The End of Country (38 page)

Almost all. Even as the Cabot saga continued to unfold, there was one more major milestone in the story of the Marcellus. It had begun in the early fall. For weeks, Terry Engelder, who had by now taken to thinking of himself as “the Godfather of the Marcellus,” had been compiling figures from those wells that Chesapeake had been reporting, along with some others that Range was operating, and a few from a handful of other companies, and in early September he had come out with yet another earth-shattering estimate of the potential wealth of the Marcellus. Figuring that there were some places in the Marcellus that were richer than others, and that there were others where, no matter how much gas was there, the land was too steep or too inaccessible, or conversely far too built up, to get a rig in to retrieve the gas,
Engelder had developed a probability model that was again far more optimistic than any of his previous estimates. There weren’t 50 trillion cubic feet of gas in the Marcellus just waiting to be sucked out, and there weren’t 363 trillion cubic feet. According to Engelder, drillers could reasonably expect to hoover some 493 trillion cubic feet of natural gas out of the Marcellus during the thirty-to-fifty-year life of the play. That was the energy-producing equivalent of more than 8 billion barrels of oil, a resource nearly eight times richer than what was thought to lie beneath the controversial Alaska Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

It had taken a while for these new numbers, which were first published in a dry and poorly circulated oil and gas journal out of Fort Worth, to have much of an impact. But once they did, the fallout was remarkable. Because gas and oil drilling companies are valued by Wall Street based in large part on their holdings, the amount of proven and probable reserves of petro-products that they control, Engelder’s new numbers had in essence conjured up tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of dollars in brand-new value for the companies. Their reserves were now more valuable, and as a result, so were the companies themselves. Though it was all theoretical—though the wealth that Engelder had conjured for them was as vaporous as the gas itself—they nonetheless felt a lot richer than they had a year earlier, and felt that they’d be richer still if they could sew up whatever leases remained to be had, to stake their wells as quickly as they could and add even more reserves to their tally sheets.

And so it was that the landmen came back to Ellsworth Hill and the hollows beyond. Flush with the promise of those reserves, the landmen returned to their old ways, lavishing cash on anyone who would listen to them, and as usual, it was Chesapeake that took the lead. The company’s first order of business was to finally secure all that property—some 37,000 acres of land—that was controlled by the Wyoming County landowners’ association, which had been in limbo since the middle of 2008. That was the same group that included among its leadership the courthouse clerk that Casale had taunted a year and a half earlier, to the astonishment of his young trainee. Casale had left Chesapeake to pursue more lucrative opportunities elsewhere in the Marcellus, and now his replacement was pursuing the landowners’ association with a more lucrative offer than they had
ever dreamed of. Not only would they get 18 percent royalties, but they would also be paid $5,750 an acre, twice what my mother had received when she signed at the height of the previous land rush.

And the members of the Wyoming County group were not the only ones. At the same time, George W. Clay, who had been representing Anne Stang and Roger Williams and several of my mother’s other neighbors, had been negotiating quietly with Carizzo, a smaller Texas firm, and he finally came up with a deal. Though they received only a fraction of the amount that Chesapeake’s new leaseholders had in up-front money—they got $2,500 an acre, the same amount my mother had gotten a year and a half earlier—Clay had assured them that the terms of the deal were good, that their interests would be protected, that the company had a solid environmental track record, and that in the end they’d see more than enough money to keep them comfortable.

There was still some trepidation. As Anne Stang said not long after she signed her lease, “We’re losing something, and this may be the end of country.” At the same time, though, there was much to be gained, she thought. Maybe not right away, but eventually, the gas would bring new opportunities for her children and her grandchildren and their children. Things were going to change, that was certain. But change would have come anyway. If the gas had never been discovered, if the leases had never been signed, sooner or later this country would have been carved up for homes and businesses, and “country” would have been lost anyway, she figured. Yes, it would be scarred, it would be battered. But this way, at least, there was a chance that the farms could remain intact. And besides, she said, “It’s progress. You can’t stop it.”

