The End of Country (24 page)

M
y old Mercedes gulped and sputtered and howled, belching out a great gray cloud of tempura-scented exhaust as I slammed it into low for the final assault on the rock-strewn sluice that passed for my mother’s driveway.

It was after 7
P.M
. I was late, and though I wanted with all my heart to blame my screaming kids, three-year-old Liam and six-year-old Seneca, who had by then managed to loosen the seat belts from their booster seats and were now using them like nunchaku against each other, I knew perfectly well it was all the car’s fault.

I had thought it would convey the appropriate amount of skepticism about the whole process if I showed up for the last serious meeting between my mother and the landman from Chesapeake Appalachia driving my retrofitted vintage Mercedes fueled by environmentally correct waste vegetable oil. It hadn’t occurred to me that I had already driven three thousand miles that month in the car and that I had neglected to change the specialized fuel filter that strains enough of the
shrimp and broccoli bits out of the oil to make it an effective fuel. About halfway to my mother’s farm, the car had started to complain, and now it had no more top end than the 1941 Farmall Model A tractor rusting in the barn.

By the time I made it up the driveway, my sister and her husband, Tom, had already arrived. I’ve always thought that my sister, as an adult, had two incongruous personalities living inside her. Sometimes she could be the Flying Nun, a wholesome, giddy imp; other times, she was Nurse Ratched, seeing only the darkest of intentions in everyone around her, and as I pulled up to the house and spotted Janet sitting imperiously on the front porch, still decked out in her banker’s work clothes, I knew which one I’d be dealing with that evening. I grunted a hello and shooed the kids out of my car, sending them off to play with their uncle. Marshall Casale was already there, too, leaning against the gleaming hood of his 350-horsepower Dodge pickup, eyeing me, my bedraggled kids, and my rattletrap car with a mixture of bemusement and pity. So much for my grand entrance and my carefully calculated display of diffidence.

He was enough of a salesman to feign interest in the drab green oddity I drove, and he waved away my mumbled apology for being late as if he were shooing away one of the millions of tiny mayflies that seem to spring spontaneously out of the fallen black walnuts on my mother’s lawn: “You’re the last ones today.”

It had been a couple of weeks since Casale and I had first met. As impressed as I had been by his mixture of directness and charm, my mother had been doubly so. In fact, she had even stopped complaining to me about his calling her “dear.” What’s more, unlike the case with our neighbors who had signed contracts with George W., any deal we struck with Casale would be between his bosses and us. There would be no middleman siphoning off a piece of the royalties.

Casale had been on the road since just after sunup, visiting one farm after the other, all within a few miles of my mother’s overgrown hundred acres. He was closing in on one lease, he said, for a few hundred acres of woods owned by a local hunting club. That would bring his personal total up to 7,500 acres, a respectable chunk of the roughly quarter million acres the company had leased in the region, and Casale had even found time that day to stop by the crowded registrar’s office in the decrepit county courthouse in Tunkhannock to
do a quick title search that traced my mother’s property back two hundred years, just to make sure that she still owned all the mineral rights to her land. She did, and now Casale was ready to formalize his offer.

We sidled in the front door, through the tiny foyer that my mother has decorated with red wallpaper and a hanging red carnival glass hurricane lamp, past the mournful portrait she keeps there of a young Irish woman standing on a rocky promontory somewhere in the windblown west of Ireland—my mother does romanticize the past—and sat down at the dining room table. My mother and my sister were already there, sipping coffee from a pair of matching china cups that, like the table, had been hard-purchased eighty years earlier on my grandfather’s meager mine earnings and handed down by my grandmother.

My mother poured Casale a cup of coffee. As always when she wanted to imbue a moment with significance, she was using her best china and her silver service, and she set the delicate china cup with its gold leaf handle and saucer on a lace doily she had already laid beside him. He looked at the cup and saucer for a moment, obviously aware that it meant something but unsure what, and then cast a pleading glance at me, as if silently looking for reassurance that the dainty cup would not shatter if he touched it. I gave him no such reassurance, and he didn’t touch the coffee.

