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WORK TITLE: The Great American Outpost
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Minneapolis
STATE: MN
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Reporter. Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Minneapolis, MN, staff reporter in Washington, DC.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to periodicals, including Atlantic, Awl, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Longreads.
SIDELIGHTS
Reporter Maya Rao works in the Washington DC bureau of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. She has also published articles in various periodicals, including Atlantic, Awl, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Longreads. In 2018, she wrote Great American Outpost: Dreamers, Mavericks, and the Making of an Oil Frontier, a look at how a huge oil discovery in western North Dakota transformed the region, for better and ill. Development of the Bakkan oil field was called a modern-day gold rush as entrepreneurs, investors, drifters, and criminals flocked to the cold, remote, and underpopulated territory.
Between 2012 and 2016, Rao traveled to the region and immersed herself in the culture. She befriended Danny Witt, a divorced surfer from North Carolina who became a truck driver for the oil industry hauling water and crude along the desolate highways and breathing in the toxic fumes. Rao chronicles the pioneers, restaurant owners, Ponzi schemers, scandal-plagued celebrities, disgraced businessmen, and regular folks who all thought they could get rich. Housing costs and prices rose, as did the crime rate as drug dealers and sex offenders moved in too. However, as booms go, the bust came only a decade later with abandoned equipment left in fields, an environmental nightmare, and empty-handed investors.
For authenticity, Rao interviewed oil executives, Native Americans, local farmers, and junkies and dealers to learn of their aspirations and struggles as the boom times promised high wages and careers, but also the crash that left loneliness and exploitation. “Rao poignantly captures the change in atmosphere as the boom turns to bust,” noted a Publishers Weekly Online reviewer, who added that the book is a memorable account of the consequences and effects of the Bakken boom.
“Rao occasionally injects herself into the story, but the truck driver who freely shared his adventures rightly dominates the book,” according to a Kirkus Reviews writer. The writer added that despite some scattershot anecdotes, the book is a superb report “marred only by an occasionally wandering narrative.” On the Minneapolis Star-Tribune Online, Stephen J. Lyons remarked: “Rao’s frightening yet objective account of America’s modern-day equivalent of the Gold Rush, drags readers into the nasty business of oil extraction, fracking style.”
On Point host David Folkenflik commented that the story is not that of the Bakken oilfield, but rather “This is a narrative, on-the-ground account of capitalism, industrialization, and rugged individualism in twenty-first-century America. This book is about what that Ponzi scheme symbolizes: the ways in which the largest oil rush in modern U.S. history wrestled with ephemeral and lasting interests, scam and legitimacy, and the power and failings of free enterprise.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2018, review of Great American Outpost: Dreamers, Mavericks, and the Making of an Oil Frontier.
ONLINE
Minneapolis Star Tribune Online, http://www.startribune.com/review-great-american-outpost-by-maya-rao/480300123/ (April 20, 2018), Stephen J. Lyons, review of Great American Outpost.
On Point, http://www.wbur.org/ (April 30, 2018), David Folkenflik, “America’s Oil Frontier.”
Publishers Weekly Online, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (March 5, 2018), review of Great American Outpost.
Maya Rao is a staff writer in the Washington D.C. bureau of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Awl, Philadelphia Inquirer, Longreads, and more.
Rao, Maya: GREAT AMERICAN OUTPOST
Kirkus Reviews. (Feb. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Rao, Maya GREAT AMERICAN OUTPOST PublicAffairs (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 4, 24 ISBN: 978-1-61039-646-2
Newspaper journalist Rao travels to remote western North Dakota to immerse herself in the boom-and-bust cycle of shale oil extraction.
For more than a decade, the dangers of fracking--drilling deep into the Earth to extract shale oil using massive amounts of water and chemicals--have been widely reported: environmental degradation, earthquakes, outsized profits for the oil industry, lost savings for individuals scammed by get-rich-quick schemes, negatively transformed local economies, and deaths of itinerant oil field workers as well as local residents. Portions of Oklahoma, Texas, and Pennsylvania have received huge amounts of attention during the debates about fracking, but North Dakota, one of the most remote, frigid, and least populous of the 50 states, has been affected more heavily than any other. To understand the real situation among competing claims, Rao arrived from out of state, established a working relationship with a truck driver trying to earn a better living than he could in North Carolina, developed numerous other sources, lived in costly but substandard housing, existed on low-quality food, and placed herself in physical danger almost every day, emerging with an eye-opening, occasionally scattershot, "on-the-ground account of capitalism, industrialization, and rugged individualism" as well as "the power and failings of free enterprise." At some level, almost everybody involved in the business understood that the boom economy would collapse eventually, but the author found few who predicted that the bust would arrive in less than a decade. As a result, local businesses went broke, temporary environmental scarring became permanent, and western North Dakota became less desirable than ever as a place to settle, especially given the harsh weather and downturn in agriculture. Rao occasionally injects herself into the story, but the truck driver who freely shared his adventures rightly dominates the book.
