The End of Country

by Seamus McGraw

  With all of that to think about, it was easy for Ralph and me to ignore the fact that the two things absolutely essential to drive a ’71 Mustang or a ’69 Torino way too fast on treacherous two-lanes—fossil fuels and youth—are both finite resources.

  Of course, even then, there were people who understood such things far better than we did. In fact, by the time Ralph and I got our licenses, both the government and private industry were scouring every remote corner of the country where gas or oil might be lurking, looking for some hidden cache that might stretch America’s dwindling supply of domestic fuel. In the fall of 1974, they had made their way up to Ellsworth Hill. That was when a team of geologists from the United States Geological Survey turned up, pulling into the neighbors’ driveways unannounced, knocking on doors, asking if they could poke around. I wasn’t there when they showed up, but as my mother explained it to me, they told the locals that researchers had located an underground formation—the remains of a coral reef, they said, left over from some long-buried sea—north of these hills in New York state and to the west, and they wanted to take a quick look at the lay of the land around here to see if maybe that formation stretched this far to the east.

  They were primarily looking for oil. But it was clear to the locals that these clean-cut and officious-looking men with their clipboards and their monitors and their furrowed brows didn’t hold out much hope that they would find anything of value. Still, there was something about their manner that made the locals nervous. There has always been a deep mistrust of government in these hills, and every bit as much mistrust of big business. So, for a few tense weeks, the party lines on Ellsworth Hill and beyond were humming as one neighbor alerted the next that the government geologists had come by and were heading toward the next farm. “Let ’em look around, but whatever you do, don’t sign anything,” one neighbor warned my mother.

  As it turned out, there was nothing to sign. The geologists took a few samples of earth; they cored out a few rocks and did a few calculations as wary farmers looked over their shoulders; they squinted at tables of figures; and finally they came up with their conclusion: that elusive cache of oil they were hoping for was not here. As for the gas, they told folks that the wisps that they had encountered over the years were, just as they suspected, nothing more than nuisance gas, small upper-level deposits of methane that would come and go, never amounting to much. However, deep down, thousands of feet below that gas, the geologists said, they believed there was an ossified sea of the stuff, as volatile and rich as anything this part of the country, maybe even the world, had ever seen. It was locked in a stratum of shale called the Marcellus, which had been discovered a century and a half ago and named for a small town in New York where that layer of shale had, through a series of geological upheavals, been wrenched to the surface. Up in Marcellus, where the rock was exposed to the air, the gas had long since drifted away. But everywhere else it remained deeply buried in a subterranean incubator. That was all academic, though, the geologists told them. There was no way that the full power of this deeply buried and tightly compacted sea of gas could ever be unleashed.

  TWO

  Burn the Creek

  When my mother first called to tell me about her visit from the young woman with the nose ring, I knew virtually nothing about natural gas or the techniques used to capture it. I wouldn’t have known the difference between Marcellus Shale and Cassius Clay.

  I knew even less about the men who spent their lives in pursuit of the stuff. If I imagined them at all, I pictured them as they appeared in movies, as arrogant and insidious oligarchs, the shadowy vanguard of rapacious corporatism bent on stripping away any public constraints, befouling the land and raking in enormous profits, venal crooks who cloaked their infamy with cowboy kitsch. Part of that was my own prejudice. I had spent most of my career as a crime writer, rubbing shoulders with all manner of con men and criminals, and so I’d conditioned myself to start from the premise that anything presented as “the next big thing” is likely to be just another fetid swamp of corruption.

  It wasn’t just that I had given my mother my word that I would research the Marcellus. I’ve promised my mother I’d do lots of things over the years that never got done, from painting the old hay rake rusting away in the front-yard barn red to locating her great-grandfather’s discharge papers from the Army of the Potomac. But this time there was something critical riding on my promise. We might have known next to nothing about the Marcellus or the gas companies that were courting us, but we knew enough to realize that we couldn’t take anything anybody told us at face value. The gas companies had an agenda, so did everyone else involved in this, and my family needed one, too. It wasn’t enough that we might get some money, maybe a lot of it. And it wasn’t enough that we wanted to protect the farm. We needed to learn everything we could to figure out how, and even whether, we could do both. And because I had spent the last three decades as a journalist looking for the flaws in every great promise, pulling together the disparate data from a thousand sources so we could develop that agenda became my job.

