The End of Country (23 page)

There, it was still as drab as the first days of March. When Casale and his young trainee shouldered their way into the dingy first-floor record room at the courthouse, it was tomblike except for the fact that even now, at ten o’clock in the morning, the place was jammed with other landmen and their assistants. They were standing three deep at the counter, pacing in place as they waited their turn while the lucky ones, the ones who had gotten there early, pored over the musty record books that listed in arcane detail the precise property lines of every large farm and small building lot in this corner of northeastern Pennsylvania.

Now that the land rush was in full swing, every acre counted, Casale had explained to the trainee. As a matter of fact, now that the drilling apparatus was so accurate that it could target a deposit of gas within a few meters, every inch counted.

It had been like this for weeks now at the courthouse. When Casale had first turned up in this section of the state a few months earlier, he could have walked right in, filled his notebook with the names and addresses of the landowners he wanted to target for the day, and been on his way in a matter of minutes. Back then he could have had a couple of $25-an-acre leases signed before lunch-time. All he’d have to do was call a farmer or a landowner and chat him up on the phone, or sometimes just show up and flash that disarming country-boy smile of his, maybe drop a few local names, dangle a promise of cash, and before you knew it, he had a deal. He was happy, the farmer was happy, the bosses were happy. Everybody was happy, though it did seem like the more folks he signed, the more signatures the bosses wanted. Still, that was fine with Casale. There was a big part of him that thrived on competition, and he could tell that
the bosses at Chesapeake saw things the same way. “I’m a sniper, man,” he liked to say. “I’m in there one meeting, maybe two, and I’ve got a deal.”

But all of a sudden the job had gotten a lot tougher, and Casale could pinpoint the moment that it happened. It was when Engelder’s estimates went public. The farmers, the bosses, the landmen themselves suddenly became hard-nosed negotiators and, in their minds, gas mavens.

Just a few days earlier, as a matter of fact, there had been a well-publicized meeting at the local high school, one of those “informational” seminars that Penn State had been holding all over the Marcellus, a traveling circus of the burgeoning gas industry, and even Casale had been surprised not just by the turnout, which was staggering, but by the tenor of the whole thing.

It was chaos. The local newspaper was there, and television crews had come all the way up from Scranton, and no matter which way he turned, Casale, who had made the mistake of putting on a freshly pressed shirt with a Chesapeake Appalachia logo on it, was besieged by landowners, reporters, even other landmen, coming at him so fast and furious that he found himself retreating to the edge of the lobby, near the cases filled with trophies, where he and all the other landmen were passing out prospectuses and trinkets—baseball caps, pencils, Frisbees—as fast as they could in the hopes that that might satisfy the mob.

It was no better inside the tiny auditorium, where gas experts and lawyers who had already picked up on the value of this new gas play droned on about the history and science of the Marcellus. Casale knew that those guys were wasting their breath. No one was interested in the specifics of gas; the only thing that anybody in that room really wanted to know was who was going to get rich.

And it wasn’t just the locals who were obsessing over that question.
The New York Times
had even sent a reporter to the hills, and in typical
Times
fashion, the reporter, who probably wouldn’t have been able to find the new gas fields of Pennsylvania with a Geiger counter two days earlier, was now marveling at how these poor hardscrabble famers were suddenly poised to become wealthy.

Thanks to Engelder and the press he generated, there was blood in the water, and now every landman from every company in North
America seemed to smell it, Casale had told his young trainee. There sure as hell weren’t going to be any $25 leases anymore. If he could get somebody to sign for $1,500 an acre, he’d consider himself lucky.

On the plus side, the fact that Chesapeake had decided to go all in to become the largest leaseholder in the Marcellus meant that no matter how stiff the competition got, Casale could almost always outbid the other guys.

Of course, that was also starting to dawn on the landowners, and it seemed that the more money Chesapeake and the other companies offered the more money the farmers and the landowners demanded. The more they demanded, the more Chesapeake was willing to cough up. And of course, every time Chesapeake raised, the others had to see that raise or fold.

It was becoming a vicious circle, and Casale was caught in the middle, trying to fill in the space between the gas guys—“guys who spent a million dollars before breakfast,” as he described them—and the increasingly big dreams of the locals, a lot of whom, before this land rush began, “couldn’t even afford to get their toasters fixed so they could
have
breakfast.” What was starting to bother the native Pennsylvanian in Casale was the nagging sense that the mad rush to pump money into the place was starting to poison the community.

Most of the other landmen—gas field migrants brought in from Oklahoma and Texas and West Virginia—seemed less bothered by the impact their truckloads of cash were having on the locals. They had no connection to the place. But Casale had been born and bred in Pennsylvania. He had grown up two hundred miles to the west in Clarion County, a rugged and fairly hidden corner of Pennsylvania, a mirror image of this place on the other side of the state, where people had spent their whole lives going without. That kind of life teaches people to depend on themselves and on each other. But now all this money—tens of millions had already been slathered around these hills, and there were perhaps billions more to come—was starting to take its toll. He could certainly see the promise in it all. This land boom, and the money that it brought, could be a godsend for people who had been scraping by for decades, and there was no doubt in Casale’s mind that not only would it bring prosperity to the landowners, but it would also bring good luck to the folks who didn’t have land. There would be jobs, there would be commerce, there would, for the
first time in a long time, be hope. This place needed something like this, he thought, and it had needed it for generations. In fact, it made him feel downright virtuous when he could give an old farmer who didn’t know how he was going to hold on to the land his father had left him for another year without carving it up and selling it off in ten-acre chunks to vacationers, one last chance to hold on in exchange for a five-year gas lease.

