(from Episode #33 of AgArts from Horse & Buggy Land)

Mary Swander:

The rural environment can offer vast landscapes, wildlife, a lower cost of living and tighter local communities. But often these very benefits can come at a cost. The rural economy can be based on extractive practices, and a tight community can become exclusive. Today we listen to an interview with Taylor Brorby who grew up gay in Center, North Dakota in the middle of the fracking boom. He has just published a new memoir called Boys & Oil, about the challenges he experienced, and how he had to navigate as a person of difference in this environment.

Taylor Brorby is a nonfiction writer, poet and activist.  In addition to Boys and Oil, he is the co- editor of Fracture: Essays, Poems and Stories on Fracking in America. Brorby regularly speaks around the country on issues related to extractive economies, queerness, disability and climate change. He is the Annie Tanner Clark fellow in Environmental Humanities and Environmental Justice at the tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah.

Taylor Brorby: (Reading from Boys and Oil)

When I struggle, I close my eyes, breathe and go there, to the bend in the Missouri River where, when the light strikes the surface of the water just right, it sparkles, and the wind and leaves and orchestra of the prairie snap into sharp relief. There’s the croak of the northern leopard frog; the cut banks slough into the sepia-stained river, the piping plover trembles across the wet sand searching for its nest.

In my mind, there’s an eagle sharp and lean, perched against a backdrop of the darkening cottonwood river bottom. In the bottom, somewhere a lynx slinks among the lush grass. A log, stripped of its bark, smoothed to marrow, is submerged in the river. And then the armored ghost comes into my imagination–larger, more fully grown now than when I saw it years ago. It’s whitened with old age, its barbels trace the murky river bottom, its small eyes barely detect any light; the sturgeon hunts, as it always has, for seventy million years. It’s here on the dark bottom of things where I have gone in my journey, like a grain of sand pushed by the current, my life has meandered, slowly shifted farther downstream, where it inches toward a new beginning, as I continue to search for the deep current to find the place where I am meant to be.

Mary Swander:

In the passage that you just read, you talked about searching for the very bottom of things, and I think that’s what you do in your book Boys and Oil. The book begins and it ends with the prairie. The prairie was once the bottom of the sea. In the book, you’re searching for a foundation for your life. So, what significance does the prairie have for you and what kind of a foundation did it provide?

Taylor Brorby:

The prairie is such a magical landscape. I mean, it’s one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems on the planet. It’s more diverse than the Amazon rainforest. And yet we call it flyover country partly because the landscapes aren’t immense in height but they are in water. They make us feel small. But that diversity means that, for me, the prairie has so many different voices, so many different life forms that it thrives in its diversity. And for me, that was such a magical place to grow up, because it also allowed me to watch how light works. I mean, in the golden hour, at about 5 p.m. in November, the prairie is just ablaze with glory. And I thought it was like growing up in an oil painting every day. It was this immense landscape that I thought I could run forever and never reach the end of it. It was a place that allowed curiosity to bloom and blossom. And that was such a wonderful place to grow up in terms of thinking about an inner landscape that was reflected in the physical landscape.

Mary Swander:

And you’re out there in nature and in the prairie in those opening passages, you’re foraging, you’re fishing, you’re really taking in that diversity. And, you know, I kept thinking about the white settlers who came upon that prairie thinking it was nothing but a pile of weeds to plow up, and how tragic that was. Because we lost a whole eco-system. But you are also a person of diversity. You are an out gay man, and disabled man who grew up in that environment. And unfortunately, as a young child at school, you were bullied. I would imagine that you carried that trauma the rest of your life. How did that affect you– that bullying in grade school?

Taylor Brorby:

I think that’s why I probably was out in nature so much.  There was this big open world and I didn’t feel that the Great Blue Heron was judging me. Or you know, your relationship with a northern pike. If anyone’s a fisherman who’s tuning in, it is pretty straightforward. You know, they’re kind of like, pissed off teenagers, if you get in their space, they’re going to strike what you’re throwing at them. It was very clear what the relationship was. And I would go to these hills or out into the creek beds, and it was a place that could hold all of that. It could hold what I was feeling.

