The End of Country (25 page)

I was stunned. So was my sister. My mother seemed perfectly serene.

We had been sitting there for less than five minutes, and in that time my mother had made an extra $50,000, more than twice the per capita income of the county, and now she was looking down the barrel of a loaded check worth $250,000, and that was before they placed a single explosive charge on her land to determine whether it would be worth the roughly $3 million it would cost the company to sink a well. Once they started drilling, she stood to make a 15 percent royalty on all the gas they piped out, and the $250,000 would not count against that. At $8.75 per 1,000 cubic feet, the going rate for natural
gas that spring, that could amount to nearly three-quarters of a million dollars in the first year alone, with millions more to come in the next thirty years or so.

There were a thousand reasons why my mother had been reluctant to sign a lease with anyone, and Ken Ely and Victoria Switzer could easily have given her a few dozen more.

On the other side of the ledger, there were at least 250,000 reasons why we did.

M
y mother was the first to say it aloud, though all three of us had been thinking it. It was a few days after the signing. My mother and I were sitting in the living room, and I was trying to lay out for her, for the thousandth time and in excruciating detail, what would happen next. The truth was, nothing was going to happen right away, I told her. Chesapeake was still busy trying to sew up leases, and there was no telling how long that would go on. Once that was done, there was no guarantee that they’d actually put a well on her land. They might just as easily locate the well on a neighbor’s land and simply suck the gas right out from underneath my mother’s home. And even if the geological studies that the company planned to run did indicate that my family’s hundred acres was the best place to drill, it could be anywhere from six months to a couple of years before the work began there.

The sun was streaming through the lace curtains in the living room, and outside, the industrious hum of nature at the end of spring—the insects, the birds, the gentle wind through the black walnut trees
outside her window—was interrupted for a moment by the sound of a truck downshifting somewhere down the road. “I hope we didn’t make the wrong decision,” she said. I didn’t reply. I didn’t know how to, because despite all the research I had done, despite all I now knew about the perils and the promises of drilling, at that moment I was thinking the very same thing. I did my best to hide it, but deep down, I had a sense that I could only describe as dread.

And I wasn’t the only one. A few miles away, Victoria Switzer was feeling the same thing, though in her case, it was far more specific than my vague fears. It was the last thing she thought of at night when she went to sleep, and it was the first thing that greeted her in the morning. And then, one night, not long after we had signed our lease, the feeling mysteriously vanished for a while. It wasn’t fear, it was the sound of the wind that woke Victoria Switzer up that night, an approaching roar like a distant rockslide or a line of freight cars hurtling down through that last standing grove of old hemlocks at the top of the hill. Even though she was half asleep, she could feel that it was headed straight for her trailer. The trailer began to shudder and rock, and when the wind hit with full force, it hissed and whistled and moaned as it probed the gaps between the flimsy aluminum sheets that were the only thing that separated her and her sleeping husband from the tumult outside.

Victoria sat up in bed and listened closely. When she and Jim had first arrived in this hollow, that kind of wind used to soothe her, like the voice of an old friend. And now, instead of jarring her from her sleep, there was something surprisingly gentle in the way the wind woke her. Sitting there shaking off sleep, Victoria suddenly realized how much she had missed the sound of the wind. It seemed like months since she’d heard it. It had been drowned out by the constant sound of the drilling, that urgent mechanical clanging of several hundred pounds of diamond-tipped carbide bit powered by a screeching diesel, hammering away at solid shale a couple of thousand feet below the ground, and now no more than 150 yards from the back of her home. But now, suddenly, the sound of the drilling had stopped.

But why? The landman from Cabot had told her the drilling and the fracking and the noise were supposed to go on for another two weeks at least. That question gnawed at her, and she couldn’t stop
herself from probing it as if it were a bad tooth in the back of her head. It robbed her of the relief she had awoken to. It would be days before Victoria learned what had happened. The drillers had accidentally stumbled across a buried field of gravel—they had no idea it was there—and their drill bit had gotten stuck. Now, as they struggled to get it out and to resume their work, there was a danger that the gravel would be so disturbed that it might create a channel that could allow the methane that almost certainly was lodged in other deposits of rock far above the Marcellus to drift dangerously below the surface. Of course Victoria didn’t know that then. All she knew was that it was suddenly quiet.

Certainly, Victoria had come to hate the sound of the drilling. It was a round-the-clock reminder that the land she had come to love was changing, and the way she saw it, it was her penance for having been way too gullible when the gasman had first shown up, making all his promises and waving the contracts at them. It wasn’t just that she and her neighbors felt that they had been conned into leasing their land for a pittance. That was a done deal, at least as far as the law was concerned. And it wasn’t really Cabot’s fault that land prices had skyrocketed since they signed. The way Victoria saw it, that was Engelder’s fault. There would be no new contracts for those who had signed with Cabot for next to nothing in those early days. They were locked in, and all they could do was look on with envy and regret as the last of the holdouts grew rich. All Victoria had to do was look at her neighbor Rosemarie Greenwood. That poor woman had gotten just enough to cover the taxes on the farm she and her eldest son ran, while her neighbor, right across her back fence, who had been one of the last to sign, got almost a million dollars for his 400 acres. And if that wasn’t galling enough, Rosemarie’s younger son got more for his thirteen acres than she got for her whole farm. Rosemarie had not been at all happy about that, Victoria knew.

