Anne Lambelet
It is a gentle, peaceful place,” my father says as we stand at Scoria Point at sunset. A pink sky is turning violet; the red flaming ball casts a crimson light on my father’s face. It suits him. His life has been the reflection of passion for one thing only: work. And his work has been laying pipe throughout the American West.
“I have never been in North Dakota,” he says. “We missed the boom here in the Bakken.” By Bakken, my father means the Bakken Shale oil field, one of only ten in the world that is yielding more than one million barrels a day, kicking off the biggest rush for oil and gas in America’s history.
My brother Dan was one of the men who came to work in the Bakken in 2014 to make money. He worked during the winter on the frack line, washing off the chemicals used to break up the strata below so the oil can seep up to the surface more easily. The brutality of the weather only approximated the brutality of the work. Sixty degrees below zero in howling winds is man against nature; but months alone in the freezing darkness cramped in the cab of a truck is crazy-making.
What began as a dream becomes a matter of survival—for some, as in the case of my brother, just barely.
My youngest brother, Hank, works in the family business in Utah, sometimes Wyoming, often Arizona, laying the pipe that carries natural gas to subdivisions and homes. He is among the quiet and brave men who make our lives easy when theirs are not.
“I’m proud of what we’ve done,” my father says. “Not many men can say they’ve walked most of the major gas lines that fueled the American West’s development like I have.”
We are visiting Theodore Roosevelt National Park. It is the Fourth of July weekend and we are alone, no other cars or visitors in sight.
Teddy Roosevelt speaks of “the doctrine of the strenuous life,” and my father sees himself as a practitioner of TR’s philosophy. He admires mightily America’s twenty-sixth President. Theodore Roosevelt is, after all, a man’s man. In our family, the worst thing you can call someone is a “weakling.” Turns out this was one of Roosevelt’s favorite words. For all I know, maybe Dad stole it from the man himself, who said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.” Tempest masculinity, a core family value, was also extended to women and children. Above all, you had to be tough, no complaining; in fact, the fewer words you spoke overall, the better. Your stoicism was your power. Yet under the brawn was an unexpected tenderness, a sharp sense of humor largely directed at oneself.
My father was and remains a champion of the workingman. Whenever anyone who worked for him died, he was at the funeral. Over lunch recently, my father said, “If I was a young man again, I would work for the labor unions on behalf of the rights of workers.” I was surprised. “Union” was a dirty word around our house. But my father has watched the dignity of workers decline as big companies exploit their workforce in the name of profit.
“They are human beings,” Dad would say. “It’s not always about the bottom line.”
“Be practical as well as generous in your ideals. Keep your eyes on the stars, but remember to keep your feet on the ground,” Teddy Roosevelt said. That sums up John Tempest perfectly.
As we drove into Theodore Roosevelt National Park, my father’s focus was on the construction company laying the gravel on the roads. In the midst of watching white-tailed deer forage on the margins of the forest or spotting an elk on the ridge, his eye was on the infrastructure: roads, pipelines, telephone lines, and the expanding oil patch within view.
Be practical as well as generous in your ideals. Keep your eyes on the stars, but remember to keep your feet on the ground,’ Teddy Roosevelt said. That sums up John Tempest perfectly.
Banded hills, waving grass, green, green-yellow, rust, sweet clover, cottonwoods, red-tailed hawks, bison, crickets, sage. There is a tapestry to this country that is unique to the badlands of North Dakota. They are not bald and bare like the eroding hills of South Dakota. To my surprise, they are forested with junipers and in some cases pines. Everywhere we turn are harriers and field sparrows, meadowlarks and crows. Magpies hop around us, banking we will leave behind something shiny or edible.
Theodore Roosevelt would have liked Valerie Naylor, the superintendent of his park. (Valerie retired in 2014 after a long, illustrious career.) She is formidable upon first appearance in full uniform; it is hard not to be intimidated. But her side smile gives her away. Already, she is teasing my father, calling him John, and offering him condolences for having me as a daughter. He is smitten. He offers to drive. She says she will, and there is no further discussion.
“I became a naturalist for Theodore Roosevelt National Park during the summers,” Valerie says. “I realized I wanted to go into the National Park Service to share my love of this place with the people who visited it. This is my home park. It’s where I started and where I will end.”
