The End of Country (2 page)

The young woman, an agent for New Penn Exploration LLC, one of the gas companies that had sprouted up all over the region, had turned up at just about every farm on and around the hill over the past couple of weeks. In a voice that dripped with the honeyed twang of Texas, she’d been trying to sweet-talk farmers into signing leases to give the drilling company she represented access to their land so it could poke and probe and explore the Marcellus Shale, a deeply buried stratum of rock a mile down that was believed to hold a large deposit of natural gas. She spoke in only general terms about the gas and the process of extracting it, which the farmers took as an indication that perhaps this young woman was not all that schooled in the ways of the gas industry. Either that, they thought, or she was being coy.

My mother summoned all her lace-curtain-Irish breeding and greeted the young woman with effusive cordiality as she guided her to the front porch, offering her a seat on one of the old rattan chairs my father had painted barn red before he died and sitting down beside her. The young woman didn’t offer much in the way of small talk, and didn’t even mention my mother’s garden—an omission my mother considered an unpardonable breach of etiquette. Instead, she immediately launched into an explanation for the visit, apparently unaware of her growing fame in the neighborhood. Her voice was soft and a little breathless, as if she were letting my mother in on a very special
secret. My mother played along, interjecting the occasional “Oh!” and “My!” at what she deemed to be appropriate intervals, or whenever she felt that the woman might be running out of steam.

The way the young woman explained it, there was something almost charmingly mechanical and industrious about the way these guys would go about their business. “You might see a few trucks on the road,” she told my mother, “and a rig or two”—not mentioning that a single rig has a footprint as wide as a barn and at least as high as a church steeple—“and they might thump the ground and listen in with something like sonar.” Or they might plant little depth charges in the ground—“sort of like firecrackers,” she explained—to see whether there was enough natural gas to make it worth their trouble. There was always the chance that they’d turn up nothing, and if not, they’d be on their way, and my mother would be a few thousand dollars richer. But if there was gas there, well, they’d bring in a few more rigs, dig a few holes in the ground, and if they struck gas, well, then, who knows what might happen, she said. She never came right out and dangled vast riches in front of my mother, but she did mention, offhandedly, that in Texas, and Arkansas, and Louisiana, and other places where shale gas had been found, she’d heard stories about people who became millionaires overnight. “Oh, just like the Beverly Hillbillies,” my mother said sweetly.

The young woman smiled back at her. “And how many acres do you have?” she asked. “One hundred,” my mother replied. “Would you want to lease it all?”

The young woman nodded. It wasn’t as if the company would take over the whole place, of course. In fact, at first, the disruptions to my mother’s life would be minimal, nothing more than a few of those seismic tests, and my mother would hardly even know they were there. If the tests didn’t pan out, that would be the end of it. But even if the tests indicated that there was enough gas beneath my mother’s place to justify the effort, they’d only need to disturb a few acres, maybe three, maybe five, not much more than that, to get to it. And once they were done, the whole place would return to normal, except for the fact that my mother would have an almost guaranteed income—thousands of dollars, maybe tens of thousands of dollars, who knows, maybe even more, not just for the rest of her life but perhaps for a generation or more beyond it.

“We can go as high as a hundred and fifty dollars an acre. Tell you the truth, that’s probably the most you’re ever gonna see. But you’ve got to move soon.”

My mother leaned back in her chair. It was a tempting offer, she allowed. And indeed, the prospect of $15,000 in free money was enticing, even if she never saw another penny after that. After all, that was more than half what she and my father had paid for the land forty years earlier, and the truth was, although she was collecting a decent income from her teacher’s pension and the investments she and my father had made over the years—decent at least by local standards, where roughly 7 percent of the local population lived below the poverty line—there had been troubling signs that the nation in general, and my mother’s fortunes in particular, were heading toward a rocky patch. Her pharmaceutical stocks—where the bulk of her money was—had taken a real beating. My sister and I had been urging her to sell them off and stanch her losses, but among my father’s final instructions to her before his death had been to hold on to those stocks at all costs. And she would do just that. But in the meantime, her costs were rising along with everybody else’s.