B
Y THE TIME
L
IAM
and I made the long haul up Ellsworth Hill Road on that October afternoon to meet the boys from Chesapeake, progress was already parked in my mother’s driveway waiting for us. As we passed old man Ellsworth’s still struggling farm and the abandoned one-room schoolhouse and the charred bluestone remains of Marcy’s barn and the swampy pasture where deep below the muck the bones of an old milk cow were slowly changing into something else, we could already see how progress had staked its flags on its future territory. There were flags marking where the pipeline would go to
carry the gas that would inevitably come churning up from the ground to the market on the coast. There were flags where the road cuts would go, where in a few months, battalions of trucks and armies of roughnecks would pour onto our land.

Liam had been unmoved by it all. He was busy scanning the woods just past the power line for any lurking bad guys he could use his superpowers on. But I was starting to feel the weight of the inevitability of it all.

That weight got a bit heavier when the three men from Chesapeake showed me the map that indicated not just where the well would be placed but how six horizontal legs would span out, spider-like, siphoning out all the gas for a mile around. It was no longer an abstraction. I now knew what the operation would look like. I could see how this land that had owned me for forty years would be ripped open, how a five-acre gash would be torn into its side, a surgical scar that would take years to heal. I could almost hear the scream of the drill, the rumble of the trucks, almost smell the stink of the diesel generators. Once that pit was cut, it could stay open for as long as five years. That was the plan, anyway. They would spud two wells and cut the first two horizontal legs, and then, a year or two later, two more, and a year or so after that, the next two.

I remember looking at the map and realizing that the first leg that they would drill was following almost the exact path that Ralph and I used to take when we’d vanish into the woods to sneak sweat-soaked cigarettes and explore the long-ago battlefield where we never found any arrowheads but found plenty of fossils. That leg would run beneath those woods, plunge down beneath a gully, and end just beyond a small creek that ran there. I could envision the spot where the leg ended. It had always been a special place to me. It was at that precise spot—right about this time of year, when the leaves were gone and the cattails along the creek had turned brown—that Ralph and I had spotted that white deer, an albino, foraging for grass. It’s still the only one I’ve ever seen in the wild. I shook off the superstitious Irish urge that lingers in me even now to read anything more into it, to see it as some kind of omen, but beneath the ancestral bog-trotting voodoo, I couldn’t help but wonder whether my son would ever have a chance to stumble across so magical a creature while walking through these hills, or whether the magic would be chased away by the din and dirt of industry.

On the other hand, development brought so much promise. Looking as far into the future as I could, I saw those six wells bringing a level of reliable financial security to my kids. Maybe money is a talisman, too. And maybe my superhero son, who prizes Batman and Spiderman, will grow up to be skillful enough swinging between moral and cultural ambiguities to cull what’s good from it and avoid the dangers that it poses.

It’s the rare man who can. Ken Ely was certainly one of the few I had ever known who could do it with grace. It was a rough grace to be sure, but grace nonetheless. Back at the beginning of the story, when I first started trying to track Ken down—we had played a game of cat and mouse over the telephone that stretched out several weeks—I had been afraid that Ken had remembered me and decided that, regardless of my long-ago connection to the neighborhood, I was now just another stranger asking questions, a guy who didn’t belong there. I was surprised by how much it bothered me that Ken would think that.

And then one winter day I had run up to the farm to take care of a few errands for my mother, justifying the long drive by telling myself that I could catch a peek at some of the rigs in Dimock on my way. It was late in the afternoon, the winter sun had just set, and in the distance I could see a couple of derricks, brightly lit and glowing, rising above the barren trees on the hilltops, when he finally called me on my cell phone. The reception was poor—and I’m not just talking about the signal. He greeted me with a simple sentence: “If you want to talk, why don’t you come up here now.”

