The End of Country (10 page)

In what can be described as either a supreme act of self-confidence or the thoroughly desperate act of a man who in middle age was watching his last chance for redemption float off with the gas from the Lockport Dolomite, Bill Zagorski hopped on a flight to Pittsburgh and arranged a meeting with his boss, Jeff Ventura. He carried with him one of those core samples from the Renz site that he had initially overlooked. He recounted his visit to the Black Water Basin, described in minute detail the shale he had seen there, and showed Ventura how that shale matched in almost every important aspect the shale that was lying beneath the Renz farm. He barely took a breath as he explained to Ventura precisely what he wanted to do next: he wanted to spend at least another million to drill a vertical well straight down into the Marcellus, and then, using the new technology that the Mitchell boys had discovered, he wanted to frack the hell out of it.

After silently chewing over Zagorski’s audacious proposal for a few nerve-racking moments, Ventura leaned forward in his chair and said simply: “Let’s put the big slick water frack on it.” The way Ventura figured it, if they were going to do it, they might as well do it big.

And so, not long after they had trundled away from the Renz farm with their collective tails between their collective legs, the various marchers in the spectacular parade of drillers were on their way back, only this time, there were more of them.

On an unseasonably warm October day in 2004, they brought out the pride and joy of the gas field, the machine that would make the “big frack” possible. It was a fifty-foot-long, gunship-gray behemoth mounted around a 2,100-horsepower Cummins diesel engine. It had an Allison transmission capable of churning out enough torque to pump slick water more than 6,500 feet straight down at sustained rates of thousands of gallons per minute and at sustained pressures of 9,500 pounds per square inch. And it could do it, without stopping, for up to fifteen days.

Zagorski couldn’t stand to be there. His career, his reputation,
everything was riding on the outcome, but there was nothing more he could do but wait. He spent the next couple of days holed up in his office seventy miles to the west, littering the place with half-drunk cups of office coffee and pacing back and forth in front of his computer, waiting for periodic updates from the project manager at the site. He had no idea how long he would be there. But then, a little less than twenty-four hours after the roughnecks had finished putting the big slick water frack on the Renz well, there was news. And it was stunning. The well spewed back some 40 percent of the fluid, and right behind it came the gas. A lot of gas. The initial estimates put it at more than 300,000 cubic feet per day. It showed no sign of letting up, and while it wasn’t the single richest well in the world, those numbers put it in the big leagues, right up there with the initial returns on the early wells drilled in the Barnett.

Zagorski and Range had done it. They had found what drillers, in a turn of phrase meant to summon all the Wild West romance of those first gas-and-oil-soaked gamblers, would come to call the next Big Play.

They didn’t know it at the time, but they had also triggered a kind of earthquake, a tectonic shift that would change everything. It would breathe new life into the old energy fields of Pennsylvania and beyond. The Renz well may have been the epicenter, but the shock waves that would follow that discovery were already radiating out, and some of the most powerful of them would soon be felt three hundred miles or so to the northeast, in a forgotten little corner of Appalachia a few miles south of the New York state border, about twenty-five miles north of Scranton—the place that my family called home.

In fact, a few miles from my mother’s farm, on a hill not far from the old gas station where back in the old days a grim-faced Ken Ely used to let me gas up my Torino even if I didn’t have the money to pay him, those changes were already starting to happen.

I
never did meet the young woman with the nose ring. Rumor had it that after her bid to woo my mother and her neighbors, she made one or two more circuits around Ellsworth Hill and then vanished. But others from other companies took her place, and as autumn gave way to winter, their numbers started to increase, until as December turned to January, there was a thundering herd of them. You could spot them from a mile away, gathered at the local gas stations to fill up their brand-new GMC and Chevy and Dodge pickups glittering in the winter’s afternoon sun, looking for all the world like a pack of Hemi-powered pachyderms. They’d sit shoulder-to-shoulder at the local lunch counters and diners, and if the fact that they could afford to drive brand-new trucks wasn’t enough of a sign that they weren’t from around here, the fact that they could afford to order a slice of pie, even after breakfast, was.