  IN NO TIME, THE CRAMPED corner of my basement that serves as both my children’s playroom and my office was crammed with all manner of maddeningly inscrutable documents—scholarly treatises on arcane geological principles, impenetrable papers on the mechanics of drilling, and histories of the frantic, never-ending hunt for energy that had played such a critical role in the development of this part of the country. It was the history of it all that first captured my attention. That’s only natural, of course. I’m not a scientist, or an engineer, I’m a storyteller, and I didn’t even set out to do that; it had just happened, through a long series of accidents in my own life, and the more I looked at what was written between the lines of all those inscrutable reports, the more I came to realize that the whole history of the Marcellus Shale, from its genesis at the dawn of time to the present, was itself a history of random accidents and improbable coincidences that stretched across a hundred thousand millennia to create this vast sea of buried energy. I might not have been able to pierce the veil of numbers and formulas and theories that made it all possible, at least not at first, but I had it in me to understand on a gut level how, over hundreds of years, hundreds, thousands of men—losers, many of them—guys just like me—had spent their lives struggling to master it, to subdue it. I could understand how, in the end, it took an almost desperate stab by a geologist—a Pennsylvania boy named Bill Zagorski who, much like me, was staring at the business end of middle age without a lot to show for it, a guy who, also a lot like me, was at the end of his rope, but who was above all a guy with the grit and savvy to turn that frayed rope shank into a lifeline.

  The deeper I dug, the more I came to see that at its heart, this was a story I recognized, a story about characters and character, that it was all about a peculiar breed of men and their obsession, an obsession that pulsed through the deepest layers of American history, shattering the bedrock before it until finally it would emerge through the fractures and fissures it had created on my mother’s rocky driveway and innumerable places just like it, in the form of a young woman with a jacket that was too tight, a nose ring, and sheaf of legal papers.

  I soon came to understand that while there were plenty of examples of ravenous greed and wanton destruction writ large in America’s energy history, there was something else concealed beneath the text of all those dry tomes as well. It was the story of an endangered species, a kind of American that was fast disappearing, guys who had the hard-earned skills and rough wisdom to make something out of nothing.

  In short, what I found buried under all those dry calculations was an epic story about men who in many respects were just like the guys I grew up with at the farm.

  EVERY GOOD STORY BEGINS WITH “Once upon a time,” and in this one, it is the early 1820s in the rustic little village of Fredonia, New York. If you had seen Fredonia back then, it wouldn’t have seemed like much more than a wide spot in the road between the great e
astern forest and Lake Erie, a tiny village of modest but sturdy houses built out of the same trees that had been cleared to make way for them. But from the beginning, it was a place that reflected a kind of restless and purely American energy.

  The village itself had been founded by a handful of settlers who had streamed into the region following the Holland Land Purchase in 1792, when a group of investors from the Netherlands, barred by law from buying land in America and so using Americans as front men, bought a vast swath of virgin land, nearly two-thirds of all the land in western New York, cut a deal with those Native Americans who remained, and began selling pieces of it. But if the men who sold the land were classic European oligarchs, those who bought it were anything but. Those early settlers, fueled no doubt by the kind of revolutionary spirit that motivated so much of the fledgling republic in those days, had apparently dreamed of building a village that they believed would reflect the ethos of democracy and free enterprise, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century they had re-created a rustic version of a stout, no-nonsense New England town in the hemlocks along Canadaway Creek, right down to the village green complete with a wooden platform in the center reserved for civic functions. In a zealous attempt to claim this outpost for the republican principles they espoused, they jettisoned the original name of the place—the earliest pioneers had called the place Canadaway, after the creek, a bastardization of an Algonquin word meaning “nestled in the hemlock.” They redubbed it Fredonia, a pompous and synthetic name that took the word “freedom” and added a high-toned Latin suffix to it to make it seem more awe-inspiring and pseudoclassical. The name was once considered (and quickly rejected) as a possible name for the new United States.

