The End of Country

by Seamus McGraw

  Cleo Teel had been one of the first farmers up there to see the futility of farming. His epiphany occurred not long after the first energy crisis in 1973, and within a few years, he had liquidated his herd. He followed a few other paths that earned him a reasonably comfortable living. He would carefully harvest his timber, making sure to take only what he needed. And he still kept one hand in farming. Every summer found him behind the wheel of his tractor, cutting, conditioning, and baling hay that he then sold, usually for less than $2 a bale, to other farmers who hadn’t had as much foresight, or perhaps as many options, as he had.

  Teel had already accepted the Cabot man’s offer. To him, it was a solid business decision. Period.

  But of all the neighbors, no one more clearly embodied the pressures that the local farmers were under to sign than Rosemarie Greenwood. A warm and friendly woman, she had immediately invited me into her house when I showed up unannounced and made me a cup of coffee—she would have offered me something more substantial, like a homemade muffin, but, she told me, her oven had broken months before and she couldn’t afford to replace it. There was no secret why she had signed on. Everybody knew it had been a rough couple of years for her.

  She had been widowed two years earlier. Even though her husband had smoked three packs of Pall Malls every day of his adult life as he struggled from before dawn to after dark to keep the farm his family had tended for three generations from going under, it was ultimately colon cancer that killed him.

  Looking at Rosemarie, it would have been hard to imagine that she could be from anywhere else. Though well into her sixties, and though the years of struggle had lined her face, she was still lithe in an almost girlish way, and in her barn boots and loose-fitting bargain store sweats, she seemed perfectly at home scampering up the slippery ladder of a silo or tossing hay from a mow. But the truth was that to Rosemarie Greenwood, farming was a kind of indentured servitude. As one of her neighbors once put it, “Dairy farming is a lot like being in prison except that in prison you don’t have to get up twice a day and milk the guards.”

  Farming wasn’t really in her blood. Rosemarie had been born and bred in the valley, down in the coal mining town of Taylor south of Scranton, and probably never would have set foot on a farm if she hadn’t been swept off her feet four decades earlier by a good-looking farm boy who had come down to a local dance in the valley. The next thing she knew, she was a bride and the next thing she knew after that she was cutting hay and milking cows and pitching ensilage—chopped corncobs and stalks—from the top of a fifty-foot silo.

  And then, in the fall of 2002, her husband started to weaken.

  Rosemarie had promised him on his deathbed that she would try to keep the farm going. That’s what he had wanted. That’s what her eldest son, Todd, wanted, too. And for a while, they were able to make a go of it.

  But within three years of her husband’s death, things were starting to become desperate. That, too, was linked in no small part to the price of oil.

  In the spring of 2005, as a result of a complex federal pricing structure that had been in place since the Great Depression, Rosemarie was getting about $11.40 for every hundred pounds of milk, regardless of what it cost a consumer on the shelf. That worked out to about one dollar per gallon of milk produced, at a time when the national average cost of a gallon of milk was about $2.32. Back then, it cost her about 26 cents to produce that gallon of milk.

  But energy prices were spiking, and so were Rosemarie’s costs.

  The cost of diesel for the Ford tractor was going up. They were now spending a few hundred dollars a week just to keep it running. Nobody could afford to run a tractor for long at those prices, she said. The cost of feed for their seventy-two head of Holsteins was going up, too, and that was also linked to the cost of fuel, more than 60 percent of which was now imported into the United States. The federal government estimates that fuel accounts for about 40 percent of the cost of growing corn, and that does not take into account the hidden energy cost as more and more corn is diverted from the great national food machine to be used as the feedstock for the energy-intensive alchemy required to create ethanol and other biofuels.

  It had gotten to the point that grain alone cost Rosemarie and her son $3,500 every twelve days, and the price of seed corn was already starting its climb from $3 to $8 a bushel. It was only a matter of time, she knew, until for the first time in her life she would be in debt to the feed store. But what choice did she have?

  Energy costs were taking a 30 percent bite out of the farm’s gross revenues, and that was just in terms of operating expenses. Like everybody else in America, she had to live, and living in a rural community like Dimock meant that she had to drive long distances, sometimes forty miles or more, to get to a shopping center or make a doctor’s appointment, and that meant buying ever costlier gasoline to fill the tank of the gas-chugging SUV she needed just to navigate these back roads during the snowy northeastern Pennsylvania winters or to slog through the axle-deep Pennsylvania mud in spring. The narrow profit margins that the farm had relied on had never been enough to put aside enough cash to adequately insulate the 150-year-old farmhouse she lived in, and it was now costing her $100 a month to buy the oil to heat the place. That, too, was going up.

  Everybody else on the dairy farm food chain could factor all those costs into their price. And they did. While the price of a gallon of milk on American store shelves was fast approaching $4, farmers were still getting a buck, and unlike the big corporate farmers, who could use economies of scale to guarantee their profits, many, like Rosemarie, were falling behind.

  Most of the other farmers on the road from Dimock had seen the writing on the wall after the first fuel crisis (the Arab oil embargo of 1973), or after the second one (the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979), or the third one (the run-up to the first Gulf War in 1991). Just like Cleo Teel, they had thrown in the towel.

