Boom Dreams

Somewhere in the lonely middle of the high Wyoming prairie last February, I picked up a hitchhiker who'd been standing for an hour in a hard snowstorm, in a wind that was 14 degrees below zero. He looked to be about 55 years old and he was about half frozen by the time he climbed into my rented Oldsmobile. He was toting a beat-up leather suitcase with a rag for a handle, and he'd been on the road for six days, from Youngstown, Ohio, He said he was broke and had been out of work for six months and that he was on his way to Jackson Hole because someone had told him they were building a Holiday Inn there, and he thought maybe they'd have a construction job for him. Said he hadn't hitchhiked since 1953, and he didn't think he'd ever do it again. He'd asked the police in Moorcroft if he could sleep in their jail, but they told him their insurance wouldn't cover it. So he'd slept the night before in an abandoned house that didn't have any windows or doors. Hard times, he said.

I told him I knew what he meant, and when he said that it looked to him like I was doing pretty well, I warned him not to be fooled by appearances. Then I told him I had been broke for so long that I'd just spent a week, in a dirty, ugly, cold, treeless little oil-and-coal boom town called Gillette, and I'd liked it. In fact, I said, I thought I was going back, just as soon as I got my bankrupt affairs in order, to see if I couldn't get work among the dirt eaters. And if I couldn't find anything in Gillette, then I'd go on down to Evanston or Rock Springs and look around there for something steady and lucrative.

He asked me if I'd been laid off and I told him it was worse than that; I was trying to make a living as a free-lance writer. He said he thought that paid pretty well if you did it for the big magazines. I told him it probably would if you could write 1000 words a week, for 52 weeks a year, and sell every one of them, which I have never been able to do, or even come close to doing. Then I gave him the small but crucial epiphany that I had come to in the past year or so: Poverty is nature's way of telling you you're in the wrong line.

He said he couldn't argue with that.

•

Nobody ever went to Gillette, Wyoming, for the hell of it. It was born in 1892 as a railhead village from which the ranchers of the Powder River basin could ship their cattle and pick up their necessaries. It was named for the railroad surveyor, Edward Gillette, who was responsible for pushing the tracks out to this nowhere little piece of the high plains; and though he was no particular relation to the razor tycoon, by the Fifties, when the civic Pooh-Bahs of the town were casting around for an identity and a slogan, they made the connection anyway: They nicknamed the place Razor City and called it "the sharpest little town in Wyoming." Then, the story goes, somebody suggested a stunt to make the whole thing vivid. The idea was to roust an antelope out of one of the big herds, drag him down to Gillette Avenue, lather him up and shave his entire body with a Blue Blade.

Somehow, it never came oil, and as it turned out a few years later, there wasn't going to be any need for such chamber-of-commerce flackery. The town was sitting on its fate--a seam of coal 100 feet thick, 60 miles wide and 200 miles long. Geologists called it the Fort Union formation, and when they talked in tons about the load they expected to blast and scrape out of it, the numbers began to resemble the distance in miles between stars. There was oil underneath that, too, and even some uranium in there, and by 1973, all boom-town hell had broken loose in Gillette. Roughnecks, miners, railroad men, construction gangs and truck drivers came from everywhere and were recruited out of bars and off the streets, and still jobs went begging. Hotel rooms were rented out in 12-hour shifts; people lived out of their cars or pitched tents. The population doubled, then quadrupled, and in a little more than ten years, what had been a harmless little cow town of 3000 people had become a wild prefab city of 17,000, where the young men who came to do the hard, filthy work outnumbered the women ten to one.

Gillette wasn't the West's first boom town, of course. For more than 100 years, gold and silver and oil had been changing drowsy crossroads into nasty, roaring camps, had been attracting tough young men with their boom dreams. But Gillette was one of the very first towns to go up in the new boom, the rush for energy that began to ride down on the Rocky Mountain states when the Arabs decided to make the monkey dance back in the early Seventies. And because it was predicted that dozens of towns in the cowboy states were going to be victims of the same explosive growth before all the oil and coal were pumped and hacked out of them, the social scientists began to watch Gillette as if it were a lab animal.

Mark Twain could have told them what they were going to find, and they found it: murder, robbery, assault, child abuse, wife beating, divorce, alcoholism, depression, madness and suicide all out of proportion to the number of people in town. They began calling it Gillette syndrome, and then, in the best traditions of sociology, they began to argue whether it really existed or was just a statistical aberration built of shabby data.