  The casual visitor to Fredonia in the early days of the nineteenth century could be forgiven for thinking that the name was the most impressive thing about the town. There wasn’t much in the way of commerce—a general store, a mill, a gunsmith’s shop that by the standards of the time was fairly prosperous—and every chore was an ordeal, from hacking down enough firewood to cook to making sure the flinty land yielded enough to make a meal worth cooking at all. Like most of America back then, Fredonia was a place that ran largely on sweat and sinew, the kind of place where a man was measured by the amount of work he could get done in a day and where the day was measured by the progress of the sun, because when it set, the whole community was plunged into darkness. Life was a constant race with the sun, and when winter approached and the days grew short, that race would always become more desperate as the Fredonians scrambled to lay in enough fuel to warm themselves against the frigid winds and blinding snows that blew in off the lake.

  Fredonia did have one characteristic that set it apart, though. Here and there, in the woods or along the creeks around town, there were small fissures in the ground where strange flammable vapors escaped from the earth.

  The people around Fredonia had long known of the existence of the mysterious vapors. As far back as the early seventeenth century, French trappers, busily working to extirpate the beavers and the pine martens and the other fur-bearing creatures in those forested hills and valleys, had stumbled across a number of places where gas spewed from the rocks or from the creek beds. But neither the trappers nor the nineteenth-century English-speaking settlers who followed them had any idea that the stuff might turn out to be of practical value. To them, it was a source of amusement, a natural magic trick, but not much else.

  In the early 1820s, for instance, according to one local story, a little girl out gathering chestnuts along Canadaway Creek with her father was frightened to tears by a bear; her father, unable to comfort her any other way, waded out into a familiar spot in the creek, built a chimney out of stones, and set fire to it.

  To a great degree, the little girl’s experience was typical of the way humans had always dealt with gas. As far back as recorded history can peer, and all over the world, there are tales of people encountering strange wisps rising up from the ground, sometimes burning for no reason at all. In fact, three thousand years before this pioneer father set fire to Canadaway Creek to soothe his child, ancient Greeks had been trekking toward what is now believed to have been a fissure exuding natural gas on Mount Parnassus around which they had constructed a temple for the Oracle of Delphi. In fact, the Greek word psyche, signifying the animating essence of the human soul, and their word for gas share a common root. Some scholars now believe it’s possible that the burning bush of the Book of Exodus was in fact an ignited natural gas deposit.

  Not everyone was dazzled by the stuff, however. Some saw a more practical use for it. By 500 B.C.E., the Chinese had found a way to harvest and harness small amounts of natural gas. To get to it, the ancient Chinese developed what has come to be known as cable tool drilling, a crude but effective technique that has remained fundamentally unchanged for millennia. Most of us, if we think of drills at all, equate them with the household power tools we use or the high-speed dentist drills we dread, precise and civilized devices of finely forged steel spinning at high enough speed to focus all that energy into a minuscule point to create a discrete puncture. The cable tool drill was nothing at all like that. It is to that refined and cultivated modern drill what a cannonball is to laser beam. It was in effect a kind of brutal, giant, whirling pig-iron battle-ax. It was hoisted to the top of a large scaffold by a battery of gears and cams—in those early days, the gears were turned by hand, and later by engines of various sorts—and when it reached the top it would plummet, spinning furiously as it fell, gaining enough force to shatter the rocks and dirt beneath it, with enough energy left over to churn through the earth a few more feet before starting the whole process again. In other words, it wasn’t designed to gently urge the earth to part with its riches. It was designed to punish her for having the audacity to think she could resist. It was far better than digging by hand, but it was still a time-consuming process. Some wells, reported to have reached a depth of three thousand feet, took generations to complete.

  It’s staggering to think that for all the time and work it took to get to the gas, the gas wasn’t really what the Chinese were after. To them, gas was simply a means to an end, a way of getting what they really wanted: salt. Once the gas was freed, these early drillers collected it and moved it through rudimentary pipelines made out of bamboo to nearby saltwater deposits where the gas would fuel fires beneath huge cauldrons to boil away the water and leave the salt behind.

