Inside The Boom: Sleeping In My Car

I was up on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota last week doing some reporting on how the oil boom is influencing the election for tribal chairman there. I was kind of winging it and didn’t have a plan of where to stay that night. I knew it might be hard to find a hotel room, but figured there’d probably be space in the tribally-owned casino. Wrong. Every single hotel in New Town was full.

Inside the Boom: My Family’s Oil Patch Tour

Last weekend my parents and brother came to visit from Massachusetts. They’d never been to North Dakota before, so we headed up to the oil patch (I like to make sure visitors see where their energy comes from, so later that week I sent them on a coal mine tour). As we drove north towards Watford City, rain started spattering the windshield. Huge trucks whipped by in the other lane, sucking our little car towards them. The sky was slate gray, and natural gas flared along both sides of the road. “It kind of feels like we’re driving into hell,” my mom said.