Thirty Two Magazine by Jill Blaeser

f e at u r e

The Last Days of the Creative Class Ten years after Richard Florida’s ‘The Rise of the Creative Class’ Frank Bures discovers it may have been a myth. He asks: Why were we so eager to believe it?

$6.50

singer haley bonar Her Dreams, Unedited. arts & culture At the Walker, the 1980s Are Back current affairs Cheer Up, the Midwest Will Rise Again uptown’s secrets “Someone Got Married in the Poetry Section Once”

about

2012

m i n n e s o ta m i n d s e x p l o r i n g o u r t i m e s .

The New Twin Cities Magazine

July/August

You Say You Want a Revolution

b y m a g g i e r ya n s a n d f o r d

Maybe Minnesota is having a renaissance. Now what?

You may have heard the rumors. In recent months, at least four local and national media sources have entered the argument over whether or not Minnesota is having a cultural renaissance. I prefer to call it a Minnessance. So you know where I fall on the issue. I grew up in Seattle, but lived in Minneapolis for a few years when I was young; I have fond memories of my mom taking me to the MIA and quizzing me on the artists’ names. So when I moved out to attend Macalester, I already knew the Twin Cities to be a hotbed of cultural happenings: the best regional theatre in the country, one of the most highly regarded art museums, and Prince—the man himself—I mean yes, we’re all sick of the hype, but as an eighteen-year-old kid, what more could I want? Still, I got a lot of, “Where are you going to school again? Michigan. . .?” and, “So, you’re studying agriculture?” I admit it, I didn’t love that reputation. In fact, it wasn’t until my senior year, when I met my now-husband, a Saint Paul native that I really began to appreciate what the Cities had to offer. We feasted in Northeast and on University Avenue. He played me Rhymesayers, Har Mar Super Star, Lifter Puller; took me to the Turf Club, the Triple Rock, the Museum of Russian Art. Together, we discovered Burlesque of North America, screen printers who now share CO Exhibitions with Permanent Art & Design Group. “O brave new world, That has such people in’t!” I thought, totally making that line up right off the top of my head. But by then, the egotist in me had already made plans to move to New York. I think I felt I had something to prove. Just before we took off, I had a conversation with my grandmother, in Seattle, about cities and how to choose one. She had lived in San Francisco in the late fifties and early sixties and had hung out with the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Peter Voulkos. My granddad passed down a tie he got from Dizzy Gillespie. My grandmother said to me, “What you really hope to find is a moment in history. Like San Francisco when we were there. That was special.”I thought, “No kidding, Gramma, that was special. Like it’s ever gonna happen to me.” But of course, I dreamed that it would. In New York City, I watched the mottled masses of young folks teeming like rats from the L train; they all seemed to be trying their DebbieHarry-damnedest to chase that same dream. I’m not trying to compare the Twin Cities to New York City.

DC is an award-winning children’s book illustrator who shows her “sinister but sweet” artwork nationwide. This October, she will be the featured artist at Gallery 360, located at Xerxes and 50th in Minneapolis with an opening reception on Saturday, October 6. DC will also be showcasing her work in coordination with the St. Paul Art Crawl, from October 12 -14, at AZ Gallery in Lowertown St. Paul. More art by DC Ice can be found on www.dcice.com.

And I did love it there. I had a moderately successful sketch comedy group and a budding career in television. But it didn’t feel like a moment. This past winter, I spent a few months in Portland, another colorful, youthful city on a river...whose moment already seems to be turning into a myth. Plus, the weather was so mild; I found myself missing that communal feeling of an entire metropolis hunkering down like a band of Voyageurs ready to cut off their frostbitten fingers without blinking an eye. The Twin Cities are the new badass, a little voice in my head insisted. THE Cities. That is the place and this is the time. How do I know? I don’t, really. History will tell, and we have no business preempting it, to be honest. Call it a hunch: I like it here. I’m not going to list all the local talents you “should have” heard of by now (that’s kind of the thing about getting big, it should go without saying). If you want specifics, keep reading this magazine. I, along with many other enthusiastic writers and thinkers, are only too excited to discuss our favorite bands, our favorite visual artists, restaurateurs, performing artists, writers, storytellers, comedians, gallerists, designers, publishers, philanthropists, inventors, entrepreneurs, and those in-between folks who defy labels, running their salons and teach-ins, art shanties atop frozen lakes, adult education nights and trade schools, constantly mixing media for epic, citywide, all-night-and-into-the-next-day random acts of culture. This place is lousy with people who have taken their creative, capable minds and committed them to finding ways to make art relevant in the twenty-first century. Beyond 494. Beyond so-called “flyover country.” If this sounds like a manifesto, it should. Sure, a manifesto is something that young upstarts write, hungry to change the world. It’s also something you write when you have a really great idea. So let’s do it, and keep it civil, simple and sincere: This is our moment. We don’t need to say it out loud or to anyone else, let our work speak for itself, let word spread organically, like a hashtag prairie fire. But for Christ’s sake, let’s start acting like we’re onto something. Quit with the polite lack of braggery and the Minnesota niceties, and let us start thinking of ourselves in bolder terms, holding ourselves to new standards. Talk is cheap. Let’s do this. Let us never be satisfied, never complacent, never proud, but let us burn, burn, burn like— wait. Jack Kerouac said that. Let’s do our own thing.