Instead, Casale reached down, hefted up his black briefcase, dropped it on the table with the thud of a body falling from a great height, and snapped it open. “We’ve got all your addenda in here,” he said as he ticked off the long list of demands my sister and I had added to the contract, clauses to protect the groundwater supplies, clauses limiting Chesapeake’s access to our water, clauses requiring the company to mitigate any foreseeable environmental damage they might cause, even a clause holding them responsible for any property tax liabilities that might arise as a result of their operations, and Casale hadn’t flinched at any of them. “There is one change, though,” he said.

My sister shot me an icy glance. “Here it comes,” it silently said.

I shot her an even icier glance that I imagined would convey my response in no uncertain terms: “Don’t start in again.”

It had been a tense couple of weeks between my sister and me, and
a few days earlier we had had a fairly significant blowup. The fight had broken out over Pugh clauses, of all things, though of course it was really something far more primal than that.

A week earlier, neither of us had ever heard of a Pugh clause, an arcane part of conventional oil and gas leases that spells out the landowner’s rights and the gas company’s responsibilities regarding portions of a leased property that are not part of the unit the driller plans to develop. Even as we started bickering over it, neither of us really had any idea whether such a clause would matter in our case. (As it turned out, it didn’t. The gas company was looking for all the gas under our land, and they wanted it all in a single drilling unit.) But we could certainly use this term as a cudgel to bludgeon each other, and we stood there a few yards apart on the lawn of the farm, shouting “Pugh” at each other, spitting the plosive as if it were a poison dart.

My sister saw the Pugh clause as the pivot on which the whole deal rested. Unless the gas company was willing to meet her demands on that—demands she had not yet formulated—well, then, that was proof that they were simply trying to take advantage of us. With just as little support for my position, I was demanding that she abandon her devotion to the Pugh clause, convinced that all she wanted to do was sabotage our efforts. I told her so as I stormed up the hill that afternoon, angrier than I really had any right or reason to be. My mother had summoned us to the farm that day for the sole purpose of deciding once and for all whether, and if so with whom, she would ultimately sign a gas lease.

Janet and I had done the legwork, separately, of course. We had presented our findings to my mother, separately, of course, and that day we were expecting my mother to make the final call. But she had no intention of doing that. My mother, in keeping with the lace-curtain-Irish sensibility she has always aspired to, planned to do her own version of the Queen’s Address to Parliament. She was going to give a flowery speech and then hand the decision off to us. She was going to punt, but with style.

My sister and I realized that we were going to have to come to a decision, and we were going to have to do it together. And soon. But at that moment, it didn’t seem likely. We hadn’t gone five minutes before
we both exploded, arguing about minutiae, about the proper dimensions of drilling units and our ability to control land pooling. We both started wagging our fingers, and by the time the subject of the Pugh clauses came up, it was a full-blown donnybrook. And so just a few days before our scheduled meeting with Casale, my sister and I had our showdown on the front porch of the farm, and in childish rage, I had stalked off. I walked through the hayfields I had cut as a boy. They hadn’t been properly tended since I left for college, and now, after thirty years of benign neglect, they were a tangle of briars and wild blackberries and staghorn sumac. Another thirty and they’d be gone altogether, lost in a forest.

By the time I made it to the top of the hill, I had started to calm down. For both my sister and me, the farm had always been our refuge, and we both secretly wished to keep it the way it was forever. We also both realized that change was coming and that there was nothing we could do to stop it. And for all the good the gas might bring, my sister and I both feared those changes. I feared that the gas drillers, who would soon be demanding hundreds of millions of gallons of water to frack their wells, would overtax the water supply. I feared that the chemicals and compounds used to make the slick water slick could, as a result of a spill aboveground or a mechanical failure below, seep into the water supply or be released into the air. I feared that radiation—so prominent in deep shales that one of the ways prospectors identify potential gas sources is to look for a spike in underground gamma ray emissions—could be carried to the surface with the rock shards churned up by the drilling, by the frack water flowing back up the well bore, or with the gas itself.