And that's why I went to Gillette: to find out if sickness and sin were any more rampant in Razor City than in any other American city of the same size.

I didn't get the answer to that one, and very soon after I got there, I didn't care, because the question had changed from the abstract to the concrete: Could a man--a man like me, for instance, who didn't have skills enough to do gentleman's work or the nerve for serious crime--could he stand to do a year in a rough and greedy place if it meant he could pay off his debts and maybe even have a little left to squander when he was through?

•

It's a good three hours from Casper to Gillette if you drive it: across the wide, treeless range land that is most of Wyoming, through Midwest, where the grasshopper pumps stand by the hundreds in rows so straight they could have been laid out by farmers, and past the cattle ranches that were once the main business around here. Except for the oil rigs, this prairie hasn't changed much since the Johnson County wars, since Butch and Sundance hid out at Hole-in-the-Wall. It's still empty of everything but grass and sagebrush, and the deer and the antelope still play in great numbers around here, though nowadays they do most of their dying on the highway.

Thirty miles from Gillette, I picked up the local news broadcast, sponsored by a roommate service that was promising to find you not only a roommate but a friend. Gillette police were reporting a glass-smashing rampage in town Sunday night. A liquor store lost its window first and was missing about one armload of whiskey. Then me sliding glass door at a private home was hit. and then the big window at Atlantic Richfield headquarters. Police said they had no clues and no suspects, but it sounded to me like somebody making his goodbyes.

A sign on the freeway said, Gillette next three exits. When I topped the next hill, it became clear that whatever disagreements there are about the social fabric of Razor City, one thing is certain--it's ugly. It spills down off the pretty little hill that was the original town in long grim strips of everything you have ever seen that is quick, dirty and squat-empty of imagination or planning.

Just off the highway, I dropped into a shift-change traffic jam of pickups and power wagons that were cuming and going from Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Long John Silver, The Ponderosa, the Super Eight Lodge or one of the liquor stores that punctuate these thoughtless streets like commas in a runaway sentence. I passed a grubby huddle of trailers next to the main-line railroad tracks, where 100 or more singlewides sat within spitting distance of one another on a flat dirt patch so dismal that the rats probably leave it alone. And through all of it there is not a tree, not a shrub, not a sapling anywhere.

On a hillside just above the trailers, there is a scattering of new, custom-built houses. These buildings actually sit down on a foundation and are called permanent. The signs say they cost 80,000 and up, though you don't get any trees with them, either, and finally, with their prefabricated "wood grain" aluminum sides, they don't look like they'd do much better in a high wind than the trailers they overlook.

What's left of old Gillette is about four blocks wide and ten blocks long. Gillette Avenue runs up a gentle hill, and the old buildings and big elms in (continued on page 166)Boom Dreams(continued from page 118) this neighborhood are evidence, if you need it, that the character of a town is made by what it does for a living and by how long it expects to be in business. The ranchers who settled this place obviously expected to pass it along to someone, so they built their houses, shops, restaurants and their one hotel out of brick, and they planted shade. New Gillette surrounds the old village like a badly kept storage yard. Most of what you see on a drive through looks as if it could be trucked away almost as easily as it was trucked in, and nobody seems to be planting anything.

That night, on the way to The Stockman's bar to have a drink, I spotted two bumper stickers. The first was on a red Porsche 914 and it said simply, and almost plaintively, Native. The other was on a big Chevy pickup that was driven by a pretty little blow-dry princess and it said, Tree my Dog.

Stockman's is an old downtown saloon, a large, brightly lit room with nine pool tables and a long bar at which you can get a 30-cent beer. Berry Smith is the manager, and his clientele is mixed, including a lot of people on the down end of life in Gillette.

"I have to be father, brother, doctor and shrink," he told me. "And there's no pawnshop in town, so sometimes I'm that. But I see dramatic changes of fortune all the time. You spot a guy a beer when he gets into town broke, and a month later he shows up in a brand-new truck, new clothes, buying drinks for everybody. And I see it go the other way, too, of course. But Gillette isn't a bad town. There's no unity to it, though. The churches hate the bars, the cowboys hate the long-hairs. It's two towns, really. See that guy over there?" He was pointing to a young man with long blond hair and a fat lower lip that had fresh stitches in it. "He walked into a cowboy bar and asked for change."

