The End of Country (18 page)

“Here,” he said, shoving the rock shard into my hand. “Take a whiff.”

It had been thirty years since I had huffed anything—I hadn’t even had a drink since 1983, when I had wrecked my 1973 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, with its rusted fender skirts and paisley interior, on the Market Street Bridge in Wilkes-Barre. That was when I had finally acknowledged that I was part of the commonwealth’s most stubbornly consistent demographic: alcoholics. But I still remembered the protocol.

I cupped the rock in my two hands, brought it to my face, and inhaled deeply. A faintly cold sensation rippled up through my sinuses, and for just a nanosecond, my frontal lobe did that old familiar jig.

I don’t know why I was so surprised. Long before I ever got that first heady whiff of shale gas, I already knew how intoxicating the Marcellus Shale could be. It was a potion and it was a poison, and just like booze and drugs, how it affected you depended almost entirely on who you were, on your genetic makeup, on your psychological strength and that of all the people who surrounded you.

T
his was most certainly not what Victoria had expected when she and Jim signed up with Cabot. This was supposed to have been an exploratory operation, and in her mind that meant small-scale, a rig here or there, but not this, the relentless truck traffic, the round-the-clock noise, the diesel spills, the creeping industrialization, as she saw it, of her precious hollow.

She had wanted to be on the cutting edge of a new energy age, and now she was. It just hadn’t dawned on her until now how much cutting that actually involved.

It was just a few months after she and her neighbors had signed when Cabot first started clear-cutting for the well they planned to drill on Cleo Teel’s place, which sat about a half mile from Victoria’s place. And when that well was done, they drilled another, and another. Every week, it seemed, they were edging closer, until Victoria felt surrounded by the clanking chaos of the operation. It wasn’t just that they were carving out the three to five acres where the wells themselves would soon sit, felling trees and tearing up topsoil and
gouging out pond-sized holes in the ground for their flowback pits; they were also clearing land to make way for access roads and pipelines. They had been given an inch and they were taking a mile. Now, they had cut and clawed their way almost to Victoria’s property line and were busily at work on the top of the ridge down and across the road from Victoria’s place, where yet another rig and road and pipeline would soon be built.

She had been jarred out of her trailer early one morning by the monstrous shriek of hard steel against soft wood, the lascivious grunting of diesel engines, and the anguished crack of decades-old trees snapped out of the ground like weeds, the sound one might imagine of bones breaking. It was coming from the woods just beyond the standing grove of hemlocks above her house. She and her dog headed up to investigate. She was stunned by what she saw. A massive piece of equipment with a whirring blade the size of a merry-go-round had leveled everything in sight, while just above the blades, mantislike claws were lifting thirty-foot timbers like pickup sticks and hurling them into a pile at the edge of the property. She stood across the broken stone wall that separated the still-wooded side of the hill, dumbstruck by the furious efficiency of the deforestation process. A few minutes later, one of the local men Cabot had hired for the job walked up to her and, over the howl of the machinery and plaintive shriek of fresh-fallen timber protesting against its destruction, tried to engage her in small talk, as if nothing really important was going on.

As she looked into his face, trying to conceal her confusion and her anger, she wished she had her camera. Right from the beginning, Victoria had promised herself that she would document the changes that were coming daily to her new neighborhood, and she wasn’t just sticking her photographs in an album, either. She was circulating them among a small group of neighbors who, like her, were becoming increasingly unnerved by all the industrialized chaos around them. They had already started to meet informally, though at their first gatherings they had spent most of their time griping about how little they had been paid for their land, about $25 an acre in most cases, while those who were signing on now were getting five and six times as much. But as the operation ramped up, they realized how much larger the problem was than just a relative profit margin. As the members of the group became more and more acutely aware of how
disruptive this whole process really was, they took it upon themselves to map out a response, in case something went seriously wrong. If that happened, Victoria’s pictures might come in handy. But in her haste to make it to the top of the hill that day, Victoria had left her camera behind. She would have loved to take a picture of the cheerful, friendly face of the Cabot contractor juxtaposed against the industrial-strength deforestation that was going on right over his shoulder. If only there was a way that Victoria could photograph her own growing rage, her anger over the stick-by-stone dissection of her precious sanctuary, and her own fear over what might come next, she thought.

They were all but finished at that site and ready to move on, but Victoria knew that soon enough she’d get another chance to get her picture, and sure enough, a few days later and a few fallow farms down the road, while the contractors were chomping away at the woods where yet another drill pad was planned, Victoria got a second chance. This time, she did have her camera. She positioned herself carefully to make sure she got the proper angle, finding a location in a field across the road from the work site where she could get a clear shot. She was dozens of yards away—much farther away than she had been the last time during her pleasant chat with the Cabot man—and she wasn’t even on the same piece of property where Cabot was cutting. But as she panned her camera across the scene and stopped momentarily on one of the contractors, he turned his head and glowered at her.

She snapped a few shots and put her camera away. A couple of days later, she got a call from the neighbor on whose land she had been standing. The neighbor told her that the Cabot man had given her a message for Victoria: “Tell her she could get hurt.” The comment might have been a genuine expression of concern. But Victoria had seen enough episodes of
The Sopranos
to wonder whether that was really a veiled threat, a warning not to become too nosy. Her neighbor wondered the same thing.