I grew up in a very small town. I mean, I grew up in a county without a stoplight. I went to school with the same 22 people. My whole experience. And it was just a place where when you’re different, it it’s a hard place to fit in. It is so confounding to me knowing how biologically diverse the landscape is. I found the town more of a mono culture way of thinking. You know, boys need to play football, they’re going to grow up to be ranchers or farmers or coal miners, There are things as I say, in my book, that don’t survive. If you’re tender on the prairie, you have to be pretty hardy.

But the way that I had to survive was by largely leaving the human community I lived around. There was something in me that I didn’t even know that other boys sniffed out, and that’s been an experience well into adulthood. Certain men can sniff out if you’re gay pretty quickly, or if you’re just different, and that becomes pretty threatening. And there’s not really a recovery from that, because we’re still living in times where I would say much of America, if I even went out to dinner, let’s say with a boyfriend and put my hand on his thigh, that could be a death sentence. You know, I mean, it could certainly be a sentence for harassment, but much worse as well.

Mary Swander:

That’s a lot to deal with. For a small child and for an adult man to continue to have to face that kind of oppression. And you were in Center. I love the name. You’re in Center, North Dakota, population 541. And by the time you’re in high school, you’ve had it with Center.  I think it’s remarkable you convinced your parents to move to Bismarck, to a larger city. And what were the advantages? What did Bismarck have to offer you that you certainly weren’t going to get in Center?

Taylor Brorby:

Well, it had stoplights. Bismarck, only 40 miles away, was about 100 times bigger than Center, population wise. It had a symphony orchestra. It still does. It has a junior college and private liberal arts Benedictine College, so I could go to plays and things like this. There were advanced placement classes. It was an incredible gift that my parents gave me. I mean, bullying was so bad, my eighth and ninth grade year that I just said to them, either we move or I’m commuting for school every day. That was my ultimatum. And they gave me this great gift. We moved. My mom had to commute back to Center, whereas my dad was commuting to Bismarck when we lived in Center. So they switched commutes. And in some ways, it was even more convenient, because my mom could carpool to Center.

My graduating class was nearly the size of Center. And just with that number of students in one grade, you’re going to find people. I had people who love making jazz music. I had people in my life who loved acting in plays, I could find people who wanted to sit at coffee shops and have conversations, even as high schoolers, which just wasn’t really a part of my life prior to that. I had really gone into myself and my final two years in Center, I just needed to survive, I needed to figure out what was going on. I just played my saxophone and piano all the time and didn’t have a lot of light in my life.

Mary Swander:

It seems to me that when you were in Center, you took refuge in nature and the beginning of your interest in arts. And then when you moved to Bismarck, you were really allowed to flourish.  As you say, there was a symphony orchestra there. You were reading a lot of literature. You were into music, you were into drama, all of those arts really buoyed you when you were in Bismarck. After high school, you went to St. Olaf College. This is all of course documented in the memoir. What was that experience like? I know you were really homesick in the beginning.

Taylor Brorby:

I’m such a mama’s boy.  I’ve been a Type #1 diabetic since I’ve been five. And so I didn’t really travel a lot away from my parents. And then I went to college. My sister went to a year of college, but I’m the first one in my family to finish college. And I chose to go to college 500 miles away from home! And I didn’t know how to study. I didn’t know what college was, I knew how to do laundry and stuff. But it didn’t matter if I got up in time. Then I was in charge of me. And I think all of that was compounded by having to make new friends again. Oh, I’d gotten to Bismarck and I had some friends there. And now I left them and I have to go through this process again.

But that world, after that first semester, after my homesickness, sort of faded away. It was like the world went from black and white into color. And that’s how I felt when we moved to Bismarck, but going to college was even more so. You encountered thinkers you had never heard of. Who had ever heard of Soren Kierkegaard in high school? In college, it’s like Novocaine in your brain, and you have to form some study groups with people to figure out what Uncle Soren had to say. St. Olaf was just incredible because it was such an artistic haven. I mean, it’s known for its choral tradition. Its music is stellar.

And it had a heightened level of curiosity. I learned that there was this magazine called The New Yorker that people subscribe to and read. It was such a breaking point, on page 104 in that great novel, The Great Gatsby, you hear oh, Jay Gatsby went to St. Olaf for two weeks and worked as a custodian. It was this point of pride in American literature. I’m going there too. And so it was this safe haven for me of curiosity and exploration, and also fully admitting to myself that I was a gay man. I knew I was attracted to men in high school. I knew earlier in middle school, but it was something you dare not say. And at St. Olaf, I finally came out to friends. And that was such a wonderful process.

