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

Laskas’s time on the oil rig is most reminiscent of her time with the coal miners. Her admiration for the men doing this dangerous work is clear, just as it was with the miners in Ohio. However, unlike the section on coal mining, Laskas’s focus is on one particular person: TooDogs.

Much like the other sections, Laskas provides a detailed description of the work, of the setting, and of the lives of the people she shadows. Most of the chapter, however, deals with TooDogs. This is in part because he is a fascinating character. She describes his life before working as a toolpusher, spent wildcatting—drilling exploration oil wells. TooDogs insists, “[l]ife on Oooguruk, compared with wildcatting, is practically vacation” (235). Furthermore, TooDogs had a pretty serious drug problem, though he has been clean eighteen years by the time Laskas meets him.

Laskas also details TooDogs's home life, a wife and children whom he loves, but with whom he’s also uncomfortable. His job makes him feel as if he lives two separate lives, and he often wonders if his family is happier when he’s out on the rig. She reveals as well that TooDogs is seemingly allergic to being touched by other people; it literally gives him hives.

In fact, TooDogs presents himself as tough and masculine, fiercely unsentimental. Laskas’s portrait of TooDogs reveals someone else entirely, a man dedicated not only to his family, but to the workers on the rig whom he mentors and befriends, seeing the potential in each person, despite what others might see. Laskas observes, “[i]f there is one force that drives TooDogs, it is a kind of cavernous compassion, a well of empathy that never seems to empty. Maybe because of all the forgiveness he’s still working on getting, or maybe it’s just the way he’s built” (226).

For example, TooDogs has developed a relationship with another worker called Kung Fu because of his habit of breaking into kung fu moves to blow off steam. Kung Fu claims working on the rig saved him from a life of meth and motorcycle gangs, but it’s clear that the man is unstable. He tells Laskas about being monitored by the “enemy” and, at one point, “begins laughing in a way that doesn’t seem right, doesn’t seem joyful, and then in a minute he is crying” (225). TooDogs works with him, however, and tries to keep him on an even keel.

TooDogs is a paternal figure for the other workers, most of them much younger and with little experience. Unlike Rod, who is almost contemptuous of their inexperience, TooDogs approaches these young men empathetically, offering them guidance at every step and spending a great deal of time training them.

Laskas and TooDogs also form a bond. They have deep conversations about TooDogs and his family, his hopes and fears. TooDogs seems pretty laid back; for example, he has a habit of identifying a problem, then declaring it “workable.” When he tells Laskas that old roughnecks seem to die quickly after they retire, however, Laskas “cut[s] him off before he can say it doesn’t matter, that it’s all workable,” stating pointedly, “[t]hat’s not workable” (242). There is a deep well of sadness in TooDogs, and the parallel between drilling through the earth for oil and drilling through TooDogs’s layers of defensiveness is subtle but clear.

Laskas’s account of their last conversation before she leaves the work site is poignant. TooDogs wants to be sure he’s made it clear that a “loving family is way better than anything” on the rig, and Laskas points out there’s a kind of family in the rig as well (242). TooDogs admits he often feels more comfortable with the family on the rig than with his real family, which is “not a bad thing” but “kind of sad,” nonetheless (242).

This parallels her account of TooDogs’s last day on the rig before taking his promotion. TooDogs compliments one of the workers, and the compliment makes the man cry before wrapping TooDogs up in a bear hug. TooDogs shakes his head and says, “My God, this is just supposed to be a rig” (243).

Finally, Laskas reveals that TooDogs dies the day he begins his new position, leaving the reader to wonder if TooDogs dies of a broken heart. Laskas’s grief over TooDogs’s death is palpable, and she demonstrates once again her sense of humanity and connectedness to others (however different); she wants to show her readers not Hidden America, but hidden Americans, and wants the audience to appreciate them in the same way she does.

Laskas’s next chapter on trucking similarly focuses on one person and is also similarly colored by her grief: this time not at the death of one of the people she meets on this journey, but the deaths of her own parents. Her mother dies first, though not unexpectedly; she was 86 and ill. However, her father dies ten days later. Laskas notes that while many people would find this beautiful, it is actually exhausting. She rides along with Sputter to leave “all that behind” (247).

However, she does not really leave it behind as much as she incorporates it into her time with Sputter. The nature of the truck driving means spending a lot of time with Sputter, time talking or listening to music. However, despite this forced intimacy, Laskas does not seem able to have that same kind of connection with Sputter as she has with TooDogs, despite Sputter’s “magnanimous way that invites the whole world into her inner circle” (247).

This might be because Laskas has a hard time understanding Sputter. She likes Sputter, but does not, for example understand her affinity for things like country music and chrome. Sputter is unusual; there are few female truck drivers, and even fewer Black female truck drivers. Laskas’s language here seems to hint that Sputter is overly optimistic and friendly, assuming a friendship—a brotherhood where one doesn’t really exist.

Laskas finds a reflection of this in her desire to believe that Sputter’s sister loves her work with the elderly. She needs to believe, wants to believe that the women who cared for her own parents were “not only pretending to care—just doing a job, just getting a paycheck” (261). This indicates that Sputter is also pretending to care, or perhaps, pretending that other truck drivers care about her, or that Michael cares about her.

Sputter spends a lot of time talking about both Michael and her father, and she realizes that her desire for a strong man is linked to her image of her father, as well as his dismissal of her. Sputter reveals how desperately she wanted her father’s attention, that she became interested in trucks as a way of trying to connect with him, even though he disapproved and refused to teach her.

Sputter’s relationship with her parents gives Laskas room to think about her relationship with her parents. Not as strained as Sputter’s, Laskas is nonetheless haunted by their funerals, which do not go as she wants because she “never got to read the words [she] had prepared to say at [her] mother’s funeral.” Furthermore, after her father’s death with all its “high drama of love, sixty years of marriage, God, love and how beautiful it is to have your parents dying in each other’s arms,” there is no room for Laskas to remember him as funny, as humorous, or to explore the ways in which they were alike.

In a way, this chapter is haunted by grief. For Laskas, grief over her parents’ deaths and all that entails, and for Sputter, grief for a life she wanted and may never get to have—a strong relationship with her dad, marriage to a good man, and children. However, both Laskas and Sputter find comfort in each other’s presence, even if they don’t connect on the same level as Laskas does with TooDogs.

Indeed, they don’t make such a connection until after Laskas’s time with Sputter is over, and there is a clear sense that neither Laskas nor Sputter are open with each other during their time together. Sputter, for example, though she complains about Michael, nonetheless puts on a brave face for Laskas. Similarly, Laskas does not talk about her parents’ deaths with Sputter. It is not until much later, when Sputter reveals that she and Michael have broken up, that Laskas and Sputter are truly honest.

Sputter apologizes for not communicating with Laskas, and Laskas thinks this “is an odd reaction to sorrow—the need to apologize to others for disappearing into a cave ten thousand miles deep,” and so she lets Sputter open up to her and then “open[s] up [herself] and tell[s] [Sputter] all about” her own cave of sorrow. Laskas then “thank[s] [Sputter] for taking care of her” (274). Laskas ends the section on a note of hope: Sputter has purchased “a rusty Old Cadillac without wheels and an engine that almost works” (276), and she and her dad have begun working on it together. This anecdote is a metaphor not for getting over grief or finding closure, but about being able to move on: to try to fix things when possible.