Welcome to the third and final installment of this journal — these jottings on North Dakota. For the first two parts, go here and here.

Boom brings with it problems, in addition to blessings, and the biggest problem facing the Bakken is housing: There’s not enough of it, to keep up with the people. Sons of men have nowhere to lay their heads.

This problem is partly remedied by “man camps,” also known as “crew camps.” We’re talking about modular housing, not unlike military quarters in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Thousands upon thousands of men stay in these facilities. Some of them sleep in shifts. Generally, the residents are prohibited from having guns, booze, or drugs. The women are few.

I visit a man camp just west of Tioga. It has I think the longest hallway I’ve ever seen. A man in charge gives me the precise length: 1,008 feet.

And the facility has 1,002 rooms in it — bedrooms. It has plenty of other rooms, including an Internet center.

‐Did I tell you how I was greeted in Tioga? It was late at night. Suddenly, something darted into the road, into our headlights: tumbleweed. Scared the hell out of me.

‐I meet a man who’s building a hotel in this area. His name is Ray Cody, and his permanent home is Telluride, Colo. He is a formidable man, with a formidable past: hockey player, speed skater. Trained with Eric Heiden.

And get this: Ray rollerbladed across the United States. Yes, you read that right.

That’s the kind of adventure I’ve always wanted to have. But chances are, I won’t be rollerblading even across W. 69th St. anytime soon.

‐By the way, I just looked up the bed and breakfast that Ray runs with his wife, Anita, in Telluride. (Anita hails from North Dakota.) Looks good.

‐I hear a line I like: “He was so poor back then, he couldn’t afford to pay attention.” (I.e., he could afford nothing.)

‐Here’s another line, pure North Dakotan: “Twenty-below keeps the riffraff away.”

‐They look you in the eye out here. It’s almost disconcerting. I’m not used to that firm-handshake, look-you-in-the-eye stuff. I feel like it’s 1952 or something (and I mean that in the most positive way).

‐On the street signs of Tioga (such as they are), there are so many Norwegian names, you might think you were in Lillehammer.

‐In my NR piece, I mention Kathy Neset, who is a very successful oil consultant here in the Bakken — almost a guru, I would say. She’s not from out here. She’s from New Jersey. As she was leaving, in the late 1970s, someone said to her, “You mean, people actually live in North Dakota?”

She went to Brown University, majoring in geology. When she arrived in North Dakota, she worked a range of jobs in the oil business. (Same as Lynn Helms, whom we met in yesterday’s installment.) Kathy even roughnecked.

This lady certainly doesn’t look the part of the Big Bad Oilman: She’s soft, poised, feminine, sweetly reasonable. I say to her, “Does anyone ever say to you, ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a business like this?’” “Back East they do,” she answers. Here in North Dakota, they know better.

In a February issue of NR, my colleague Kevin Williamson wrote a piece about oil and Pennsylvania: “The Truth about Fracking.” He observed,

Everybody here has a three-day beard and a hardhat and steel-toed work boots, but there’s a strong whiff of chess club and Science Olympiad in the air, young men who are no strangers to the pocket protector, who in adolescence discovered an unusual facility for fluid dynamics and now are beavering away at mind-clutchingly complex technical problems . . .

That is so true. As I say in my current piece — my piece in the current NR — you encounter a mixture of Poindexters and he-men in the oil patch. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell one group from the other.

‐I get into the environmental question, a little, in my piece. Bottom line: Virtually every North Dakotan says, “We care about our land more than you do. More than any outsider ever could. We are good stewards. We depend on this land, we live here. You think we would despoil our backyard? Go jump in a lake, please.”

‐It’s funny what people — people from all over, from the various walks of life — get upset about. What they choose to be offended by. A lot of people don’t like oil drilling. The sight of it turns their stomachs.

But consider: These days, a derrick is up for 20 days, 25 days, 30. Then it goes away, leaving a simple, unobtrusive pump — which in any case is painted to blend in with the landscape. When the well is dry, the land is quickly back to normal. There’s no way of telling that drilling ever took place.

Contrast this with wind turbines: They have to be up for as long as they’re producing energy (a fairly pathetic amount).

I, for one, don’t like these flocks of turbines that appear across the country. At first, they look kind of cool — like an installation by the artist Christo. But then they grow tiresome, in my opinion.

How about highways, railroads, telephone poles, telephone wires? Oh, telephone wires! A blighter of the landscape if there ever was one.

Remember how Lady Bird campaigned against billboards?

‐In North Dakota, I hear two pronunciations of Minot (one of the more prominent cities). “MY-not” and “MY-nut.” My impression is the former’s more common — as in the slogan, “Why not Minot?” (The standard, and cheeky, answer: “Freezin’’s the reason.”)

‐A pub in Minot is called The Pour Farm. Get it?

‐When I was in grad school, I knew a student from Minot — wonderful guy. He was half Norwegian, half Syrian, I believe. Scott Hennen tells me he knows someone who wrote a monograph: The Arabs of North Dakota.

Speaking of Arabs, or Arab Americans, in this part of the world: Do you remember James Abourezk, the South Dakota senator?

‐In Bismarck, North Dakota’s capital, there’s a funny street: East Boulevard Avenue.

Huh?

‐On the grounds of the capitol, there is a monument to “The Pioneer Family.” It shows a man, a woman, and their children. Kind of stirring. What these people faced must be hard for us moderns to imagine.

‐The capitol itself is . . . um, the word “eyesore” would be too strong. Untraditional, let’s say. No rotunda and whatnot. At first, the building strikes me as pure Soviet bloc (if the word “pure” belongs there). But then it sort of grows on me.

For pictures, go here.

‐In the capitol is a hall of fame, depicting some favorite sons and daughters: Roger Maris, Peggy Lee, Lawrence Welk, Louis L’Amour, Angie Dickinson, Warren Christopher, Phil Jackson . . .

That’s an impressive lineup, for a state so sparsely populated. (We can joke about Christopher later, maybe, but now’s not the time.)

‐On an upper floor of the capitol, you’ll find Kevin Cramer, a member of the Public Service Commission, and a Republican candidate for Congress. I hope he wins. He’s smart, principled, undogmatic, personable, down-to-earth — the whole ball o’ wax.

I don’t see how anybody could vote against him, including the liberal Democrats. But then, people find a way . . .

When they were young, Cramer’s dad was a close pal of Dick Armey — a North Dakotan, despite his association with Texas. He doesn’t talk like a Texan, does he? Neither does another famous Texas pol, Phil Gramm — a Georgian through and through.

I see a picture of Kevin’s dad with Armey. They look about 19. I think the picture was taken in Rugby, N.D. — right smack in the center of the United States. The Geographical Center of North America, people say.

Let me sum up Kevin Cramer, philosophically. In this op-ed piece, he quotes Jefferson: “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”

And at the bottom of this other piece, Cramer writes, “Free people producing products other free people need and want — this really does work.”

Amen.

‐Ladies and gentlemen, I could go on and on, but I’ll stop now, referring you to my National Review piece. I have been lucky enough to take many enriching and even moving trips, wearing a reporter’s hat. North Dakota was one of the best.

The state has a fan in me forever. Angie Dickinson is just icing on the cake. (Peggy Lee, too.)

#JAYBOOK#