by josh cook

The Princess of Owatonna Owatonna, Minnesota—we like our patterns, our routines: fishing, hunting, hockey, swimming in the summer, prayer, and beer. I’d love to announce myself as the son of a long line of doctors or philosophers or explorers, but that’s pure fantasy. I’m an amateur historian, a fortuitous inheritor of a lofty-sounding vocation after college in the big city, which around here, means St. Paul. I’m a gangly six-two, a recent divorcee, and these days preferring people at a distance. Today I open my office door and step on a crisp white sheet of cotton paper, stamped with Steele County’s egregiously gaudy seal. It’s a summons. The city council wants to see me in the Round Room, our mostly-vacant space with the half-moon desk and two rickety oak tables that serves as our court room. With resources at full nosedive, I’ve often imagined this day during my late-night studies of closeout whiskey and the History Channel, and I want to walk in there now; salute, bow, and be done with it. Midwesterners: we’re too damn genial. Call a meeting—for what? A send-off package of life-time discounts at the par-three? I shamble to the bathroom and lock myself inside a stall, working at my teeth with some emergency floss I keep stashed in my wallet. After a few minutes of cathartic gum-bleeding, an old-timer from the council—the velcro shoes, a dead giveaway—pounds on the stall. Gill Sherwood, the historical society’s “president” scuffles with a stack of blueprints as I enter the Round Room. Except my DNR friend Mike Wetherby, they’re all pushing seventy; haggard, and disconcertingly beaming. This is the sixth time I’ve seen Gill in person, the other five for my bi-annual review. He’s a moderately-inflated fellow with a glowing face and floppy white hair. “Thumbs up, Jimmy. Great work,” he always tells me before launching into some family story— grandma’s biscuits or his nephew’s weed whacker mishap. Gill clears his throat until he gets to coughing, thirty years of smoking Luckies, no doubt. I reach inside my blazer pocket but come up empty. No drink, no pills, no nothing; my morning headache the size of those jumbo bologna packages sold down at Skip’s Grocery. “Look, Jimmy. Mr.—” Gill checks his notes. Then

he pronounces my last name naive instead of Nee-vee. “We’ve gone over the city budget with the mayor and—” Gill mumbles into the table, trailing off until I can’t hear him. That’s when Gladys, my seventy-one-year-old secretary, speaks up, her voice like the creak of a door. “You’re such a handsome Harry.” “In other words,” I say, “I’m shit-canned.” “Come now, son,” Gill says. “How’s this? My job’s diminished.” “Reintegrated,” Gill says. “With the funds—a swimming pool.” He waits for me to say something. When I don’t, he puts on a toothy grin and nods, his hair flopping, and says, “We’d like you to manage the grounds.” “A lifeguard.” “Come now, son,” Gill says, gesturing as if directing traffic. “A babysitter, then?” I survey the other members: their skin translucent, eyes aglaze. I was a farce from the beginning. My dusty office; two real tasks: Rearrange the museum display and rearrange the museum display. I turn and saunter to the foyer. I go over to the framed sepia of the Straight River. Underneath it reads, Wakpá Owóthanna. Like an imaginary buoy I bounce my finger over the river’s path. In the fridge behind Gladys’ desk I find a bottle of cheap wine we’d served to the four geriatric donors and their sons and daughters a month ago, most of whom took grimacing sips. I pull the cork. Two oblations. I’ll be the first one to admit that I’ve been unfaithful to History, my first love, my mistress when I was married. I salute the sepia and the bust of Chief Wabesa. I walk back into the Round Room. A few of the older council members cheer. “Give me the weekend,” I say. Gill and Mike deliberate, whispering behind the sterile Mr. Marjory’s back, and finally acquiesce me two days. Two days to conjure an argument for the preservation of me.  

The town is an armpit. Mention it to someone in the Cities, they’ll guffaw. We suffer the classic symptoms of the great American epidemics— underpaid, overworked, paranoid, stuck. Like our cuisine—burgers and potatoes and cheese—we’re comfortable. Ask us how were doing? “Excited”

means primetime. “Good” means bored. “Hanging in there” means I’m tired. And “All right” means I had a fight with the Missus. Here, farms diminish. Here, on any given night, when one walks the neighborhoods, most windows flicker like blue-white boxes in the dark. Here, there is only one bookstore, The Little Professor. Technically there are two, the second a paperback exchange by Interstate Mills in a building nothing more than a dilapidated garage, owned by Midge Thunderbauke, a retired woman, who sits in her sidewalk lawn chair and reads bestsellers all day. Where spring cleaning housewives donate their dusty high school bounty, their pharmacology textbooks, decades of Mademoiselle back issues. And, as I flip through our one official account—a pamphlet, really—I realize that our single claim to history is most likely fiction. If I were a real, classic chronicler, perhaps I would begin with the settlement of Owatonna in 1853, Steele County’s largest. Perhaps I would mention the proliferation of the German and the Irish, the abounding Lutherans, the moderate-right politics. Or delve the juicier past, how the Klu Klux Klan made its slow way here in 1923, and when they couldn’t find Blacks or Jews, they targeted Catholics. I’m convinced that if there’s anything that will save my job, it’s the princess alive in this thin archive.  

It’s 1808, and via my interpretation, she, Princess Owatonna, daughter of Chief Wabesa, falls ill, bedridden for weeks. She can’t collect birch bark for utensils or help the other women harvest manoomin. An elder mixes up a panacea of sheep sorrel, burdock root, slippery elm bark and rhubarb—but the princess keeps slipping in and out of a coma. When Wabesa tries to sleep, he dreams only of a burial mound, a freshly erected jiibegamig, a wooden marker inscribed with the tribe’s doodem. One night he bridles his pinto, murmuring prayers to his ancestors. Miles later, the mount starts to buck. Checking its legs for burs or bruising, the Chief finds them unharmed, but saturated. He hears a rolling gurgle in the distance and leads the horse to a natural spring by a creek, where water bubbles up through the soil by the shore. He throws himself to the ground and fills his canteen. He drinks and fills it again. A force overtakes him. He strips and flails water over the horse. On his way home, Wabesa sings tribal

songs about immortality. “Drink this,” he says to his blue-faced daughter. “Father, please, I cannot.” She raises her hand and pats her heart over and over and then pats the Chief’s chest. They interlace fingers. He props up her head, drains half the canteen over lips that look like cracked ice, down her chest, and onto the bed before she can summon the strength to open her mouth. The sound of that first gulp sounds to the chief like a thousand jumping pike. The princess’ grip tightens; the Chief’s fingers go purple. The princess seizes the canteen with both palms and drinks until it empties. The next day they marshal the tribe and ride toward the springs, christening their new home Owatonna. For the next five days they carry the sick and the wounded to the water. They sing songs and dance around as many fires as it might someday take to light up Steele County. No one knows what tribe belongs to the myth, but I’ve heard the Ojibwa, Cheyenne, Sioux, and Dakotas all reference the legend. Even the Swedes brandish stories about how the princess was actually a local farm-girl.  

