WESTERN NORTH DAKOTA—I had zero cell-phone service when I landed in Bismarck. I know this state is mostly rural, but how was I supposed to know Sprint doesn't operate here? Two hours, $183, and one new cheap smartphone later (thanks, Radio Shack!), I was on the road for an almost four-hour drive to Williston, the heart of America's oil boom.
Monday
Everyone warned me that the 132-mile drive between Dickinson—another town booming from all the oil—and Williston was going to be longer than advertised. They were right. Trucks hauling oil, fracking material, and heavy equipment were hogging the roads and tearing them up. Construction just started to expand this small two-lane road built for sleepy farm towns to a four-lane highway so it can handle all the newfound traffic of the past four years. Like many parts of the oil-boom status quo, this construction is temporarily exacerbating the way of life here, but eventually, it will permanently benefit everyone. That is the goal, anyway.
Four hours later, I finally arrived in Williston, a town the Census Bureau bills as the fastest growing small city in the country. Its population in 2010 was 14,000; today it's at least 26,000 and possibly as high as 33,000.
I had managed to secure a last-minute dinner with Harold Hamm, the CEO of Continental Resources, an independent oil company that had the earliest and still has the largest footprint in the Bakken oil fields of Western North Dakota. (He was also Mitt Romney's energy adviser during the presidential election.)
We made reservations at The Williston, the fanciest restaurant in town, for 6:30. Hamm was running late but would still make it to dinner, I was told. I decided to head over to The Williston around 7 p.m. and wait at the bar. After driving my Altima rental car around potholes and construction (a scene almost more common than the oil industry itself in the oil patch), I found the restaurant and situated myself at a corner bar stool.
Forty-five minutes past. Hamm stood me up. I sighed. He was a gentleman about it, though. He called me and told me he was stuck in traffic near Watford City, an even smaller town that locals here say is really the heart of the oil boom. Isn't that ironic: The man most responsible for the Bakken oil boom is stuck in traffic created by the Bakken oil boom. We made arrangements for breakfast the next morning at 7:30.
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