Price Per Barrel: The Human Cost of Extraction (hardcover)
First responders, once called to duty, refuse to abandon their posts, even when their towns change around them. They rise far and above their job descriptions, putting aside their own PTSD until the boom is over. But the trauma they endure at the hands of newcomers and outsiders is real, persistent, and contagious. Emergency response is the kind of work that will change a person, the kind of work that leaves an indelible mark. Each person in that profession finds some way to cope with the horrors of mankind. Or, they don’t survive.
Robin Lynn Behl's means of coping was to drive. For years, she drove long distances across the country, across the continent, until she had seen all fifty states and every province in Canada. Her years on the road included six months living in her truck and talking to the people on the front lines. Along the way, she ran into friends--her brothers and sisters—in the badge. She found the other people who were still doing the work she had done, and they started to tell her their stories. By telling their story, she can tell hers, and maybe be rid of the burdens.
“In this wide-ranging, reflective collection, Robin Lynn Behl takes the reader everywhere from Ohio and Maine to the Bakken oil boom to astronauts in space. Insightful, thought-provoking, and at times delightfully confounding, Price Per Barrel reveals how extractive economies—their lingering impacts and our obsession with what lies beneath the surface—haunt the stories of our lives.”
—Taylor Brorby, author of Boys and Oil
“Behl is courageous in her writing, noble in her efforts, and more than occasionally . . . funny. She offers tough, gritty nonfiction about providing health and emergency services, all in the form of an intimate travelogue. Written by a woman journeying in the hyper-masculine world of first responders, this book is for those working in extractive industries and living in shitty housing and for the first responders who serve them. It should be read by the policy makers who need to know about the lives of all these people.”
—William Caraher and Bret Weber, co-leads on the North Dakota Man Camp Project
Robin Lynn Behl grew up in southeastern New Mexico, where she got her first taste of emergency response as a volunteer firefighter just after she graduated from high school. That early passion for helping people was solidified during her undergraduate tenure at New Mexico State University, where she continued her service and training with Mesilla Fire Department as a firefighter and EMT. She would go on to spend thirteen years in Emergency Services with a variety of agencies around the country, becoming a paramedic and a dispatcher. She earned a master's degree in medicine at the University of New England, in Portland, Maine, and worked as a physician assistant in cardiovascular medicine for seven years. In that time, she had the opportunity to train and work in the Arctic, both in Alaska and in Greenland. Her love for remote northern climates and her insatiable wanderlust inspired Price Per Barrel, her first nonfiction book. Robin was previously published in an academic journal related to her medical practice, "The Hidden Field of View: Challenges in Sustaining a Robotic Open-Heart Program." In her travels, Robin has visited every state in the union, every province in Canada, and more than three dozen countries. She has left the practice of medicine and now works in documentary film-making, which allows her to tell stories in a whole new way. She is a musician, a dancer, and a choreographer who feels most at home when she's on a stage. She is currently working on her next book, a critical look at medicine in America and what drives providers like her out of the field and into work they find more rewarding.
ISBN: 978-1-946163-45-5
Page count: 244
Hardcover
Publication Year: 2021