A superbly reported book marred only by an occasionally wandering narrative.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Rao, Maya: GREAT AMERICAN OUTPOST." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527248265/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c1cf068f. Accessed 16 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527248265
Great American Outpost: Dreamers, Mavericks, and the Making of an Oil Frontier
Maya Rao. PublicAffairs, $27 (336p) ISBN 978-1-61039-646-2
Minneapolis Star-Tribune journalist Rao’s debut paints a vivid picture of the rapid development that accompanied the recent oil boom in North Dakota. For seven years beginning in 2012, Rao immersed herself in the Bakken oil boomtown, which she likens to a 21st-century gold rush as “hordes of people flock to this untrammeled terrain to make their fortune.” Her portrait focuses largely on the lives of the people she encountered there: the “pioneers, outcasts... dreamers, do-gooders, failures, drifters, deadbeats” who were drawn to the site from all around the country for its promise of economic prosperity. Rao introduces readers to Danny Witt, a surfer from North Carolina who trucked water and crude along desolate highways to and from the oil fields. She writes of the monotony of his task—much of it “was stop and go, idling and stalling”—and the peculiar rhythms of time spent largely on the road. She also follows Marcus Jundt, a restaurateur who financed four restaurants in town, including the Williston Brewing Company, to serve newcomers and offer respite for the laborers working at the Bakken rigs. Rao poignantly captures the change in atmosphere as the boom turns to bust and local businesses built on the thriving oil community start to go broke. This is a memorable account of the Bakken boom and all that it entailed. (Apr.)
DETAILS
Reviewed on: 03/05/2018
Release date: 04/24/2018
Pre-Recorded Audio Player - 978-1-5491-1775-6
Books 480300123
Review: 'Great American Outpost,' by Maya Rao
NONFICTION: Star Tribune reporter Maya Rao drags readers into the nasty business of oil extraction, fracking style, in North Dakota's Bakken fields.
By STEPHEN J. LYONS Special to the Star Tribune April 20, 2018 — 11:11am
Photo by Xavier Dussaq
Maya Rao Photo by Xavier Dussaq
They rushed in from out of state to reap the real and imagined profits of North Dakota’s recent oil boom. They were “pioneers, outcasts, losers, tramps, dreamers, do-gooders, failures, drifters, deadbeats, felons, freaks, dodgers, bootleggers, scum, miscreants, missionaries, stumblebums, sneaks, bastards, loan sharks, hustlers, millionaires.”
This stew of American humanity also included sex offenders, sex workers, drug dealers and parolees who were given a one-way ticket to the Bakken oil fields, which contain the largest oil deposit in the United States, larger than even Saudi Arabia’s.
“Great American Outpost,” Maya Rao’s frightening yet objective account of America’s modern-day equivalent of the Gold Rush, drags readers into the nasty business of oil extraction, fracking style.
Rao, a staff writer for the Star Tribune based in Washington, D.C., spent a year in the Bakken, living there for an extended period and also making many shorter trips between 2012 and 2016.
She cashiers at a truck stop. She bravely — or perhaps foolishly — rides with stressed truck drivers across isolated roads in a stark landscape that reminds Army veterans of Iraqi war zones.
Although it seems as if Rao is everywhere at once, her base is Williston, N.D., a quiet burg transformed into a traffic-clogged boom city struggling to preserve its character as the population overflows with transients whose goals are to make a living, not a life.
ERIC GRAY • Associated Press
Oil pump jacks worked in unison in Williston, N.D. The Bakken oil fields contain the largest oil deposit in the United States.
She interviews oil executives, American Indians, the newly arrived, local farmers and high-risk deal junkies. Everyone salivates over a slice of the pie: the oil leases, the six-figure salaries and a chance to pay off debts back home. Yet the real profiteers are companies such as Halliburton that had invested some $450 million in Williston’s infrastructure.
Lured by the high salaries, Danny Witt left North Carolina, a bitter divorce and an estranged son for the Bakken. At times he made good wages ($12,000 in one memorable week), but he also found a shortage of housing, hazardous working conditions, expensive and dangerous man camps and numbing loneliness. He says, “This kind of desolation truly scares me. … The sheer emptiness of it.”
Despite the hardships and a recent market correction that has slowed oil production, people continue to head to the oil fields and to their imagined fortunes. As one woman, who lives in a dreary encampment by a landfill, tells Rao, “You just have to put up with the opposite of the American dream when you’re here. When you go home, that’s when you can have it.”
Stephen J. Lyons is the author of four books, most recently “Going Driftless: Life Lessons From the Heartland for Unraveling Times.”
Great American Outpost
By: Maya Rao.
Publisher: Public Affairs, 324 pages, $27.
