The End of Country (21 page)

“T
hose roads can be treacherous at this time of year,” my mother hissed into the phone, sharpening every sibilant before driving it into my unfeeling filial heart. It was, after all, my fault that I hadn’t been able to find a babysitter so that I could make the 180-mile round trip from my house to the Keiserville Community Center, which sat atop a small rise along a stretch of perfectly snow-and-ice-free pavement roughly two miles from my mother’s house. But to her, it was unthinkable that I had asked her to haul her ten-year-old Buick out of her driveway and make the trip herself.

It was February, and even though the forecast called for only a remote possibility of a thin dusting of snow, that was enough to send my mother into a white-knuckled panic. If she had her way, she told me, she wouldn’t be leaving the house at all that night if she hadn’t run into her neighbor Anne Stang, who informed her that there was to be a meeting at the community center one hill over in Keiserville at which they were going to discuss the gas. It was essential that my family
be represented, Anne had said. My mother decided that this was important enough that she even made an extra trip off the hill to drop in on Dorothy Sharpe, a part-time hairdresser, so she could have her hair washed and frosted especially for the meeting.

It had been only a few weeks since word of Terry Engelder’s estimates had hit the papers, but already the rules of the gas business had changed. The richest game of Texas Hold ’Em ever played in the history of American energy was on. And nowhere was the game hotter than in the hills and hollows around my mother’s farm.

Almost immediately the number of landmen in the region multiplied, setting off a frenzied bidding for land the likes of which had never been seen. Offers that only six weeks earlier had topped at $150 per acre had exploded to $1,500 by mid-January 2008. Even in Dimock, where Ken and Victoria and their neighbors had thought themselves reasonably lucky to get $25 an acre eighteen months earlier, offers were, by February, creeping up toward $1,500 an acre and more, adding to their already mounting sense of regret. And there was no end in sight. Landmen begin to ratchet up pressure. Oily Texans and fresh-faced country boys turned up everywhere, and the hills now echoed with their battle cry: “Beautiful place you have here …”

By late January, my mother and her neighbors were starting to feel under siege. Their phones rang constantly, their mailboxes were crammed with letters from agents representing Chesapeake and Devon and a host of other companies large and small that none of them had ever heard of. Some of the agents were aggressive, some obviously phony, though some were perfectly charming, like Marshall Casale, the nice young man with the Green Beret haircut and the altar boy’s smile who had approached my mother politely on behalf of Chesapeake. Despite his tendency to call my mother “dear,” he had been surprisingly forthright with her—he didn’t downplay the downsides of drilling, the noise, the dirt, the round-the-clock chaos that would be commonplace once the drilling began in my mother’s neighborhood. And he had an appealing earnestness, a boyish enthusiasm to sew up the largest chunk of land in the neighborhood for Chesapeake, that my mother found disarming. He reminded her of the boys she knew back in Scranton when she was a child, hell-bent on selling the most newspaper subscriptions so they could win a new bike, or the
kids at Holy Rosary, her grammar school, raising money to “buy” pagan babies. If his competitors were offering fifteen hundred dollars an acre, he told her, he’d go as high as two thousand.

It wasn’t just the way the landmen, flush now with more cash than any of them had ever seen, were acting toward them, though that had definitely changed. Their pitches had taken on a real urgency. It was all about the hard sell, and in just a matter of weeks the up-front cash they were offering in their leases had increased tenfold and then doubled again. My mother now stood to make $200,000 just to lease her land, and once the drilling was done, and the wells up there started producing, who knew how much money she could make—maybe $2 million over the forty-year lifetime of the well, maybe $5 million, maybe more. That alone was enough to take your breath away.

To my mother, my sister, and me, that kind of money was unimaginable. I mean that literally. None of us had any frame of reference for it. It all seemed utterly unreal. And yet, as the three of us pored over Terry Engelder’s spectacular predictions of the potential riches of the Marcellus, we knew we had to find some way to comprehend it. Thanks to Engelder, change was coming to Ellsworth Hill. It no longer mattered whether we wanted it or not. Even if we chose to do nothing, those changes, good and ill, were going to happen around us, and ultimately they would affect us in ways we couldn’t even begin to calculate.