•

The next day, around noon, I picked up two men, a woman and a child who were hitchhiking into town from one of the outlying trailer parks. The men had rough beards and long hair, and they were dressed in work clothes that had seen a thousand hours in a very dirty place. They were oil hands, on a day off, on their way to a party, they said, and if I wanted to meet some Gillette people, I ought to come along. Not native Gillette people, one of them added quickly. He didn't actually know anyone who was born and raised in town. He thought he knew one guy who was a native of Wyoming, though. I asked him what life in Razor City was like. "Lots of drugs, no pussy," he said.

The house we stopped at was a blue prefab box with a living room, dining room and kitchen upstairs and two bedrooms below that. It sat on a bare dirt rectangle in a block with 20 houses exactly like it except for their colors. Upstairs, around a kitchen table, a dozen people, two of them women, were laughing and talking, drinking beer from a keg and smoking cheap marijuana, which in Gillette costs $50 a bag.

I met Burt, a conductor on the Burlington Northern coal trains, who had a red beard big enough for quail to hide in and who wore a cowboy hat over his long hair; Wild Bill, also a conductor, and a biker who wore a black-leather jacket and a black-leather cap with a skull on it and who kept his wallet tethered to his belt by a chrome chain; Lee, an adolescent-looking kid from Minnesota who was out of work at the moment but who thought he might get back on a rig any day; and Scortch, a nervous oil hand who kept looking at his watch because, he said, he was due in court that afternoon for trial on a charge of heroin possession.

Then, for two hours or so, the conversation jumped back and forth around the room as each of them offered his notions about the character of the town.

It was a hard-drinking town, they said, and the bars and liquor stores offered plenty of incentives in case you weren't already inclined to take a little juice at the end of a hard shift. The keg we were drinking out of was free, they said, from one of the bottle shops that gave you a barrel of beer for every $350 you spent with them.

"Lots of free booze in the bars, too," Burt said. "They all have gimmicks to bring the women in, because if they get them, they know damn well the men will be right behind. So a place like the Ramada runs a ladies' night on Tuesdays and Thursdays where the women drink for nothing between nine and midnight. And over at The Mine Shaft a couple of months ago, they had a deal where everybody drank for free between seven and nine every night. That got a little out of hand and they had to quit it, though."

"You just about have to drink whiskey in this town, anyway," said Scortch.

"Have you tried the water?"

I told him that I had and it had made me gag.

"Have you seen the chunks of crap that drop down out of the ice cubes in your drink? That's bad water. First three weeks I was here, I had diarrhea you would not believe. When I stopped drinking the water, it cleared right up."

I asked them if it would be easy for a guy like me, say, to get a job. They pretty much agreed it would be harder this February than it is most winter months. Hadn't really turned cold yet, they said, and it hadn't really snowed, so most of the workers who ordinarily took off for home when the weather got hard were still in town. But turnover was always high in a place like this, they said, and there were jobs if you really wanted them, if you could afford to wait around for a month or two in a town where a trailer rents for $500 a month and up--if you can find one.

Jobs in the oil patch, they told me, are dirty, hard and dangerous. Then they talked for a while about a friend of theirs who had been killed a month before, and another who had been put on crutches when the rig they were working on blew up under them.

"But the wages is good," said Lee. "Even low man on the rig can make $80 or $90 a day, plus you can get all the overtime you want."

I told him it sounded good, except the part about the dead guy.

"Sounds good, yeah," Lee said. "But you still can't save nothing, least I can't. Get a check for $1200 or $1500 every two weeks and it's gone in two days with the prices around here."

When I asked, they said you could always get any kind of drugs you wanted and that the town was full of stoners.

"I don't know one person who works on the rigs who is straight," said Lee. "You gotta be stoned to stand it. No . . . that's not true. I do know one guy who never gets high, but he's crazy. He was on the rig one night, said he looked over to Devils Tower--that's 50 miles east--said he saw glowing cowboys and Indians chasing each other all around the top of the thing."

Burt told me that working for the railroad was pretty easy compared with jobs in the oil patch. Both he and Wild Bill rode caboose duty on the mile-long coal trains that run from the mines to Moorcroft, 100 miles east.

"Nothing to it," said Wild Bill. "Just jump on the train, smoke some dope, play your guitar, listen to some music."

I could do that job, I thought to myself. I don't play guitar, but I can listen to music, and I could probably learn to smoke dope on a regular basis if I had to.

