The End of Country (31 page)

It wasn’t just that they had killed his dog, bad as that was. It was the fact that they had broken the unwritten law, by not having the courage or decency to tell him, and that had made it worse, much worse. If they had only done the right thing, the manly thing, he would have been able to put away the grief, he told himself. That’s what he had been conditioned to do all his life. He might never have been able to forget what had happened, but he could have put it in its proper place and been appropriately stoic. Cabot had robbed him of
that chance. It would take a lot more than a stammered “I’m sorry” to tamp down the raw country rage that was boiling up inside him.

As he stood there, Ken understood that something bigger than the death of his beloved dog had happened. He knew it, and thinking back on the look of terror in the Cabot man’s eyes, he knew that the Cabot guys knew it, too.

The way he saw it, their silence had been a declaration of war, and Ken Ely, now full of righteous rage, was going to be a warrior. In fact, he was going to become the most effective kind of warrior, one with a lot of time on his hands, one who, thanks to the wells Cabot had drilled on his property, suddenly had a lot of disposable income.

E
ARLIER
, K
EN HAD NOTICED
that one of the water tanks at the still not completed wells on his land had been leaking slightly. There hadn’t been much water coming out of it, but even a drop of foreign water was a drop more than Ken was willing to tolerate, especially if that water came from the Susquehanna as it wound its way south through the old rust belt towns upriver. Cabot of course agreed to fix the leak, but as far as Ken was concerned, the company hadn’t moved fast enough, and that irritated him. His irritation became a little more acute in the following days, when he also noticed a small tear in the lining of the flowback pond, the plastic-lined pit that held the water flushed back from the well. And it took on an even greater sense of urgency when, a little later, while casting for dinner in the pond outside his cottage, he noticed that his fish seemed a little lethargic. “The fish tell me they’re not feeling very well,” he had told Emmagene over a dinner that evening that pointedly did not include any fish from the pond. Later, after dinner, Ken wandered up to the well site, and when he was sure no one was watching, he filled a water bottle—one of his spit bottles sanitized for the purpose—with a sample of water from the pit. He would bring it with him to a meeting of the local group. Victoria, naturally, would have a lead on a good laboratory that could analyze the contents without tipping off Cabot.

Ken was ready to take a public stand, and it was that stand that helped catapult Ken into a position of leadership in the group, which he now referred to affectionately as “our little environmental club.” Ken had all the qualifications for being the public face of the group.
He certainly had skin in the game; after all, he was poised to become one of the millionaires that some of the Cabot men had derisively referred to as “the Beverly Hillbillies.” And there was no one who better represented the character of the place than Ken Ely. He was rugged and rough-edged, but the more he talked, the more Victoria realized that he was also one of the smartest people she had ever met. Even Jim, a guy not given to casual compliments, had been impressed by the breadth and scope of Ken’s self-acquired knowledge on a variety of subjects, including drilling. He understood the process, he understood the land, and he had a way of talking that was simple, down to earth, and funny as hell. But there were some concerns, not the least of which was Ken’s frequent suggestion that maybe, if the drillers didn’t respond acceptably to some of their ideas, the group could always turn vigilante. Victoria cringed every time he suggested that the “Pumpkin Brigade” might be called upon to make another appearance in Dimock. You could never really be sure when Ken Ely’s devilish sense of humor would kick in, Victoria and the others fretted. But on the other hand, if he could keep his anarchic impulses in check, there was no one who could be a better spokesman for the group.

A short time later, Ken got a chance to prove his worth. The group had managed to get the attention of the Scranton
Times-Tribune
, a fairly well respected local newspaper that not only had solid circulation of its own in the area but also ran a chain of weeklies that served the smaller communities like Dimock and Springville and Montrose. The paper was sending up a reporter to look at the impact the drilling was having in Dimock. Arrangements were made to have her meet with Ken.

There was some trepidation among the group when Ken led the reporter, Laura Legere, to the leaking frackwater tank. But those fears evaporated the next morning when the story came out. He had heaped criticism on both the DEP and Cabot for failing to notice the leak or to correct it on time, but he also appeared calm and reasonable, a kind of rustic sage, a guy who fully understood and appreciated the benefits that the drilling was bringing to the community but also understood the dangers.

Legere’s story depicted Ken as a moderate and reasonable man. “Landowners like Ely have become protectors of their properties as
companies move in to drill wells into the gas-rich rock formation,” she wrote. “They offer amateur oversight at a time when DEP is understaffed and industry groups are lobbying to make it simpler and quicker to get drilling permits.”

It amused the group—hell, it amused Ken—to think that he, the same guy who had to be escorted off the courthouse grounds the year before by a sheriff’s deputy, the same dead-eyed mountain man who had plinked a squirrel off a tree right over the head of a Cabot truck driver, was now the voice of reason, the one guy who could articulate a middle path between the “drill, baby, drill” cheerleading of the gas companies and their supporters both in and out of government, and the harsh naysaying of groups like Barbara Arrindell’s Damascus Citizens for Sustainability.

Of course, by the time the interview appeared, the synergistic relationship between Victoria and Ken was already cemented, far more securely than Cabot’s well bores were. Victoria had long since started calling Ken her hero, and Ken would say the same thing about her. The way he saw it, the teacher who had lamented that she hadn’t done her homework when Cabot first arrived in these hills was doing it now. She could do the legwork, she could work the phones, and Ken would be the charismatic voice in the wildness calling for responsible development of a precious resource. They were so reasonable and so effective that the drillers, and even the DEP, would have to take notice.