Mary Swander:

Well, and at this time, you were also dealing with disability, you’re really a person of double difference. Being gay and disabled. You mentioned you are Type #1 diabetes. Maybe you could tell the listeners the difference between Type #1 and Type #2 diabetes.  And then you were on the path of a musical career and had the unfortunate experience of losing part of your thumb in a construction accident.

Taylor Brorby:

Two weeks after graduating high school, I was working in an assembly line job, which is very hard work–repetitive tasks. You have to maintain your focus for eight hours a day, and if you have a mind like mine, it can wander easily. And this job was going to help pay for college. It was working for Bobcat, where my father spent his career as a welder. And I was building these doohickeys called rollers and idlers, just these metal pieces that had to be pressed together by a press. And the press I was using operated by a button. But you only needed one hand to press the button. The other hand was free to move around. And I accidentally left my left thumb over the hole of where the press was going down. And the left thumb is the octave key for saxophonist which is the most important key on the instrument. And the press lobbed off my thumb like a hunk of butter. I mean, I didn’t even really feel it, I felt sort of a pinch.

And then I went into instant shock with adrenaline. The fortunate part is: the press didn’t take off more. Had it clipped the knuckle, they would have removed my whole thumb. On piano I can still reach a perfect octave, like my right, but it was just short enough for my saxophone that I had to leap to the octave key, which slows down your technique. And we were looking at how much would it be to redesign the saxophone? Well, several thousand dollars.  That was another source of trauma. You know, you’re trying to get back into playing music at the level you were used to. Every time you miss a note or when your thumb has to rotate up, you’re reminded of that accident, that trauma there.

So that was part of going into college and fueling part of that homesickness we talked about earlier, because my whole identity was wrapped up in music, I wanted to be a symphony conductor. And this was my main instrument. And now I didn’t do it. Or when I tried, I would spend more time weeping in the practice room than playing my scales and arpeggios.

And then the diabetes that’s been a part of me since I was five. And for listeners, you’re born with a genetic predisposition to Type #1 diabetes.  And there has to be a disruption to your endocrine system. Most people who are Type #1 diabetic, get diagnosed after a severe flu or pneumonia or something like this. That sort of shocks their system. But I was diagnosed in the springtime. And so looking back, there was nothing like a cold that we could point to, though there is increasing research that growing up near fossil fuel and extraction sites can trigger endocrine disruption. And you know, I grew up four miles from the coal mine where my grandpa had spent his entire career in the power plant, and where my mother spent the entirety of hers.

Type #2 diabetes is more related to lifestyle– being overweight, or maybe it runs in your family. And later in life, things start happening that push you on a path towards Type #2, but that can be sort of regulated or kept in check through diet, exercise, and pills. If it isn’t, then it can become full on Type #1. But when someone is diagnosed as Type #1, it’s just a ticking time bomb until it gets activated. For me, it happened at five, I have a good friend that had happened to him at 25. I had a friend earlier this year from college, she’s 34. And she just got diagnosed with Type #1 diabetes. And so that that’s been a part of my life now for nearly 30 years. And it impacts every waking moment of my day, even when I sleep.

Mary Swander:

I don’t think people quite understand that diabetes is a constant calculation, a constant worry, constant self-medication, constant regular trips to be monitored by the doctor.

Taylor Brorby:

Oh, yeah. I feel like I’m in warfare with the nations of Italy and France. I love pasta, I just can’t eat it, you know, it’s very hard on my body. And you’re right, it’s a constant calculation of, okay, if I’m invited to a potluck, do I need to bring a backup meal just in case there isn’t really anything I can eat there, or things like this. I don’t drink beer, for instance. It just messes with my body in really negative ways. So it’s a constant evaluation. And you’re checking in with your body wondering where your blood sugar is, if it’s going up or down, while you’re trying to still be a good community member.