I stand in front of Princess Owatonna’s statue, wondering what she thinks. Come Monday, what do I do? Mike Wetherby assures me that his colleagues are unimpressed; all they’ve been wondering about is whether or not the pool will have a high dive. I reach up and run my fingers over the feathered skirt so intricately carved into the marble. I could gather stories of swimming tragedies, crunch the pragmatics. Upkeep costs, lifeguards, health codes, permits. Shower facilities, cleaning products, chlorine, lockers. I study the soil, trying to decipher the footprints, the cracks and the roots underneath. I turn to make sure I’m alone. I get down on all fours and put my ear to the ground.

Josh Cook holds an MFA from Pacific University, and his work has been featured in The Iowa Review, Spontaneous Combustion, and Guitar World Magazine. He lives with his lovely wife in Minneapolis, and when he’s not writing, he’s honing his juggling skills.

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books

2012 [midwest]

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Author Benjamin Percy recently relocated from Iowa to Northfield, Minnesota to take a position as writer-inresidence at St. Olaf College. Percy has written two novels and two short story collections; he is the recipient of an NEA fellowship and a Whiting Writers’ Award and has been included in the Best American Short Stories anthology. He regularly contributes to magazines like Time, GQ, Men’s Journal and the Paris Review.

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Heynen, best known for his short stories, stretches his legs with this new novel about worlds colliding in small-town Iowa.

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So what prompted your exit from your literary haven, such as it was, down in Iowa?

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finnish style in the twin cities finnstyle [mpls]

When Finnish design blew up this year with Helsinki’s selection as design capitol of the world, Ben Horn was not surprised. The title, he says “has put Finland back in the limelight”. Ten years ago, Horn brought Finnish design to the Twin Cities when he opened Finnstyle. “Finnish design has wowed the design world since the early 1950s. Their products are practical and beautiful and innovative with materials and technology.” The bold, colorful patterns of Marimekko, sleek Iitala glassware, and modern Alvar Aalto housewares and furnishings line the shop in the Warehouse District of Minneapolis. So what is it about Finnish design that warrants the title of design capitol of the world? “Finnish products are high-quality and long-lasting. People appreciate that these items can be passed on to a future generation and still look and function perfectly. The Alvar Aalto vases first designed in 1936 still look cutting-edge and modern,” says Horn. In honor of their design title, the well-known companies like Marimekko and Iitala have been churning out exciting new products as well as rereleasing some old classics, which Horn has of course stocked in his store. “A new version of Kai Franck’s utilitarian Kartio glassware, first designed in 1958, is ultra thin and elegant, yet stackable and naturally easy to use on the tabletop. Also this year, Marimekko re-introduced its Helsinki print from 1952.” If you’re looking for your own piece of quintessential Finnish design, Horn has some recommendations: “Marimekko’s Unikko poppy flower print is one of the most iconic Finnish designs. Unikko dresses and tunics are especially popular and it’s always fresh because Marimekko releases new colors and updated cuts every season. Recently, Converse shoes and Marimekko joined forces, and the shoes they’ve made are cool, comfortable and really popular.” www.finnstyle.com 42

woodchuckcase, [mpls]

Don’t ask Ben VandenWymelenberg how much wood a woodchuck could chuck. He has heard that question a lot lately and doesn’t know the answer. But he does know that he wants to “put nature back in people’s lives.” The recent University of Minnesota architecture grad partnered with fellow student Kevin Groenjes to start WOODCHUCKcase, selling wooden covers for iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks. His late night idea has become a hit, with many local stores selling the cases and Best Buy recently agreeing to stock the Woodchuck. Not only a beautiful addition to electronics, the Woodchuck Case is durable and in most cases will outlive the phone or computer it’s attached to. The company hopes to be in other large retailers and on the global market soon, but until then, the pair is focused on “Woodchucking” Beats by Dre headphones, Apple’s wireless keyboard, Droid phones, and other pieces of cold electronics that could use a wooden touch. www.woodchuckcase.com

conrad table, misewell [milwaukee]

trash-to-treasure furniture design

Omforme, a Norwegian word meaning “to transform,” is turning the Twin Cities’ trash to treasures. Founded by interior designer Carter Averbeck, the Minneapolis artisan shop transforms discarded and What is the time period that is most often discarded? Currently the most items come from the late mid-century period up until the late 1970’s. But we see items from every time period during the twentieth century being discarded. Where do you typically find your furniture? We find furniture in a variety of places from Craigslist, old storage warehouses, yard sales to items thrown out or set on the curb as trash. Because we are focused on a mission of saving good items for refurbishing, anything considered passé by others are pieces we find the most appealing. Is there one neighborhood that is particularly prolific in throwing out old stuff? For the most part, there isn’t one specific neighborhood but rather those that are going through a transitory phase from humdrum to gentrification. Houses in older neighborhoods get sold, remodeled and much of what is in those homes get thrown out during the process without a second thought.

Sweden is best known for its meatballs, cold weather, and easy-to-assemble furniture. Replace meatballs with beer and you could be talking about Milwaukee these days. Misewell was founded by Vincent and Paul Georgeson who share a belief that the best materials and craftsmen combine to make the best design. The brothers have been pumping out award-winning furniture design since 2009. The Milwaukee version may value locally sourced materials and a Midwestern sturdiness more than its Swedish counterpart, but their commitment to functionality and an easy assembly is the same. Misewell’s Conrad table is one of the best examples of all of the above with a locally harvested walnut top and legs that easily snap into a steel bracket, all handmade in Minnesota. The Milwaukee brothers will be releasing their newest line of furniture in the near future. www.misewell.com

omforme [mpls]

What is the golden rule of revamping old furniture? Our golden rule is: Does the piece have good lines? Many aspects go into that, such as if the item has an iconic shape like the Louis XVI style chairs we found slated for a landfill or a classic modern outline on a dresser that is still considered stylish in our current market. What many people don’t realize is that furniture styles actually change very little over the decades—only the outer shell changes. A sofa’s fabrics can look dated, yet the lines of the piece are great. When we transform a piece, we consider the frame and what would be a good fit as far as injections of style to breathe new life into a piece. It could be a fresh coat of lacquer, reupholstering, adding sculptural details and a host of other elements we have at our disposal to use on any given item of furniture.