I see birds everywhere and hold myself back from asking whether we can stop. I guess blue-gray gnatcatchers and rufous-sided towhees. And meadowlarks are everywhere we look, especially scattered through the prairie dog towns.
“Lots of prairie dogs, Terry,” Valerie says, knowing my affection for these communal rodents most people in the American West call varmints.
“Do you love them, too, John?”
“Never mind,” my father says. “Let’s just keep moving.”
Theodore Roosevelt National Park has large prairie dog towns that support a community of grasslands species: coyotes, foxes, burrowing owls, rattlesnakes, pronghorn, cottontails, and killdeer among them. At almost all hours of the day, red-tailed hawks and harriers can be seen floating above them with the corresponding alert calls coming from the prairie dogs.
“May we just stop for just a minute or two to hear their voices?” I say to my father. I can’t help myself, I am in love with these maligned creatures called “pop-guts” by my family, who have shot them for target practice.
“Here we go,” Dad says.
Valerie pulls over and I step on the dry, golden grasses and lift my binoculars.
“There you are,” I say. For as far as my binoculars can span the horizon, I see prairie dogs: males, females, juveniles, and babies feeding, nursing, wrestling, kissing, chirping, popping up and then abruptly disappearing into their burrows, only to pop up again.
I focus on one clay-covered prairie dog with a black tip on its tail. He stands up on his hind legs and wails, then drops down and scurries across the grasses. Stands up again with more hearty chirps and is joined by several others. They appear as the size of small children, so much larger and stockier than our Utah prairie dogs.
“Terry exaggerates,” my father says through the window that he has rolled down. He stays in the backseat of the truck as Valerie and I talk prairie dog. “None of us trust her.”
“Our prairie dogs are pretty big, John.”
I have an ally. Valerie and I met a decade ago. The last time I was here, we watched a pair of courting great horned owls in the campground by the river. We hooted back and forth in the cottonwoods at dusk until we were staring into their yellow-citrine eyes inches away. I made a vow to come back with my father.
A wall of bison stand in the background, maybe a hundred or more, bulls, cows, and red calves, all swishing their tails in the mid-morning heat. The wholeness of this scene asks us to imagine a large part of the American landscape stretching from Texas up to the Dakotas, looking just like this view before us.
“Let’s get going!” Dad says.
Back in the truck, I turn around and say, “We’re here.”
Valerie is taking us up to the North Unit, which means we have to drive through the South Unit and then on Highway 85, the main route between the two units of the park.
“This is a dangerous road,” she says. “It’s the thoroughfare from Dickinson up to Watford to Williston, known as the gateway to the Bakken oil field. Look at any North Dakota paper and read the obituaries, many are killed by car accidents. These big fracking trucks and oil carriers just barrel along, no pun intended.”
“It’s energy development 24/7 up here,” Valerie says. “The Bakken has changed everything. Most of my job now is figuring out which oil and gas leases are going to affect the park and then meeting with the energy companies to convince them to drill somewhere else.” She pauses. “Honestly, there’s not enough hours in the day.”
“I really want to see what’s going on up there,” my father says.
“I know you’re in the business, John,” Valerie says. “I think you’ll find it fairly shocking. It’s out of control and it’s affecting everything.”
Dad and I gaze at the moving scenery. Whole patches of yellow sweet clover dot the landscape beneath a blue sky with herds of white cumulus clouds resembling white buffalo.
“It’s like the California Gold Rush—there’s no real process, no organization,” Valerie says. “Everyone wants to make a quick million and get out. And with the oil comes all the social ills associated with it: violence, prostitution, drugs. You name it, we’ve got it.”
“I understand what you’re saying,” Dad says. “I mean in the seventies, in Evanston, Wyoming, you’d go into a bar off I-80, and there was a ‘coat room’ where it was understood that you’d leave your guns and knives and brass knuckles behind so everybody could dance or drink. It was crazy. But I have to say the oil companies did a lot of good in the town. They built recreational centers, swimming pools, and libraries. I mean, the towns benefited.”
‘It’s like the California Gold Rush—there’s no real process, no organization. Everyone wants to make a quick million and get out. And with the oil comes all the social ills associated with it: violence, prostitution, drugs.’
