The following is a reflection on one aspect of our recent visit to my Mom's home town of Douglas, Wyoming.
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They seemed to be everywhere that morning. After a weekend spent at homes many miles and many hours removed from this prairie town, a horde of laborers, from the marginally capable to the highly skilled, returned to their grueling routine.
These were weathered men in rough, dusty jeans and boots. In the hotel dining room they were devouring selections from the breakfast buffet and washing it down with coffee. The rectangular outline of a box of cigarettes or the circular imprint of a can of chewing tobacco marked many hip pockets. Caffeine and nicotine, staples of the working man.
Intense eyes peer out of faces creased and burnt by days in the sun and unceasing wind of the Wyoming plains. Their bodies are shaped by strenuous physical toil, producing a certain taut lean-ness reminiscent of an earlier generation of transient workers who rode these plains a century ago called cowhands. Not the careful, narcissistic sculpting of regular trips to the local gym, theirs was the hardness of hours and days and weeks of constant labor.
In the hallways and the elevator I was passed by men carrying backpacks or tool bags out to their pickup trucks. A few were standard half-ton trucks, but often there were heavier 3/4-ton or 1-ton rigs laden with tool boxes and equipment. Where I was used to seeing mini-vans and SUV’s and economical sedans, the parking lot and nearby gas station was full of bulked-up trucks destined for a long drive out to the fields of work: the trusted steeds of the modern western man. After topping off the gas tank, they ‘saddle up’ for a drive over narrow winding roads, treacherously crowded by the influx of traffic.
Where their predecessors would have herded recalcitrant cattle to the railroad, these men guide fossil fuels to railcars, either oil fracked from miles under the earth or coal scraped from nearer the surface. The cargo ultimately powers homes and automobiles of people with little understanding of where the petroleum or electricity came from, much like the city dwellers of an earlier era who dined on beef-steak that arrived on their plate long after the cattle drivers had done their work.
As I watched these men, I wondered how long I would last in a day on their job. I thought about my esoteric work with data and information systems. Where results are measured by invisible changes to software. Where I sit in an air-conditioned cubicle farm surrounded by other knowledge workers in office casual attire worried about whether our workstation is ergonomically correct, not whether someone will be injured or killed on the job or just making it to the job site.
Oh, yes, we do our part to bring products to market, to contribute to the necessary stream of capital flowing in the economy. I am thankful for a mind that allows me to perform complex analytical tasks. But those coal and oil workers, following the new boom in Wyoming energy brought on by the irresistible economic forces of scarcity and demand, are at the top of the food chain. If they were not ripping that hard, black coal from the ground or sucking that reluctant dark oil from deep fields of shale, I would be sitting at home, in the dark, with nothing to do.
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