Do people not understand what they are throwing away? Sometimes we wonder that ourselves when we find really great items left by the side of the curb. I believe there is an overwhelming habit to just throw away things in favor of new ones. So much of our society is built around the notion that dispensable things are somehow better: food, products, clothing, furniture. The very idea of transforming a piece of furniture doesn’t come naturally to most people, hence buying new is easier. I also think that even if a person knows a piece of furniture might have value, they may not have the creative vision or motivation to transform a piece into a new look. Why did you decide to turn this into a business? This has really been a passionate hobby of mine since, forever! I would find a great piece of furniture that had seen better days, revamp it and use it in my home. With the right amount of creative thinking, anything can be transformed into something better. Being in the Interior Design business for as long as I have, I have seen incredible things come from that world: cool, sleek, cutting edge and expensive. There is an overwhelming abundance of accessories and furniture being manufactured at breakneck speed and it got me to wondering: What happens to all this stuff? Where does it go when it’s no longer given value? That answer is usually: in the trash. Our landfills are at the brink of being overstuffed with perfectly good items of furniture. By taking these items and giving them a new lease on life, it’s has been amazingly gratifying to witness how people are now starting to see the value in older furniture that has been transformed through the artisans at Omforme. www.omformedesign.com 43

The Flat Tire Man about town Andy Sturdevant finds himself stranded in the hinterland

The plan was simple. Take the Northstar line north to Big Lake with my bicycle on board, and then bike an hour or so west to Lake Maria State Park. After arriving, I’d stay in one of the pristine new camper cabins for a few days, grilling things, looking at birds, reading, and enjoying the solitude. Having lived in Minnesota for nearly a decade, it seemed ridiculous I’d never really taken advantage of the state park system. A train trip followed by a leisurely afternoon bicycle ride seemed to be the best way to do just that. Somewhere west of Monticello, about half an hour into my ride, my rear tire blew out after thumping over a discarded piece of someone’s bumper on the side of the road. At first, I had that perverse sense of excitement you often have when an emergency you’ve planned for finally occurs. I edged over to the shoulder, dismounted, flipped my bike over, and removed the wheel. It was an emergency I’d planned for, but not well, as it turned out. I tried to patch the tube, but it was a lengthwise tear the patch wouldn’t quite cover. I tried my spare tube, which turned out to be the wrong size. Somehow a 28-inch tube had made its way into a package claiming only twentyseven inches. The extra inch ballooned out of the rim like a rubber polyp. Cars kept speeding by me. I took the contents of my pannier—bike tools, steaks wrapped in foil, a Coleman lantern—and dumped them out around the side of the road in an effort to make my situation look more pathetic. Maybe someone would pull over and offer to drive me into town. There were no takers. Even a county highway patrolman flew by without so much as a wave. I kept thinking, with a growing sense of city-centric rage, that if I were sitting with a flat tire on the side of the road in Minneapolis, passers-by would be tripping over themselves to lend a hand. And if it were St. Paul, they’d probably offer to let me borrow their car. “Here, take this,” I imagined these spectral St. Paulites saying, “while I call my friend at the bike

shop and have him bring a new tube by.” After a half-hour, a pair of late-model cars slowly pulled over onto the shoulder, a few hundred yards away. A teenage boy and girl stepped out of each one, looked at me for a moment, and then spread a blanket by the side of the road. They had a brown bag with a bottle in it, which they both took a nip from. Then they started making out. I had apparently broken down near their appointed rendezvous site. A half-hour passed. The couple disengaged, and the boy waved at me. “Hey,” they said, walking over. “You look sort of pissed off.” “Yeah,” I said. “I am. Look at this mess. Why the hell haven’t you offered to help me? Or any of the other twodozen cars that have blown past? Where’re those heartland values I’m always reading about?” The girl sneered. “You think just because this is the country we have some pure, selfless desire to help you? C’mon, this isn’t The Andy Griffith Show.” “You people from the Cities are all the same,” said the boy. “If you think it’d be any different in Minneapolis, you’re totally deluded. You’re just attaching your dumb prejudices to a situation that has nothing to do with geography.” “Yeah, it’s not our fault you can’t fix a flat,” said the girl. “We’re just here to enjoy our regular weekly highway shoulder make-out date, not restore your faith in the American people’s innate goodness. We’ve got lives, you know.” “I can’t believe you’re making this out to be an urbanrural issue,” the boy sniffed. “That’s really crass, dude. Blow out a tire on the side of Hiawatha Avenue sometime and let me know how that turns out for you.” Then they both turned around, and walked away. Of course, nothing after the boy’s wave actually happened. Instead, the teens got back in their respective automobiles, keeping the distance between us, and drove off. As evening rapidly approached, I set out on the long walk to the campsite, into the darkness.

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feature

in the land of

oil and money By Bill Donahue

In North Dakota, the siren call of the shale has swelled the Bakken oil fields with workers and equipment. With an unprecedented demand for goods and services, the town of Williston has become a haven for fortune hunters who left their old lives behind to find their share of the American Dream.

t was dark when I got there, and cold outside, with nary a tree to offer reprieve from the harsh midnight wind ripping across the dry plains of western North Dakota. I had nowhere to stay. All the motels in Williston were booked for the next year on account of the oil boom, which had just brought roughly twenty thousand newcomers to a once-modest town of twelve thousand. I only had the name of a man camp with me as I drove four hours north from the airport in Bismarck. There was supposedly a single bed waiting for me for ninety dollars a night amid a warren of prefab homes otherwise rented by oil workers. But the hotelier, an old rancher-cum-entrepreneur, was a bit squirrely to deal with, eschewing credit cards and playing it close to the vest each time I pressed him to reveal the physical whereabouts of his establishment. “Just call me when you get here,” he kept saying as I wended my way up through the badlands. In the dark, on the barren plains fifteen miles or so west of Williston, I was simply unable to find the place. So now, needing shelter, I phoned another one of the myriad entrepreneurs who had flocked to the Williston area since 2008 hoping for a slice of the $2 billion that the oil industry is now pouring into western North Dakota every month, thanks to the Bakken formation, a shale-rich bed of rock that also underlies eastern Montana and southern Saskatchewan, harboring at least four billion barrels of crude.