My mother had already begun to feel it before the stakes had risen. She noticed that some of her neighbors suddenly seemed a lot more guarded. When they talked, they talked about each other, and about the offers this neighbor had gotten, or how that farmer had gotten swindled by his relative, but almost never about the offers they themselves had received. In fact, whenever the conversation drifted too close to that taboo topic, a chasm of silence would open up, until the uncomfortable silence was broken by small talk or harmless gossip. My mother had noticed that some of her neighbors suddenly seemed a lot more concerned about property lines than they ever had been. All of a sudden farmers were walking their fence lines, covetously eyeing that extra quarter acre that might or might not actually be part of their land.

Even my mother, who had never set foot on the densely wooded
back corner of the property, now found herself studying the old deed maps she kept in my grandmother’s secretary in the living room, just to make sure that all the land she had always believed was hers was in fact hers.

My mother and Anne discussed it when they agreed to meet at the community center, and so had my mother and Dorothy that day at the hairdresser’s: their vague but growing sense that something fundamental, the hard work and common purpose that had held the farming community together and that had somehow survived even as the farms had failed, was, in the face of all of that gas company money, starting to come apart.

At some level it may have been that they simply weren’t prepared for their luck to change. There is, after all, a strategic pessimism that develops among people who live in a place where disappointment, sometimes bordering on disaster, is the common course of things, the kind of place where a creature can die a slow, agonizing death from dehydration while standing up to its neck in water, and people see it not as a cruel irony but as just the way things are. It was bad enough in the days when there was still enough farm work to be done to keep your mind off your problems. But that industry had been dying for decades, and now it was almost gone. And that pessimism was slowly hardening into permanent desperation. Sometimes, for some people, it was too much. Those kids who could escape by going off to college or moving out of the area to places with better opportunity did. Many who couldn’t did instead what kids from the country have always done: they joined the military. More often than the rest of the population, they found themselves fighting and sometimes dying in somebody else’s oil patch half a world away. Some escaped in other ways: drugs, booze. Late at night you could hear their tires squealing as they raced down some distant back road, and a day or two later, the local newspaper would have their picture, along with the time and location for the viewing and the burial.

Every now and again you’d pick up the paper and read how some local man or woman had taken his or her own life, and maybe taken somebody they loved with them, and you’d hear the neighbors talk about how hard things had been for that person lately, and though you could never really draw a straight line between the points, you’d
wonder whether things might have turned out differently if the farms hadn’t failed and the businesses they supported hadn’t closed their doors.

But most people around there just went on. In farm neighborhoods like my family’s, stoic acceptance of hard luck—summed up in the old saw “It’s not how hard a punch you can throw, it’s how hard a punch you can take”—is more than a virtue, it’s a survival skill. Nobody questioned the notion that it was that ethic more than anything else that had so far kept this community and its country way of life from eroding. But what if people suddenly got lucky? Theirs was an ethic that could stand up to any misfortune. But could it stand up to what was coming now?

It wasn’t just fear of the drilling, which was just now beginning a few hills over and soon enough would come to Ellsworth Hill. That would have a physical impact, disrupting the long-established rhythms of the place, shattering its peace and perhaps posing hazards to the environment. Those things would be a challenge, but a temporary one—or so the landmen who had bothered to mention such things at all had assured the landowners. Sooner or later, that part of the business would be finished. Yes, the land would be altered; there would be gravel service roads where none had been before, and there would be the appendectomy scars of pipelines running from one hill to the next, but the land has a way of camouflaging such things. As my mother had pointed out to Anne, the driveway that leads to my family’s house is, for example, the stub of a once-upon-a-time road that led to a long vanished lumber mill that the ancient Averys had built a mile or so back in the woods. Except for the hundred yards of rutted dirt that leads up from Ellsworth Hill road to my mother’s flower garden, there’s no longer any trace of that road. Nor is there any trace of the timber mill. Not even the stone foundation remains. And the forest where it once stood, clear-cut nearly two hundred years ago, has returned. The land has a way of reclaiming what is taken from it. It can’t be tempted by riches to change its ways.

