The End of Country

by Seamus McGraw

  “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?”

  I HAD BEEN WONDERING LATELY what my father would have thought about a lot of things. It had been a tough couple of years for me, too, and though I knew it was only my imagination—and my propensity for looking at things in the worst possible light—I often found myself wondering just how disappointed my father would have been at the way I was turning out. I was nearing fifty, and it was not lost on me that by the time my father was my age, he had owned the farm for a decade, managed to amass a sizable nest egg, and married off his two children, whereas for me every day was a constant struggle.

  My father had always thought that I was both pigheaded and reckless, and to a great extent he had been right. By the time I was twenty-five I was already reaching the end of one failed marriage and had managed to turn myself into a full-blown blackout drunk, a condition that on at least two occasions landed me in jail. The last time was in 1983, when I rammed my 1973 Cadillac Coupe de Ville into the rear end of a rent-a-wreck in Wilkes-Barre and ended up not only in the Luzerne County Prison overnight, but also on the inside pages of the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader. Reluctantly, my old man bailed me out.

  At thirty, I was bankrupt and well on my way toward an equally disastrous second marriage. But by the time I turned forty—the year my father died—I was at last beginning to grow up. I had met and married my third—current and, I swear, last—wife, Karen, a woman who had faced down some of the same demons I had, but who had emerged from the encounters a lot stronger and a lot wiser. My parents loved her. They didn’t even seem to mind that the ceremony was held in the Methodist church in Montrose rather than in a Catholic church. We held our receptio
n at the farm, and the day before the wedding, my father and I sweated together as we hefted about a hundred large flagstones into place, building a path that would run from the caterer’s tent to the canopied tables arrayed in the front yard. I didn’t know it then, and neither did he, but he already had the tumors that would, in six months, kill him.

  For a long time after he died, I had the feeling that I might be doing the kind of things that would have made him proud of me. In fact, for the better part of the next ten years, I had managed to make a decent living writing freelance articles for national magazines and websites. It was hard to imagine my father reading Playboy, but I was pretty sure that if he had been alive, there would have been at least one copy—one with my name in it—stuffed in his underwear and sock drawer.

  But a few months before my mother’s phone call, things had started to fall apart. Those of us in the newspaper and magazine business know that when it comes to the economy, we’re the canaries in the coal mine. When the nation’s businesses start to flag, the first thing businesspeople cut back on is advertising, and it’s the last thing they bring back when the economy recovers. By the spring of 2007, I was already choking on the toxic fumes of the coming recession. The work hadn’t dried up entirely, but the assignments were fewer and farther between and the checks smaller.

  It didn’t help that my wife was a newspaper editor. Not only was she facing the same economic perils that I was, she was doing it at a newspaper office sixty miles from our home at a time when gas prices were spiraling, and in order to keep that job she had to work nights, driving treacherous mountain roads in the dark. I could see that it was taking an awful toll on her. She was tired all the time, and every minute she spent on the road was time she felt she was stealing from our kids. It was taking a toll on them, too. Seneca, who was then six, and Liam, three, were reaching an age when they needed the firm hand of their parents—and Karen has a firmer hand than I—and they also had increasingly expensive needs. I could see the look of pain in Karen’s eyes every time we had to say no to them. And then, just a few weeks before my mother’s call, while I was waiting for an overdue payment to arrive from a troubled and now defunct magazine, Seneca came to me and told me that she needed thirty dollars for a class trip. I didn’t have it. But I couldn’t stand the thought of disappointing her, not on something like that, and I couldn’t imagine the humiliation she would have felt, even at that age, if she had to be excluded from the trip because her father was a failure. I drove into town and hocked one of my few nonessential possessions, a .50 caliber flintlock rifle.

  I was trying not to let any of that influence me as I spoke to my mother that evening. I promised her that I would research the whole matter and get back to her in a few days. But just before she hung up, she made it clear that she wasn’t buying my desperate attempt to act like a cool, detached reporter taking on a new assignment. “I know you have to understand that this affects you, too,” she said. I tried to protest, but she cut me off. “I don’t have that many more years left,” she told me, making sure to squeeze as much good old-fashioned Irish pathos out of the statement as she could. “If anything comes of this, it’s going to be yours and your sister’s, and the kids’—and the two of you, you and your sister, you need to decide what you’re going to do about it, and you’re going to need to decide it together.”

  I hadn’t asked her for a thing. I didn’t have to. For all her flaws, my mother has always been a generous woman, and even then she proved it, offering to give my sister, Janet, and me half of whatever she got. But beneath her offer, I could hear her fear. She was going to relinquish control of her affairs, at least in this matter, to her children, and she would abide by whatever decision we made. But there was, she reminded us both, far more than just money at stake. My father was watching.

  • • •

  IT WAS STRANGE, I THOUGHT as I hung up the phone. In all the years that my family had owned that farm, I had never thought much about it in the future tense. It was always past and present, something that just was.

