Fun, in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, is a calendar event. Out here, on the largest and most remote oil field in the United States, thousands of workers rise each morning in endless summer, eternal darkness, mosquitos, and snow, to begin twelve-hour shifts, which on the drilling rigs requires a discipline that is taken seriously: a mistake, however small, could cause this entire place to explode, as it did in West Texas two years ago, or in Texas City twelve years ago. For a change of landscape one can board a bus with elderly tourists to the edge of the Arctic Ocean, point out the artificial palm tree, suggest a dip, and laugh—the water is 28 degrees—but even that route grows dull: the single gravel lane that traces tundra abuts miles of pipeline. For the oil workers, there is little to look forward to before the end of a two-week shift except for scheduled socialization. Each summer, such fun goes by the name Deadhorse Dash, a 5K race traced across nearby Holly Lake.
“Last year, someone dressed up as a dancing polar bear,” Casey Pfeifer, a cafeteria attendant, tells me when I arrive at the Prudhoe Bay Hotel for lunch on the afternoon of the race. Casey is wearing purple eyeliner and a sweatshirt that reads MICHIGAN in looping gold-glitter cursive. Every two months Casey travels between Idaho and Prudhoe Bay—for her, life in Alaska is synonymous with adventure—to work in the service industry at places like the Hotel, which is not actually a hotel at all but a work-camp lodge, with hundreds of tiny rooms housing twin-size cots and lockers. Casey smiles at me from behind her warming tray and I feel cozy, despite the dirt and dust clinging to my skin. The fluorescent lights illuminate her golden hair, which is tucked into a sock bun, and she tongs a sliver of battered cod. “Picture it,” Casey says. She sways her butt to the sound of nothing. “This giant bear, and he is grooving.”
I picture an enormous mascot gyrating to the Backstreet Boys. It is not my idea of fun, but I am an outsider. I had arrived on the North Slope only the day before, seeking a week in the most isolated community in America and what I hoped would be storybook Alaska: purple arching Coho salmon, caribou, moose, air that belongs in a breath-mint commercial. Instead I found square buildings like so many others, and a cafeteria just like that of a high school, with wheels of cheesecake and racks of chips. How normal everything felt. At an empty table, I watch workers lay playing cards out in front of them. Behind them, mounted televisions loop the Steve Harvey Show and Maury, The Price Is Right and Dr. Phil. Workers in heavy coveralls spoon cubes of honeydew onto their plates, consider the merits of the cacciatore, and pile their bowls with limp linguini. They puff their cheeks like chipmunks, gearing up, they joke, for what would no doubt prove a feat of monumental athleticism.
“The calories aren’t expended in the walking,” one worker tells me, reaching into a basket of Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls. I watch as his hands, the largest I have ever seen, raise the cakes to his mouth. He consumes them whole, parting his lips dramatically—wet pink petals, upon which the skin blisters, burned by Arctic sunlight. His name, he says, is Jeff Snow, but he goes by Snowman. He earned the nickname in the dead of winter, because up here, he comes alive: a redneck, forklift-driving Frosty the Snowman, made animate by extremes.
“The real work tonight is swatting the mosquitos,” Snowman says. He rolls his eyes, he laughs.
“The Deadhorse Dash is mostly bullshit. But it’s the sort of bullshit you look forward to.”
According to posters fixed to the cafeteria’s white-painted cinderblock walls, participants are to meet at six o’clock by the biggest warehouse in the stretch, owned by Carlisle Transport. The evening would start with a few minutes of mingling, during which men with binoculars would scan the horizon for polar bears. “They rarely come in this far in summer,” Snowman says, “but better alive than dead and sorry.” Once our safety is assured, we would set out across the tundra, tracing a two-mile stretch from one edge of Holly Lake to another across a landscape normally restricted to oil-field employees and suppliers who hold the highest level of security clearance. At the halfway checkpoint, marked by a folding table, we would collect a token, redeemable at the finish line for a burger, a handful of chips, a chocolate-chip cookie wrapped in thin plastic, and our choice of apple or banana.
An Arctic picnic in eternal summer.