  Given all that effort for such a small return, it’s easy to see why it took a while, a few thousand years in fact, before the idea of using natural gas for anything other than the amusement of children or the foundation of a religion really caught on.

  That’s not to say that there wasn’t the occasional visionary who saw the commercial potential of gas as a fuel. As far back as the late eighteenth century in Britain, a dirty-burning and inefficient gas manufactured from coal was in limited use, and by 1816, that same manufactured gas was being used to fuel lamps in Baltimore.

  But it wasn’t until about 1825 in Fredonia that the local gunsmith, William Hart, struck on the idea of tapping into the deposits of cleaner-burning natural gas around Fredonia. He wasn’t trying to get rich. Compared to his neighbors, he was already pretty prosperous, having made quite a reputation for himself as a skilled gunsmith and a bit of an innovator. He was one of the pioneers of a new technology that was revolutionizing the art of arms making at the time: the use of percussion caps, small, reliable charges that would make old flintlock rifles obsolete and lead in time to the development of modern bullets and even more deadly modern firearms.

  Hart’s life was hard, but not overly so. His house and workshop were, like the man himself, solid and well built, strong enough to withstand whatever the harsh local environment could churn up. That might have been enough for a lot of people back then. But not for Hart.

  Hart was by all accounts a man of restless curiosity, and while few historians would suggest that he was immune to an interest in making money,
it seems clear that he was the type who was always looking to test his wits against a new challenge.

  The story goes that Hart stumbled across his greatest challenge one day while walking along Canadaway Creek. Like everybody else around there, the enterprising Hart was weary of the tedious work of collecting firewood. One day, he stopped and watched as a neighbor of his did the same thing the pioneer father had done: the man built a cairn out of creek stones, struck flint to steel, and set off a dancing column of flame. Hart had an epiphany. He figured that if the mysterious gas that so delighted the children could be harnessed and channeled, it could provide a steady, clean, reliable, and, above all, easy source of fuel for the villagers.

  Before long, the pursuit of vapors became an obsession for him. Hart had observed the behavior of the gas, the way it sometimes collected in pools and pockets, and calculated that if he dug a few feet down into the earth near the creek, he might find a big enough pocket of gas to meet the town’s needs. It seemed to him that a cistern, a deep pit similar to the ones long used for collecting water, might work, and so he pressed a couple of other local men into joining him in digging a hole, using nothing more than picks and shovels, twenty-seven feet into the rocky ground. There is no official record of the project—back in those days, one didn’t need to secure a permit or file logbooks with the state—but it’s clear that Hart had undertaken a gargantuan task. The work was backbreaking—even today, with modern earth-moving equipment, it is no easy matter to dig through dozens of feet of unforgiving Appalachian rock—and Hart and his men were doing it with hand tools. It’s easy to imagine them down in that pit, grunting and panting, their eyes burning from the dirt and the dust and the gathering gas, their linen shirts soaked with sweat and maybe the occasional droplet of blood from tiny wounds inflicted by flying flecks of stone, their arm and shoulder muscles twitching every time they lifted the awkward weight of their picks above their heads. That would be followed by an instant of relief, fleeting and taunting, as their picks fell, a relief erased the next instant by the sharp pain pulsing through the steel when the picks hit stone, a pain they could almost see coming as it coursed down the wooden handles of their tools and into every joint of their bodies from their necks to their knees. Even the sound would have been torture, the threatening hiss of the pick slashing through the air, giving them just enough warning to tighten all their muscles, and then the harsh shriek of metal on stone that would signal their immediate punishment for tensing and flinching. And underneath it all was the sense of danger. The deeper they dug, the more difficult it would become to catch a breath as the cistern slowly filled with gas. They would almost certainly have become light-headed and woozy, and that at the very moment when they most needed to keep their wits about them, because almost every swing of their picks would send up a spark, and if they miscalculated, if they dug too deep and the gas gathered too thickly before they were done, one of those errant sparks might just ignite an inferno. Woozy as they might have been, they had nothing to judge that by except their instincts.