-war reliance on automobiles and petroleum products caused a new oil boom. Though it was not as great as the first, the discovery of new oil fields created a need for more jobs. Agricultural jobs in the state and surrounding areas were on the decline, and families – like Doyle’s – came looking for work, which makes me wonder how my generation would fare crossing the Mississippi or walking westward from Georgia or working sixteen-hour days. It makes me wonder what happened between then and now, namely because of my own inability to imagine a generation that knew work as the only way to keep their families from starving to death, that knew the only work to be had was the kind of work that can break a man if he is not strong enough, and inside this wondering is the fear that I have come to believe, like many Americans, that work means air-conditioned offices and long, paid vacations. That things should be given to us because we deserve them. That in seeking the good life, with good jobs and good benefits and a three-car garage, we have rendered vestigial the will to work hard – it is there, but as a thing remembered, or to be brought out only when absolutely necessary.
But our collective histories can’t always be separated into cause or effect. There are not always gradual demarcations to show us the way, to delineate where we are from or where we’ve been. There are things we don’t know until we get there, until we drive west from Arkansas, across the huge brown flatness of Oklahoma in summer and see the oil derricks rising from the earth. There are things missing.
Doyle misses two fingers on his right hand.
One cold winter in January somewhere on a small state road in Oklahoma, Doyle was driving a low-boy with a bulldozer loaded on it when he was pulled over by a state policeman. It was just starting to snow, the dead winter grass frosted and the trees stirring in the wind. Doyle worked the low-boy over to the side of the road and the trooper pulled in behind him. It was late in the afternoon, the dark coming early. I imagine Doyle getting out of the high cab to meet the officer near the front tires, the bulldozer hulking over them. I imagine the officer with mirrored sunglasses even in the grey afternoon, his blue lights spinning behind him. There were no other cars on the road.
The blade on the dozer was 12 feet, hooded-officer-with-shiny-tape-measure told Doyle, after measuring. Doyle’s permit was a 10 wide. The low-boy had to stay on the side of the road, or the dozer blade had to come off. One or the other.
As the trooper pulled away, Doyle went to work removing the dozer blade. He was wrenching off the last bolt when the bolt sheared away and the blade fell, trapping the index and middle fingers of his right hand beneath it and slicing them almost in two. It did not fall toward him, but settled back against the dozer, otherwise he would have been trapped beneath it, and I do not know what bulldozer blades weigh, but, according to Doyle, when I asked him how much it hurt for the blade to be sitting on half his hand: “A lot.”
I want to say now that it began snowing harder, and the cold came out of the north and night fell, and I think all these things are true, but I’m equally sure we don’t need them. The trooper had driven away, no more cars passed on the road, and a bulldozer blade that weighed more than he did had kidnapped two fingers from his right hand, shearing them almost, but not quite, off. Partly in shock, he looked down at his destroyed hand, up at the snow falling from the sky and east and west at the empty road. He realized there was a very real possibility he could freeze to death if he could not free his hand.
Doyle’s solution was this: he began reaching for his pocket knife with his left hand to cut his own fingers off and thus extract himself before his limbs froze and his heart quit working. I don’t know how long he deliberated before making that decision, but I do know he had reached the pocket knife and opened it one-handed and was preparing to go to work when he heard a car coming. He flagged the man down one-handed and together they lifted the dozer blade high enough to free his hand. The man drove Doyle to the hospital, his two fingers dangling uselessly by threads of skin and shattered bones.
At the hospital, doctors cut away what still hung on and sewed him up. The man who had driven him to the hospital drove him back to the low-boy, where Doyle secured the dozer blade, then drove it through the night to the job site, where he reported for work the next morning. If anyone asks, as my oldest daughter once did when she was too young to know any better, he tells the story cheerfully, turning his hand this way and that so you can see the missing fingers, the smoothed-over scar tissue. The first time I met him, my father warned me not to say anything, not to look down when we shook hands.
Big Nose went missing from the Army after being enlisted for a total of 13 hours. He had not been in long enough for a haircut or a uniform when a drill sergeant told him he would be shipped to Vietnam after training. Big Nose did not know where Vietnam was. This was the late ’60s, he was 18 years old, and he had not left the oil fields since he had arrived there at 14.
“I don’t know where that is,” Big Nose told his drill sergeant, “and I ain’t going. I’m going back to work.”
He left a few hours later, snuck off in the middle of the night and caught a bus outside Fort Polk, Louisiana. He rode all night to the oil fields and went back to work the next morning.
The FBI came looking for him, showed up at the door late one night flashing their badges. Big Nose answered the door, and when he found out who was there and what they wanted, told them he was Doyle. When Doyle heard this from the other room, he went out the back and hid in a tree so they would not see the two of them together and try to ascertain who was who. The FBI hung around the house waiting for his return until 4am, when Big Nose told them he had to go to work.
A few days later they returned. When Doyle answered the door, the FBI, annoyed by their earlier failure, slapped handcuffs on him. Big Nose was running out the back. Doyle did not try to explain. He went quietly, sat in the back of the car for the long ride as Big Nose drove in the opposite direction. I like to imagine what happened when he explained, several hours later, that they had the wrong man, that once again the FBI had been foiled by two uneducated oil hands.
Big Nose and Doyle’s younger brother John D. did time in the Army as well. He lasted longer than Big Nose but on the second day he decided to quit and go back to work. Like Big Nose, he escaped and caught a bus. Like Big Nose, he was back working in the oil fields the next day.
The Army did not agree with them, Doyle told me, or they did not agree with the Army. They did not like the pay – they made much less in the Army than they did on the pipeline. They did not like the rules or the regulations or the people presiding over them. They did not like not being in the oil fields. They spent over a year avoiding the FBI while continuing to work, and when I asked Doyle why they didn’t just go back to the Army or head north to the Canadian border, he told me work was the only thing they knew.
