This story begins with Mary Hodell who was the owner and operator of the Farmer’s Daughter Cafe in South Heart, N.D.
This local eatery was the closest eating establishment to the then-new 20,000-barrel- per-day Dakota Prairie Refinery (Calumet Specialty Products Partners and MDU Resources) as well as a stone’s throw from a trailer and RV park.
Mary’s husband worked in the oil fields, while her children assisted in the café. The kids take their turn waiting tables, doing dishes and filling in where they are needed.
The five Mary children include: Andy, 14, Avery, 12, Abby, 10, Aiden, 7, and Arica 5.
In the beginning, they were the only help Mary had on staff. Mary cooked all the food and the kids took care of the customers.
Mary said most of the men who work in the oil fields and frequent her café will play video games on their phones with the little kids or talk sports with the older ones.
“We do have a lot of locals that support our business,” she said. “But the RV park is filled with guys working the oil patch with families back home.”
Some of the oil workers will even shoot hoops out back after dinner with the Hodell children and their neighborhood friends.
“They have kids and families back home, so our kids have somewhat filled that void for them,” Mary explained. “I have five children of different ages, so many of the guys have a child their age back home.”
In this exclusive interview, Mary describes the reality of living The Crude Life while driving home from church after her daughter’s First Communion.
The Crude Life’s founder Jason Spiess sits down with Mary as she relives that April 22 experience after she was hit by an oilfield truck with her children in the vehicle.
“(After the accident)… before I could even come to completely, you know I was kind of dazed, my 11-year-old who was upfront, well 10 at the time, and he’s scrambling around and I am looking at him trying to figure out what he is trying to do,” Mary said. “Well he was searching for a cell phone to call 911 but my cell phone was in the cupholder shattered.”
Mary continues sharing her family’s experience of driving, working and living The Crude Life.
“So my son tried to get out of the car and the frame had buckled up and he couldn’t get out the back seat and his door was crushed so he couldn’t open his door,” Mary recalled. “So he kicked his window out and jumped out and ran to stop this truck we had just hit.”
Like an scene in a dramatic thriller, Mary describes the rollercoaster of real time emotion while her 10-year-old son attempts to be the Hero Of The Day and get help.
“He runs out in front of the truck and he’s waving and screaming and yelling ‘Stop Stop Mom’s hurt she needs help’,” Mary said. “Well the truck stopped but he wouldn’t open his window or anything.”
Mary continues describing the moment-by-moment sequence as her son jumped up on the running board of the truck and yelled that his mother needs help.
“My son is yelling ‘my mom needs help call 911’, and the guy turned his head away from him. So I am watching this and I see this kid just dazed like ‘what do I do know'” Mary said. “He comes running back over to me, in tears, and he said ‘I tried to get him to call 911 but he ignored me'”.
Trapped in a crushed vehicle in some random ditch on a Bakken backroad, Mary musters enough energy to comfort her son’s emotional distraught over the reality of how people are in real life emergencies.
“While all this was happening, my 12-year-old was getting the rest of my kids out of the car and right at that moment a Patterson Rig drilling crew on rig move and they stopped,” Mary said. “They had seen the accident and by the time they had gotten up to us one of them had called 911.”
The real life experience of living The Crude Life continues as Mary explains how her accident made her question whether she was alive or dead while trapped motionless in the smoking, crushed car.
“I heard the one on the phone with the 911 operator and he said ‘there’s five kids, the driver’s dead’,” Mary said. “So I’m listening to this and thinking ‘I swear I just talked to the kids’, but then I started thinking maybe it was Devine Intervention or something like that.”
Then the reality got even more real.
“Then I heard him say ‘I don’t know where we are, we left Watford City this morning so we are somewhere south of Watford’,” Mary recalled. “So immediately I am thinking, ‘well I’m screwed.”
Luckily her son was still amped up on adrenaline and started yelling to anyone who would listen that Mary and her family here close to South Heart, which is over 75 miles from Watford City.
While the frantic arguing of where exactly the accident was located, Mary is able to somehow join the conversation and pointed out that there was a street sign right behind them.
“Well then the other guy said ‘Oh the driver’s not dead’, but he didn’t relay that into the phone,” Mary said.
After the ambulance was called and emergency services started in motion, the reality of living The Crude Life continued of what it is like in rural North Dakota, working with volunteer fire departments and processing how and where resources are spent and used in government. After 20-minutes of waiting for the ambulance, Mary said the crew from Patterson started getting anxious and wanted to take matters into their own hands.
“I was pinned in my vehicle and this Patterson crew looked over and I said I was stuck and the one was like ‘I got a jack and a crowbar and we’re going to get you out’,” Mary recalled while laughing. “I was like ‘Oh dear God no, please leave me’.”
Well the impromptu debate it turned into a compromise in roughneck emergency services. The Patterson crew cut the seatbelt and took the door off. Then one of the crew members wanted to put his former training into play. However, Mary was still lucid enough to be the voice of reason after the Good Samaritans wanted to keep the emergency services going.
“The one said ‘I used to be an ETM’ and I said than you should know better and know not to touch me,” Mary said. “But they were great, they called my husband and my neighbor who came and sat with the kids.”
She even chuckled a bit more when reliving that particular moment in the accident as she began realizing she was the only calm one at that time.
“I was very calm, you know being a mother you stay calm in an emergency,” Mary said. “We laughed afterwards because they (Patterson Crew) told me that I yelled at them because they were freaking out and it was scaring my kids.”
Mary continues explaining what life was like getting into an accident in rural America as well what the accident did to her.
“I ended up in a wheelchair, ten days in a bed at Saint A’s (Andrews) with a neck brace on you know because I broke part of my vertebrae,” Mary said. “I ended up with I don’t even remember how many broken ribs, my lung collapsed, broke my wrist, broke my shoulder, broke a vertebrae, my foot my knee, but my kids who were all with me were relatively unscathed, just minor injuries. We were very lucky that way.
Mary brought the interview back to the reality of the roads and living The Crude Life.
“The roads are different now, the 18-wheelers going with some speed down the road kicking up dust and every wheel kicks up this huge cloud, it’s crazy, it’s dangerous,” Mary said. “Honestly it is going to be a long time before I let my kids drive on those roads because they are not the same roads as when we grew up.”
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The Crude Life Podcast: Local Café Owner Mary Hodel Relives Oilfield Accident