This program aired on April 30, 2018.
With David Folkenflik
Stories from North Dakota. Deep inside the boom-and-bust world of America’s oil frontier. We take a look at "Great American Outpost: Dreamers, Mavericks, and the Making of an Oil Frontier."
Guests
Maya Rao, Washington correspondent for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune writer and author of "Great American Outpost: Dreamers, Mavericks and the Making of an Oil Frontier." (@Mrao_Strib)
Russell Gold, senior energy reporter for the Wall Street Journal. (@russellgold)
Danny Witt, water trucker in North Dakota since 2011.
From The Reading List
Excerpt from "American Outpost" by Maya Rao
Introduction
Past the abandoned shack that said great food fast and for sale, rows of trailers lay forsaken in the weeds. Laborers had run out of time to install the doors and windows in several dwellings, and rain seeped through the openings. Cement slabs marked parking spots that had no vehicles. The dining hall was locked; the boot scrubbers on the porch had no mud in their bristles. Federal authorities had evicted the tenants. A banner had begun to drag off the chain-link fence, the red lettering barely decipherable: great american lodge.
Once a symbol of prosperity in the North Dakota oilfield, the lodge had become a gallery of fortune gone to ruin. Investors from Hong Kong to Madrid were reeling from revelations that their money had vanished in a $62 million Ponzi scheme. The British developers had disappeared overseas. Only the squirrels remained, running along the tarp and pallets that lay scattered in the grass. I drove by several times a week for much of 2015, looking, to no avail, for the smallest change; eventually the lodge loomed as just another landmark fringed by weeds along the highway. A Colorado real estate broker who did business with the swindlers told me they could have done well enough without scamming. “But no!” he said. “Greed, greed, greed!”
Artifacts of dreams abandoned have long strewn North Dakota’s landscape: old farmsteads, shuttered schools, wood planks rotting in the prairie grass. The Northern Pacific Railway drove settlements along the tracks west of the Missouri River, but residents built too many towns, churches, farms, newspapers, and schools to support a society that never grew as populous as planned. Farmers struggled against blizzards and droughts and meager harvests. Some starved. Many fled. Half of North Dakota’s communities were losing people by the 1930s, when the state’s population peaked at nearly 681,000. Citizens clustered in the cities of Bismarck, Grand Forks, and Fargo. The western edge of the state faded into earthen bones as the young left for better prospects and the old died off. Loss and despair vexed the buttes and grasslands; it brooded in the savage emptiness and the derelictions of wood and blotched glass.
North Dakota’s first oil discovery came in 1951 in the little town of Tioga, but the petroleum was difficult to extract profitably. A burst of oil development came in the 1980s, followed by a bust that stranded local governments with debt. By 2008, advances in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling confirmed the largest domestic oil deposit since the discovery of the reserves under Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, four decades earlier. Billions of barrels of oil lay in the Bakken shale formation. Western North Dakota became an astonishing laboratory for the Darwinian, breakneck capitalism that one imagined was no longer possible in modern America, as outsiders engulfed the state to get rich, hide out, or start over. The state’s population grew for the first time in the lives of even its most elderly residents.
Observers often compared it to the California Gold Rush, when hordes of people flocked to an untrammeled terrain to make their fortune and, unwittingly, redefine the American dream from a steady grind of work and thrift to a gamble that favored the bold. The journey to the West Coast by ox- or mule-drawn wagon was long and arduous in the 1840s, as gold-seekers fought cholera, hostile Indians, and starvation. Voyages by sea could be perilous. In modern times, the way to prosperity was unimpeded. Adventurers drove, hitchhiked, or rode the train to the great land north. There was little of the speculative nature of past booms. Nobody wildcatted anymore—companies knew where the oil was and had the technology to extract it. Newcomers were almost guaranteed to find a job as long as they could pass a drug test, and if they couldn’t, those were easy enough to fake. North Dakota was again at the whims of exploitative outsiders, a half century after historian Elwyn Robinson claimed that the state’s remoteness had established it as a colonial hinterland dependent upon faraway markets.
Journalists from around the world came to North Dakota, often for just a few days. I was one of them, traveling from Minneapolis to the oilfield for a week in 2012. Yet most news stories could never capture the reality of it—the Bakken defied mainstream explanations. That place was an outpost of outcasts and dreamers and geniuses, an unending paradox in what it meant to be American, a phenomenon that called for nuanced reporting that captured the hopeful and the dark and the absurd. North Dakota! What a wild frontier. Who were all these people rushing in, and why? I tried to imagine the civilization they would build and its trajectory when the frenzy went away, the things the pioneers would leave behind. How might the natives regulate mass industrialization when they were so resistant to government intrusions, so protective of their own liberties? Observers always said this would be studied in history classes a century from now, and history demands a book.
