February 18 & 25, 2019 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue that I enjoyed most is Ian Frazier’s “Pumper’s Corner,” a profile of Oklahoma oil well pumper Rachael Van Horn. Actually, pumping wells is only one of her jobs. She’s also an Army Reserves veteran, a newspaper columnist, and Director of the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau for the city of Woodward. And she does extraordinary things like save three badly burned Angus calves:

Rachael brought the calves to her place and bucket-fed them, called a vet to treat them, put salve on their burned foreheads and lips and on the stubs of their burned-off ears, and built a small wading pool that she filled with a saline solution and walked them through twice a day in order to soothe their burned feet. The pain they were in distressed her so much that she drove to Pueblo, Colorado, and bought liquid THC—marijuana extract—to give them. After they began taking the THC, she noticed that they got hungrier, started to eat more, and put on a lot of weight. The calves gradually got better. She spent endless hours doctoring them. She had been in Iraq for three years and was present at the mess-hall suicide bombing near Mosul on December 21, 2004, which killed twenty-five people. She was continuing to deal with her post-traumatic stress, and the calves became part of the process. 

But it’s her job as a pumper that draws Frazier’s closest attention. He accompanies her on her oil well rounds:

As Rachael walked me through each well, I appreciated the Rube Goldberg-ness of it all. No two were the same. “The guys out here like to say that a well is like a woman, because each one needs to be handled differently,” Rachael said. She had been to these wells often, and sort of whispered each one, the way she would a horse. She put her hands on pipes, felt for hot spots, peered into gauges, cocked an ear for wrong sounds. She had me listen at a pipe where rising gas from a mile down hissed and echoed—all O.K. there. 

At a well called the Neff, Rachael has to re-start the pump. Frazier writes, “As the pump motor re-started, the horse head lurched to its full twenty-foot height above her, like a waking Tyrannosaurus.”

The piece brims with Frazier’s lyrical descriptions of the prairie: 

Prairie grasses turn colors in the fall, like trees in New England. The broad patches of big bluestem had darkened as if marinated in red wine; other grasses seemed to have been bleached to the palest yellow, like sun-damaged hair. A brisk wind blew, and hawks teetered by on it. 

I made the fifty-minute drive from Woodward to Laverne in darkness that became a gray day. No trees in America are more beaten down than the cottonwood trees of the central plains, chastised by ice storm and fire and wind into postures of broken supplication. Their black, wracked branches emerged against the sky as the light came up. 

My favourite detail in “Pumper’s Corner” is Frazier’s description of Rachael when he first meets her:

When she came out of her house, she was brushing her teeth. The arrival of a stranger at her door at nine-thirty in the morning did not faze her, and she continued to brush for a few minutes as we talked.

“Pumper’s Corner” is a tribute to an amazing individual and a fond appreciation of the land where she works. I enjoyed it immensely.