North Dakota's Bakken Shale

They’re independents, innovators, young, and heeding an entrepreneurial urge: ‘If you have any ambition at all, move to North Dakota ... the sky’s the limit.’

In North Dakota’s Bakken Basin, the Christmas holiday will be another drill, baby, drill 12-hour Monday for mancamp roughnecks, roustabouts, and derrick hands.

Away from families, their nation in an existential war, for ‘humanitarian parole’ workers laboring in a lonely limbo of uncertainty, Christmas is ‘canceled.’