Oil boom chasers: Next stop, Kansas

I hired on [in Arkansas] in the middle of a boom, and three years later, I'm up here in Kansas. I could have quit if I wanted to, but I gotta make a living.

You just go where they tell you to go -- where the next hole is. I'm single, no kids, so I ain't got nothing holding me down.

I got a lot of responsibility -- I take care of mud pumps [devices used to circulate drilling fluid in order to cool the drilling bit]. I work 12 hours a day for 14 days straight. It's hard sometimes, and the heat sucks, but we make the best of it. They provide us with popsicles and water.

I've made lots of friends out here working on the rigs. Some of them I keep in touch with, some of them not so much. These guys I work with now, I'm the baby of the crew, so they mess with me quite a bit. But they're all good guys, and you all become pretty close. You're together for 14 days solid so you get to know each other pretty well. We're living together and working together, so on our 12 hours on we're together and our 12 hours off we're together. This trailer [we're staying in], it ain't bad. We have bunk beds, we all share two bathrooms and a washer and dryer.

It basically used to be just a job for outlaws. I've worked with guys who can barely write their own names -- barely read -- that's what it used to be. Now we have a lot more education I guess. If we wanted to, any one of us could go get a job somewhere else, doing something else, but we all prefer to work with our hands. I'd go stir crazy working in an office somewhere.

We wouldn't be doing it if we didn't make good money. And when it all adds up, we work six months out of the year -- that's really all we work. And we still make as much -- or more -- than some people do working a 9-to-5 job, 7 days a week. I save a lot of money to travel, and I got a motorcycle back home that I ride.

For privacy reasons, Cody asked that his last name not be included in this story.

NEXT: Gary Davis