Mary Swander:

So, you’re finishing your college at St. Olaf, and you’ve a double difference. And you’ve come out there. And then when you graduate, your aunt outs you to the rest of your family. And this was a huge moment in your life. Because your parents, didn’t embrace you for that. And you became estranged from your parents. This was another huge heartbreak.

Taylor Brorby:

This happened on my oldest nephew’s fifth birthday, I was working a food supply warehouse job. I was leaving in a month for seminary out east at Princeton. I wasn’t sure I wanted to become a pastor. But I thought, oh, it’s more liberal arts learning, you have to study philosophy. You get to learn Hebrew, all these things. And I get to go to Princeton, $4,000 a year and I get to live down the block from where Albert Einstein last lived. It’s a great gig. And in 2009, the ELCA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the tradition I was raised in had voted to ordain openly gay people, men and women and, and that was incredible. I was sharing those sorts of articles online. And in my family, the thinking sort of goes, if you share something, you must believe it, there’s no sort of arguing a different viewpoint than the one you might personally hold. So the reasoning would be, well, if Taylor is sharing articles about this, he must be gay. Well, in this case, it is true.

But to have a family member, not come to you and ask you directly, but go behind your back and say, you know, I’m worried Taylor might be gay. Well, you don’t have to worry about my being gay. I am gay. Even if I’m not gay, you don’t have to worry. We can have a conversation. But things really hit the fan. I mean it. It was really as bad as I write about in that book. My parents were not in a place where they could deal with it. And it was both from a sort of religious perspective but also a class perspective. I had finished college and I had been accused that I thought I was better than my family. And there was a lot of psychological trauma in those weeks after that.

Mary Swander:

And it’s a common experience with people of difference. When they’re not accepted by their families, nor by society at large, it weakens their mental health. And you had periods where you were suicidal, right? Can you talk about that?

Taylor Brorby:

It’s something that’s on my mind a lot, especially with this book. And you make choices when you put a book out in the world. Am I going to go there? Am I going to share this? And I wouldn’t claim to tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t do in their own life or writing. But just yesterday the Trevor Project, which is an LGBTQ plus advocacy group, just released that there’s increased suicidal ideation amongst queer youth. It is now as high as one in two. It’s previously been in the 40th percentile. Those numbers change when you’re talking about transgender youth, or queer youth of color in particular. Those numbers get higher. And part of it is about what we’re talking about, that we have those cliches of blood is thicker than water, or family never abandons you. My family abandoned me. They thought I was going to burn in hell.

And that’s some real psychological damage for a person no matter how old you are. It’s why people never came out of the closet. I had struggled with that in different ways. My parents did so much for me growing up. Their lives were not easy. Their lives were blue collar lives, dad working the graveyard shift, paying my saxophone lessons. It was incredible. I mean, they bawled at my college graduation. And then to have that foundation, just crumble. How can it not send you spiraling? And I come from a culture where you don’t seek mental health help. Finally, I had to get over it and go, I’m not doing well. I’m not getting out of bed, or I’m thinking I’m going to jump off a bridge down from where John Berryman did in Minneapolis.

This is not a healthy way of dealing with things or of moving through the world. But I want people to really understand that that is happening now. We need to be open and affirming in our conversations. It cannot go unsaid that queer youth are listening to the conversations we’re having. They’re seeing the social media posts. And one of my goals with this book is to get a boy to take the pistol out of his mouth to get the girl to take her head out the oven. Life should be big and beautiful, and it should be filled with love because of who you are. And when you don’t feel that, the other option can be very tempting.

Mary Swander:

We all need to open our hearts to youth like you. That scene in the book where you’re standing on the bridge just sent chills up my spine. It is really dramatic and moving. And, yes, let’s try to support our youth and get over our biases. However, we got them. You can get them through culture. You can get them through religion. You can get them through all sorts of different venues. But eventually, let’s hope that we can have a wider perspective on these issues. Thankfully, you were able to pull your life back, put it back on a steady path.

After you graduated, you found yourself in the Twin Cities. You did find some people that supported you, and those people are still in your life. And you got a graduate degree at Hamlin in the Twin Cities. You got very serious about your writing. You’re also a visual artist. You’re really, really talented. You’re a musician, you’re a visual artist, you’re a writer, what else do you do? I don’t even want to ask.

