In the towns that ring the Bakken, the café is where the boom is taken in — the riggers, the ranchers and the truckers all crowding the same counter over coffee and the price of crude.
To understand the oil patch, sit awhile in one of the small-town cafés that ring it. Here the boom is not an abstraction but a crowd at the counter — roughnecks off the night tour, ranchers in from the calving, truckers hauling sand and water, all elbow to elbow over coffee and eggs, trading news of the price of crude and the state of the roads.
The Boom Over a Cup of Coffee
These cafés carry the boom's whole story in miniature. They fill and empty with the rig count; their waitresses earn tips that rise and fall with the play; their bulletin boards advertise everything from a room to rent to a truck for sale to a hand wanted on a crew. A stranger can learn more here in an hour than in a week of reports.
From the almanac's reckoning:
- Oil-patch cafés fill and empty with the rig count.
- Riggers, ranchers and truckers share the same small-town counter.
- The café's bulletin board is a barometer of the local boom.
When the bust comes, the café thins but rarely closes, held up by the ranchers and townsfolk who were there before the oil and will be there after. The almanac counts the café among the truest institutions of the oil country — the place where the boom is served hot, one cup at a time.
Elsewhere in the Almanac
The Roughneck's Trade on the Bakken Rig
On drilling floors across the west, the roughnecks work the pipe in long shifts through heat and cold, in one of the hardest and best-paid trades the plains have to offer.
Carbon Capture Comes to the Lignite Country
Hoping to square coal with a lower-carbon future, engineers on the Missouri Slope are pursuing projects to capture carbon dioxide and lock it deep beneath the plains.
Produced Water: The Oil Patch's Other Flood
For every barrel of Bakken oil comes salty water from deep in the earth, and managing that brine has become one of the oil patch's quietest and costliest challenges.