“I hear ya, John,” Valerie says. “But like I said, I am on border control every day of every week, trying to stop the rigs from going up in our view shed. I’ve completely given up on our governor and the legislature. They’re very tight with the energy companies. So I’ve got some folks who alert me when there is a proposal for a new oil development, and then I go directly to the CEOs of the company and ask if they will meet with me. I’ve had my best luck working directly with the oil companies because our state regs are so poor.”
She focuses on the road and many miles of silence pass. “But I’ll tell you, honestly, it’s relentless and depressing and I’m tired.”
A national park superintendent has to be part politician, part businessperson, part naturalist, and always the diplomat. In Valerie Naylor’s case, you can add fierce advocate.As the day heats up, we are standing in an oasis of dappled light and shade. We drink some water and bring out our lunches. It is so wonderful to be able to share this with my father. He likes Valerie Naylor a lot; I can tell. With my father, you can always tell what he’s thinking because he tells you.
“I think you are running this park really well, not at all like most government bureaucrats.”
Valerie laughs. “Thanks, John.”
In fact, Dad is right. He knows leadership when he sees it. Having run his own pipeline construction business for more than fifty years, he understands what it takes to get things done. He always told me, “Leadership is not about being liked, it’s about being respected. And consistent.” In 2013, Valerie Naylor received the prestigious Stephen T. Mather conservation award given by the National Parks Conservation Association “for her steadfast dedication to protecting Theodore Roosevelt National Park from the impacts of energy development, along with her successful elk management plan, and ongoing work to safeguard and elevate the importance of Theodore Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch.”
As Valerie disappears into the visitor center to check on some things, Dad and I eat our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches under the trees.
Theodore Roosevelt National Park is an island within a sea of oil development. Oil companies can bid for leases to drill on public lands at public auctions held by the Bureau of Land Management. Leases are purchased at ridiculously low prices, far below market value; in some cases, an acre of land can be leased for two dollars.
“That’s the price of energy independence,” Dad says to Valerie. “You environmentalists—and I will say you’re better than most—but you can’t have it both ways. Terry’s against the war in Iraq—and against oil and gas development here at home.”
“It’s not that we have to stop drilling for oil and natural gas, John, we just have to think about how to do it right.”
My father nods. “I agree,” he says. “The haphazard nature of it all hurts everyone.”
Dad walks to the edge of the Oxbow Overlook. He turns to Valerie. “It’s funny, when I look out on this country, I still mentally figure out how to lay the pipe, how we would cross the Little Missouri, how we’d take the pipe down this hill, run the trench over there, which is what Terry objects to about our work, but I’m proud of the scars I’ve left in the West.”
The town of Watford City is fifteen miles from the park, driving north on Highway 85. The trailer parks are starting to appear outside our windows. Everywhere we look: scraped land, trucks in traffic, dust. We stop at a red light. “Watford didn’t even have traffic lights before the boom,” Valerie says.
Dad wants to see the man camps. Up ahead, like a mirage, row after row after row of storage containers appears against the horizon. As we get closer, the shine dulls.
Behind the rows of storage containers, we can see three rigs, pumps moving up and down like mechanical blackbirds pecking for seeds. Behind them, flares from another oil patch rise like quick-match strikes.
Dad walks down the rows of beat-in units, stepping around beer cans and bottles, most of them broken. Some of the container units have lawn chairs out front; one has a flower box, planted with red and white petunias. There are a lot of NFL stickers on the units, a few American flags.
I’ve lost my father, so I follow footprints; I know his boots. Even at eighty, he can outwalk me. After a half hour or so, we gather back at the car and drive farther down the road.
“You know, for years, I’ve felt guilty that we couldn’t put our men up in motel rooms one summer when we were working out near Rock Springs, Wyoming,” Dad says. “I went to the army supply store and bought a dozen army cots and sleeping bags, cooking pans, plates, utensils, you know—and we put them in a circle—and camped by the river. And, you know, we ended up telling stories and eating together, sleeping under the stars, and it built up a real camaraderie among the men and by God, if we didn’t bore under that river in record time.”
Dad pauses. “There’s none of that here. You can feel it. Hell, I bet these men have never met one of the owners of these companies. The men are like ants, expendable, kill one, there’s a hundred more coming to replace them.”
A gray fox spots us; stops, runs, disappears. We turn around and drive back toward Highway 85. Once we’re on the road, the glare of the sun highlights a bison in silhouette, standing alone on a bluff.