Mike Teague, 57, isn’t a hotel guy. No, back home in Spokane, Washington he ran a video company, Suburban White Guys Productions, and broke even, more or less, making films about four-wheeling—that is, guys mashing over sagebrush and up cliffs in pick-up trucks with gargantuan black tires. In 2010, he launched another business, trying to sell insurance via instant message. He went broke, his wife left him, and then in his misery, he googled the word “boomtown.” He learned about North Dakota. He left inside of a month. In Williston, Teague had visions of a multi-tentacled empire that would cost him roughly half a million dollars to build. When I met him, he was ready to buy a two-thousand-square-foot prefab home in which he planned to live, rent out nine bedrooms, and also house his fledgling production firm, Vision First Media, which would do video and photo promotion, most of it online, for Williston-area oil field service companies—pipe suppliers, say. The house would be set on a thirteen-acre lot that Teague had picked just outside town. The property would otherwise be devoted to a parking lot rented to oil-field trucks, as well as an eco-friendly truck wash using recycled water. Teague was trying to land a $300,000 bank loan when we met, and meanwhile saving up the cash he earned by driving a grader, leveling the earth on which concrete wellheads would sit. In 2011, he worked 340 days and made $130,000. But still he was living in a crowded RV with his Vision First lieutenant, thirty-year-old Seth 33

Wolther, a heavy-metal singer and erstwhile Vegas strip-club manager who calls Teague Coach. The two men have their rig parked in a wheat field, hard by three silver grain silos. Quarters are cramped, but the booth seats by the kitchen table fold down into a bed. Graciously, Teague availed this berth to me. “It’s all yours,” he yelped over the phone. When I arrived, I found a ruddy gray-haired fellow wearing nothing but a blue terrycloth bathrobe as he hunched over a tumbler of Black Velvet whiskey. Teague’s two cats, Pretty Girl and Lover Boy, scrambled away as he rose to pump my hand with great, blowsy gusto. “Welcome to the Wild West,” he exclaimed. “Can I fix you a drink?”

he next morning, I beheld the mayhem in Williston. On the main strip, Highway 2, every third vehicle was, it seemed, a brand new Ford F350 affixed with a trailer to bring gear to the oil rigs. There were eighteen-wheelers headed that direction too. The sound of large, laboring engines was everywhere, and the bumper stickers were menacing: “Don’t Tread on Me” and “This truck protected by Smith & Wesson,” they warned. There was dust swirling about—it had been a dry winter—and on the sides of the road, at McDonald’s and Subway and Wildcat Pizzeria, job seekers filled the booths, solitary men peering hopefully into their laptops as they commiserated. They were émigrés, all of them, from weaker economies. “There was nothing in Mobile,” I heard one fellow say, “so I came up on the train.” The Walmart parking lot, which had been a de facto campground for months, was off limits for sleeping now, but still trailers and RVs were everywhere. I talked to one weary sixty-year-old Williston local who told me that he began renting out fifteen trailer spaces in his yard after strangers knocked on his door. “And now I’m a social worker and a psychologist for these people,” he said as we sat before his large-screen TV, surrounded by campers waiting to use the shower inside his house. “I’m working 24/7 to give them a safe haven.” At the south end of Highway 2, downtown Williston was a little scuffed by the onslaught. There was the odd broken window, and sandwich wrappers swirled about. Still, downtown shone like a pearl inside the crust of an oyster. There is no Starbucks there, and the ancient businesses, many of them with their own proud neon signs, bespeak a stolid small-town idyll. There is Gaffaney’s Stationary, Conlin’s Furniture, Pierce Steak House, and Sportsman’s Lounge. The marquis at the Grand Theatre which is still showing movies, reads, “The Screen Talks”. Until recently, Williston was quietly dying, like the Texan small town in The Last Picture Show. But then in 2007, engineers discovered a new method for shak-

ing petroleum out of the Bakken. Stealing a page from natural gas prospectors, who had been hydrofracking intensively for a decade, they began fracturing subterranean rock by gushing vast quantities of sand- and chemical-laden water into their wells. North Dakota oil prospecting had once been a matter of wildcatting and striking pay dirt about twenty percent of the time. Suddenly the hit rate leapt to ninety-five percent, and Williston exploded with pilgrims seeking their fortune. Launching a hydrofracking business costs millions of dollars, and large oil-field operators—in North Dakota, these include Hess and Halliburton— need small-timers to haul water and pipe. The support workers need amenities: restaurants, hotels, houses, gas stations, and convenience stores. The upward thrust of Williston’s economy appears to carry an almost pheremonal power on the streets of the town. People in Williston were giddy and bug-eyed, manic with exuberance. At Mondak Motor Sports, for instance, manager Josh Kringen told me that revenues were up two hundred percent since January, when Mondak relocated from Montana. “We’ve got nineteen-year-old kids here making a hundred thousand dollars a year on their first job,” Kringen said. “They’ll come in here and buy a twelvethousand-dollar ATV on an impulse.” At the Williston Mixed Martial Arts & Self Defense Center, owner and instructor Brandon “The Loose Cannon” Anderson aims to tap the same market. A reigning light-heavyweight champ in Montana, twentyseven-year-old Anderson told me he had just settled into this cavernous twenty-five-thousand-square-foot space once home to a furniture store. His only sign was a hand-painted sandwich board perched by the roadside. He didn’t yet own an actual cage for cage fighting. The structure, bought and paid for, was being retrofitted in Montana. Still, Anderson envisioned a dazzling future. “There are hardly any women in Williston,” he reasoned. “Guys are not getting laid. They’re fighting in bars, and we’re going to channel that energy. This is going to be the fourth largest Mixed Martial Arts gym in the nation. We’re gonna do it!” Behind all bravado, of course, is the specter of failure. Williston has boomed on oil before, most recently in the early eighties; back then, things fizzled almost overnight. In early December 1985, OPEC decided to flood the world market with oil. Prices dropped, and prospecting in Williston suddenly wasn’t worthwhile. “I didn’t see it coming,” said Ardean Aafedt, a Williston oil investor who owned a local hotel at the time. “We were booked solid, and then a couple years later we sold an empty building.” Some forty or fifty other businesses skipped town, ceding their buildings to the City of Williston and leaving the city on the hook for twenty-five million dollars in unpaid sewer and water setup fees.