And, you’re the first generation that went to college from your family. That’s another special category. That designation puts a lot of pressure on the kids who finish high school, then go to college, and the parents have not gone to college. It’s hard, it’s disorienting, you don’t have that kind of support that you would have with parents that would say, “Oh, let me see what your schedule. Okay, now you need to get a history course in here, or, let’s get some good science courses.” You know, you don’t have that. And you don’t have anybody who really understands what you’re going through.  So, you’re a man of triple difference. After graduate school you find yourself back in North Dakota, and you’re documenting the Bakken oil boom. Tell us a little bit about that experience.

Taylor Brorby:

When I left for college in 2006, that was the year the Bakken oil boom began in Northwest North Dakota. North Dakota had had two previous oil booms. But the first one started in the 50s, when oil was first discovered, the second in the late 70s busting in the early 80s. And they had gotten all of the easy access oil. If you can imagine a glass of soda with ice cubes in it, and you’ve sort of sucked the main part of it out. But there’s still a little soda between the ice cubes, but you don’t know how to get it with the straw that you’re using.

Well, in the 90s, an engineer who now owns multiple tropical islands developed this thing called a whip stock that over several 1000 feet allows you to bend pipe so it can approach oil horizontally, not just vertically. You don’t have to drill multiple pinholes into the soil. You can drill down but then bend the pipe and snake it upwards of two miles in any direction to slurp that residual oil up. And once that hit, Northwestern North Dakota exploded.  At the height of the boom, it was the second largest oil producing state in the country after Texas towns. I can think of one town– Watford City–a small town of maybe 1000 people when I graduated in high school. By 2014, it was over 10,000. It was doubling in size every two years. And that means you need more restaurants, more bars, you need better highways, you need more nurses, all of these things.

Mary Swander:

I remember there was no housing. Some workers were commuting on light planes from Wisconsin and other places every day, flying back and forth.

Taylor Brorby:

There were people literally living in ice fishing houses in the middle of wheat fields. There were people who moved their campers in. Farmer Johnson said, “Oh, yeah, you can park your camper out in my field for $1,200 a month.” There was a point where an apartment in Williston, North Dakota, was more expensive than New York City. And Williston, let me just remind you, does not have good Chinese takeout, and so, it exploded. And I was back there in November of 2013, teaching creative writing workshops in the Bakken oil boom. And it was just incredible. The horizon flickered and they’re burning off so much natural gas that you could see North Dakota from space. It gave off more light pollution than Minneapolis and St. Paul. It was effectively the planet’s largest bonfire.

Oil was booming. It was more cost effective to burn off the natural gas, which in North Dakota is a byproduct, compared to say, Pennsylvania where people are going for natural gas. It’s a byproduct in the Bakken. They’d simply light it on fire and send it into the atmosphere rather than slowing down developing technology to capture it. It was interesting to me to see how economics builds that in.  We can afford to burn off the gas because business is booming. To slow down is to lose money.

But of course, this came with incredible risk. We don’t keep track of the missing murdered Indigenous women when we have no clue how many missing Indigenous women there are. They’ve been trafficked through that part of the world, been removed from the reservation that the boom surrounded–the Fort Berthold Reservation. But because of that lack of infrastructure, it allows other things to come with it like increased drug trafficking, human trafficking. It’s a far away part of the world. It is a far distance from Minneapolis, St. Paul from Denver, it is very, very rural, and it changed so much of the landscape because money was flowing in at just incredible rates.

Mary Swander:

And what happened to the Missouri River?

Taylor Brorby:

Oil spills, of course, were increasing exponentially. And for a while the state was recording, every spill– everything from as small as one gallon up to you several 100,000 gallons. And in 2016, a Duke University study confirmed, in fact, that the Missouri River is radioactive, because of course, it’s the main watershed. All streams go to the Missouri River. And water finds a way. Oil finds a way. Chemicals find a way. You would read these stories of 200 gallons of some chemical spilled into a little creek. Well, that creek eventually went to a larger creek and then made its way into the Missouri River. And so, the water that is used throughout the breadbasket is contaminated. We have radioactive wheat. It’s stunning. It’s horrific.

