Forests of oil-gas rigs mean mounds of burritos to cook

Gargi Chakrabarty, Rocky Mountain News

Published July 29, 2006 at midnight

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• Dawn Schumann-Keithley, co-owner of Pink Pig lunch truck

Dawn Schumann-Keithley wakes at 4 a.m., scrambles to do her hair and rushes out the door.

By 6:30 a.m., the Pink Pig lunch truck is parked at a T-junction where Piceance Creek Road forks out from Colorado 13, about 19 miles north of Rifle.

The menu: breakfast burritos, hamburgers, hot dogs, tacos and sodas.

By noon, she's had about 50 customers: truck drivers, haulers, rig workers, oil engineers and company executives.

She bought the lunch truck three months ago for $11,500. Since then, business has picked up.

"Just yesterday, a (rig) supervisor came in the morning and bought 30 breakfast burritos for his whole crew," Schumann-Keithley says. "This (business) is paying off, I am making a living."

Schumann-Keithley and her business partner, Amanda Poole, replenish supplies once a day.

They pack up at 6:30 p.m. The pair even set a picnic table with an umbrella and chairs to accommodate customers under a hot sun.

Truckers, mostly from the East Coast - as far away as Connecticut or Maine - like to take a break before driving to Meeker or Rangely. They typically deliver machines to the oil and gas operators.

Rig workers and roughnecks call Schumann-Keithley "ma'am." They tell her inside stories and ask her if there are any rooms for rent in Rifle.

"All of them are really nice," Schumann-Keithley says with a laugh, then adds, "they better be; by the time they get to us, they are very hungry."

The 5-foot, 5-inch blond woman has a 20-year-old granddaughter.

Turning serious, Schumann-Keithley says not everyone is comfortable with the influx of workers.

Many residents of Rifle, used to calling each other by first names, don't like strangers. They have to wait in long lines at grocery stores or scramble to find a spot in crowded bars. They hear police cars dashing around town and see them making arrests or handing out tickets.

Some say companies are drilling in their backyards, but they can't do anything about that.

Rifle sports a new Starbucks, a Wal-Mart and a La Quinta hotel.

New homes are sprouting all over the place, and people are driving around in new pickups, SUVs and on motorcycles.

"This place is not what it used to be," says Bunny Rohrig, who manages the 89-room Rusty Cannon Motel.

In the 1980s, the mostly empty Rusty Cannon would compete with the Buckskin Inn across the road.

These days, Rohrig re-directs people to Glenwood Springs or Grand Junction. No vacancy in Rifle.

Schumann-Keithley agrees Rifle has changed.

She has lived there, on and off, since the 1970s. After her first husband passed away in Oklahoma, she came back for good in 1990. She married Don Keithley, a construction worker, 15 years ago.

Food always interested her and prompted her first business - catering breakfast, lunch and dinner for rig workers in the Piceance Basin.

She later leased a cafe in Silt and ran it for four years. When the lease expired, she and Poole (a former waitress at the cafe) decided to buy the lunch truck with their savings.

Schumann-Keithley doesn't mind the strangers or the money flowing in to town.

"People are earning a lot of money, and they are spending their money," Schumann-Keithley says. "I don't think anybody is worried about a bust. If that happens, they know they can go through it - they have done so in the past."

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