“It’s a privilege, really,” Casey says. There is a home-away-from-home feeling here, she explains. But still, one passes most days as if a zombie. You rise, you work, you eat, you go to bed, repeat. Mostly, life on the North Slope is spent waiting to return to life in the Lower 48 and, with it, a return to children’s birthday parties, dinners with the spouse, backyard barbecues, and the simplicities of normal life: a fishing line, unfurled and bobbing red above a riverbank in Idaho.
“Put it to you this way,” Snowman says. “We don’t do anything up here but work and sleep and eat. So shit like this means an awful lot.”
“Last year, someone dressed up as a dancing polar bear,” Casey Pfeifer, a cafeteria attendant, tells me when I arrive at the Prudhoe Bay Hotel for lunch on the afternoon of the race. Casey is wearing purple eyeliner and a sweatshirt that reads MICHIGAN in looping gold-glitter cursive. Every two months Casey travels between Idaho and Prudhoe Bay—for her, life in Alaska is synonymous with adventure—to work in the service industry at places like the Hotel, which is not actually a hotel at all but a work-camp lodge, with hundreds of tiny rooms housing twin-size cots and lockers. Casey smiles at me from behind her warming tray and I feel cozy, despite the dirt and dust clinging to my skin. The fluorescent lights illuminate her golden hair, which is tucked into a sock bun, and she tongs a sliver of battered cod. “Picture it,” Casey says. She sways her butt to the sound of nothing. “This giant bear, and he is grooving.”I picture an enormous mascot gyrating to the Backstreet Boys. It is not my idea of fun, but I am an outsider. I had arrived on the North Slope only the day before, seeking a week in the most isolated community in America and what I hoped would be storybook Alaska: purple arching Coho salmon, caribou, moose, air that belongs in a breath-mint commercial. Instead I found square buildings like so many others, and a cafeteria just like that of a high school, with wheels of cheesecake and racks of chips. How normal everything felt. At an empty table, I watch workers lay playing cards out in front of them. Behind them, mounted televisions loop the Steve Harvey Show and Maury, The Price Is Right and Dr. Phil. Workers in heavy coveralls spoon cubes of honeydew onto their plates, consider the merits of the cacciatore, and pile their bowls with limp linguini. They puff their cheeks like chipmunks, gearing up, they joke, for what would no doubt prove a feat of monumental athleticism.
“The calories aren’t expended in the walking,” one worker tells me, reaching into a basket of Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls. I watch as his hands, the largest I have ever seen, raise the cakes to his mouth. He consumes them whole, parting his lips dramatically—wet pink petals, upon which the skin blisters, burned by Arctic sunlight. His name, he says, is Jeff Snow, but he goes by Snowman. He earned the nickname in the dead of winter, because up here, he comes alive: a redneck, forklift-driving Frosty the Snowman, made animate by extremes.
“The real work tonight is swatting the mosquitos,” Snowman says. He rolls his eyes, he laughs.
“The Deadhorse Dash is mostly bullshit. But it’s the sort of bullshit you look forward to.”
According to posters fixed to the cafeteria’s white-painted cinderblock walls, participants are to meet at six o’clock by the biggest warehouse in the stretch, owned by Carlisle Transport. The evening would start with a few minutes of mingling, during which men with binoculars would scan the horizon for polar bears. “They rarely come in this far in summer,” Snowman says, “but better alive than dead and sorry.” Once our safety is assured, we would set out across the tundra, tracing a two-mile stretch from one edge of Holly Lake to another across a landscape normally restricted to oil-field employees and suppliers who hold the highest level of security clearance. At the halfway checkpoint, marked by a folding table, we would collect a token, redeemable at the finish line for a burger, a handful of chips, a chocolate-chip cookie wrapped in thin plastic, and our choice of apple or banana.
An Arctic picnic in eternal summer.
“It’s a privilege, really,” Casey says. There is a home-away-from-home feeling here, she explains. But still, one passes most days as if a zombie. You rise, you work, you eat, you go to bed, repeat. Mostly, life on the North Slope is spent waiting to return to life in the Lower 48 and, with it, a return to children’s birthday parties, dinners with the spouse, backyard barbecues, and the simplicities of normal life: a fishing line, unfurled and bobbing red above a riverbank in Idaho.
“Put it to you this way,” Snowman says. “We don’t do anything up here but work and sleep and eat. So shit like this means an awful lot.”
by Amy Butcher, Harper's | Read more:
Image: Amy Butcher
