Postcards from the End of America by Linh Dinh

Author:Linh Dinh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: middle america, poverty, small town, travel, photography
ISBN: 9781609806545
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2016-02-18T15:53:06+00:00

FRACKING WILLISTON

7-15-14—Oil made this America-dominated, futuristic world, and with its increasing scarcity, will unravel it. Most pampered yet most disappointed, we’re living in the age of peak oil, water, gold, copper, wheat, rice, cabbage, porn, greed and banking shenanigans, etc., for with more mouths than ever going after a shrinking donut hole, the ugliness is just getting started, and let us not forget, this age of oil has also been an era of mass carnage, a century of resource wars that have wiped out hundreds of millions, but for the survivors, us grubby schmucks, what a cool ride, eh?

But wait, wait, here comes the game changer, a fracking revolution that will make the USA energy-independent, and extend this gaseous joyride for a few more decades, at least. If you believe the hucksters, North Dakota and Texas as deus ex machina will lead this sagging nation to a new epoch of prosperity.

Each well can be fracked up to 18 times, and for each fracking, you must pump millions of gallons of water, twenty-five railcars of sand and more than five hundred chemicals into the ground, less than half of which is sucked out, meaning much of the toxic cocktail stays in the earth to poison the soil and water until Jesus returns, pigskin in hand and singing “God Bless America,” but let’s not be tree-hugging terrorists here. If not for this, we’d be forced to invade innumerable countries to steal their oil, God forbid. To not rape their lands there, we must violate our own foundation, but just to be on the safe side, we’re doing both, of course.

This empire will be defended at all costs, even if the entire world is blown up and this nation itself destroyed, for nation and empire are not one. A nation is the total fabric, the water and soil that nourish, the all-consuming anthill, while the empire is the violent wet dream of a few sneering egotists. It’s the fist-fuck that kills. The Amtrak route that goes from Chicago to Portland, Oregon, is called Empire Builder, and it was on this train that I saw Williston, North Dakota, for the first time. With so much freight traffic coming in and out of Williston, the Amtrak train is always delayed, from several hours to half a day, and so the conversations on board often focused on fracking as we approached the Bakken Shale Play. The conductor said, “Yes, this is a hassle, but I also look at it as our country’s future!”

Having sold drilling rights to an oil company, a tall, beefy man in golf shirt and khaki shorts intoned, “Of course the money is nice, but more importantly, our family has become a part of history.”

Wearing a blue Abbey Road T-shirt, a boy of about eight boasted to the portly woman from outside Spokane, “My grandpa is, like, the president of Exxon. He keeps a notecard on everyone he’s met. Me and my mom, we flew from New Jersey to Boston, where we stayed a few days, then we flew to Chicago, where we got on this train.

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