Beneath the surface: Hard times, high hopes meet in Uintah Basin

VERNAL — The honking begins as soon as the guy in the cowboy hat takes his position on Main Street. As usual, he's holding a sign, one of those slogans with a red heart instead of a verb. Honk, it says. Honk if you (heart) drilling.

Sedans, tanker trucks, pickups: Nearly everybody who drives by honks — and not just a little tap on the horn but long blasts that make you cover your ears.

When George Burnett first got the idea for the sign, he was looking for a way to drum up business for his new custom seat-cover shop, which sits in a tiny strip mall on the main highway in this gas and oil town, in between the 23-foot-tall pink dinosaur at one end and the year-old Lowe's at the other, three miles to the west.

When he first took to the corner with his sign last fall, things were hopping so much in the Uintah Basin you couldn't find a hotel room for miles, and the area had one of the state's lowest unemployment rates. The joke around town was that if you could fog up a mirror, you could get a job. People honked then as if they were giving a thumbs-up to prosperity.

Then, last winter, people started losing jobs in the gas and oil fields. By spring, drilling had come to a relative standstill. By summer, thousands of workers had moved on and some businesses in town were struggling.

And as things got worse, people honked louder.

Now they honk as if they're caught in gridlock while rooting for their favorite team: angry and determined but also almost festive. People honk now as if they're shaking their fists at the federal government, which doesn't seem to (heart) drilling very much at all.

In this town, boom and bust is a familiar story. But some folks who have lived in the basin for decades say they're less sure how the industry that has driven the economy here for so long will bounce back. This bust, which followed an almost rocket-like high, feels different.

At first glance, it looks like the recession has hit the Uintah Basin no harder than the rest of the state. But the slide from one of the state's best employment rates to one of its worst was fast and steep.

While most of Utah was faltering last December, the Uintah Basin was still growing. Jobs were so plentiful and workers so scarce that McDonald's was paying new hires $10 per hour to serve burgers, making it hard for the hospital to find workers to clean rooms and serve meals. And teachers couldn't take days off because substitutes had found better-paying jobs driving trucks.