In the heart of America’s oil country, suicide numbers are up as rigs close down. With a local industry in shambles, men are suffering in silence
On the road to Mooringsport, Louisiana, the billboards advertise, in a one-mile stretch, a pro-life pregnancy helpline, a Christian suicide helpline, and a Covid-19-era performance by Stormy Daniels at the Shreveport Hustler’s Club on 22 and 23 March. It’s late August, dawn, and I can’t tell yet whether this place is timeless or a time capsule. It is, to say the least, a land of contradictions – one where the life above ground was built almost entirely from the dead matter below it. Here, oil is king.
I’m on my way to meet Joshua Patrick, a recently laid-off 42-year-old “roughneck”, as he proudly refers to himself, and father of five. He says he’d seen the downturn of oil coming for years – “every boom seems to bring a bust sooner or later.” An aphorism, an axiom, an industry story in a single line. The edges are starting to show some fray.
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