Booming

Yesterday Kadizzle spoke with someone, can not even remember who, but the person said their father was a boiler maker, and went "Booming".  There are two types of boiler makers apparently.  The local boiler makers take the cream, and get to stay home and work on the local power plants.  Boiler making is an on and off proposition.  The work comes and goes, so you have to chase the work.  That is where the boomers go.  The boomers go to where a new project is being built.

Booming has sort of been a way of life around Kadizzles home town of Hazen.  The big boom hit many years ago when the gas plant got built.  There were 5,000 boomers here.   They are about to add on to the gas plant and we can expect 750 or more boomers.  The boomers are like gypsies.  The boomers are the guys who did not pay attention in high school, and did not realize that meant they would have to move around for the rest of their life looking for work.

A whole different cause of booming in North Dakota is oil.  Hazen is on the fringe of the oil boom.  Booming does not make for stable families, it does make for drugs, drinking, divorce, and kids growing up the hard way.  When the boom hits things get built as if the boom will never end. The bars sprout up, so do the hotels, and even the new subdivisions.  When the boom goes bust there are streets with no houses, and city governments wondering how they are going to pay for all the leftovers.

During the gas plant boom a whole man camp was built in Beulah.  Today the cafeteria is a church.  The street lights from the project are along the bike path in Hazen, and all over Mercer county.

When Kadizzle came to Hazen in a way he was a boomer.  Kadizzle came with the coal.  There were not a lot of people in North Dakota with coal mine management skills, so Kadizzle packed up and landed in Hazen.  One good thing about boomers is they do sometimes introduce new DNA into the culture.  When a new plant or mine is built some of the builders remain to run the damn things.  A lot of intelligence is involved in a gas plant.  It involves complex planning, and even a new kind of knowledge about chemistry, metallurgy, and a host of things the locals never heard of.

One of the first things the boomers did was overthrow the old guard.  When Kadizzle moved here there were about three families running the whole show.  Those days more or less ended.  Religion was another strange thing.  Originally everyone was either Catholic, or Lutheran.  Now the whole area has been infested with every kind of fundamentalist insanity known to man.  Southern Baptist is an invasive species.  Once those dingers took hold we were off to the races.  Baptist are like dogs there are a thousand breeds.  When two baptist disagree about how god made salad a new church springs up in a basement, a garage, or an old lumberyard.  Now everyone has their own flavor of Jesus.

Well the next boom will be here soon.  Fasten you seat belt.