But people are not nearly as resilient. This new money was something different. Almost none of it had hit the bank accounts of the locals yet, but just the promise of it was enough to make neighbors view each other with suspicion, to wonder whether one was getting a better deal than the other. It was getting to the point where people
who had always stoically shared the hardships of rural life seemed no longer willing to share anything at all. It was, as Anne Stang put it, the first rumbling of “the end of country.”

“The end of country.” My mother repeated the phrase into the phone with all the flair she could summon, and then paused dramatically. She had rehearsed the line. In fact, she had used the same line a day before when she had asked me to attend the meeting on her behalf. Now that she had started using canned copy, I saw that this was my chance. Maybe now I could get her to tell me what had actually happened at the meeting.

But first, I had to hear about the preparations she had to go through just to attend the meeting. That, of course, included getting her hair done. My mother told me that there had been an odd silence between my mom and her friend and hairdresser Dorothy that afternoon. As she sat under Dorothy’s hair dryer, my mother hadn’t mentioned the latest landman to approach her, that charming young guy from Chesapeake. That was all right. Dorothy never mentioned that she had been approached by the same guy. And they certainly steered clear of talking about that Texan, George W. Clay IV, who had been invited up by an ad hoc group of local farmers, many of them neighbors and many of them members of the local homeschooling community, to address them that night.

All of them had been getting the same stratospheric offers my mother had. And most of them had been watching the unfolding events at Cleo Teel’s place, and Ken Ely’s place, and elsewhere in Dimock, with the same kind of fascination and fear as I had. And all of them were feeling the same kind of pressure that we were. It had been building up ever since the young woman with the nose ring had come and gone, but in the past few weeks especially, it seemed as if some kind of line had been crossed, though nobody remembered crossing it.

There had been probably fifty people in the room that night, said my mother, crammed shoulder-to-shoulder into what had once been a one-room schoolhouse, when Clay made his entrance. With his white Stetson and his courtly cowboy charm, George W. Clay IV cut a dashing figure; my mother had to give him that. He was charismatic and authoritative, she told me, and at the same time soothing and reassuring, almost paternal, as he stood in front of the small crowd and
offered to guide them through the perilous process of negotiating with whatever gas companies might come knocking on their doors. And he had been on time, another not insignificant point in his favor.

As far as the locals were concerned, his credentials were impeccable. It wasn’t just that he had been in the oil and gas business for twenty-eight years. He had another qualification that endeared him even more to the locals on and around Ellsworth Hill.

In an area where a simple, unadorned Christian faith is the norm, and where many parents homeschool their children to make sure that faith remains intact, George W. Clay’s role as a national advocate for the homeschooling movement made him something of a celebrity. Among other things, he was a trustee of Patrick Henry College, a Christian college—a majority of whose students were homeschooled—that since its founding eight years earlier had made it its mission to prepare a new generation of Christian politicians. Even in evangelical circles, the school had a reputation for pushing the envelope. It was the subject of a series of articles in the evangelical press after its administration was accused of subverting academic freedom for its professors, half of whom walked out two years ago. But it was also successful in placing a large number of its students in important internships in the Bush White House, and in some conservative circles, particularly in the homeschooling community, the college was considered a beacon, and anyone associated with it reflected its glow.

As impressive as he was, my mother was not, however, swayed by George W. Clay. As a reasonably devout Catholic, she wasn’t particularly impressed by his evangelical pedigree, and as a former public school teacher, she didn’t put much stock in Clay’s educational credentials. But her neighbors did. In fact, it had been through the local homeschooling leaders that George W. Clay was first introduced to the people of Wyoming and Susquehanna counties. And now he was schooling them.