As I made my way up his driveway, I could no longer see the derricks, but I could hear the distant rumble of their diesel engines from behind the trees at the hilltop, and their nearness was underscored by the sound of my footsteps on the gravel—fresh, clean gravel that had spilled onto Ken’s driveway from the old timber road that Cabot had widened and stoned to accommodate their trucks and equipment. I stepped onto the front steps and peered inside the two-room cabin just big enough to hold Ken, his wife, his 12-gauge for turkeys, the .30-06 for bucks, and a .22 for squirrel, which, as one young driver for Cabot had learned, could also be useful for scaring off other varmints.

It took Ken a while to make it to the door. Time and distance have
a way of freezing people in your mind. You imagine that they stay forever the way you last saw them. But the Ken who greeted me was not the same robust and barrel-chested pump jockey who had fronted me gas back in 1978. He was sixty-one now, a little deaf, which was an occupational hazard for a guy who had by then spent years blasting stone out of the earth and then scooping up the clattering remains from behind the controls of a screeching backhoe. He was heavier, his joints were stiffer, and he walked with a bit of a limp. He was more stoop-shouldered, too, and maybe it was the light in the place, but he seemed to have taken on a grayish blue hue, not just his hair or his mustache but all of him, as if he were turning into one of the stones that he spent all those years gathering.

That first night when we had sat down, he eventually opened up, talking with me about hunting and about his fish and about his land and his dog and about his lifelong and complex love affair with Emmagene. He also talked about hope. The gas “is gonna do a lot of good for a lot of people up here,” he said. “Land-poor people, they’re going to get something now, and that’s good.” It wasn’t just the locals who would benefit. If things worked out the way everybody figured they would, maybe there would come a time when no more kids from the New Milford National Guard would have to ship out to some far-flung corner of the globe and none would come back in body bags. “There’s a lot of good that can come from it,” he said.

As I got ready to leave his cottage that evening, I caught Ken studying me. A look of recognition finally flickered in his eyes, followed by a look of triumph. He had figured it out.

“Hey, didn’t you go bankrupt once?” As a matter of fact, I had. Eighteen years earlier, after my first failed marriage. “I remember you. You owe me a hundred bucks for gas and bullets.”

I didn’t remember that. As far as I knew, I had paid Ken every cent I ever owed him. But I wasn’t going to dispute it. Ken Ely had a long memory. I didn’t have a hundred dollars on me, but I promised I’d write him a check. “Don’t bother,” he told me. “I don’t need the money anymore. Wait till you get rich on the gas and then give it to somebody who needs it.”

T
HE TALL MAN WITH
the honeyed Texas accent pressed the four-pound mallet into Liam’s hand, and the poor kid nearly toppled over
from the weight of it. “Hold on tight, Superhero,” the man said, as with one hand he helped Liam heft the hammer while with the other he held the stake in place. “Now, give it a shot.” Liam let go of the hammer, and as the man drove the stake into the ground, the superhero broke free and scrambled back to the comparative safety of the overgrown raspberry bush.

It took me a while to talk Liam out from behind the bush, and once I had, we walked the Chesapeake men back to the house where their trucks were waiting. We said goodbye and I left Liam with my mother and walked back up the hill. I followed the path of the first leg of the soon-to-be-drilled well as it snaked across the lane, past the spot where I had stood guard, at my father’s behest, over the remains of our dead calves all those years before, past the abandoned bluestone quarry where the rusting carcass of that ’49 Plymouth lay on its roof, until I reached the edge of the half-acre pond my family had dug there thirty-five years ago. I don’t know how long I had been standing there, lost in thought, when I heard a sound behind me, a frantic rustling in the brush near the barbed-wire fence line my father and I had run thirty years ago, and I turned to catch a glimpse of brown fur scuttling through the undergrowth and diving into a partially obscured hole in the ground. It was a woodchuck, a descendant, no doubt, of one of the critters my father had tried so hard to run off the land by pouring used motor oil into their dens. He had never been a particularly superstitious man, but at the end of his life, when pancreatic cancer had all but hollowed him out, my father had come to believe that he was paying some kind of karmic penalty for his actions. And as I traced in my mind’s eye the path the drillers would take beneath this land, I found myself wondering what karmic lessons my father might imagine were now in store for the rest of us.