The price of oil, for one thing, was starting to spike. It had reached $87 a barrel on the New York Commodities Exchange that month, and there was every indication that it would head even higher, affecting heating prices, transportation, food—everything. As hard as that was on her, it was even tougher on her neighbors. Those few who were still farming—most, unable to make ends meet on the government’s set price of $20 per hundred pounds of milk, had given it up and either retired or taken whatever subsistence jobs the sagging local economy offered—found themselves deeper in debt with each passing month. Pretty soon, there wouldn’t be a single working farm left on the road that led past my mother’s place. For those people, the promise of a few hundred dollars an acre up front, with the possibility of far greater riches—perhaps millions of dollars—down the road, was a godsend.

My mother was still gnawing on that reality when the momentary silence on the porch was broken by the preparatory whirring of one of her many clocks before it struck what it believed was the hour.

“You said a hundred and fifty dollars is as high as you can go?” my mother asked, as suddenly, from somewhere inside, a clock began hammering out a tinny version of “Lara’s Theme” from
Dr. Zhivago
.

“That’s right,” the girl responded.

“You know, I have some friends over near Nicholson, and they’ve been offered two-fifty.”

My mother lives for small victories like this, but she didn’t rub it in. As the woman stammered that she might find a way to match the $250, she just smiled and nodded, accepting a sheaf of papers and cheerfully agreeing to review them. As the clocks inside the house continued to chirp and chime and warble at random, she assured the young woman, now clearly unnerved, that she understood that in this matter, time really was of the essence.

“I’
VE JUST SPOKEN WITH
your sister,” my mother blurted into the phone before I even had the chance to say hello. “The two of you need to sit down and discuss this.”

It was a little before nine on a Thursday evening. My mother always began her conversations in the middle, and over the years I had become pretty adept at figuring out what she was talking about. But this time, I had no idea.

“What, Mother? Discuss what?”

She stopped and sighed heavily, her voice taking on that tone of pity and frustration that I had last heard when she was trying to tutor me in high school French.

“The gas,” she said. “I’m talking about the gas.”

“Ah,” I said. “The gas.” I began to rifle through my mental file to find some context—the house had oil heat, so it couldn’t be that, and her stove was electric, which didn’t matter anyway since its primary use was as a hiding place for her jewelry on the rare occasions that she left the house. Finally, I gave up. “What gas?”

“You’re not listening to me,” she said. “You’re just like your sister. She doesn’t listen either. We need to decide what we’re going to do about the gas.”

The proposed contract, as my mother read it to me over the phone, poured out in one long rushing torrent of ten-dollar words, a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth, all translated from the jargon of the oil and gas industry into the impenetrable tongue of the legal profession. Yet my mother was struggling to squeeze some sense of out them. She tried to compensate for her—and my—utter lack of comprehension by reading the words with a little more feeling. But
phrases like “utilization and pooling” and “conversion to storage” didn’t become any easier to understand when they were declaimed. I jumped in whenever I was able to make anything out.

“It sounds like they’re saying they’ll give you a lump sum of fifteen thousand dollars up front and then give you an eighth of whatever they take if they find something, minus their expenses, of course.”

“Well, how much would that be?” she asked.

I had no idea.

“Well, that young woman told me it could be quite a lot of money,” my mother said, “maybe tens of thousands of dollars over the long run, maybe even hundreds of thousands.”

“So, what are your reservations?” I asked her. I knew she had some, many of them in fact. I could hear it in her voice, and even if her voice hadn’t betrayed her, I would have known they were there anyway, simply because my mother always has reservations—make that grave doubts—about everything. In her defense, it is another classic Irish American trait—there’s a reason that Murphy’s Law is named after an Irishman. In my mother, such pessimism is elevated to its highest art. And if there is one character trait that I’ve inherited from her, it’s that. And so, even before she answered, I already knew what her reservations were because I shared some of them myself.