  Some had retired. Some had found other jobs, though those were getting harder to come by. As the farmers went under, at least in part because of the cost of fuel, so did the companies that relied on them. Local mills that for a hundred years had ground the corn that the farmers grew into grain had gone belly-up. Local dairies that processed the milk had gone out of business, too.

  There were other costs as well, costs that are harder to factor into ledger books. These were the hidden price we pay to try to keep those foreign energy sources flowing, those intangible costs we don’t speak of generally when we draw a line between the price of a gallon of gas and the price of a gallon of milk, costs that are calculated not in dollars but in lives.

  In places like Susquehanna County, when jobs get scarce, so do the young people who used to live there. Those who can leave do, and those young men and women who don’t have the resources to move away have to find some way of getting by.

  In the spring of 2005, the local paper had run a story about how fifty-nine young men and women from Susquehanna and two adjacent counties, all attached to the National Guard unit in nearby New Milford, had just shipped out to Iraq. A lot of people in Susquehanna County lingered a little longer over the news pages that day before turning to the coupons.

  So it was no surprise that when the West Virginian in the white pickup truck showed up at her place at the end of 2005, Rosemarie was only too happy to invite him inside. To her, the $6,400 he was offering for a five-year lease on her 256 acres of land was a godsend. It wasn’t a fortune; there probably wouldn’t even be enough left over after she paid her property tax to settle the bill at the feed store, let alone replace the old electric stove in her kitchen. The oven had given up the ghost not long after her husband had, and ever since, Rosemarie had been living on canned soup, hot dogs, and anything else she could heat up on the top burners. But it was enough money to keep them going for maybe another year. And if it turned out that there really was gas down there, there could be a lot more money. “You wouldn’t even have to milk your cows anymore,” the West Virginian had told her. “
You could just turn ’em out and let ’em go.”

  She liked the sound of that. Rosemarie inked her name at the bottom of the contract.

  IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE now why a passionate, some might even say militant, environmentalist with an individual-versus-the-corporate-complex attitude would agree to lease her precious 7.2 acres of paradise to a big out-of-state gas and oil company. As with almost everything about Victoria, the reasons were complicated.

  Jim and Victoria certainly didn’t do it for the money—the bonus payment, the up-front payment to a leaseholder, for their small patch of land was, after all, only going to net them a couple hundred bucks at most. Instead, they seemed to have been seduced by a larger promise, the promise of the big picture. Back then, the big picture included a lot of talk about the comparative advantages of natural gas over ozone-munching coal and dirty and dangerous foreign oil. You couldn’t turn on the television in those days without seeing a picture, usually of happy-go-lucky children frolicking on a swing set, with an inconspicuous wellhead squatting benignly in the background, reassuring Americans that natural gas was not only cheaper, cleaner, and domestically produced but somehow friendly. The promise then was all about how we could someday power our cars with compressed natural gas or liquefied natural gas, which would produce less pollution at the tailpipe, or could use the gas to generate electricity to run plug-in hybrids as well as everything else we plug in. Mass transit could be fueled directly or indirectly by natural gas, and the byproducts of the gas, such as nitrogen, could be used to make fertilizer to grow vast harvests of corn or saw grass that could be turned into biofuels. No one talked much in those days about the downside, about the greenhouse gases that were generated aplenty by the act of drilling itself. Nor was much said about the fact that there was no infrastructure to speak of in the country to accomplish any of those lofty goals of changing the way America uses gas. It was just taken as an article of unspoken faith that once the gas started flowing, entrepreneurs and engineers would find ways to use it, just as J. Paul Getty and John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford had done in the early days of oil. It was that bedrock American belief in the limitlessness of our own imagination, a petroleum version of “If you build it, they will come.”

  It’s not that Victoria and Jim were naïve. They were just products of the time, and even then, they were not especially keen on the whole idea of drilling anywhere or for anything. Victoria had often imagined herself as one of the vanguard of the new settlers in these hills, the artists and intellectuals who she believed would soon be lured here, just as she had been, by what she perceived as the pristine beauty of the place, not to mention its reasonable proximity to the “real” seat of culture 120 miles away in New York. The way Victoria saw it, she was among those, a handful of them already here but more still destined to come, who had the learning, the character, and the commitment to usher in a post-carbon-fueled world. She was, of course, also enough of a realist to understand that such massive changes to the culture, to the economic structure and the gas-guzzling souls of the great American middle, would not come overnight. But in the meantime, as the laconic landman from Cabot had explained it, the drilling in Susquehanna County and elsewhere in the Marcellus could be a hell of a good start. That idea—that she and Jim could “be there at the cusp of a new era instead of at the end of one”—appealed to Victoria. But it wasn’t the only factor.

  In her quieter moments, Victoria privately suspected that it was all a pipe dream anyway, that whatever gas was lying beneath the surface of this hollow that she and Jim were already thinking of as home was probably not enough to keep the interest of a big and important company like Cabot for very long. In all likelihood, they’d bring up their geologists, poke a few holes in the ground, and then give up and go away, and everyone could pocket their small rolls of cash, smile wistfully at each other, and say, “Oh well, we gave it a shot,” and that would be the end of it.