And then there were the fears that accompany drilling of any sort, fears of diesel spills from the massive pieces of equipment and fears of air and noise pollution from those same pieces of equipment, the sorts of things that Ken and Victoria and their neighbors were already coping with.

Those risks, I assured myself, were manageable, at least as long as there was someone there to watch over the process. I also knew that that someone would most likely have to be me.

As much as I hated to admit it, our land and the land around it had been changing for years, and this, the gas, would only accelerate the
changes. Even if we did nothing, the place was going to change around us. We both knew that. And each of us had appealed in our own way to an aspect of our old man to deal with that fact. My sister—who had always been much more like my father than I had ever been—tried to cope with that fact by adopting his natural skepticism. Her fixation on the arcane language of the Pugh clause was her way of channeling the old man’s lifelong suspicion that anyone who glad-handed him was probably “a goddamned phony.” I, on the other hand, was channeling his fatalism, that dry acceptance of facts that in its own way may have encouraged him to hasten his own death so that he could meet the three-month deadline the doctor had given him when he diagnosed his cancer.

In my mind, the deal was already done. One of the other landmen I had spoken to had told me that if we went up into those high hay fields at the top of the hill on a summer night, closed our eyes, and listened real close, we’d be able to hear the trucks rumbling north, hundreds of them, with maybe thousands more behind them, coming up from Texas and Oklahoma. They were already rumbling past the ever dwindling herds of bemused dairy cattle on the back roads of Dimock, they were already drilling, from Rosemarie Greenwood’s place to Cleo Teel’s farm to Ken Ely’s hill and beyond. It was only a matter of time before they’d be rolling up the road that runs to my mother’s farm. It was inevitable. We could spare the hundred acres that we controlled, but we couldn’t stop what was coming. The best we could do was to learn from the people in Dimock, erect whatever contractual safeguards we could, and hunker down and wait until the industrial onslaught was over, until the drill rigs were gone, until the land reclaimed the ground around the wellhead. “The land always comes back,” Ken Ely had said. I prayed that he was right.

M
Y SISTER WAS STILL SITTING
on the porch swing smoking a cigarette and flipping her ashes into the upturned lid of an old milk can when I made it back to the house. My mother was in her favorite rocker. “Sit down, now, and shut up,” my mother said. “Both of you!”

I hadn’t heard that tone from her since, as a six-year-old, I had shattered her favorite blown glass lamp. Even though I was almost fifty now, I obeyed.

“This isn’t about you two,” she began, drawing on that high oratorical style she had learned from the good sisters back in Scranton. “And it certainly isn’t about me.” With eloquence that I hadn’t expected from her, my mother convinced my sister and me that regardless of what we wanted, regardless of what we feared, change was coming, and that it was up to us—the three of us, but mostly my sister and me—to decide what shape that change would take. But she didn’t want us giving the farm away, either. She would stand by whatever decision we made. She’d ink her name at the bottom of whatever contract we came up with. And if we chose to pass, to do nothing at all, that would be our decision, she said. But whatever we decided, that decision had to be made not for her benefit, or even for ours, but for the benefit of her four grandchildren. I’ve never asked my sister about it, but I suspect that she had come to the same stunning realization that I did that afternoon. All our lives, we had both assumed that our father, a mercurial man to be sure, was the dominant force in our family. It never dawned on either of us to wonder how it was that he had been able to balance himself between the two poles of his personality, his skepticism and his willingness to accept what he couldn’t change. That afternoon we learned his secret. My mother made him do it.

As inspired as we both were, neither one of us had yet been willing to admit that we had been petty, and so, here we were, sitting in an uncomfortable silence a few days later with more than just a landman and his bulging briefcase separating us.

“Remember, I said two thousand dollars an acre?” Casale finally broke in. “That’s changed. It’s twenty-five hundred an acre.”