Though I hadn’t been raised in the coalfields as she and my father had been, I had been weaned all the same on tales of the coal barons’ greed and excess. I had seen the mansions they had built in every coal-patch town and city in northern Pennsylvania and had seen the hovels that the people who worked in their mines were forced to live in. I had seen the results of the environmental disasters that had accompanied the rise and fall of anthracite coal in the region, a fuel that, much as natural gas is today, was cleverly marketed at the turn of the last century as a cleaner-burning fuel. Not long before my mother had called me, I had taken my wife to visit one of the most chilling examples of that legacy, a little ghost town about a hundred miles southeast of my mother’s farm in a desolate corner of Columbia County, a place called Centralia.

Fifty years ago, Centralia was just another coal-patch town, a village, like hundreds of others in this region of Pennsylvania, perched like a canary on a seam of anthracite. A thousand people lived and worked there. They depended on the coal for their livelihood. Their
safety and security depended on the good graces of the coal company and the willingness of the state and the federal government to monitor and regulate that industry.

Both were in short supply in Centralia, it seemed. In 1962 a minor fire erupted at a garbage dump in town. The dump sat atop an exposed seam of coal. The local fire company thought they had extinguished it. They hadn’t. The fire reignited and burned down under the ground. When it became clear that an underground mine fire was raging, state and federal environmental experts were called in. They bored into the fire in an effort to vent it. But the air rushing from the surface only fanned the flames. It took them years to finally declare that the fire was hopelessly out of control. By the 1980s, the town was all but abandoned. Almost all its buildings, its houses and shops, its municipal building, were demolished. Even now, nearly half a century after the fire erupted, it still burns. You can visit if you like. No one will stop you. There are still streets and sidewalks you can walk along. There are still concrete stoops where houses used to be. And wherever you look, you can see stray wisps of smoke, stinking of sulfur, rising from beneath the ground. Even in the dead of winter, if you reach down and touch the ground, it’s hot. It’s like hell is buried one shovelful down.

Such images were imprinted in my DNA. And what little I knew about the oil and gas industry—the catalogue of environmental disasters that spanned the globe, from Valdez, Alaska, to the coast of Australia—did not reassure me.

But on the other hand, all I needed to do was look around at the many formerly thriving farms on and around Ellsworth Hill, places that after nearly forty years of bad federal and state farm policies had failed, places where a sense of desperation and loss was as thick as the brambles that covered once carefully tended fields, to see that something needed to change, and perhaps this was that chance. That, too, was imprinted in me. The documents that the woman with the nose ring carried in her briefcase could be blueprints for the construction of a new world up there, a world where some people at least no longer had to lie awake at night wondering whether this was the year they would lose everything. There might even be a greater good that could come of it, maybe for the state, or even for the nation at large. There
was, after all, a lot of talk in those days about energy independence, and this, I told myself, could be a step in that direction. But it could also be a step backward. Those same papers could be a declaration of war by a new world on an old one, a fading world where the same people would lie awake at night wondering how they could have allowed themselves to stand by while the land, their birthright, was poisoned and maimed. Such things had happened before, and it was always the people on the ground, those who lived in the out-of-the-way places where energy is found, who paid the highest price.

Looking back, I realize that I already understood how terribly thin the line between those two possible futures, between the promise and the peril, actually was, and that which side of the line we ultimately found ourselves on—the answer to the question what we would make of the land—would depend almost entirely on what the land had already made of all of us. It’s probably not what she intended to do, but this mousy little woman with the Texas drawl was testing us. Did we have what it would take to make sure that if this was to be done, it be done right?

I’m not sure if my mother felt the same thing. I suspect she did, because she summed up all her doubts in one simple but fraught question: “I wonder what your father would think about all of this?”