Victoria was not the only one in the neighborhood who was starting to have concerns. Right across the stone hedge at the back of her property, her neighbor and sometime cultural adversary, Ken Ely, was having some second thoughts of his own, and not just because Cabot had been mowing down his trees. In fact, Ken was fast running out of
patience. So was Emmagene, and so was Crybaby. It had all come to a head one morning while Cabot was getting ready to frack the first of what would ultimately be six wells on Ken’s land. Three times that morning, Ken had warned the young truck driver who was hauling water from the Susquehanna River up the serpentine mud track that led to the drill site at the top of Ken’s hill:
Leave the damned wall alone
. And three times the truck driver had ignored him. The kid’s job was to get the water up the hill, and the only way he could possibly get enough traction was to dismantle Ken Ely’s stone walls and stick the big rocks under the truck’s back wheels. He’d done it on the first trip. By the time he made it back with his second load of water, the first set of rocks had been sucked down into the ooze, and so he did it again, and now that those rocks were lost in the mud, he was doing it a third time.

It galled Ken. The stone wall was older than he was, even older than his father would have been, and Ken was intimately familiar with every single rock and stone in it. They had cut his skin, calloused his hands, and all but broken his back. For years, Ken had been fighting a never-ending battle against time and gravity to keep that ancient wall together—he had no idea how long it had stood there, or who had built it—straining his back to heave a heavy bluestone back into place whenever one fell. There was an art to building stone walls, and an art to maintaining them, the way each individual stone had to be precisely balanced and shimmed against the next in an intricate pattern, almost as if the stones were braided. One rock fallen or removed would in time lead to the fall of the others.

The kid grabbed another stone, and Ken could feel his anger rising. He might have been a little more tolerant of the gear jammer’s dilemma if he hadn’t been up most of the night, kept awake by the constant rumble of one massive truck after another clattering up the hill past his cottage. It wasn’t just the noise that bothered him, though that was bad enough. Many of these drivers were just kids, farm boys imported from other parts of the state or from out of state. They didn’t know these roads. They probably didn’t even know the trucks all that well. It was only a matter of time before one of them flipped over, spilling God only knows what kind of contaminants they might be dragging up from the river onto his land, where they might seep into his fresh, clean, spring-fed pond. And he feared even more what
might happen if one of the trucks carting the chemically enhanced used frack fluid overturned.

For the life of him, he couldn’t understand why a big company like Cabot would stake the future of a $3 million well on a kid’s ability to handle a tank truck with as much finesse as he handled his ATV on the first day of hunting season.

In a way, Ken felt a little sorry for the kid behind the wheel. In all likelihood, the kid was a lot like him at that age. He had no doubt been raised in a place a lot like this, and just as Ken had done when he was younger, the kid had probably latched onto the first opportunity for a steady paycheck that came his way.

That sense had been one of the things that Ken had clung to as he tried to keep from losing his temper. But at last, his patience was wearing thin.

And now, as he watched this kid steal yet another of his precious stones—for the third time—his impatience was about to erupt.

“Don’t touch my stone!” he yelled one last time. And once again the kid ignored him.

With Crybaby at his heels, Ken walked in the front door of his cottage. He put his spit bottle on the table and ambled over to his gun cabinet. He grabbed the .22 and threw a round in the chamber, then walked back out front and waited. And when he spotted a little gray squirrel scampering up a tree not far from the spot where the stone thief labored, Ken took careful aim and squeezed the trigger. He dropped the squirrel. The driver dropped his rock.

“You’re shooting at me!” the kid squealed.

“Naw,” Ken responded as a sudden, self-satisfied calm descended on him. “I was just barking a squirrel. But if you thought that, maybe you shouldn’t have been stealing my stone.”

I
T WASN’T MUCH OF A
spill this time, probably not more than a few dozen gallons of diesel fuel from a truck on a field where Cabot had been drilling a new well. But it was disturbingly close to Victoria Switzer’s trailer, close enough that she could hear it when the driver shut down the engine and clambered, cursing, out of the cab, and in a heartbeat she was there, camera in hand, ready to record the trickle of oil turning into a small stream as it poured out of the bottom of the truck, so she could add it to the growing file of such mishaps—most
of them so far thankfully small, and all of them so far correctable—that had occurred since Cabot began drilling in earnest.

“You need to stay back,” the truck driver shouted over the roar of machinery as he waved her away with a gloved hand. Victoria could feel her anger rising. He may not actually have used the words “little lady,” but Victoria felt the condescending sting of them all the same.

Victoria wasn’t trying to provoke anybody. But as she clicked away, she knew very well that she was doing just that. It was becoming fairly well known in the neighborhood that the Cabot workers were beginning to regard Victoria and her camera as a nuisance and maybe even as a bit of a threat. They couched their displeasure with her in the most benign terms, as if they were only interested in her well-being. She had been told before that it was for the locals’ own good that they maintain a safe distance—say, just outside camera range—from the drilling operation.

Victoria had to admit that there was some merit to the company’s concern. Drilling, as she had painfully learned, could be a dirty and dangerous business. It wasn’t just the potential hazards posed by the fracking fluids; those, at least, were contained, and thanks in part to the alarms that Victoria had raised with the local office of the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), there was some scrutiny of the company’s handling of them. There were other dangers as well: the very real threat of getting run over by one of the heavy pieces of machinery or being permanently injured by a falling pipe wrench or bolt from the top of a rig. There was a reason the rig workers wore hard hats. Even those would offer little protection if one of those heavy iron pipes that were stacked up like thirty-foot-long toothpicks was to suddenly drop from its moorings.