The End of Country (27 page)

And solving the question of where the water comes from was going to be far less daunting a question than what to do with it once it was used.

There is no single formula for the fracking fluids that are used in the Marcellus, or anywhere else, for that matter. Every company that spuds—or drills—a well had its own formula, its own specific mix of surfactants and biocides, its own special blend of sand, and each tended to jealously guard those formulas, arguing that they are trade secrets.

And while that information was provided to the DEP, both when
the wells were approved and when the resultant wastewater was to be disposed of, that information had not been widely shared with the locals. Even the Susquehanna Emergency Management office, the agency that would be responsible for the initial response in the event of an accident, had no idea what was in the stuff that was now being stored and used around Dimock and elsewhere in the county, and had had no training whatsoever on how to respond in the event of a spill.

In fact, Victoria told me, she had discovered that the local fire department had effectively been told to keep out of Cabot’s way and let the company handle it if an accident were to occur. They were told directly, for example, that if a fire were to break out at a drill site, a not entirely unheard-of accident at drilling rigs, and if they were so presumptuous as to put the fire out, Cabot would instruct them to set it ablaze again and let the experts deal with it. No one in Dimock was sure whether Cabot had been kidding when they said that.

But despite all that, despite her growing preoccupation with the dangers that might be lurking and her genetic predisposition, inherited from her father, for community activism, Victoria was trying to force herself to remain in the background, letting Ken Ely and the handful of other neighbors who formed the nucleus of her own small watchdog group take the lead role when it came to explaining their worries, not just to the authorities but to the neighbors who were not as troubled by the developments.

The way Victoria saw it, it was probably best that she remain in the background. After all, she knew, a lot of her neighbors still looked at both her and her bicycle-racing husband as rather peculiar. At the very least, she understood that some of them found her a little flamboyant, and it was common knowledge in her adopted neighborhood that ostentation of any kind could provoke draconian punishment. One of the first stories she had heard when she moved into the neighborhood was the tale of the midnight ride of the Pumpkin Brigade. The way the story went, a few years earlier a farmer’s wife who had become a little too fond of Martha Stewart had decided to decorate her house for Halloween with an elaborate and cloyingly rustic display of pumpkins. She had spent hours carving them, and she set them on her fenceposts and porch in what some of the local boys decided was an entirely too presumptuous manner. By the time she
woke up the next morning, her entire property looked like an unbaked pumpkin pie. The Pumpkin Brigade had sent her a message, shattering every one of the pumpkins.

The last thing Victoria wanted to do—and the last thing Jim would permit her to do—was to attract that kind of negative attention from their new neighbors. Adding urgency to her desire to remain low-key was the fact that only a few months earlier, Victoria had narrowly dodged the bullet of local notoriety.

It had happened during the hotly contested Pennsylvania presidential primary race in 2008, when Victoria had seen it as her civic duty to volunteer for the Obama campaign. Working a local phone bank, she had been stunned by the reaction she had gotten from some of the people she called. One voter called Obama her “boy”; another said the African American candidate “should be hanging from a tree.” Another told her “You should be ashamed of yourself for making these phone calls.” Victoria was flabbergasted. “These were Democrats,” she told a coworker, as it slowly dawned on her that racism, at least in that part of northern Appalachia, might not be widespread but was certainly bipartisan.

Victoria hadn’t realized that the coworker she had confided in was not a local but a paid worker for the Obama campaign, and that worker relayed the information to the campaign’s national headquarters, which in turn relayed it to a reporter named Kevin Meredith of
The Washington Post
, who a few days later interviewed Victoria and a few other campaign workers who had similar experiences and wrote about it. Her fifteen minutes of fame went into overtime a few days later when Maureen Dowd, the
New York Times
columnist, also reported Victoria’s phone experience. For a few breathless days, the retired teacher waited for the almost certain retribution that she was sure would come. It eventually dawned on her that few of her neighbors had the time or the opportunity to read
The Washington Post
or
The New York Times
, and that fewer still would ever have the inclination to do so.

Victoria was relieved. And she had no intention of tempting fate a second time. Fortunately, Ken had stepped up, becoming her ally and her friend.

Yet as she stood there that night, leaning against the counter in the kitchen of her mobile home, listening to the wind roar outside, the
feeling of distant dread began to return. It had to mean something. From the moment the drilling had begun up there, it had been constant, around the clock. It was a costly business and the drillers could not afford to stop, even for a moment, unless something had gone wrong. It would be days before she would learn what had happened that night. All she knew then was that an old friend had dropped by to warn her.

W
hen I look back, the most remarkable thing about those long summer days after my mother signed away the drilling rights to our family’s land is that there was nothing remarkable about them at all. The early strawberries still grew wild in the untended field behind the barn where we used to mow hay, and they gave way in time to the wild blackberries that clung to the fenceline, just as they had every year.

Someday, of course, that would change—the bulldozers would show up, followed by the drill rigs and the frack trucks—and even if it didn’t happen on my mother’s farm but instead on one of her neighbors’ places, we’d hear it and see it and smell it. The changes would come. Still, my mother, my sister, and I weren’t terribly worried. After all, unlike our unfortunate friends in Dimock, we had taken precautions with our lease, and we were certain that any disruption to our land would be limited.

We hadn’t seen any money yet, of course. The contract still had to be registered and recorded in the local courthouse and shipped off to
Chesapeake’s Appalachian headquarters, where the bean counters would review it. A check wouldn’t be in the mail for months, we had been told. When it came, my mother had generously promised, she would give my sister and me $10,000 each. Neither she nor my sister was terribly anxious about the money. I tried not to look as anxious as I was.

