By Zachary Ugolnik ​

In 2005, seeking adventure and the solitude of pilgrimage, I bicycled from my hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to an Eastern Orthodox monastery in West Virginia, where I stayed for three months. From there I continued on to my uncle’s apartment just outside New Orleans. Low on cash, I filled out job applications until, three weeks later, I heard back from one. My uncle drove me to Venice, Louisiana, the southernmost point of the state, affectionately called by Louisianans “the end of the world.” He dropped me off at 4 AM, and I waited for a helicopter to take me still further, past marshes and grassy wetlands, to an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico.

On these small colonies at the edge of civilization, from structures that reach down and touch the nether regions of the earth, oil workers collect one of our most valuable commodities, bringing the world not only oil but also many and various substances formed from its components, from tires to soft contact lenses. These men (and a few women) are the forgotten faces behind the 1.7 billion barrels of oil produced in the Gulf of Mexico every day, providing the United States with 30 percent of its domestic oil.¹ Their days are long and their schedules are regimented. On the fringe of society, they have built a community as peculiar as a monastery.

“You’ll meet people out here you never knew existed,” the foreman said to me the morning I arrived on the platform, greeting me at the bottom of the stairs of the helicopter pad that blanketed the roof of the main building. His smile glistened with a few golden teeth. Grey chest hair peeked through his one-piece work suit, which was worn without an undershirt, zippered just high enough to hold in his belly, his pants tucked into cowboy boots.

“Is that right?” I replied as I followed him along the yellow-grated walkway that clung to each level of the building like an elaborate fire escape. We went down a flight of stairs to the main level. The waves, eighty or so feet below, blurred through the diamond-patterned grates in the walkway. Pillars lifted the platform above the ocean. The thick beams, coated with green algae where the waves crashed, plunged into the dark water. The height visible to the eye was only a portion of their true depth—only deep-sea divers could see where their metal met mortar on the ocean floor. Looking down from our perch, I felt queasy.

We walked into the main building, and I took a breath of cool synthetic air. It was like the office trailer on a construction site, except bigger. There were three offices, a full kitchen, a dining area, a TV lounge with theater seating on the first floor, and seven rooms with a total of twenty-eight beds off the hallway up the stairs. Wood paneling lined the walls and faded brown linoleum covered the floor. Large boxes of toilet paper, coffee filters, and candy bars had been propped against the wall, covering posters that—ironically—provided advice on how to pick up large, heavy boxes.

The foreman sat me down in the lounge to watch a safety video I had already seen during my three-day training session on land. A man lights a cigarette while leaning on a tank pasted with a flammable sign. Two men blithely toss a barrel over the railing into the ocean. In the next scene, the barrel washes ashore on the trash-adorned beaches of San Padre Barrier Island in Texas, where the gulf currents dump 150 tons of waste every year.²

Fittingly enough, my first task was to take out the trash. I hauled the full bags from the kitchen to the open space on the main level and threw them into a large burlap sack. Within its reach, the arm of a red crane jutted out over the ocean, its base on the edge of the platform. Every week the crane would lower these sacks onto a supply boat, the same boat that brought food packaged in Styrofoam coolers on dry ice.

A white tank that I assumed held water stood vertically against the wall of the main building next to air-conditioning units and a row of generators. On the opposite side, two trailers filled with bunk beds walled in the space. A derrick rose behind them in the distance. Two emergency boats resembling flying saucers floated beyond the railing, suspended by pulleys, equipped with an exterior sprinkler system in case the boats are ever dropped into water that is on fire.

As I stood in the middle of the main level, the sun reflected off the metal grated floor. I could see three more levels beneath me before the rig dropped to the sea. The entire platform was veined with red piping that pumped water to water cannons and hose stations, intertwined with arteries of various sizes and colors. Tanks and valves with red and yellow laminated tags mingled throughout. There were floodlights every twenty feet.

Two more trailers on a lower level brought the rig’s total capacity to forty-two workers, but I was told we were only carrying twenty-five. I had learned in training there were approximately 3,500 production platforms in the water between Florida and Mexico, 1,000 of them manned, including rigs that house a few hundred residents. If ninety were actively drilling at the time, with others pumping oil and gas, an overall population of around 35,000 workers was being maintained for oil and gas exploration and production in the gulf.³ I had entered the fifty-first state.