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“Guys are not getting laid. They are fighting in bars, and we’re going to channel that energy.”

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his boom doesn’t seem poised to end in a repeat fiasco. The price of oil isn’t likely to decline, given China’s and India’s growing consumer base, and the multinationals working in the Bakken seem to have deep confidence in the rock’s potential. Six of them have proposed to build multi-billion-dollar pipelines linking North Dakota’s oil patches to processors in Oklahoma and Texas. Williston-area boosters believe drilling will persist on the Bakken for ten years, at least. Still, there’s no guarantee that fracking will stay legal. The Environmental Protection Agency is looking closely at the practice as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth, among others, clamor for a nationwide ban. In December 2011, the EPA found that, in fracking for natural gas, prospectors had polluted drinking water beneath Pavillion, Wyoming. That same month, Youngstown, Ohio suffered two small earthquakes after gas frackers pumped wastewater deep into underground sandstone. Cincinnati just banned fracking. Myriad other cities—among them, Detroit, Albany, and Berkeley, California—have likewise passed antifracking laws, and so did the state of New Jersey. North Dakota won’t likely follow suit, but the EPA could clamp down and stymie Williston-area drilling by, for instance, setting stringent rules about how well operators dispose of their chemical waste. Even if fracking stays legal, entrepreneurs in North Dakota will still face an expiration-date problem: Williston’s population boom won’t last forever. Sometime in the next ten or so years, drilling will stop on the Bakken. Pumps will continue sucking up oil, but running a well will require only one person, as opposed to the 120 needed for drilling. In other words, the consumer base will sharply diminish. “I’m not saying it’s gambling, investing in Williston,” said Mark Schill, a North Dakota-based economist who writes about community development for the website New Geography. “The place is thriving. But you better do your homework before you go there. And you’re taking some risks, starting a business there. Everything costs more in Williston--labor and land and materials—and things are shifting so rapidly, it’s just hard to tell what will happen.”

uckily, Mike Teague enjoys life on the edge. His closest friends are all in their thirties, and he bonded with them a little over a decade ago when Seth Wolther’s brother, Jason, was the lead singer for a Spokane cover band called Party Central. “I met Jason,” recalls Teague, who has been a heavy equipment operator since high school, “and I had this epiphany that I was going to get into the video business.” So Suburban White Guys was born. The boxes on the videos warned, “Dangerous and often stupid auto-

motive insanity contained inside.” The road trips to shoots were legendary. On one occasion, Wolther remembers, “Coach was standing on the breakfast bar in his underwear, playing Rock Guitar at three in the morning as we listened to REO Speedwagon.” Eventually, Teague had a second epiphany: insurance. Sold via Facebook. He set up a war room in his basement, and with two of his Party Central chums, he began refining his scheme. “We were on fire,” he remembers. “I was doing research to see what sales words would work and what religions were more likely to buy insurance. I was giving those guys personal business coaching. We were working eighteen hours a day. I was going to be filthy rich if it worked.” It didn’t work. His wife, ignored for months, left him. “Basically,” he says, “she fired me.” Now, in the RV, Teague was tuned into his cats. “This one’s a huntress,” he said of Pretty Girl, “and the other one”—he gestured at Lover Boy—”he’s my attack cat. These cats can kill three mice in an hour. Even when I’m sleeping, I can hear them crunching on skulls.” Teague had a girlfriend back in Spokane; she was thirty-five and a “professional student,” as he put it. Teague was helping to pay her tuition. But the relationship was tumultuous. After a fight, Teague dispatched Wolther to the woman’s home to repo a Jeep that he’d given her. Later, he gave the Jeep back. By his shaving mirror, on a slip of green memo paper, Teague had written a note to himself: “I do not seek women’s approvel.” There was another note that read, “Don’t forget u r beautiful!” and also one very outdated Playboy, a 1995 issue featuring Nancy Sinatra celebrating her fiftieth birthday au naturel. With me, Teague was guileless and sweet in his rough-and-tumble way. When I asked him, “What if the oil boom here goes bust?” he cupped his palms to his temples, as though he was being attacked from all sides, and whimpered, “I’m fucked.” Teague planned to buy the land for his new home and business venture from the same farmer who was renting him RV space. The price was not yet set, though it would be somewhere around $70,000, Teague told me. He didn’t have a written contract, but he was confident that the farmer, who he considered a friend, would cede him the flattest and most easily developable land on his spread. He planned to do the grading work himself, with a machine borrowed from his current employer, Hexco construction. “It should be real easy,” he told me. “Coach has common sense,” Wolther added. “You get that working with dirt.” Wolther himself had migrated to North Dakota just a week before, after he’d failed to meet rent, freelancing as a gopher for rock bands. He was living in

Mike Teague was living in a crowded RV with Seth Wolther, a heavy-metal singer who calls Teague Coach.