  I can still remember the moment we first saw the place that would become our home. It was forty years ago. We had traveled up from New Jersey to this spot, about 150 miles west of Manhattan, beyond the Delaware River where the Catskills give way to the Poconos, past the coal-scarred valleys of the Susquehanna and Lackawanna rivers, a worn-down stretch of Appalachian Mountains in northeastern Pennsylvania. Up here, they call that patch of hills “the Endless Mountains.”

  We were sitting in a coffee shop on Route 6, a scenic old highway that stretches across the northern tier of Pennsylvania, waiting to meet with a real estate agent, when my mother caught sight of an ambling road that rose from the highway and disappeared in a series of switchbacks into the hills. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could find a place on a road like that?” my mother had sighed. Sure enough, we did. I spent the best part of my childhood—both in the number of years and in the quality of them—along that stretch of road, on a none-too-productive patch of scrub forest and farmland that rises up from a creek bottom at the eastern edge of Appalachia. And for all these years, this place has remained my family’s home. My sister was married here. So was I—the last time, at least. My father died here. My mother, of course, still lives here.

  I was eleven years old when my family bought these hundred acres a stone’s throw from the little village of Lymanville. They paid $23,500, the rough equivalent of $130,000 today.

  My parents had reached a prosperous middle age, having spent the first twenty years of their working lives in central New Jersey. Like tens of thousands of others, they had escaped a decaying coal-patch town—in their case, Scranton—in the mid-1950s and headed east for a fresh start.

  It had been a good move. But by the end of the 1960s, Mom had had enough of living in the vast postwar Pennsylvania diaspora; she was sick of being one of thousands upon thousands of onetime coal crackers who had left for better opportunities in New Jersey. My parents had earned a pretty good living—she as a public school teacher, he as a systems analyst for a pharmaceutical firm—and once they amassed enough money, my mother decided that she wanted to go home. But not to Scranton. She wanted to move beyond that, another twenty-five miles to the north and west, to a spot the coal industry had never reached, up to the farm country nestled in the Endless Mountains. She had always treasured her memories of the trips to the nearby town of Tunkhannock as a child in the early 1940s to visit her grown-up sister and her brother-in-law, a state trooper who had been assigned to what was then a remote outpost in these hills.

  To a little girl from coal country, the mountains were a romantic place, foreign and in a way forbidden, a region that seemed to be one of the last places in America where you could find the sentiment—if not the actual sign—“No Irish Need Apply.” In her mind, it was a place where rigid, old-fashioned Bible-thumping Protestants gathered every Sunday in their stark white wooden churches, where, my mother had been raised to believe, they talked of nothing but the perfidy of the Irish Catholics from down in the valley. Far from being deterred, my mother had always dreamed that someday she would gather both enough money and the social clout that it brought to stake her claim in these mountains, and when at last she had attained them, she wasn’t about to let anything, or anyone, stand in her way.

  This became a problem when, having found a home that the whole family loved, my father, who always suspected that everyone was trying to cheat him, dug in his heels when the sellers demanded more money for the place. My mother can become ostentatiously Irish Catholic when circumstances require it, and in this case she quite audibly began making daily novenas to Saint Martin de Porres—the child of a slave woman who became the church’s first black saint, in whose rise she saw a parallel to her own ambitions—asking him to intervene with both God and my father. God certainly seemed amenable. My father finally came around.

  He knew she loved the place. It had been built piecemeal beginning in the 1830s and was expanded room by room by a wel
l-to-do farmer, merchant, and timberman named Avery who was spurred on, it’s said, by his love for his younger wife. He built onto it over the next few decades until it reached its rambling twelve-room apex. The house sat back a hundred yards from the road in a ring of seventy-foot hemlocks, a covered porch along one side of the place, three tall gables rising in front and tying together its disparate elements. By the time we arrived in 1970, old man Avery was long dead, his descendants scattered, and a succession of far less inspired owners and tenants had buried his oak and plaster love song for his wife under 110 years of ugly wallpaper and paint. My mother immediately set down her statue of Saint Martin on the ledge of a gabled second-story window overlooking what would become her garden and set about uncovering its past. Literally. For the first few months we owned the place, my father, my mother, my sister, Saint Martin de Porres, and I lived in a constant toxic cloud of cleaning products and wallpaper remover.

  The house and the yard that surrounded it would be my mother’s domain, and she worked like a dervish, believing that she was turning it into a showplace. She spent her days studying swatches of the most garish Victorian wallpaper she could find and perusing catalogues for extravagant glass hanging lamps—a disturbing number of them turned out to be bordello red—and on Sundays she would scour the newspaper for antiques to furnish her dream home. She drew her inspiration, both for her decorating ideas and for her developing farm-woman persona, from the old movies she had seen and from the cheap and lurid novels about frontier women to which she had become addicted.

  Before long the rambling old house was so crammed with all manner of antiques—lamps and spinning wheels, handcrafted solid oak tables, carnival glass candy dishes, not to mention the aforementioned clocks, a ticking, whirring swarm of grandmother clocks and old schoolhouse clocks and all the genera and species of cuckoo clocks—that you couldn’t walk from one side of any room to the other without barking your shins on some cloyingly ornate artifact from somebody else’s past, or tripping over one of my mother’s discarded personalities.