The End of Country (15 page)

It’s not that Victoria and Jim were naïve. They were just products of the time, and even then, they were not especially keen on the whole idea of drilling anywhere or for anything. Victoria had often imagined herself as one of the vanguard of the new settlers in these hills, the artists and intellectuals who she believed would soon be lured here, just as she had been, by what she perceived as the pristine beauty of the place, not to mention its reasonable proximity to the “real” seat of culture 120 miles away in New York. The way Victoria saw it, she was among those, a handful of them already here but more still destined to come, who had the learning, the character, and the commitment to usher in a post-carbon-fueled world. She was, of course, also enough of a realist to understand that such massive changes to the culture, to the economic structure and the gas-guzzling souls of the great American middle, would not come overnight. But in the meantime, as the laconic landman from Cabot had explained it, the drilling in Susquehanna County and elsewhere in the Marcellus could be a hell of a good start. That idea—that she and Jim could “be there at the cusp of
a new era instead of at the end of one”—appealed to Victoria. But it wasn’t the only factor.

In her quieter moments, Victoria privately suspected that it was all a pipe dream anyway, that whatever gas was lying beneath the surface of this hollow that she and Jim were already thinking of as home was probably not enough to keep the interest of a big and important company like Cabot for very long. In all likelihood, they’d bring up their geologists, poke a few holes in the ground, and then give up and go away, and everyone could pocket their small rolls of cash, smile wistfully at each other, and say, “Oh well, we gave it a shot,” and that would be the end of it.

And in the unlikely event that Cabot actually discovered gas, Victoria assumed the drilling would be as it had been described to her, a relatively painless extraction that would cause only a comparatively minor disruption to the local environment. Certainly, it wouldn’t impinge too much, or for too long, on their lifestyle, she figured. What’s more, if Cabot’s prospecting was successful, the company would almost certainly come back to them so they could all sit down in good faith and negotiate more specific terms for the lease. They could even do it over coffee, with the gentle babbling of the brook alongside the property playing background music.

There was even something exciting about it all. Although they had never seen a gas rig in action, never set their brand-name hiking boots in the shin-deep mud of a drill site, although they didn’t know how the whole mysterious process worked back then, they were still convinced that they had a chance to be among the first of many who would be taking those first tentative steps toward throwing off the shackles of foreign energy, toward greener fuels, and ultimately toward sustainable ones. Cleaner-burning natural gas was not the whole answer, of course. It was just a start—a fuel they could use to stoke their boilers and heat their radiant floors until wind or solar or something even better came along. But for right now, they were doing something.

Ken also had his own reasons for making the decision. Though he would later claim that the landman simply wore him down, the truth was far more complicated. In a way, Ken may have had fewer illusions than Victoria about the company’s good intentions, at least as far as creating a greener world was concerned. He certainly was more realistic about how the company would view the contract it was offering.
He understood that to most of the locals, a contract was like the received word of God, an immutable set of commandments set in stone. Big companies, Ken knew, saw them a little differently. To them, they were like the line of scrimmage in a high school football game, nothing more than a good place to start pushing toward the end zone. Ken had seen that principle in action a few years earlier when an out-of-town company had tried to site a landfill not far from his old gas station. The company had tried to exploit every legal ambiguity, and only a spate of bad publicity kept them from moving forward. But the experience had taught Ken valuable lessons about the power of a few disgruntled locals to bring a big company to its knees. It had also taught him that out-of-town companies have deep pockets. This time, he figured, he might be able to turn that to his advantage.

Ken knew there was gas in the hills. He also knew it was not enough to make him rich. Sure, $25 an acre or thereabouts was a lot more than the $5 or so the people around there had been offered in the past, and Ken had to admit that with his youngest son now in college, he could use the cash.

But the real money was going to come from the miscellaneous expenses that Ken figured he could extract from them as long as they were there. If they needed to expand the road that led up from the creek so they could get their seismic trucks in, Ken would let them do it, and he’d be very reasonable when tallying up the charge for it. He might even throw in some of his stones if they needed them, as long as they only took the ones Ken was willing to part with, and as long as they paid him the market rate for them. If they needed to cut down a few of his trees, they could do that, too, as long as they paid the going rate for them. They could even have some of his water if they needed it. They could take it from the pond outside his cabin or from the creek at the bottom of the hill, as long as they didn’t bother the fish too much—Ken knew that the fish didn’t like to be disturbed. Of course, there’d be a price for that, too.

The landman thought he was getting a bargain, Ken knew. He could go back to his bosses with another couple hundred acres of potential gas land all sewed up for only a few thousand bucks. Another local rube won over.

Ken was perfectly content to let him think that. By Ken’s own calculations, if he played this just right in the days to come, he could
gouge the company for up to $100,000 for rock and road work and maybe even squeeze out a few more dollars as compensation for disturbing Crybaby and him and the precious seclusion of his hill.

He scrawled his name across the last page of the contract, initialed all the spots where the landman indicated he should, and then slid the contract across the table. “I’ll take the money,” he said.

At that moment, Ken was feeling pretty proud of himself. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad businessman after all, he thought. He had made a pretty good deal for himself. Soon enough, though, Ken, and Victoria and Jim and their neighbors, would discover that they were about to get far more than they bargained for.