Federal waters begin three miles from the coast and extend two hundred miles into the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) of the United States, establishing what is internationally recognized as the “Exclusive Economic Zone.” Crimes committed offshore are booked as felonies and enforced by the Coast Guard, an added deterrent to punching an annoying roommate in the face. Our platform was not in a county or parish, but in a leased block of water called South Pass 70. In 2010, 6,643 blocks were leased in the Gulf of Mexico for a total area of 35.6 million acres.⁴ Six blocks down from South Pass 70 and thirteen blocks across you find Mississippi Canyon 252, the leased block of Deepwater Horizon (the site of the 2010 British Petroleum oil spill).

The blocks are grouped together and those that are coterminous with the coasts are often named after the parishes and counties of the states they abut, such as Corpus Christi, Grand Isle, and Pensacola. Similar to the naming of suburban subdivisions after geographical features they do not seemingly possess, the distant blocks of the continental shelf are often named after qualities of their seafloor. The Deepwater blocks boast such names as Amery Terrace, Destin Dome, Garden Banks, Green Canyon, and Walker Ridge. But from the railing of the platforms, they all look the same.

After taking out the trash, I stopped and leaned on the handrails, gazing into the blue. It was uncomfortable being in the ocean and standing still. I felt like the rig should move with the water, but it did not bob or sail. Affixed like a skyscraper, it only shook when the helicopter took off from its roof, leaving me behind. The wettest I could hope to get was standing at this railing feeling the spray of the waves brought up by wind. Swimming was impossible. I could only gaze into the water, an opaque blue window into a different dimension. We lived above the ocean, not in it or of it. We were hermits in our own way.

While living on the platform, I boarded with the kitchen and housekeeping staff, which consisted of two: my supervisor, Bill, who was the cook, and me. Bill was in his early forties, with buzzed red hair and a chin on its way to being doubled. We worked for Delta Catering, a subsidiary of the largest offshore catering company in the world, and we were contracted to clean and cook. The room the two of us shared was slightly bigger than a sleeper on a train, but without any windows. As I lay down to sleep that first day, in the lower bunk across from me Bill was hidden behind a hanging sheet tucked underneath the top mattress. I fell asleep to his snores. Bill woke me up the next morning at 4 AM and I passed on the favor to the rest of the men. I made the rounds, knocking on doors and flipping on light switches—a great way to get on everyone’s good side for the day. Conversations remained short. Alarm clocks, like alcohol, seemed to be forbidden.

In my stint at the Orthodox monastery, I had often been given the task of waking up the other monks. On the oil platform, I felt the same camaraderie in beginning our days together under the darkness before dawn. After breakfast, I would often watch the sun rise from the railing just outside the kitchen. I’d stand next to crew members as they smoked cigarettes, sharing our grogginess and a few words.

Four meals a day (breakfast at six, snack at nine-thirty, lunch at noon, dinner at five) kept the men’s bellies from growling despite their long work hours. Most of the workers, contracted for specific tasks, didn’t spend more than a few weeks on the same site. But no matter on which rig they found themselves, they could count on a basic menu: Tuesdays were always steak, Fridays were seafood, and Saturdays fried chicken. It was like this “everywhere in the gulf,” Bill told me. The workers filtered into the kitchen according to rank: the operators first, then the electricians and wire-line, then construction, and last the sandblasters and painters. At the monastery, I had sat in the farthest seat from the abbot, but on the rig I rarely ate at the same time as the foreman. When I did, he usually reminded me to refill the toothpick dispenser.

A number of the men would devour a whole lunch without realizing their hard hats were still on. “No Fear,” “NASCAR,” and other random assortments of faded stickers adorned many of these scuffed plastic shells. Two of the workers my age reversed the fittings so the visors rested upon their necks and they could wear their hats backwards, like broken-in baseball caps. Their equipment was an extension of themselves; they wore their coveralls and overalls like a second skin. When I saw their heads bare, they looked suddenly odd, like my high school Latin teacher with her glasses off.

After each meal, I’d break down the buffet and fill a metal bucket with all the leftovers. We rarely saved more than a side dish. If the painters from St. Lucia had time after the meal, they’d search the bucket for ideal bits of bait, sparing me the chore of walking it to the railing. Setting up on the lowest level with a simple fish line and a tug, they were usually guaranteed a bite. As they got their catches, they’d wrap their “take-home” dinners in newspaper and stuff them in vacant freezer space. The oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico make up the world’s largest artificial reef, supporting creolefish, blue runner, Bermuda chub, almaco jack, amberjack, barracuda, red snapper, spadefish (among other species) and, in the deeper waters, yellow- and blackfin tuna.⁵ On the weekends we’d often see recreational fishing boats lingering in the platform’s shadow, trying to reap some of the benefits of life on what I’d come to think of as our aquatic hermitage, hoping for the same catch rate as our crew.