I began going to North Dakota to pursue these inquiries more seriously in May 2014, stopping for gas near Fargo off Interstate 94, where there would invariably be some shifty-eyed man at the next pump over—probably just out on parole—and I would know, without either of us saying a word, that he was bound for the oil field six hours across the state. That look. Freedom, desperation, adventure, meth, money . . . it was perhaps the only time I would harbor a vague respect for a gas station ruffian. There was something so brave about heading out there that who one was mattered far less than that he was headed to the Bakken at all, and this was the truism that bound everyone.
It was such a novel place, so inscrutable to those who’d never been, that the oilfield remained a secondhand story even to inhabitants of the more populous eastern edge of the state. Farmers and barflies I met on the way out warned against going out there—not that they had ever been, but they’d heard all about it. Seen it in other ways. Take Casselton, the little town where an oil train derailed in 2013 causing an inferno so tremendous that people could feel the heat through their windshields a half mile away. The following year, oil began displacing the farmers’ crops on the tracks, delaying their transport of grain. “Warren Buffett can go screw himself,” several farmers told me, alluding to the billionaire’s ownership of the Burlington North–Santa Fe railroad. They already had a dim impression upon hearing of oil workers who’d make $17,000 in a month or two, fly to Las Vegas, then come home broke and eat ramen noodles. And another fellow from Casselton speaking of the supposed violence: “You wanted to go to a bar and have a beer—physical assault charges are up . . . and someone’s going to beat you up? You can go get a six-pack and sit home and watch Wheel of Fortune.”
One could travel there by taking the interstate all the way across North Dakota, then going up Highway 85, which formed the backbone of the oilfield and ran 1,479 miles from El Paso to the Canadian border. But to really understand the place, a traveler ought to make a series of northern and westerly turns from Jamestown and its iconic buffalo sculpture, into long and green hollows of feral quiet that ran hundreds of miles. Get out in some smudge of a town like Harvey to fill the tank again—shiver in the eyes of stillness that beamed over that endless expanse—retreat to the car as if to escape forces that would pull a human interloper into the fissures of the earth. Remember this upon arriving at the western flank of the state, where trucks and rigs and men ran roughshod and nature was the trespasser.
I spent seven weeks in the oilfield during 2014, including a stint cashiering at a truck stop for all of June, a month that would make world history for being the final peak of oil’s historic run trading at more than $100 a barrel. I lived in western North Dakota from April 2015 to January 2016 to conduct more in-depth research, finding that it was then, as the oilfield matured, that the missteps sown during the boom came to the fore. It was a story that would last for at least a generation, and over time I shifted my interest to investors and longtime residents of North Dakota, knowing they would live with the legacy far longer than the mass of transients who left after the easy profits dwindled.
North Dakota was always a trusting place, where a handshake was as good as a contract and nobody was a stranger—and yet this is a book threaded by mistrust and shaken faith. Even the most naïve among them became hardened to unscrupulous outsiders, as they discovered people were not who they seemed and grand promises danced away like mirages on the prairie. Landowners became leery that regulators would protect their interests against Big Oil, and migrants knew they could not count on the structures of mainstream society—from corporations to the government— to advance their lot. They had only themselves.
Many didn’t foresee the boom lasting much longer and hustled for a profit as fast as they could get it. Now was what mattered; later, an afterthought. Made-in-America exuberance abounded— and with it, a great deal of waste: illegally dumped oilfield brine, pipeline spills, trash scattered along the highway, the excesses of a boom revealed after the fall. Critics decried the transformation of their home into an industrial wasteland. Even the migrants were spoken about as refuse: oilfield trash, white trash, society’s castouts, the broken and disposable. This sense of things thrown away came into sharper relief after oil prices saw the worst rout since the eighties and empty oil trailers and tanks scattered like the old farmsteads, relics of different eras but the same American way.
This is not a tome on fracking. Nor should this be taken as a comprehensive account of the Bakken oilfield, a topic too vast and multifaceted for one book. This is a narrative, on-the-ground account of capitalism, industrialization, and rugged individualism in twenty-first-century America. This book is about what that Ponzi scheme symbolizes: the ways in which the largest oil rush in modern US history wrestled with ephemeral and lasting interests, scam and legitimacy, and the power and failings of free enterprise.
Excerpted from AMERICAN OUTPOST by Maya Rao, Republished with permission of PublicAffairs, a division of Hachette Book Group. Copyright © Maya Rao, 2018.
North Dakota was turned upside down by the innovation of fracking—drawing waves of people seeking new fortunes. A great new oil boom, unrivaled in decades had implications for the local economy, the landscape, the environment and Dakotans’ sense of themselves. Author Maya Rao captures the wild tale in her new book “Great American Outpost: Dreamers, Mavericks and the Making of An Oil Frontier.”
This hour, On Point: the Bakken oil fields.
- David Folkenflik