For a long time, part of the state of Oklahoma was missing.
I assume that even those of us who spent high school geography breathing through our mouths while staring at the flickering overhead fluorescents know that there are two parts of Oklahoma: the fat boxy part that somewhat resembles a pan, and the handle. The Panhandle was, for close to 50 years, no man’s land. Literally. When Texas tried to enter the Union in 1845 as a slave state, it was forced to give up all land north of 36′30″ latitude. The 170-mile-long handle of land became officially known as the “Public Land Strip,” but unofficially people called it “No Man’s Land.”
It was a territory thick with hookers and rustlers and robbers and thieves. There was no government, no army, no law. What little towns existed had a constable far outnumbered by lawless men. Gunshots were not uncommon, nor were people dead in the streets. I imagine old wild west movies here, but the fiction came from truth. On the wide ranges fights broke out over land and cattle, cowboys of the open range versus settlers, or “nesters,” who stole their crops and sometimes cattle and fenced in grazing land, and in the cities the illegal sale and transportation of alcohol, as well as gambling and prostitution, often erupted into gunfights.
It had never been a densely populated area. Before the conquistadors arrived, even the Plains Indians did not live there. The Spanish claimed it as their own, but for hundreds of years only a few Comanches riding stolen Spanish horses inhabited the area. When Mexico earned its independence from Spain the land became part of Mexico, and when Texas won independence from Mexico it became part of Texas. In the 1800s, with the rise of the cattle industry in the West and the building of the railroads, cattle ranchers sparsely settled the area, against the orders of the government.
When No Man’s Land was opened to settlers in 1890 by the Oklahoma Organic Act, most of them landed in the Unassigned Lands that had opened the year before, and not many settled the panhandle. It is still sparsely populated. In 2010, according to the National Census, the Oklahoma Panhandle had a population of less than 30,000 for an area the size of Connecticut, or four and a half times the size of Rhode Island, both with populations over one million.
It was a land that had changed hands so many times it seemed no one wanted it, not even America, at least until the first oil was discovered and people came west looking for work.
The iconic image of the ’30s is the Okie – falling-apart truck, family loaded in the back or crowded into the front, long lines of traffic on dusty roads, dirty, sad faces, always headed west, looking for work. (In the cities it was long lines of people waiting for government cheese). This is John Steinbeck; it’s Woody Guthrie. It’s part and parcel of our history. Fifteen percent of the population of Oklahoma went west during the ’30s. Those who were fortunate found work in the California factories or the fields and were able to feed their families.
Doyle and Big Nose went west in the ’60s, a different time, but for the same reasons. The word Okie came into being as a derogatory term, a shifty transient, an uneducated farmer coming to take jobs and sully society. People who stayed behind often saw them as quitters who gave up on where they had grown up. Now, the state of Oklahoma has adopted the term as a symbol of a people who survived hardship, who endured turbulent times. When their homes were swept away by the wind or their farms failed, they uprooted themselves and drove toward what they thought might provide a better life. People in England did this for religious freedom. People in Ireland did it when their potatoes failed. They crossed an ocean. They rolled up their sleeves.
Since they landed we have been moving west, crossing the black earth under blue skies or skies not so grey. Always looking over the horizon, searching for greener pastures, rushing for land or oil or gold. Searching for work, some way to stay afloat (picture tiny birds with mouths open).
Imagine it, then – west, the setting sun. End of a long summer day in which you crossed borders, traversed the length of a long state and arrived in its western reaches. The last light is dying. America shines or California shines or Oklahoma shines as the oil derricks rise from the earth, catching the last light, turning them to gold. Tomorrow, there is work.
Doyle retired from the oil fields in 1987, after 25 years. He moved back to Arkansas, where he grew up, with plans to rebuild an old Mustang and tinker around with cars. He soon became bored and bought a backhoe and started a small backhoe-bulldozer business to kill time when he wasn’t rebuilding car engines or installing new transmissions.
When his wife was diagnosed with cancer, her medical bills wiped out his retirement fund. He had no insurance, so he went back to work in Oklahoma as a pipeline inspector to pay for her care and treatment. When she passed away he came home for the funeral. A few days later he went back to work. I assume it was to keep his mind off things, to keep his hands busy and his mind stilled, but it may have only been out of long habit.
The last two summers that I have driven west from North Carolina to Arkansas, Doyle has not been home. He is working in North Dakota, where new oil and gas fields have recently been discovered. Doyle sleeps in a fifth-wheel camper that he pays 600 dollars a month to park in a gravel lot. With all the oil men in the town there are no rooms to be had, and rent, on anything, even a place to park a camper, is exorbitant. There are long lines of people at restaurants, grocery stores, gas stations. Nine out of ten cars on the road belong to oil men, or pipeliners, or right-of‑way agents associated with the new drilling.
On the phone he tells me he is considering retiring in a year and a half. He will be 65 then, and have 50 years in the oil business. “If things die down up here,” he says. “I may not if it stays busy.”
At night, he says he can hear the engines and the machinery of oil rumbling in the distance. I am sitting in my office listening to his voice. I have interviewed him twice already, and have been working on this essay for 10 or 11 hours over the course of a week. He is working 12-hour days, sometimes 14. It’s a new oil-boom, he says. More people come into the towns every day, looking for work. He says he could get me a job, and when I remind him I have one, there is a long silence from his end, as if he suspects I am not quite telling the truth, or perhaps we have different opinions on what work really means.
[1]. Boyd, Dan T. “Oklahoma Oil: Past, Present and Future. Oklahoma Geology Notes. V.62, N.3. Fall 2002
Paul Crenshaw’s work has appeared in The North American Review, Shenandoah, Southern Humanities Review, and The Best American Essays.