  And in the unlikely event that Cabot actually discovered gas, Victoria assumed the drilling would be as it had been described to her, a relatively painless extraction that would cause only a comparatively minor disruption to the local environment. Certainly, it wouldn’t impinge too much, or for too long, on their lifestyle, she figured. What’s more, if Cabot’s prospecting was successful, the company would almost certainly come back to them so they could all sit down in good faith and negotiate more specific terms for the lease. They could even do it over coffee, with the gentle babbling of the brook alongside the property playing background music.

  There was even something exciting about it all. Although they had never seen a gas rig in action, never set their brand-name hiking boots in the shin-deep mud of a drill site, although they didn’t know how the whole mysterious process worked back then, they were still convinced that they had a chance to be among the first of many who would be taking those first tentative steps toward throwing off the shackles of foreign energy, toward greener fuels, and ultimately toward sustainable ones. Cleaner-burning natural gas was not the whole answer, of course. It was just a start—a fuel they could use to stoke their boilers and heat their radiant floors until wind or solar or something even better came along. But for right now, they were doing something.

  Ken also had his own reasons for making the decision. Though he would later claim that the landman simply wore him down, the truth was far more complicated. In a way, Ken may have had fewer illusions than Victoria about the company’s good intentions, at least as far as creating a greener world was concerned. He certainly was more realistic about how the company would view the contract it was offering. He understood that to most of the locals, a contract was like the received word of God, an immutable set of commandments set in stone. Big companies, Ken knew, saw them a little differently. To them, they were like the line of scrimmage in a high school football game, nothing more than a good place to start pushing toward the end zone. Ken had seen that principle in action a few years earlier when an out-of-town company had tried to site a landfill not far from his old gas station. The company had tried to exploit every legal ambiguity, and only a spate of bad publicity kept them from moving forward. But the experience had taught Ken valuable lessons about the power of a few disgruntled locals to bring a big company to its knees. It had also taught him that out-of-town companies have deep pockets. This time, he figured, he might be able to turn that to his advantage.

  Ken knew there was gas in the hills. He also knew it was not enough to make him rich. Sure, $25 an acre or thereabouts was a lot more than the $5 or so the people around there had been offered in the past, and Ken had to admit that with his youngest son now in college, he could use the cash.

  But the real money was going to come from the miscellaneous expenses that Ken figured he could extract from them as long as they were there. If they needed to expand the road that led up from the creek so they could get their seismic trucks in, Ken would let them do it, and he’d be very reasonable when tallying up the charge for it. He might even throw in some of his stones if they needed them, as long as they only took the ones Ken was willing to part with, and as long as they paid him the market rate for them. If they needed to cut down a few of his trees, they could do that, too, as long as they paid the going rate for them. They could even have some of his water if they needed it. They could take it from the pond outside his cabin or from the creek at the bottom of the hill, as long as they didn’t bother the fish too much—Ken knew that the fish didn’t like to be disturbed. Of course, there’d be a price for that, too.

  The landman thought he was getting a bargain, Ken knew. He could go back to his bosses with another couple hundred acres of potential gas land all sewed up for only a few thousand bucks. Another local rube won over.

  Ken was perfectly content to let him think that. By Ken’s own calculations, if he played this just right in the days to come, he could gouge the company for up to $100,000 for rock and road work and maybe even squeeze out a few more dollars as compensation for disturbing Crybaby and him a
nd the precious seclusion of his hill.

  He scrawled his name across the last page of the contract, initialed all the spots where the landman indicated he should, and then slid the contract across the table. “I’ll take the money,” he said.

  At that moment, Ken was feeling pretty proud of himself. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad businessman after all, he thought. He had made a pretty good deal for himself. Soon enough, though, Ken, and Victoria and Jim and their neighbors, would discover that they were about to get far more than they bargained for.

  FOUR

  Huffing Gas

  It had all seemed so benign when the landmen first described it to Ken and Victoria and their neighbors. After all, the landmen told them, it wasn’t 1907 anymore, and Dimock wasn’t some godforsaken wind-burned corner of West Texas; this was the lush green mountains of Pennsylvania, and it wasn’t oil they were looking for, it was good, clean natural gas. There wouldn’t be any of the ground-shaking tremors at the foot of some gigantic wooden derrick like you might see in the old movies, they told them. There wouldn’t be any gushers. Sure, there’d be some disturbance at first, some traffic, some trucks, some noise from the drilling. And of course they’d have to cut down a few trees, but most of them were scrub trees that had taken root in old abandoned pastures and hayfields anyway. But soon enough all that would be over and the only thing left behind would be a “Christmas tree,” an iron hydrant not much bigger than the mailboxes where their neighbors would collect their royalty checks. The grass would return, so would the trees, and except for the occasional visit from a well man to look in on how everything was doing, and the rarely used gravel access roads they’d use to get to the wellheads, it would be as if the gas company had never even been there.