Then they’d roar off, one or two at a time, speeding down back roads that hadn’t seen tires—let alone whole pickups—that new in a long, long time.

Sometimes they’d show up in person at a remote farmhouse. They were men, mostly, and most of them were from out-of-the-way corners of Texas or Oklahoma or West Virginia, hired no doubt because they could speak to the farmers in their own language. They’d park in the yard—the best of them were discreet enough to park a few yards away from the landowner’s rust-bucket truck or car so the comparison between the vehicles would not be so painfully obvious—and then they’d mount the front steps, search for a working doorbell, usually in vain, and then knock, sharply but politely, toeing the peeling porch paint with their brand-new Roper boots or Timberlands until someone answered the door. “Beautiful piece of land you have here,” they’d almost always begin, even when, as was often the case, all they could see from the porch was a sad patch of scree littered with rusted cultivators, mower blades, and wheel rims. Sometimes the men of the house would invite them inside. The women rarely did. Sometimes they’d just talk through the screen door. They’d chat with the farmers long enough to get a maybe, and then push on to the next house. Sometimes they were just a voice on the phone. They’d begin with the same drawled “How d’ya do, sir,” or “Hi, ma’am,” and modify their opening line only slightly: “I’ll bet that’s a beautiful piece of land you have there.”

Other times, the farmers would make their way to their mailboxes and find an official-looking come-on. Those could be deadly, because buried in the fine print there were sometimes poison pills, clauses written in impenetrable legalese that, while they looked like the same leases that other, more reputable land agents were offering, actually stripped the farmer of his ownership of his own buried minerals, gas included.

My mother kept me informed of each new offer. She had promised me that she’d sit tight and give me time to finish my research. But every time she got a visit or a telephone solicitation or an impressive envelope, she’d call me and in her “important” voice, a voice rife with the clipped cadences of a community theater diva, would either recite the details of her latest encounter or read aloud the latest proposal she had found in the mailbox, right down to the salutation at the top of the letter: “Mrs. Barbara McGraw … 
Dear
Mrs. McGraw …” At first it was amusing, sort of like listening to Dame Judi Dench read the phone book. But as time went on, each call took on a little more
urgency. Little by little, the heat was being turned up on my mother and her neighbors. “As you know,” she would read, “many of your neighbors are already taking advantage of this opportunity …” Honey-toned though these collective pitches might have been, they were still a hard sell. At that moment, the land agents claimed, the gas companies were eager to stake their claims, to snatch up as much land as possible, and they were in a generous mood. Once they had a big enough stake (as if such a thing were possible), well, who knows, they might not be so generous. What’s more, once the exploration started in earnest, the gas companies would have a better idea of which properties were the most promising and which they could afford to ignore. Any landowners who waited were, they suggested without coming right out and saying so, shooting craps with their future. “You need to make a decision and you need to make it now” was the not-so-subtle subtext.

That is not the kind of pressure my mother responds well to. But rather than resist it herself, she was trying, frantically, to push the urgency off onto me.

