Hidden America: From Coal Miners to Cowboys, an Extraordinary Exploration of the Unseen People Who Make This Country Work

Laskas’s chapter on oil drilling in Alaska, where she shadowed workers on the Pioneer Natural Resources rig, is one of her most detailed. The rig is managed by TooDogs, a “toolpusher” who built the rig and “runs the drilling operations” (201).

Laskas spends a great deal of time with TooDogs and develops an intricate relationship with him. She also explains the history of oil-drilling in Alaska, surprising in that one of the political arguments going on at the time Laskas was writing the text is whether the United States should drill for oil in Alaska.

This debate ignores:

“One factor: We are drilling for oil in Alaska, every hour of every day for the past thirty years, drilling in some of the most extreme conditions on earth, where the windchill can easily reach minus 98 degrees, so cold that you have to leave your pickup running twenty-four hours a day or you’ll never get it stated again, where it is pitch-dark for nearly two months each winter, where people live without families, without homes, without access to so much of what most of his think of what it means to be human” (208).

In addition to the conditions, Laskas reports on the difficulty and danger of drilling for oil by introducing various workers and their daily lives in a place that does not seem designed for humans.