the RV gratis, but he nonetheless carried himself with swaggering confidence. He had led his metal band, From Sword to Sunrise, on tour throughout the lower forty-eight, and he had seen things. He had savoirfaire. “Bill,” he confided to me at one point, “you meet a lot of beautiful women out on the road.” Later, Wolther mocked me with thespian flourish. “I am a writer,” he declaimed. “I must sit in the Subway sandwich shop all alone! I must create with my pen!” When we stopped by the Williston Chamber of Commerce one day to connect to the Wi-Fi, he was showily grateful. “Thank you, ladies,” he said with a lilt. Wolther arrived in Williston to become Vision First’s sales guy, and he met success almost immedi-

ately—with the Chamber ladies. In exchange for a membership, they enlisted him to shoot promotional photos. “And then,” Wolther told me eventually, over drinks, “I was like, ‘Okay, the last time I shot a photo was, like, in high school.’” He and Teague bought a camera for a thousand dollars and then went on a practice photo shoot. They drove north toward the Canadian border, working through a twenty-pack and a fifth of Jameson as Wolther photographed the oil rigs lining the straight, desolate gravel roads. He got several shots of Teague hanging out the car door at high speed. “That was the tutorial,” Wolther told me. A week or so later, the Williston office of Burlington Northern, the freight company, hired Wolther and his camera for a day, at two hundred dollars an hour. 37

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ne afternoon, I met with the editor of The Williston Herald, Jacob Brooks, and asked him if there were any new businesses in town that gave him a warm feeling. Brooks gazed skyward for a second, thinking, and then talked instead about Alphabet Junction, a beloved school supplies store that had just shut down, unable to pay its rent, in a town where commercial real estate values have tripled in recent years. Later, Brooks ran an editorial beseeching readers to identify a single “feel-good business that has surfaced recently…something that makes you say ‘Hey, this is really good for the community!’ If it’s out there,” he wrote, “I’ll do a whole story on this business.” Brooks got one online response, from a joker who nominated Heartbreakers, a Williston strip bar. “Technically,” the joker quipped, “that should be in your category of ‘feel-good’ shouldn’t it?” The situation wasn’t that bleak, though, for I found a handful of entrepreneurs bringing conscience and care to the boom. Among them was developer Earl Westereng, a Harvard grad who’s been living back in his native North Dakota for five decades now. Westereng, seventy-two, waxed historical when we met, noting that North Dakotans had a long tradition of looking out for one another. “We’ve got the Bank of North Dakota,” he said. “Nowhere else has a state bank. And we’ve got North Dakota Mill and Elevator.” But esprit de corps is a tricky thing in a boomtown. “It used to be that if I found someone drunk and freezing on my doorstep, I’d take him in and give him a hot shower,” Westerberg said. “But now?” His voice trailed off, but then he added that he would soon turn Williston’s grand, abandoned junior high school into forty-four affordable housing units for senior citizens displaced by Williston’s skyrocketing rents. The building was once Westerberg’s property. He recently sold it to Williston’s Lutheran Social Services in hopes that it could guide the $8.5 million renovation in ways that he couldn’t. “If you’re a private developer here,” he said, exaggerating only slightly, “the banks want you to just throw up a building with thirty-six units and rent out each one for $2,500 a month, so you can pay back your loan in three years. I’m not going to do that.” Around the corner from the junior high, Joel Lundeen, a forty-eight-year-old transplant from South Carolina, had just bought the vacant Elk’s Lodge, a magnificent and gabled Tudor manse built in 1913. The wealthy inventor of Xclaim laundry detergent sheets, Lundeen was converting the old club into a hotel, The Williston, envisioning a “boutique experience, where you can walk in and feel the history of the place.” His daughter, a fashion designer, was decorating the nine rooms and his son was leading the construction crews. Both of Lundeen’s grandchildren were on site as well, crawling about on the crimson rug by the bar.

Meanwhile, an independent garbage man, Will Chamley, was going green, after his business, Chamley Pipe and Salvage, got a shock last summer. “The landfill called us to tell us our trash was radioactive,” says Chamley, an amply built man who wore blue denim overalls when we met at a café. “We’d just dumped off a load of filter socks from a rig, and we went and checked it, and sure enough, those socks were hot.” The sand that frackers use, Chamley learned, contains small amounts of radioactive minerals, enabling the drillers to trace where a rock is cracking. After drilling, the radioactive water is run through filters. “We started checking the dumpsters with Geiger counters and, yup, they were sneaking those hot socks into the dumpsters—they were there in about one out of every seventy dumpsters.” Chamley began calling violators, asking them to stay legal. “A week later we’d call back and they’d say, ‘That radioactive stuff’s all gone now.’ It was scary—we didn’t know where they’d put it.” Eventually, Chamley discovered that his clients were sneaking garbage bags full of hot socks into competitors’ dumpsters, or just taking them to the Williston dump. “I live two miles from the landfill,” he said. “My water well is only twenty-eight feet deep, and I have to drink the water here for the rest of my life.” A few months ago, Chamley connected with Emerald Services, a Seattle-based waste management firm, to propose that they jointly build North Dakota’s first hazardous material facility in Williston. Together, Chamley and Emerald are now searching for $6 million in financing. “The place should be up and running next year,” Chamley told me, “There’ll be a big concrete floor, and we’ll just dump on that and sort. That way, if there’s any of those hot socks in there, we’ll know. And then we’ll haul them to the hazardous waste facility in Colorado.”

Teague pumped my hand with great, blowsy gusto. “Welcome to the Wild West,” he exclaimed. “Can I fix you a drink?”

tepping outside into the grinding noise of the traffic in Williston, I could feel a sick, rapacious hunger in the air. But the truth is that most of the people I talked to were decent and amiable and not quite at ease with the fracas around them. At a diner called Lonnie’s Roadhouse, I met Shelly Wright and Danny Dugan, a fiftyish couple who are the impresarios behind Doin’ It Right Trucking, which hauls sand and gravel to the oil fields. They had migrated to Williston from Idaho fifteen months before amid financial troubles. Back home in Hayden Lake, Doin’ It Right’s workload was so thin that Wright had to put the title to her pick-up truck into hock. They arrived in Williston in January 2011 and spent that first winter, one of the coldest in North Dakota history, living in the cab of their eighteen-wheeler in Lonnie’s parking lot and