I
t had all seemed so benign when the landmen first described it to Ken and Victoria and their neighbors. After all, the landmen told them, it wasn’t 1907 anymore, and Dimock wasn’t some godforsaken wind-burned corner of West Texas; this was the lush green mountains of Pennsylvania, and it wasn’t oil they were looking for, it was good, clean natural gas. There wouldn’t be any of the ground-shaking tremors at the foot of some gigantic wooden derrick like you might see in the old movies, they told them. There wouldn’t be any gushers. Sure, there’d be some disturbance at first, some traffic, some trucks, some noise from the drilling. And of course they’d have to cut down a few trees, but most of them were scrub trees that had taken root in old abandoned pastures and hayfields anyway. But soon enough all that would be over and the only thing left behind would be a “Christmas tree,” an iron hydrant not much bigger than the mailboxes where their neighbors would collect their royalty checks. The grass would return, so would the trees, and except for the occasional
visit from a well man to look in on how everything was doing, and the rarely used gravel access roads they’d use to get to the wellheads, it would be as if the gas company had never even been there.

It’s possible that their description of how gas field drilling works in deep shale deposits like the Marcellus was the only time in their lives that the unctuous landmen ever understated anything. It would be almost another two years before Ken and Victoria and their neighbors and I got our first taste of just how disruptive—how explosively, bone-jarringly disruptive—natural gas drilling actually is.

I got my first taste of it miles away from Dimock, on a hilltop in southwestern Pennsylvania. The wild roar of the diesel generators was deafening, to be sure, but it was nothing compared to the sound of the drill, the screech of iron on iron, of carbide on stone, a bone-rattling thunder that shook the distant trees and churned the dull gray mud that covered my boots to the ankles. “What do you think?” the company man standing beside me shouted. It was the third time he had asked the question. I hadn’t heard him the first two times.

“I can’t think,” I shouted back. “It’s too goddamned loud to think.”

I wasn’t exaggerating. All I could do was feel, right down to my core, the raw, angry industrial intensity of it all. This is what it must have felt like when they drilled those first few wells in Dimock. This was what it was going to be like if the day ever came when they drilled a well on my mother’s farm.

It had taken some doing to get invited to that drill site to see for myself what the operation looked like. I had asked a few drillers if I could take a peek. They had either not responded at all to my request or politely turned me down. It hadn’t been enough just to be an interested party, a guy whose mother might end up with one of them someday. I had to have a solid professional reason for being there. Fortunately, I soon managed to come up with one.

It was my wife’s idea to pitch a magazine story about the Marcellus. I did, and quickly found a home for the story at
Radar
, a new venture that was equal parts serious journalism and gossip and that, much like my own marriages, had shown real promise only to fail twice (
Radar
twice suspended publication and was now making a third stab at the market, which, they assured me and anyone else who would listen, was guaranteed to succeed). I was willing to give them the benefit of
the doubt not because I believed them but because I was flat broke and they’d pay me $2 a word for the piece—upon acceptance, of course.

On the personal front, from my mother’s very first telephone call, I had been struggling with a moral dilemma. Maybe it was my guilt-ridden Irish Catholic upbringing. Maybe it was my way of trying to distance myself from my own avarice, or from my inability to choke back the sense of humiliation I felt over the fact that at the age of fifty, I was still struggling enough that money from my mother would have helped. In any case, from the moment my mother first offered to split half the proceeds with me and my sister if wells were ever drilled on her land, I had been trying to find some way to hold that promised money at arm’s length.

I told myself that no matter what happened, I wouldn’t take a red cent, because I hadn’t done anything to earn it. It was, in my mind, tainted. In that attitude, I was tapping into a deep vein of arrogant neurosis that I could trace back through a hundred years of my family’s legends. In the late 1880s, during his sea journey from the desolate coastal corner of County Mayo, where he had been raised, to the New World, my thickheaded paternal great-grandfather Mark had hurled himself over the ship’s railing to rescue the young daughter of a man who turned out to be rich.

As the story has been handed down, the girl’s grateful father offered to set up my great-grandfather in business in Kentucky. Mark refused, arguing that he hadn’t done anything that warranted such a reward. I’m told that Mark never publicly said anything about any regrets he might have had about his decision, though periodically, for the rest of his life, he would disappear on days-long benders.

It was that hereditary inability to accept a windfall that was now gnawing at me. It wasn’t as if I’d even saved someone’s life. I wasn’t being rigid about it. I told myself that it would be all right if the money went to my kids, and there was certainly nothing wrong with my wife’s taking some of it. My sister and her husband were entitled to it, too. But I wasn’t.

My contract with
Radar
, however, altered the equation. At least that’s what I told myself. Now that I was getting paid to write about the Marcellus—even if it was only enough to cover two months’ mortgage with just enough left over to take my wife and kids out to a
single dinner at the local Chinese buffet—I could, at least for the moment, remain aloof from the seamy monetary aspects of all this. It was bullshit, of course. My sister knew it, my mother knew it, and deep down inside I knew it. But at least for the moment, it allowed me to keep up a front.

There was also a much less subjective benefit to having the contract with
Radar
. The professional fig leaf meant that I could now use my status as a working journalist to further my exploration of the Marcellus. And use it I did, wangling an invitation from Range Resources to visit a couple of active drill sites in western Pennsylvania, where the development of the Marcellus was in a somewhat more advanced state than it was in my family’s neck of the woods. They even assigned me a guide, who would carefully instruct me not just in the mysterious ways of drilling but in all the steps Range was taking to make the operation as painless as possible.