F
OR ALL THAT BONHOMIE
, however, there was still another aspect to Ken’s troubled relationship with Cabot. Though he kept it to himself, he was still in mourning, and still seething, over the death of Crybaby. He could understand the accident; such things happen, especially in rural homesteads where the industrial—tractors, backhoes, trucks—has always bumped up against the bucolic. What he couldn’t wrap his mind around was the way the Cabot men had handled it. It seemed to him cowardly and disrespectful that they had buried the dog and kept her death from him for three days. To Ken, that was an unforgivable transgression, and one that demanded a response.

It had taken him a while to come up with one. And when it happened, it was by accident. When the gas company informed him that he was due to get his first check in January, and that it would be a staggering
amount—$30,000 for one month, and that included only the one well that had been brought online—Ken decided that the time had come to get his affairs in order.

Though he had always been willing to waive the debts that others owed him—he had made it a practice when he ran the gas station and luncheonette in Springville—he was far less forgiving about his own debts. There weren’t many of them, but the few there were gnawed at him, and none more than a couple of thousand dollars he owed to Charlie Memolo, a lawyer who had handled a comparatively minor contract case for Ken a few years earlier. What troubled Ken most was that he had heard that Memolo had suffered a massive heart attack and died before Ken could pay him the money he owed him. Sitting at home one night, Ken decided that he needed to at least make good on his debt, and so he fished Memolo’s phone number out of his files and called what he expected to be the widow Memolo to tell her that the check would soon be in the mail.

Ken was stunned when Charlie answered the phone. “I thought you were dead,” Ken said.

As it turned out, Ken had been half right. Memolo had been half dead. The lawyer had suffered a massive heart attack, just as Ken had heard, but he had recovered and was taking work again. That’s when the lightbulb went on for Ken. He told the lawyer that he was going to pay him the money that he owed him, and explained the source of his newfound riches. And then he offered Memolo a job.

It was all rather dubious, and it was definitely not a matter in which Memolo had any real experience, but from what he could piece together from Ken, the quarryman about to become a millionaire had a bone to pick with Cabot over the type of drilling they were doing on his property. “I signed a contract for vertical wells,” Ken said. “I never agreed to horizontals.”

Even though it was the horizontal well that had turned Ken from a dirt-poor quarryman into a rich country gentleman, he was now insisting that such wells violated the terms of his contract and that Cabot should be forced to renegotiate with him—and with any other landowner who was getting one of the horizontal wells. “I think every one of these is worth two million dollars” over its lifetime, Ken argued, and the landowners should see every penny of it. In lieu of that, Ken had decided, the company should be forced to shut down and
some court, somewhere, should order them to pay $100 million in damages and restitution.

The lawyer was flabbergasted. Even if there was the slightest chance that such a case could be won—and Memolo did not for a moment think that it could—he was not the man to handle it. He had no experience in gas and oil law, he pointed out, but Ken could bet that the high-priced attorneys Cabot would hire to pound that complaint into the ground would have it by the barrelful. He recommended another lawyer, a guy with a bit more experience who practiced out of Susquehanna County, and then begged off, promising Ken that he would help him any way he could. In fact, one of the ways he was going to do that was to advise Ken not to do anything rash.

Ken fell silent when he got off the phone with Charlie, and Emmagene, sitting in front of the television, watched Ken instead of the tube. She had seen that look in his eyes before. “All right,” she finally said. “I can see the wheels turning. What are you thinking?”

Charlie hadn’t gotten it. Ken knew that. The lawyer seemed to have honestly thought that Ken was interested in gas and was talking about money. He wasn’t. He was talking about something bigger. He was talking about right and wrong. Cabot had wronged him, and he wanted to make them pay for it. It was as simple as that. He didn’t care if he ever saw a dime from the lawsuit. He was already going to have more money than he had time left to spend it, even if he lived for another twenty years, though he figured that the diabetes and those three bouts with cancer made that kind of life expectancy pretty damned unlikely. No, this was about the here and now, and Ken had just one goal in mind: to make life tough enough on Cabot to send them a message. The fact that he could now afford to do it—that he could actually use Cabot’s own money to force them to spend bucket-loads of cash on legal fees—well, that was just the icing on the cake.

A sly smile crossed his face as he turned and looked at Emmagene. “You know what this is all about?” he said at last. “This is all about the fact that they killed my dog and didn’t tell me for three days. This is all about Crybaby.”

I
t was a little before Christmas 2008, a frigid, star-filled night, and I was making my way to my mother’s house so that I could fetch her back to my place for the holiday. We’d have to use her car for the return trip. The heater in my old vegetable-powered Mercedes had died. So had my satellite radio—one of the few luxuries I afford myself. Both had been failing for weeks. I had planned to have both of them fixed, but to tell the truth, I hadn’t had the cash. I barely had the money to get presents for the kids and to lay out the Christmas spread that my family, over these ten years since my father had died, had come to expect.

It was strange. Months earlier, when my family first signed its contract with Chesapeake, I had imagined that things would be different, that the sudden and spectacular injection of wealth into my family’s coffers, and into the community, would have a dramatic effect, that our fortunes and those of our neighbors were going to change overnight. But now, as I shivered alone in my car, I realized that I had been naïve.

Even then, if I had been honest with myself, I would have had to admit that I was ambivalent about it all. I certainly knew that the landscape would change, and that not all of those changes would, at least in the short run, be welcome, or even beneficial. And I also knew that the money—millions upon millions of dollars of it—would alter the face of this place, and not always for the better. The extent of those changes, and our ability to adjust to them, I was coming to realize, was going to be a test of our character.