(continued on page 200)Boom Dreams(continued from page 166)

"Hardest thing about the job is staying awake," said Burt.

Wild Bill said he thought burglary was probably the number-one crime in Gillette. "Everybody I know has had something ripped off--stereos, that sort of thing. Somebody just stole a Harley engine and transmission from me."

"Out of your garage?" I asked him.

"Out of my living room," he said.

"If you got long hair," said Scortch, looking at my mop, "you have to watch out for the cowboys. I don't mean the urban cowboys, neither. I mean the guys with the pointy boots and the bowlegs who drive around in their pickups with a deer rifle behind their head and a .357 Magnum sitting right out on the dashboard. You don't want to fuck with them."

When I asked about the shortage of women, some of them laughed and some of them just shook their heads.

"It's probably only five or six to one these days," said Wild Bill. "Which is plenty bad enough, because there ain't no whorehouses of any kind around here. Nothing. So you have to work with what you got, which is one of the reasons there are so many fights. Makes things very tense. You have to see ladies' night at the Ramada while you're here. Definitely one of the high points of the week."

That afternoon. I drove Scortch down-town to the brand-new Campbell County Courthouse and watched as his young lawyer made a deal with the D.A. for a reduction of the charge, It turned out, according to state tests, that the powder he had been busted with was not heroin, as the sheriff's lab had said, but a brown amphetamine dust called peanut-butter crank, which is what Scortch had said it was all along. He pleaded guilty to possession of a controlled substance, and a young, bearded judge gave him a $110 fine and 90 days' probation on drug-related offenses. His lawyer charged him a grand.

•

I was staying at the Ramada, a completely unremarkable set of two-story buildings surrounded by several empty acres of asphalt, and 100 yeards from the main railroad line, which rumbles and rings and whistles with coal trains 24 hours a day.

About eight o'clock that evening, I walked through a cold wind and a light snow to the bar that is called the Gay Nineties. Bolted to the wall just outside the door are four slightly redundant wooden signs, each with a short warning burned onto it. fight foul out or be prosecuted, says the first, and next to it no hats on, only dress shoes and boots, and below that, please respect others, fights foul out and dress code enforced, neat and clean.

Inside the large room, things were still pretty quiet. Three women bartenders filled the coolers with beer, while the manager set up a bar without a cash register at the back of the room. Small groups of men wandered in, looking as if they had just shaved, showered and picked out their best shirts. The few women who came in early were dressed in designer jeans and tops, and they moved as if they had been through this before. While the men watched them openly, they watched the men, being careful not to catch their eyes.

By 8:30, the flashing lights under the floor of the disco-style dance pit had been turned on and the staff was bracing itself for the crush. A man on an elevated platform began to play rock-'n'-roll records, but nobody got up to dance. Next to him on a small stage, a six-piece combo began setting up its instruments and adjusting the spotlights. More men drifted in. Then the bouncer arrived: 6'2", about 275 pounds, wearing jeans tucked into heavy boots, a black-satin jacket with a Harley-Davidson eagle on the back and, under one arm, a billy club that looked like a shovel handle that had been sawed or bitten off. Her name is Joey and she is very famous. The gang I had been with that afternoon told me they had seen her hustle a couple of big oil hands out the door one night by the collars of their down vests. They also told me she is a very nice person when she is off duty. She ditched her club in the stock room, then took a tour of the floor as if she were John Matuszak, which she basically is.

At exactly nine, the price of a drink for a man went up to $2.25, the free bar was opened and the women began to arrive as if they were grunion that had been waiting offshore for the moon to become full. Almost all of them were in their early 20s, some plain, some pretty, and as they found seats at the large round tables, they waved to friends and checked out the new faces. Within ten minutes, every seat and most of the standing room was taken. It looked to be about 300 people, maybe more, and just about the time movement of any kind became impossible, the man at the door began letting people in only when someone went out.

The band, which looked and sounded like Las Vegas rejects, began with an easy-listening set. There were angry calls for rock 'n' roll, but slowly the dance floor filled with couples, most of whom smiled at each other as if they were strangers. Joey patrolled the room with a scowl. The ladies lined up six deep at the free bar and then squeezed, bumped and slithered back to their tables through the tight thicket of hungry male bodies. For the most part, they seemed to ignore what was happening to them in the deeper parts of the human forest, though now and then, a particularly drunken or desperate pair of hands provoked a tough look or rough words from one of the women.

