THE GOOD HAND

A folk singer and playwright goes to the oil fields and returns with a remarkable book.

This is the book that Hillbilly Elegy should have been: a white-hot, fiercely argued case for rural working people in the face of their economically brutal lives. In 2013, unmoored in New York City, Smith traveled to the epicenter of the Bakken shale oil boom, arriving with about $5,000 to his name, hoping for much more. Williston, North Dakota, he writes, “was a tool, and we were using it to extract money from the oil companies the same way those companies were using us to extract oil from the earth.” The “we” in question are lean, hungry men from a variety of backgrounds, many spoiling for a barroom brawl. Whatever their ethnicity, they work in dangerous conditions, boiling under the summer sun and freezing in the Arctic-vortex winter. Life in Williston is no less fraught. As Smith writes, the overall crime rate during his time there was four times the national average, the incidence of rape and assault even higher. The author is no stranger to the bloody grind, having come from a dysfunctional home. In a particularly memorable moment in a book packed with them, he observes that most soldiers come from the rural poor and have suffered poverty and abuse all their lives: “These veterans have PTSD before they experienced combat. They leave home broken and come home more broken.” They come to the oil fields that way, too. Smith, having veered into overdrinking to the point of driving the wrong way down a highway, notes that they, like him, leave the oil fields with about as much money as they arrived with. Smith’s narrative, like Ben Ehrenreich’s Desert Notes, brims with intelligence and foreboding. “The North Dakota boom isn’t the one that we need to worry about,” he writes. “Boomtown Earth is busting.”

A penetrating, blazing look at people whom many of us have forgotten—but who are the nation’s truly essential workers.