My father is silent. He looks straight ahead, his eyes focused on the road.
“This the birthplace of conservation,” Valerie Naylor says, as we stand at the gate of the Elkhorn Ranch, the place Theodore Roosevelt credits for igniting his passion for preservation. “It’s the solitude that makes this ranch so special. And it’s the solitude that is now threatened.” She pauses. “We are trying to protect this experience.”
We can see one well on the ridge. I can hear it, too, the whining and whirring of the black metal pump moving up and down rhythmically.
“An oil well was staked out right here,” Valerie says, pointing to the land adjacent to the Park Service sign.
“Right here?” Dad asks.
Valerie tells us the story of finding out about the well and calling the Forest Service supervisor to say, “It can’t go there!” And he said, “According to our plan, it can.”
‘This the birthplace of conservation. It’s the solitude that makes this ranch so special. And it’s the solitude that is now threatened. We are trying to protect this experience.’
Valerie called XTO, a subsidiary of ExxonMobil, which had the lease. After a long conversation with an executive there about the placement of the well, she invited the man to come visit the site. He’d never been there. It was a blank spot on the map. He made the trip.
He saw the close proximity to the historic ranch of Theodore Roosevelt. Valerie shared its history and then she encouraged him to walk the mile-and-a-half path down to the foundation stones that remain of the Elkhorn Ranch, which he did. An hour or so later, the ExxonMobil executive returned.
“How many visitors come here in a year?” he asked, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand.
“One,” Valerie replied.
“Excuse me?”
“I said, ‘One.’ ”
They stared at each other. Valerie continued:
“Our twenty-sixth president of the United States was altered by his singular experience of solitude. This is the experience we are trying to preserve for each visitor, the experience you just had, sir. Each person who comes here is deeply affected. So, my answer remains the same: one.”
"Our twenty-sixth president of the United States was altered by his singular experience of solitude. This is the experience we are trying to preserve for each visitor, the experience you just had, sir. Each person who comes here is deeply affected."
By the end of the afternoon, XTO agreed to a compromise. It would drill straight down ten thousand feet from another unit where it held the lease, behind the ridge beyond the Elkhorn Ranch. There would be no visual impact, but they could still capture the oil.
“It is a story with a moderately happy ending. But . . .” Valerie says. “So we stopped this particular well, but look around, all these lands are leased.” She turns around 360 degrees. “Each lease that comes up we have to deal with on a case-by-case basis. What if we miss one? I tell you, the stress on my conscience . . .”
She can’t finish her sentence.
Theodore Roosevelt’s wife and mother both died on Valentine’s Day in 1884. He left his life behind and came to Elkhorn Ranch, where he was comforted in stillness and emboldened by the badlands. He would later say that it was his years in North Dakota that gave him the character he needed to become president of the United States.
As my father and Valerie keep walking the boundaries of the Elkhorn, I slip my boots back on and head down to the river. Sitting by the river—this meandering river, at midday in the middle of the summer—I find it hard not to dissipate into the heat wave riding through the badlands, melting grasses into gold. I am Theodore Roosevelt, watching the currents as grief gathers like a whirlpool and finally flows downriver.
Life and death, we are kneaded back into the accumulated soil of the prairie.
The personal shock and assault of death that drops us to our knees in time becomes a tapping, a turning, a gesture like any other—we are not special, just part of the river, this river, rushing by me now.
Our fear of death enslaves us to the illusion that we will live forever. Theodore Roosevelt knew firsthand that we do not. And so he lived large and he never forgot the source of his own healing and strength.
“There can be no greater issue than that of conservation in this country,” he wrote. He was a man of his word.
During his administration, Roosevelt was responsible for protecting 150 national forests, fifty-one federal bird preserves, four federal wildlife preserves, eighteen national monuments, and five national parks, 230 million acres in all.
My father and I look out over the vast expanse of a winding river cutting through clay and let the stillness speak. The water is muddy, brown; the sky light blue. The trill of lark sparrows surrounds us.
“Yeah,” says my father, his hands in his pockets, thumbs out. “I can see why you like this place.” He stands on the point, closest to where the widest curve of the Little Missouri turns again. He has always loved the long view.
This essay is adapted from The Hour of the Land by Terry Tempest Williams, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.