The waitresses arrived back at the bar straightening their clothes, swearing and warning each other away from the hornier sectors of the room. They left holding ten and 12 drinks on a tray over their heads and shifting their hips the way running backs do.

By 11, ladies' night seemed to be doing its job. The room had mixed and heated, and those who were going home with someone had staked their claims and were working them hard. The rest were putting the final touches on a drunk that was going to help them forget they were going home alone.

There were no fights I saw that ladies' night. There was at least one tense moment, though, when a pretty little brunette bartender leaned across the bottle wells toward a 'Lude-stupid drunk and offered to have Joey over to kick his ass if he didn't stop yelling and pounding the bar. For just a second, he looked at her as if he might do something ungentlemanly. He didn't, but I couldn't help thinking as I watched the bartender go back to washing her glasses that the most dangerous jobs in town probably weren't on the rigs or in the coalpits and probably didn't belong to the men.

In fact, almost every bartender I saw in Gillette was a woman, and all of them ran their bars with ease and with the confidence of a protected species.

•

One evening later in the week, Burt introduced me to a bright-eyed and savvy waitress at the country-and-western bar called The Mine Shaft. Her name was Terra, she was 25 years old and she had been in town two years. When I asked her what it was like to be a woman in Razor City, she said I ought to sit down with her and a friend named Robin and they would tell me all about it.

Both of them turned out to be from California. Terra from Sonoma, Robin from Seal Beach, and they said they'd met in the bathroom one ladies' night at the Ramada. They laughed as they reminded each other of the details, and both of them said that the friendship they struck up that night was the only thing that had brought them through what Robin called "this strange paragraph of life."

Terra had been in town two months when they met, and she had a job at Powder River Explosives for five dollars an hour. Robin had just arrived in town, and that night Terra introduced her to the boss at the explosives plant. He and Robin danced one dance and he offered her a job.

"It two of them worked for six months filling 50-pound bags with the volatile mixture of ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel, then tamping the bags, then loading them onto trucks.

"It was crazy," Terra said. "We'd get up in the morning, usually hung over, then we'd smoke a joint--you had to get high--then we'd go out there and laugh at each other throwing these heavy bags around all day. We must have gone through a ton of that rub for sore muscles, because we were growing muscles we never grew before and it was pain."

"It was different," said Robin. "I never did anything physical before, just mental and technical. It was the first time I ever got home from work looking and feeling like I'd put in a full day. It's a good feeling."

From there, the two of them took jobs at The Mine Shaft.

"It's like a combat zone on the floor," Terra said. "The guys grab you. and pinch you and bite you, to the point that you have to spill a whole tray full of drinks on their heads just to cool them down. And every time a fight breaks out, I swear I'm right in the middle of it. I've been hit two times in that bar trying to break up fights."

Robin was laughing. "It's like the wild, wild West," she said, "it really is. One night, some fool tied his truck to The Mine Shaft sign, took off, ripped the sign out, ripped the whole corner of the building off."

Both of them told me that if I moved from California to Wyoming, it would be like going into slow motion.

They said the people talked slower, that the traffic in town crept along and that the music and the clothes were two years behind things on the Coast. But both of them said they liked it that way for a change.

When I asked them what it was like to be outnumbered the way they were, both of them laughed as if they could have talked for a week and told me only the half of it.

"Some of the girls can handle it and some can't," said Terra. "I'd say most of them are bad-ass enough to deal with more than one guy. For some of them, though, it's their first time away from home and they go crazy--kids in a candy store. These guys have no girlfriends, remember, and lots of money, and they'll buy you the world for a night. They don't tell you that till morning, of course. But it's tough, in a way, because the guys who really have their shit together are here to make money so they can go someplace they want to be. They stay here for a few years and work their butts off, and they don't want to get into a serious relationship, because they know they're going to leave. And those are the good ones, the nice ones. I mean, I get asked out a hundred times a night at the bar, but by the end of my shift, there might be two guys left . . . wobbling. And I don't want somebody I'm going to have to carry out to the car."

"When you do hook up with guys around here," said Robin, "they're very possessive. They think a woman's place is at home cooking and stopping the pigs. They don't even want you to work. And I've seen guys jump out of their trucks in the middle of the road to go after somebody who just looked a little too hard at their girlfriend."

