The End of Country (19 page)

And as hazardous as drilling was in general, she couldn’t help but feel that it was particularly risky here in Dimock, a place so far off the beaten path it seemed as if no one but she and the few members of her informal vigilance society was watching. She wasn’t really wrong. After all, though there were more than a dozen wells drilled or being drilled, this was still technically an exploratory operation, and outside Dimock, few people were paying close attention. What talk there was about the Marcellus was still largely among the drillers themselves, and it had more to do with developing the technological prowess needed to extract the gas than with any safeguards that might be
needed in case something went wrong. At the top of the agenda for Cabot was trying to figure out the best, most cost-effective way to unleash the power of the Marcellus, to bring all that clean-burning gas to a market that desperately needed it, and that meant there was a lot of experimenting going on.

And now, as she studied the face of the Cabot man who was waving her and her camera away from this latest minor mishap, this small spill, she received that same icy glance that she had seen on the face of the man on other side of the road, and her anger started to bubble up.

“I’m not some tourist from New Jersey!” she shouted. “I live here. Here, right in the middle of all this.”

Her tone seemed to anger the already frustrated truck driver, and Victoria thought she saw him stiffen his back, as if he were about to try to chase her away. She braced herself for the confrontation, when suddenly a plume of dirt and gravel, kicked up by the churning wheels of a speeding ATV, cut right between the truck driver and Victoria.

Only a few months earlier, before the drilling began, the sight of Ken Ely would have made Victoria’s heart sink. Back then, she would have dreaded the sight of him at such a moment, fearing that he would join in a tag-team attack on her tree-hugging meddling. But little by little, as they both became more frustrated over the unanticipated consequences of the drilling, their frosty relationship had started to thaw. A couple of times, when she caught sight of him in the distance while she was walking through the woods, she actually thought he might have smiled at her. And finally, on one of those walks, Ken and Crybaby approached Victoria. She had been slightly uneasy when he walked up to her, started in on some small talk, and then, almost casually, added, “I hear you’ve got a little group together.”

“Yes,” Victoria replied cautiously.

She wasn’t sure what to make of the remark, and she didn’t want to let on more than she had to. The grim reality was that there wasn’t that much to let on about. There was a group, yes, but it was small, only about seven members, a tiny sliver of the community. There were small landowners and some with larger tracts of land in the group. But most of the local landowners, folks like Cleo Teel and Rosemarie Greenwood, had little use for Victoria’s group. They were less concerned about the noise and the potential damage, and when
they did have a problem with Cabot, they preferred to handle it themselves, one on one with the Cabot men.

Victoria understood that. Those folks had a lot to gain from Cabot’s work, and they had no desire to antagonize the big gas company. There was always the possibility that if the boat got rocked too much, Cabot could find some reason to delay the royalty payments that they were counting on, and if squeaky wheels like Victoria made too much noise, who knows, Cabot might just pull out of the neighborhood altogether. As much as Victoria might wish that the drillers and their contractors and their equipment would just go away, she knew that was never going to happen. There was simply too much at stake.

In fact, her group’s meetings hadn’t produced much. But since then, Victoria had pulled together a lot more information about what was going on, and she had a new vision for the group. Rather than being just a forum for complaints about the unfortunate terms of those early leases, Victoria imagined it as a local clearinghouse for accurate and useful information about the drilling process. If need be, it could also serve as an informal watchdog group, an organization that could be the eyes and ears of the understaffed and overworked state authorities who were supposed to be overseeing the work in Dimock and elsewhere in the state. If there was a spill, even a minor one, her group could spot it and report it, and maybe prod the state into action.

Even without much help from the group, Victoria had been able to make some progress in that direction. She had been providing her reports to the DEP—her official envoy a fresh-faced young man who, when she first met him, was dressed in a snowsuit that made him look like a little boy—and the local office had been impressed enough with her observations that when she reported something, there was generally a prompt response, like the time when the DEP came racing up to Dimock after Victoria notified the agency of a diesel leak.

But Victoria also knew that she and the group could be a lot more effective if they persuaded somebody who had the respect of everyone in the neighborhood to join, somebody who had deep roots in the community and who had skin in the game, somebody who stood to gain or lose a lot depending on how things played out with the Marcellus, and yet who still had the backbone to stand up to the company
when that was necessary. In short, the group needed somebody like Ken Ely.

Ken, it turned out, had been thinking more or less the same thing. As effective as the .22 might have been, maybe, Ken thought, he needed a better way to express his concerns when they arose, and maybe Victoria’s little “environmental club,” as he dubbed it, might be useful. The way he explained it to Victoria, he and his neighbors had noticed that the DEP seemed to respond with stunning alacrity whenever she placed a call, and that was, he told her, more than most other folks around there had ever been able to accomplish. Ken quickly became a full-fledged member of the group; not only that, he and Victoria began to have regular conversations over the stone wall that separated their properties, usually about the drilling, but every now and then about other things, like how much she admired the quality of Ken Ely’s stone, and how one of these days she might even buy a pallet or two of rocks from him and build a patio outside her dream house.

But even now, standing a few feet from the ruddy-faced Cabot man, and knowing Ken as she did, Victoria almost flinched when Ken leaped from the seat of his ATV with surprising vigor for a guy who everybody knew had survived three bouts with cancer and had recently been diagnosed with diabetes. Before she could stop herself, Victoria let off a quick string of colorful curses at the Cabot man. Ken pretended not to hear them. And then, much to Victoria’s amazement, Ken stalked toward the truck driver, his fists clenched and pumping, his eyes wide and wild, and shouted at the top of his lungs, “You’re ruining our land!”