Mary Swander:

And you put together another book called Fracture, that was an anthology of excellent environmental writers who, interpreted documented, meditated upon all of these problems. And then you were at Iowa State University in the writing program there. And guess what shows up? The Dakota Access Pipeline comes right to the edge of Ames. So you became an activist against the pipeline and spent a night in jail for that? And how did that night in jail shape your resolve to deal with these issues?

Taylor Brorby:

It was one of the most expensive vacations of my life, and I had, thankfully, some good guardian angels who footed my arrest bill in the Boone County Jail.  I’m always scared when I move to a new place, because it seems that the fossil fuel industry follows me. I was trying to put 800 miles between me and the Bakken oil boom while I was in The MFA program to work on my first few books or get some writing going. And I arrived in August, and in December, there was a big headline in the Des Moines Register, that this pipeline was being announced. And then there was a town meeting in Ames and I showed up and then all hell broke loose.

I was traveling around Iowa, and around the region, telling people what I knew and what I had seen in the Bakken, and was doing research to understand even more deeply about not only this pipeline, but the volatility of Bakken crude oil. And I would go to meetings, I would go to colleges to try to whip up a little bit of a fury to say you, too, don’t know what’s coming to your state, you know, 25 million gallons of oil is going to flow across your farmland every day. And it is volatile and pipelines break and rupture.

I went back home to go to the protest at Standing Rock for a few days, and then came back to Ames right before school started. And I got arrested as the first person arrested in Iowa over the pipeline on August 31. I think it was 2016. And I remember having to say to my students, now tomorrow, I’m going to do something that might get me taken to a place that I’m not in control of when I leave. I didn’t want to say what I was going to do. But they understood. I say, if you don’t get an email from me by 9 p.m., we won’t be meeting the next morning because I won’t be able to physically be here.

I just felt for me and for generations of my family. I have worked in coal, oil and natural gas, and we’re not rich like the Rockefellers.  I grew up in a trailer house in a county without a stoplight. And I found that I needed to test my own metal. I think of that river being radioactive, and that my nephews still live in Bismarck, and that they’re drinking radioactive water. I wanted to be able to say to them: I wrote letters to the editor, I went to townhall meetings, I produced an anthology against fracking. I wanted to be able to say I did almost everything I could to stop this, and for me, that meant putting my body on the line, which of course, was difficult because I’m a diabetic, and I didn’t have access to my blood glucose monitor. They almost took my insulin pump off of me when they were patting me down. And I said, “Oh, my goodness, you can take that, but then we’re going to have a far more interesting night in jail. It was a very serious judgment call on my part to get arrested and there was a lot more than just symbolism at stake. Not only the health of the planet, the health of my body in a very real way, was hit home in that moment for me.

Mary Swander:

That’s very tense moment in the in the book.

Taylor Brorby, you end this book, where you begin with a description of the prairie called caprock. In the petroleum industry, caprock means a non-permeable formation that may prevent oil, gas or water from migrating to the surface. How does the speaker of Boys and Oil finally relate to the word caprock?

Taylor Brorby:

It’s a very real issue for me right now. That shallow sea begins the book, which is where trilobites are swimming. And now people are burning trilobites every day. In their cars, we now call them oil, they’ve transfigured into oil. That same landscape that my friend Sandra Steingraber, says no human eye has ever seen, is now under assault again under the caprock. It is this rock where current technology is being developed. Carbon capture and storage will liquefy carbon dioxide from ethanol plants around the country or fossil fuel plants around the country, be moved through pipelines, and be put back underground where it will supposedly stay forever, and that it’ll be a natural holding tank.

And so caprock for me, is this insane space that no one thinks about that we’re walking across every day. That is literally being brought to the forefront of whether we are going to have a planet we can continue to live on that it is a holding area, like I think so much of the prairie is. It’s been the testing ground for most of our worst ideas, even though it’s supposed to be this incredibly diverse, strong, yet relational landscape. But we put our worst ideas on the prairie and we ask it to hold a lot. I keep thinking about that foundation I ran and skipped across as a child, and now that foundation can be assaulted.

Mary Swander:

I’ve been speaking to Taylor Brorby, who has the best psychic foundation to approach these issues in his new book Boys and Oil. Go out and buy a copy. Thank you, Taylor, for coming on the show today.

Taylor Brorby:

Thanks so much for having me, Mary, and for all the good stuff that you do on behalf of us all.