And then there were those who weren’t going to see any significant benefit at all. Norma Fiorentino was one. Like Rosemarie, she was a widow, but there had been no big chunk of land for her to take over when her husband died. He had really left her with nothing at all except for the run-down mobile home on two acres up the road from Victoria’s place. That, and a couple of dogs that always needed to be fed. Norma was a native of the area. She had been born and raised a
few miles east in the faded little railroad depot village of Brooklyn. That was far enough away that those who had lived all their lives in Dimock still viewed her as something of an outsider, but she was country enough that, except for Victoria, the handful of newcomers didn’t view her as one of their own, either. Maybe that was one of the things that had drawn Victoria to her in the first place.

Her four grown sons were still here—they worked in the quarries—and her married daughter had moved just a few miles down the road, but no one ever went out of their way to make Norma feel like she belonged. It’s not that anyone ever said anything to her. But there was always something under the surface, a sense that everybody else was in on some big secret and she was being left out.

It had certainly felt like that the previous fall, when the Cabot landman was making his rounds through the neighborhood. It seemed like his big white pickup pulled into every other driveway in Dimock before it finally turned up hers. Norma had only two acres around her house, so all her neighbors were getting a lot more out of the Marcellus than she was ever likely to, but she would bear as much of the burden as anyone. Word was that Cabot was thinking about sinking an exploratory well right across the road from Norma’s place and another one right in back of her property, not 1,500 feet from her trailer. And for all of that, she was paid about fifty bucks up front, with the promise of maybe ninety more a month if things worked out.

But what galled Victoria most was how she and her neighbors had effectively traded away any rights they might have had to limit the risks of damaging this land permanently when they had signed their names to the Cabot contract. No one had told them that they could have negotiated with Cabot, to limit the company’s access to waterways, to demand specific environmental protections, even to demand approval for the final location of wells, all of which my family and I, having learned from the mistakes the folks in Dimock made, were able to do.

Looking back, Victoria blamed Cabot for taking advantage of them, but she also blamed herself for the fact that they hadn’t done much research. They had barely even looked at the contract that Cabot had offered them before signing it. “I didn’t do my homework,” she ruefully admitted to herself.

•   •   •

V
ICTORIA MADE HER WAY UP
the narrow hallway—the trailer shifted slightly in the wind as she went—across the tiny living room and into the kitchen to brew herself a cup of coffee. Victoria was certainly doing her homework now, as evidenced by the papers arranged in neat piles on her Formica kitchen counter. There were file folders crammed with newspaper clippings about the dangers of natural gas drilling, culled from sources all over the country. Taped to her refrigerator, alongside the plans for the dream house and various sticky notes detailing the most pressing items on her to-do list, was a map of a five-mile swath of the neighborhood with red dots—more than thirty of them—indicating where Cabot planned to drill wells. Right in the middle of that map was the 7.2-acre tract of old-growth trees that Victoria and Jim now called home. And taped right beside that map there was a picture. It was an ancient newspaper photo, taken decades ago at a natural gas well site somewhere in a remote hollow down in West Virginia. She had stumbled across it after the drilling had begun. In it, you could plainly see a spindly old-fashioned derrick, a wooden tower that looked like some kind of medieval torture device, rising above a ravaged landscape, a rocky apocalyptic hilltop denuded and poisoned, fallen trees lying here and there rotting. It was a frightening picture, not because the ravages that it depicted had happened, but because they might again.

It was, of course, only one of the possible outcomes of the drilling. Victoria knew that. But it was one that she had not been warned about. None of the local representatives of government had talked about the possible environmental impact of the drilling, and the gas company, though it had ample experience with such things, had never volunteered that such a fate was possible. Why would they? As one of the Cabot men had cavalierly told Victoria in what he had no doubt thought was a moment of lighthearted candor, “If we had, who would have signed up?”

But now that the drilling had begun and was soon to become even more intense, there was an increasing chorus of Cassandras who had been collecting stories of every reported mishap at gas wells all over the United States and were now predicting that the fate of that West Virginia hillside was glowering over the entire Marcellus.

In fact, there were so many anti-drilling groups springing up, not just in Pennsylvania but also in New York state, dedicated to the idea
of strangling this coming natural gas boom in its crib, that Victoria was having a hard time keeping track of them all.

The groups had sprung up seemingly overnight, and the epicenter of the opposition seemed to be developing forty-five miles to the east, in Wayne County, where the hills that rise from the Susquehanna River roll down toward the Delaware and rise again on the far side of that river as the Catskills. Over there, there had always been a lot of affluent weekenders and urban transplants, and many of them had taken a hard line against any gas development, deciding, in no small part because many of them could afford to, that the economic benefits that the drilling might bring were not worth the environmental upheaval it might cause. They had become pretty well organized and had made it a mission to dominate the Internet, and they had been receiving a large amount of press in recent months. One group in particular, the Damascus Citizens for Sustainability, based one county to the east, in Wayne, had been getting most of that ink. At the center of that group was a woman named Barbara Arrindell.

T
HOUGH
V
ICTORIA
S
WITZER HAD
never met Barbara Arrindell, she had become very familiar with the woman’s background and with her work. A transplant to the hills—she had been living in suburban New York before moving to the bucolic little town of Damascus—Arrindell had emerged as perhaps the leading voice in the anti-drilling movement. Almost as soon as Terry Engelder had released his figures—the ones that triggered the Marcellus land rush—Arrindell had started compiling hers.