The driver who just a moment before had seemed so menacing to Victoria now seemed to shrink. No longer facing just a “little lady,” he turned nervously back to his rig and, with a lot more attention and energy than the task really required, resumed his search for the source of the leak.

Ken turned back to Victoria, and his fierce glare vanished, replaced by a sly smile and a twinkling wink as he ambled back toward her, the thick blue cloud of her curses still hanging in the air. “I thought you were a Christian lady,” he said.

“I am,” Victoria said, smiling. “Most of the time.”

They were becoming friends. They were not in perfect accord, of
course. Friends seldom are. While they were both alarmed by how roughly Cabot was handling them and the land around them, Ken, at least, could take solace in the thought that he had struck a decent bargain with the gas company, getting the company to pay for the timber it took and for other inconveniences they caused him, a bargain that had given him, if nothing else, reason to believe he wasn’t as bad a businessman as he had always thought himself. Even that, however, was about to be taken away from him. Two hundred miles away, in a college professor’s cluttered office, the first rumblings of a seismic shift were about to begin, setting in motion a series of events that would make some people very rich and make others, especially the folks in Dimock, bitter.

I
t was just before Christmas 2007, and two hundred miles away from the industrialized din in Dimock, on Penn State University’s sprawling and all but deserted campus, professor Terry Engelder leaned back in his chair in his cluttered third-floor office and contemplated the equation in front of him. Rubbing his bloodshot eyes with the bony, disjointed knuckle of a finger that he had broken years earlier at a drill site in a moment of youthful inattentiveness, he took a deep breath and tried to clear his mind. Even when he wasn’t staring straight at it, the sum at the end of the long column of numbers, all figures gleaned from initial production reports, danced in front of his eyes. He had checked it a half dozen times over the past few hours, and each time, it came out the same.

The number was so staggeringly large that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t missed something. Once again, he dived back onto the page and tallied up the figures, production rates he had gathered on a handful of gas wells in the Marcellus Shale. And once again, there it was.

“Why hasn’t anyone done this before?”

He didn’t know it then, of course. He couldn’t have. But buried inside that long column of numbers lay the nucleus of an idea so powerful that it would soon change the lives of thousands of people, including Engelder’s. Once the secret that he had accidentally unlocked was out, Engelder’s name would be forever linked with the Marcellus, and all that it represented, for good and for ill.

Engelder stood up and walked to a window overlooking a quad. He stretched a bit. Though he was now in his early sixties, he still had the taut muscles of a runner, and in fact, still kept a faded forty-some-year-old newspaper clipping of his glory days on the Penn State track team tacked up in a corner of the room, one of a hundred mementos of his life and academic career that had accumulated in his tiny office over the years. There were so many that it was hard to walk from his desk to the window without tripping over some reminder of his past.

Outside the window, the normally bustling campus was a ghost town, the students having left for winter break the previous week, and the majority of Engelder’s colleagues were home with their families. Never one to waste a quiet moment, Engelder had decided to use the time to scratch out a few quick calculations. He jotted down long columns of numbers on a few pages of his notebook and forced them through a few arcane formulas, applying principles of statistics and probability. He had started it as a diversion, really, the kind of thing egghead scientists do to while away their free minutes, and he probably never would have bothered had he not recently read a questionable article in a geological journal. If he was going to challenge the writer, Engelder wanted to have his numbers right. The truth was, there was not a great deal of information to be had on what was happening out on those drill sites, and what little there was had been sketchy, but enough data had managed to bubble to the surface to pique Engelder’s curiosity. As he started collecting the numbers and putting them through their paces in his notebook, that mild intrigue morphed into fascination, and now that they were all here in tight columns, driving toward a conclusion, that fascination hardened into awe.

If he was reading them right, these figures were proof that everything was about to change, that right there, deep beneath Penn State, deep beneath Dimock and a thousand other places just like it across
Pennsylvania, lay the raw material for a revolution, one that would change the fortunes not only of this forgotten corner of Appalachia but of the entire nation.

He plunged back into the pool of numbers. “Could this really be right?” he asked out loud one more time. But the numbers weren’t lying. He hadn’t made a mistake. Down there, deep below the ground, there was enough energy to fuel every gas-burning device in the United States for years. He ran his crooked finger across the bottom line, pausing over every digit and comma, and read it aloud.

“Fifty trillion cubic feet.”

T
O
E
NGELDER, THE
M
ARCELLUS
Shale had always been a mysterious creature. He thought of it, as he did the other shales and rock deposits buried beneath Appalachia, as a living, breathing thing. He had first mapped them out in 1959 when he was twelve years old, and he still kept that crude, childlike chart of the various Devonian formations taped to a filing cabinet in his office. It had been the romance of the hunt to harness those mysterious forces that he had been chasing when he shattered his finger, a mishap that occurred during his ill-fated stint as a roustabout. If nothing else, that accident had helped propel him into the comparative safety of academia, and now, after thirty years of research, there was perhaps no one in the world more familiar with the intricate matrix of shale that underlay the region. As a child growing up in Wellsville, New York, not far from the site of the great Crandall farm blowout, he had been drawn to it. Its history was much like his history, a tale of impossible accidents and improbable coincidences, but in the case of the Marcellus Shale, that history stretched across nearly half a billion years.