I never minded dumping the food bucket, because most days the splashes of the drumsticks and fried okra were met by jumping fish. Though glimpses of dolphin fins were even more exciting, the sight of anything that reminded me that the seawater was used for things other than drilling was reassuring. One Tuesday evening, as I discarded a couple pounds of uneaten steak over the rail, I fixed my gaze on the distant rigs around us, squinting for gobbets of falling flesh, wondering how many cows would be dumped into the gulf that day.

On the days they were scheduled to leave, men alternated between watching the clouds and the Weather Channel, intensely hoping they would not have to wait another twenty-four hours for a helicopter to land. The majority of the operators or the “company” guys—who all wore faded work suits embroidered with their names on the chest and a Devon Energy patch on their shoulders—lived half their lives offshore and the other half with their families. One week on, one week off. This meant that the men on South Pass 70-C didn’t go home every evening and grumble about their workday; they went home and grumbled about their week at work, and had several days to do it. As one man admitted after he had come back to the rig with its ordered days, returning from idle hours with his wife was as much a relief to him as leaving the rig had been.

Roustabouts, which refers to any entry-level position on deck, often stay out two weeks before they are sent home for the same amount of time, not sure which platform they will end up on next. In the late nineteenth century, the term “roustabout” referred to itinerant workers at circuses, and today these workers wander from platform to platform. Painters and sandblasters often stay out as long as they can bear it; the crew on South Pass 70-C had been offshore for five weeks. On my first “hitch” as a galley hand I stayed out two weeks before a helicopter brought me back to Venice, one of the many crew-change locations that dot the gulf coast from Texas to Florida. I caught a ride with an engineer, who dropped me off at my uncle’s apartment an hour and a half later.

After sleeping on my uncle’s couch for a week in August 2005, I returned to South Pass 70-C, happy to find my bottom bunk still vacant. My relief had taken the top bunk, and would be staying on. After dropping my bag in the room, I walked into the kitchen where my new co-worker, a young African American man with a freshly shaved head, was cleaning the counters. Now that he was wearing the same outfit, the black Dickies pants and tan T-shirt I had on felt more like a uniform. His pants stylishly bunched at the ankles and looked much better on him. He was my height but had a larger frame and better teeth, with wide shoulders and hearty cheeks. Living in such close quarters, you tended to compare yourself to those around you.

“I’m Otis Leon, you can call me Leon,” he said.

I shook his hand and told him I was from outside Philly. He was from New Orleans, not far from my uncle’s place. At twenty-nine (a few years my senior), Leon was putting himself through community college and had been working offshore intermittently for the past few years. Prior to that, he had spent seven years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Within seven minutes of meeting him, he said to me in a hushed voice, gesturing to our surroundings: “It’s the same, man, it’s the same. They wake you up, you eat, you have a job, spend the whole day in the kitchen.” His brow rose up and down with his words, fluorescent light reflecting off his sweaty, crinkled forehead like the streaks drying on the chrome counter behind him. “It’s the same, man,” he said to me again as he walked out of the kitchen.

Three days later, after doing our rounds making the necessary beds and cleaning the bathrooms (the dread of each day), Leon said to me: “Today’s almost over.”

“But it’s only nine in the morning, Leon,” I replied.

Leon’s internal clock seemed to run particularly fast. Six weeks earlier, I had been surrounded by monks who lived their lives working to slow time down. Leon, perhaps because of his years spent in prison, seemed to be trying to hurry it along.

“Today’s done, only six days left,” Leon said to me a couple days later.

“But it’s three in the afternoon, and don’t you have seven days left?”

“Nah ya see, all we have left is dinner, so today’s over, and tomorrow is tomorrow, so tomorrow will get done, so really there’s only six days left,” he replied with a big smile, mocking my bewilderment.

“Is that right?” I could only reply. It was true that time offshore didn’t operate according to the same rules on land. Productivity was based more on weather than on the days of the week. There were no such things as weekends. Every day was like every other day, except when nature distinguished it with winds and rain that stopped operations. There was no punching in, so men could log twelve to eighteen hours of work a day but might only end up working a few hours.

Leon often walked over to the calendar to check how many days he had left before his departure. He’d figure out which week he’d be home, and then rework the entire schedule assuming he stayed offshore a week or two longer, calculating the overtime. One morning, when we were speculating a few paychecks in advance, Bill turned to us and said: “There’s a storm way out in the gulf. . . . I think we’ll all be coming in in the next few weeks.”