I wasn’t dead broke. But I was close. The free-falling economy had killed
Radar
magazine, and the magazine had died before it had published my story on the Marcellus, meaning that I got only a kill fee—a quarter of the money I had been counting on—and had lost my cover for probing the developments. On the plus side, I had managed to put together a book proposal on the Marcellus, and had even managed to sell it, for more money than I had ever earned for anything. Or at least that’s what I thought, until I realized that book advances are paid in tiny increments over long periods of time. And so the money my mother had promised was, as far as I was concerned, a godsend.

Maybe it’s the Irish in us, but no one in my family, not my mother, my sister, or I, can allow good fortune to sit too long untarnished, and just when everything looked as if it was going to work out, my sister phoned. She was using that officious banker’s tone again as she explained, patiently but a little patronizingly, how the United States Congress had, a few years back, in their ardor to look as if they were encouraging the American Dream, raised the threshold of the estate tax—the level at which the inheritor of a business or farm or any other asset had to pay taxes on that inheritance—from $1 million to $3 million. The adjustment was due to sunset at the end of 2009, after which there would effectively be no taxes for a year, and then in 2010 the threshold would be reset at $1 million if Congress didn’t do anything to change it. Congress, being Congress, didn’t.

Six months earlier, none of this would have mattered to either of us. Our mother wasn’t starving—that was certain—but she wasn’t rich, either, and if one of the lederhosened woodcutter figurines in one of her clocks were to turn ax-murderer, her estate would have fallen safely below the estate tax threshold. But now, things were entirely different. If anything was to happen to our mother now, or in the near future, the Internal Revenue Service would value her land, the farm, at a rate based on its market value as a gas-producing
entity and would demand taxes on 45 percent of its estimated worth. Considering the value of the lease she had signed, and the rising estimates of the amount of gas beneath it, and considering the fact that if and when it started producing, the IRS would demand payment based on the amount of money that it might produce over its thirty-or-more-year lifetime, that could mean that my sister and I would have to come up with a million or more dollars before we ever saw a red cent from the drilling.

There were ways around it, of course. All of them were over my mother’s head, which naturally meant that it would be up to my sister and me to come up with the right strategy. There was no doubt that we would. This kind of finance was my sister’s forte, and as a reporter, I had the skills to do whatever research would be necessary. I assured my sister of that. “I know,” she said. “We’ll be fine.” But I also knew that a lot of those people I’d been thinking about when I wrote that line about “hitting the lottery” would not. There was a damned good chance, and there still is, that a generation from now, they’ll lose everything as a direct result of their good fortune.

What’s more, other forces were working on those fortunes as well.

G
EOLOGISTS WILL TELL YOU
that the vast, shallow, and long-buried sea that gave birth to the Marcellus Shale so many millions of years ago was big enough to create its own weather. Economists will tell you that it still is.

It proved that in the fall of 2008.

It was around that time, of course, that the whole precarious house of cards that was the U.S. economy was teetering on the brink of collapse, about to be brought down by the weight of its own avarice. Banks and insurance firms, manufacturers and consumers, had all been leveraging themselves with debt beyond reason, debt secured by nothing more substantial than the largely unquestioned belief that housing prices—the shaky foundation supporting it all—would continue to rise. At the top of the financial food chain, a cabal of clever money men had found a way to hedge their bets, developing convoluted financial instruments to pass along the risk, secure in the knowledge that other people would always be willing to beggar themselves to bet on the American dream, and that it would be those people’s ass
on the line if the whole scheme blew up. It was a sucker’s bet, of course. Beginning in the spring of 2008, the bet started to unravel, and by the fall, everyone in the country, it seemed, had simultaneously begun to realize that it had all been an elaborate and largely unregulated game of three card monte. The black queen had been a joker all along.

But by that point, it was too late. Many of the most prestigious names seemed headed for extinction. Bank of America, Citigroup, even AIG, companies that were deemed too big to fail,
were
failing, and the federal government pumped more than a trillion dollars into the banking industry in a frantic effort to keep it from going under and taking everything else with it as it sank. And as the country’s unemployment rate soared, as its factories scaled back, and consumers of everything started learning for the first time in their lives how to do without, demand for oil and natural gas, commodities that only weeks earlier had been trading at record highs, plummeted.

By September, both oil and natural gas were trading at half their July averages. I assumed this would at least delay Chesapeake’s efforts to drill on my mother’s land. But what I didn’t know was that the very economic collapse that threatened virtually every other industry in the nation, together with tightening credit and dwindling returns that in fact had even forced the oil and gas industry to dramatically cut back operations elsewhere in the country, actually made the Marcellus Play, particularly in Pennsylvania, hotter than it had ever been.

To understand why, it’s critical to understand the way drillers think. In a way, they’re like heroin addicts: the only way they know how to deal with good times is to drill another well, the only way they know how to deal with bad times is to drill another well, and as soon as the warm glow of a new gas well hits a driller’s bloodstream, he’s off looking for another hit. They tie off chunks of land with leases, and like a junkie tapping his forearm with two fingers to raise a vein, they send out their thumper trucks to bang the ground or place seismic charges on fields so they can measure the sound waves and see where the thickest, richest shale might lie. And when they find it, they jab a 120-foot needle in the ground and get another taste.