I counted myself lucky that I had the luxury of distance. I could afford to be deliberate as I sat in my home, a prow-front cedar house my wife and I had built a decade earlier on several acres in a rocky canyon ninety miles to the east of my mother’s farm, a place that straddled two worlds, where I could keep one foot in the country and still be close enough to New York City to get there in an hour and a half if I needed to. My poor wife, unfortunately, was not nearly as enamored of the place as I was. She had been, at first, seeing it as a retreat from the hectic urban life we had been leading. But that was before she realized that it would bring out a side of me I had carefully concealed when we lived in the metropolitan area. Suddenly, a guy who could with reasonable competence discuss current events, world history, politics, and the arts—the entire breadth of the Sunday
New York Times
—and who was also a pretty decent cook had turned into a skinny, balding version of Jeremiah Johnson. Just how far I had fallen in her eyes became clear one autumn afternoon when I heard that my youngest daughter, Seneca, had answered a telephone call while I was busy (let me put this as delicately as I can) field dressing a deer in front of the garage. Seneca had politely informed the caller that I was indisposed, just as she had often been
instructed. My wife’s pride in my daughter’s phone manners turned to utter horror when Seneca explained in graphic and remarkably precise detail exactly how I was indisposed. There was no mistaking the look on Karen’s face when she told me about the phone call. It was the kind of look people get with they’re struck down with a migraine, only in this case, it was a throbbing “Who-is-this-lunatic-in-my-driveway-with-a-musket-and-a-buck-knife?” headache. I know that headache still crops up from time to time, usually at the tail end of hunting season, though most of the time she manages to hide it. I take that as a testament of a love far greater than I deserve.

All in all, my privileged perch on the cusp of the urban and the rural not only allowed me to indulge those rougher aspects of my personality, but it meant I could monitor the developments around my mother’s home on Ellsworth Hill through a distant and academic prism. The dramas of the modern-day Marcellus were still as far removed from my day-to-day life as the histories of it that I had been collecting.

And yet this wasn’t a distant problem, and it wasn’t hypothetical. By the time the woman with the nose ring pulled into my mother’s driveway in the autumn of 2007, the advance guard of the natural gas industry had already been in these hills for two years. They had staked their claim in the rocky ground just outside the nearby village of Dimock, less than five miles from my mother’s house, and their presence had already meant significant changes for the people there.

I had learned from poring over the records and reports about the Marcellus that the Cabot Oil and Gas Corporation of Houston, Texas, one of the biggest players in the natural gas industry, had been amassing a vast tract of land in Dimock one parcel at a time, a hundred acres here, three hundred there, an odd-shaped two- or three- or four-acre lot between them—most of it at bargain prices—and a year earlier had even begun drilling. They were sinking vertical wells, straight shafts bored down a mile or so into the shale to test the waters. Cabot had been in such a hurry to get started that the company hadn’t done a lot of preliminary work, and so these exploratory wells were their best barometer of how good the land they had leased was likely to be. Initial reports circulated informally among the drillers indicated that those early wells had produced respectable amounts of gas, hundreds of thousands of cubic feet a day, and that each new one
was going better than the last. Cabot wasn’t confirming that; the company liked to keep such things close to the vest. But the growing number of shiny new gas company pickups was, as they say in the business world, a reliable leading indicator. Even in those earliest days, what little information there was about what was going on in Dimock was not all good. There had been no serious problems, no blowouts, no explosions. But already there had been a smattering of newspaper reports about minor issues, inconveniences really: water wells that had started fizzing soon after the drilling began, or tap water that looked cloudy or smelled odd. There were other complaints as well, mostly about noise, or wear and tear on the roads.

I needed to find out what was really happening, what the place looked like now, and what all this creeping industrialization was doing to the old way of life up there, so I decided to do what any journalist would do. I took a ride up there myself.

It’s such a classic reporter’s maneuver that it’s almost a cliché, but the first place I decided to stop was a local luncheonette-slash-service-station at the crossroads in Dimock. I knew the place. Over the years I had stopped there from time to time to fill up my tank and, over my own reservations, choke back a cup of the watery brew that passes for coffee in this corner of Pennsylvania. For most of my adult life, the place had usually been just about empty when I’d shown up. Maybe one or two local men would be sitting at the counter, sipping coffee and talking livestock, their backs turned to the pegboard wall and shelves filled with unsold bottles of transmission fluid and power steering fluid and bungee cords. There’d hardly ever be anyone in the so-called dining room, a bleak white expanse filled with a half dozen or so burnt-umber plastic benches bolted to faux wood tables.