"You especially have to watch yourself around the cowboys," said Terra. "The guys with the permanent Skoal mark worn into their back pockets, who work on the land around here and come into town maybe once a week. I was in a 7-Eleven one time during Cowboy Days, a very macho time around here, It was shift change, so there were about 100 guys in there, and one of them looked at my shoulder and saw the butterfly I have there and he says, 'Only whores have tattoos." So I said, 'Only cowboys suck the big one,' or something like that, and this guy grabbed me by the arm, spun me around and jacked my jaw. I mean, laid me out. I couldn't believe it."

"She got home," said Robin, "and the whole side of her face was puffed up, her eye was closed. We laughed. Sometimes we look at each other and just break up. 'We're still here,' we say. 'What the hell are we doing?'"

"But it's an adventure," said Terra.

"A one-time thing," Robin put in. "Not like anyplace I've ever been Some-thing we'll remember all our lives, some-thing we can tell our grandchildren about."

"This place is right out of a Western movie," Terra said finally. "You think these things don't happen anymore, but they do. Right here."

•

Wyoming ranks last in the continental Union if you line the states up by population. In fact, even with the energy boom, there are fewer people in the whole state than there are in the city of Tucson, Arizona, and now and then during my week in Gillette, that emptiness was made graphic. One morning, Lee and I rode east out of town toward an oil rig I'd asked to see. We were on Interstate 90, a four-lane freeway, when we passed a guy with a bandanna for a hat who was skate-boarding happily down the slow lane. Now and then, he made a casual glance back over his shoulder, but he didn't seem very worried. He waved when we went by.

Ten miles from town, we turned south onto a well-graded dirt road, then for another ten miles we dragged a huge rust-colored dust plume behind us as we rolled past barbed wire, sagebrush, cattle, horses, windmills and power poles.

"Red dirt and brown grass," Lee said. "You'd think it would be pretty, but it sure ain't."

Lee had friends on the rig we were headed for, and when it came into view, we turned off onto a short access road and parked among the pickups. The wind was up and it was cold. The five-man crew was dressed in insulated jump suits and hard hats with ear flaps. They were cementing when we arrived, and Lee's friends were on the ground under the deck, mucking the thick gray over flow with shovels. We slogged through the awful mud, then climbed a ladder onto the deck, where Lee had to shout over the roar of two big G.M.C. engines as he pointed around at the big pipes, chains, collars and clamps that remind you these men are essentially plumbers. The air on the deck was rotten with diesel fumes and the smell of earthy gases coming up from the hole, and by the time we had been on the rig for 20 minutes, I couldn't feel my fingers for the cold, and my head ached from the noise and the smell.

Back in the car, I grumbled about the mud I couldn't shake, or bang, or scrape off my boots.

"You don't wear any clothes into the patch that you want to use for anything else." Lee told me. "If you go into the laundromats in town, you'll see big signs on certain machines that say, greasers, because if you put your regular clothes in a machine that's washed oil clothes. they come out looking like dirt and smelling like diesel."

I told him I thought getting that dirty every day would take a lot of getting used to.

"I don't mind getting dirty," he said, "because I guess I never had a job where I didn't. But you do it for the money. Last year, I worked as a worm and a chain hand, the bottom two jobs on the rig, and I made $25,000. 'Course, I went home to Minnesota and my father said, 'What have you got to show for it?' and I didn't have nothing. I keep telling myself I'm going to get one more big check and take off, but I never do. Still, I hate to think of myself growing old in the patch."

On our way back to town, we made another dirt-road detour to a rig where Lee thought he might be able to get some work. When we got there, the driller told him yes, chances were good. He was exactly one man short, he said, because that morning his chain hand had been blown across the rig in a minor pressure explosion. they weren't sure how badly he was hurt, but he was in the hospital, having his ribs checked and his head X-rayed.

I dropped Lee north of town in a subdivision of hurry-up houses called Rawhide Village. On the way in. I said something about prefabricated houses' being to houses what TV dinners are to dinners.

"You can stand in the basement of one of these places," he said, "and if you talk in a normal voice, they can hear you perfectly in the living room. And last summer, I brought a girlfriend of mine out here from Minnesota, just a little girl, no power to her at all, and we were sitting in bed and I said something funny, and she threw her head back laughing and punched a hole right in the wall."

•

"We're not here to rape, pillage and burn the prairie," Ed Calahan told me as we drove down a meticulously kept dirt road into the huge pit they call the Belle Ayr Mine. Calahan is the manager of Belle Ayr, the largest coal mine in the U. S. and one of 16 near Gillette. He was pointing out the window at 540 acres of hilly grassland that had been returned to its original topography and ecology after the coal had been mined out from under it. "We harvest 40 kinds of wild seed for replanting," he said. "We even put the rocks back."