sleeping, along with Wright’s ten-year-old daughter, Kayla, on a mattress behind the cockpit. “We ate bologna sandwiches from Walmart, and we used the free shower at the community center,” says Wright. When nature called, they relied on the restrooms at Lonnie’s, where they were parking their truck for a hundred dollars a month. One night when Wright ventured out in a snowstorm at around 2:30 a.m. , she got lost on the fifty-yard hike back to the rig and was out in the cold for forty-five minutes. A siege mentality prevailed. “Walmart couldn’t keep the shelves stocked, it was so crowded here,” Dugan remembers, “and for three days after one blizzard, the power shut down all over Williston. You couldn’t get gas. You couldn’t get a loaf of bread. We worried that the truck would freeze up and that we’d lose our heat and die.” With life so unstable, Wright kept her daughter Kayla at her side and homeschooled her in the truck. “She was a girl of the trucks,” remembers Dugan. “All

the guys at the rigs gave her candy.” Still, stress levels were high. Once, when Wright and Dugan went to Hollen Auto Body, just across Highway 2 from Lonnie’s, they got in a spat over a repair estimate with the owner, Mark Hollen. It was not a wise move. Eventually, as Dugan tells it, Hollen got angry. He shouted, “You’re not from here, so get the fuck out of here!” He shoved Dugan three times, bending his eyeglasses. Meanwhile, Hollen’s wife and co-owner, Sheila, went after Wright. She pushed Wright to the ground, according to a police report, and Wright bruised her hip and twisted her ankle. When the case went to court, only Mark Hollen faced charges. A disorderly conduct conviction seemed likely, so he settled. “I kept telling Danny I wanted to leave North Dakota and go home,” Wright says. “Everything in this town is chaotic.” But almost from the start, Doin’ It Right was flooded with work. They hauled a dozen or so loads of gravel a day their first winter, mostly

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to well pads under construction. And when their first paychecks finally came in—truckers are paid on sixtyor ninety-day terms, generally—they were for large five-figure sums. All around them, other truckers were going crazy with their money—partying, going to strip bars. But there was no way Wright was going to let that happen. Instead, she borrowed several hundred thousand dollars to buy equipment. Doin’ It Right now makes payments on seven eighteen-wheelers, most of which are driven by subcontractors. “I’d say we have threequarters of a million dollars’ worth of iron setting out in that parking lot right now,” Dugan told me as we ate lunch at Lonnie’s. “Or she does. On paper, everything is hers because of my bad credit and my divorce.” Dugan’s eyes sparkled for a second and he quipped, “She’s so rich, I should just marry her right now.” But then he settled back into his default demeanor, dire and aggrieved, and admitted that they were still cashpoor. “You got a hell of an overhead, running trucks,” he said. “If we don’t bring in $120,000 a month, we’re done. We’re upside down.” We finished eating and walked outside. Dugan lamented that the hourly rates paid to Williston truckers had dropped over the past year, from $130 to $105, on account of competition. “Half of that money is gone right away, for fuel,” he said. “We’re hardly making anything.” It was Easter weekend when we met, and all seven of Doin’ It Right’s trucks were idle. Eventually, I asked Dugan why he and Wright didn’t take Kayla away for a little vacation. “We can’t afford to get out of town,” he said, “and you never know—we might get called for a job.”

ver the course of my five-day visit, I talked to very few people who were eager to stay in Williston, amid the throes of the oil boom. Mike Teague had hopes of leaving in a few years to retire in Costa Rica. When I went out for breakfast with Seth Wolther one morning, he intimated that he felt a bit guilty, being there on the oil patch. “To be honest with you,” he said, “the karma of making money off oil may be detrimental. When you frack, it destroys the earth.” Wolther suggested that the bad karma shaped Williston’s social dynamics. “People here are disconnected from one another,” he said. A distracted waitress came around to take our order, and after she left, he said, “See? No connection. I’ve gotta have human interaction, bro.” His plan was to keep living with his girlfriend in Spokane and commute into Williston periodically. In fact, the vast majority of Williston’s boom workforce seems unlikely to settle down there for good. As

Mark Schill, the economist, sees it, “Right now, there’s a Deadwood mentality there. It’s almost inhospitable.” The city fathers of Williston are trying to stop the town’s drift toward chaos. The Williston council has banned tent camping, and the Economic Development Office is currently on a campaign to bring five thousand new homes to town over the next year. Bumper stickers read, “Build Baby Build!” Meanwhile, Williston’s mayor, Ward Koeser, is negotiating with several chain restaurants—Chili’s, for instance—in hopes of improving local eating options. Will Williston spruce up and thrive? Or is it just another dusty Wild West ghost town in the making? For now, all that’s clear is that hordes of people are there, trying to get rich, often in rather mercenary fashion. On my last night in town, over drinks at a nightclub called DK’s Lounge, Seth Wolther told me that he was changing Vision First’s business model, having just read a biography of Al Capone. “From now on,” he said, “we’re going by gangster rules.” “That’s right,” said Teague, who wore a proud paternal grin as he listened to Wolther. “Gangster rules.” “The way things are around here,” said Wolther, “you have to be a dick to get your way in business. You have to be assertive.” He related how he’d done just that recently, cold-calling a Williston company to pitch Vision First’s website design services. As Wolther told it, the chief of marketing brushed him off, so he took his campaign upstairs, to her supervisor. “Listen, dude,” he said he told this gentleman, “your marketing lady has no idea of what’s going on—no fucking clue. I’m gonna meet with you. When’s that gonna happen?” The tactic would prove eerily effective: Over the next three months, Vision First would gross over $18,000, landing contracts with Granite Peaks Development, among others. Mike Teague, meanwhile, would convince his farmer friend to give him the choice piece of land he wanted, and he would also secure a bank loan. He plans to break ground in September. Still, that night at DK’s, I wasn’t up for a primer in gangster management. I was tired, so I went back to the RV early, and alone. When my two roomies got in a half hour later, at midnight, they jumped onto my bed. “Bill!” they cried, wrestling me as I leapt up. “The writer!” I believe they were intent on giving me a noogie, but I fought back, and soon they relented. We slipped, all three of us, into our separate beds. “Good night,” said Wolther, into the darkness. “Good night, John Boy,” said Teague. Outside between the grain silos, the wind whined away. 32

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