But it was a double-edged sword. People who have nothing often learn to expect nothing. But once you raise expectations, all hell can break loose. Casale had already witnessed one case in which a pair of brothers who had never lived more than three miles from each other in their six decades on this earth had cut each other off entirely because of a dispute, not over whether to lease, but when and for how much. And it wasn’t just that that troubled him. He also feared the effect the money was having on those who actually got some. Casale had tried not just to educate his trainee in the delicate art of deal-making, but to open his eyes to the dark side that was all too often becoming part of the daily routine. “I’ve signed farmers who were sitting there with broken-down equipment, a broken roof, losing money because they couldn’t put a fence up to keep critters out of their corn silo,” Casale had explained. “You go and write them a check and they’ve got a brand-new tractor and a brand-new Ford truck, and the corn silo’s still the same. You know that old adage: The shoemaker’s kid goes barefoot? It’s still a farmer with new equipment. I hate to say it but I see a lot of them worse off than when they started, because they get that one check, they change their lifestyle.”

As Casale stood in the musty records room waiting for his turn at the deed books, he caught sight of a haggard-looking clerk behind the counter, a guy who in Casale’s mind seemed to personify all the worst aspects of the raging land boom. He was really just a general factotum in the county, someone who had managed to cultivate just enough political connections to have won himself a none-too-demanding job in the incestuous county bureaucracy. It was just dumb luck, Casale imagined, that the guy had ended up in the one county office where he had access to both the landmen and the information that was critical to them. But he had made the most of it.

Casale couldn’t blame him for wanting to get a piece of the action. And he even had to give him credit for his organizational skills. The
guy had been one of the first to recognize that if landowners banded together, they could get more money and better terms from the drillers than if they acted individually. What’s more, he had realized that for a variety of reasons—the depth and thickness of the shale, primarily, which varied widely throughout the county and which determined how much gas could be retrieved—some properties were more valuable to the gas company than others. The drillers kept that information to themselves, of course. But he figured that if they were presented with a package deal, they’d be inclined, in fact eager, to take it. And so, with that in mind, the clerk managed, along with a few partners, to put together a group of a couple hundred landowners. Though they would each be bound by individual contracts specific to their own piece of property, the terms would be negotiated collectively. In fact, Casale had even been negotiating with the group. As early as January, when lease rates hit $450 an acre, Casale had tried to talk the clerk into signing on with Chesapeake for a ten-year lease. “When it hits $750 an acre, I’ve got a group of landowners who are ready to sign,” the guy had told him. A few weeks later, when lease rates crept up to $750, the guy brushed aside Casale’s offer. “I hear they’re getting a thousand dollars an acre up in Susquehanna County,” he told him. “Come back when it hits fifteen hundred.”

There was something in his tone that irritated Casale. The way he saw it, the county factotum had gotten more than a little arrogant, adding demands, trying to redefine the terms of the contract so that his landowners would receive a bigger cut of the royalties—the royalties, after all, were where the really big money was going to come from once the drilling started—and to reduce the length of the lease, in essence forcing the gas company that would ultimately sign them to drill on the landowners’ timetable rather than its own, or risk losing the lease altogether.

The truth was that the demands were not particularly outrageous, and in fact, Casale had been willing to offer similar terms to landowners who had not signed on with the county clerk’s association. But the way Casale saw it, this guy was making it personal. It was turning into a battle of wills between Casale and the clerk, and Casale, who was well aware of his own ego but was only willing to rein it in when he absolutely had to, was not about to back down. There was a principle involved. As much as he understood the guy’s driving desire to get as
much as he could for the land, and as much as he respected the fact that the guy was clearly not in it just for himself but was agitating for all the landowners in the group, Casale still thought there was something unseemly about the display of avarice that he was seeing, especially since it was coming from someone who was supposed to be a public servant, and a fairly low-level one at that. The way he saw it, for all the good this race to develop the Marcellus might bring, it was also luring out from under the rocks some really disturbing traits among some of the folks on both sides of the business, from the biggest gas company executive to the smallest landowner. “This whole thing is driven by greed,” Casale had told himself, and while Casale was a big fan of greed in moderation, he couldn’t help but feel that this fellow was taking it a bit too far. It was up to him to draw a line somewhere. Casale, the self-described sniper, was eager for a chance to humble this grinning clerk, but he was patient enough to wait until the right moment. And now that moment was upon him.

“Hey,” Casale said to the man behind the counter. “It’s up to fifteen hundred dollars. That’s what you guys wanted, right?”

“Hmmm,” the clerk replied. “And what’s the term on that?”

“Ten years.”

“What about seven years?”

“Well, we’re only doing that for certain properties.”

“What properties?”

“Oh, properties over two hundred acres.”

A short time later, as they headed back to Casale’s pickup truck after collecting the day’s leads, the puzzled trainee turned to Casale. “Do you know that guy?” he asked.

“Yup,” Casale replied. “Why?”

“Dude, he got like red in the face when you told him that you were offering seven years but only for parcels two hundred acres and larger.”

“Yeah, I know,” Casale said. “Know why? It’s because I happen to know that he’s only got 180.”

The kid cast a sideways glance at Casale, and the landman smiled broadly. “What can I tell you? I’m an asshole. And I love myself.”

He didn’t tell the kid what he was really thinking. But he told me later. He was thinking, “I’m killing this county.”