I was looking hard to see if I could tell the difference between the reclaimed land and the untouched prairie adjacent to it, but I couldn't. Except, maybe, for the rocks. Somehow, nature strews its boulders less carefully than man, and the rocks on the re-created land looked like they might have been placed by Japanese gardeners. All in all, though, it looks very good, and is a tribute to what man can do if he is forced to. Environmentalists say that this kind of reclamation is likely to sink and slide under the first really heavy rains, but they don't get many of those around this arid country, so nobody really knows what the land here will look like in 100 years.

The working end of the mine is a huge open slash 100 feet deep, and it is alive with a relentless traffic of monster dump trucks that come and go from the huge power shovels as they tear at the high black cliffs. It takes only four scoopfuls, about one and a half minutes, to load 120 tons into these trucks. Then they drive a mile to the crusher, dump the load and head back for another. It's a process that goes on 24 hours a day, six days a week, and in January of 1981, Belle Ayr shipped 1,500,000 tons of coal.

Calahan drove us slowly and carefully through the pit. We were in a large four-wheel-drive station wagon, but it felt like a golf cart up against the traffic of the awesome earth movers. The drivers of these trucks sit in a cab that is 15 feet off the ground, and the blind spot behind them is huge. They will tell you that when one of these machines accidentally backs over a pickup, they sometimes don't even feel the bump.

As we stood on the bank of the pit, watching the massive operation, it was obvious Calahan liked his job. He compared it to leading an orchestra or playing in a masters chess game. "Sometimes I like to just sit here and watch," he told me. "Every once is a while, I'll even drive a truck for a time, just to get the feel of it again."

Earlier that morning, in his office. I asked him if he thought the election of Ronald Reagan was going to make it easier for coal companies like Amax to do business. At which point he smiled the biggest smile of the morning and pointed to a jar of jelly beans that was sitting on his desk.

On the way back into town, I stopped at Amax headquarters for a talk with one of its public-relations men, Geoff Emerson. I badgered him for a while about the fact that the roads in the coalpit were better maintained than the roads in town, and I asked him if he thought the energy companies were doing enough to help Gillette with its boom-town troubles.

He said yes; then he told me about the 129 softball teams that the companies sponsor every year, and about the piano they had donated do the old- folks' home at Christmas. When I told him it sounded like peanuts to me, he said it was much more than the coal companies in the East ever did for their towns. I went on with him about it for a while, and then, when I felt enough like a golf cart among the earth movers. I stopped.

Just before I left. I asked him if he liked living in a town that was almost without trees.

"When you move into town," he said, "the first thing you notice is the absence of trees, and it bothers the hell out of you. But when you've been here for a while, you almost get to like it. That sounds funny, but I'm serious. I'm from Indiana, and when I go back there now, I almost feel clausthophobic, because I can't see anything. You have all these trees in the way."

•

By the time I left Gillette, the weather had turned nasty and they were about to get some of the winter they had been missing; but whatever petty complaints I'd had about the place were gone. Finally, it seemed like an honest town to me. All the people I met seemed to be getting exactly what they wanted out of the place, and if they weren't, I suppose they could always break a few windows and go home.

I never got around to any of the hard-core cowboy bars, and I never did meet any real cowboys. My hair was a little too long for an appointment like that, and I couldn't help thinking that there might yet be a shaving down on Gillette Avenue, although if there is, it will most likely be a bunch of cowboys with buck knives who go to work on an oil hand or a railroad man.

I'm not sure what I'll do when I get back to Wyoming--drive a cab, work on the rigs, ride the trains, charge a fee to write letters home for the illiterate. I'm not sure what I'll do without trees, either.

But who knows; once I have a few of those big pay checks in my account, once I've paid some of my debts and have me a pickup truck with a nice tape machine in it, my horticultural perspectives could swing all the way around the way Geoff Emerson's did. And if worst comes to worst, I hear there's a place about 30 miles east of town where you can go and visit some trees. Under the circumstances, that may have to do.

"'You just about have to drink whiskey in this town, anyway,' said Scortch. 'Have you tried the water?'"

"If you got long hair, you have to watch out for the cowboys. . . the guys with pointy boots and bowlegs.'"