The End of Country

by Seamus McGraw

  The group decided to make everyone aware of the incident and to prod both Cabot and the DEP to do something about it. Over the next several weeks, the group with Ken and Victoria and now Norma Fiorentino as its public face waged a full-scale battle to press Cabot and the DEP into action.

  For the most part, they did it through direct action: telephone calls to the state, pressure on local elected officials, and frequent interviews with local television and newspaper reporters. They even sat down with national reporters. There was a surprising level of sophistication to their operation. It was not lost on them that the vast majority of people outside Dimock tended to view the people who live in places like Dimock in a cartoonish way, either as rustic rubes or as the luckless victims of exploitation by big companies. Such narratives are deeply woven into the fabric of American culture, and Ken and Victoria were smart enough to use that mythology to their advantage. And always, they returned to the theme Ken had set in his first interview months before with the Scranton Times-Tribune, the theme of moderation. “I’m not going to bash Cabot,” Ken would state at the beginning of almost every interview, before launching into a litany of missteps by the big gas company.

  Ken and Victoria also understood that they had an ace in the hole. They were not the only ones who had Cabot and the DEP in their sights. Other groups, most notably Barbara Arrindell’s Damascus Citizens for Sustainability, had seized on the problems in Dimock to bolster their argument that drilling was intrinsically unsafe, that the DEP was irredeemably unreliable, and that the drilling needed to be stopped, completely and immediately.

  Ken and Victoria and their group did not see it that way. Their view was that there certainly were critical risks associated with the process, and they had been forced to make sacrifices they had never bargained for. As Victoria put it, the massive disruption of the land and the constant roar of the rigs had driven away the wildlife, including a great horned owl and a howling coyote that had been among the first friendly voices she had heard when she moved up here, and now it was threatening her water supply and those of her neighbors.

  But the Marcellus also offered promise, though certainly for Victoria that promise no longer seemed terribly bright. Maybe it would take a while, and maybe the ultimate payoff would not be as rich as everyone had hoped, but there was still money to be made, and in a place like Dimock, that could make all the difference in the world.

  If nothing else, the very fact that Barbara Arrindell and her group were attracting so much attention was a good thing for the locals in Dimock, because it made them seem more reasonable and thus a better negotiating partner for the drillers and the DEP, and both Ken and Victoria also recognized that.

  BY THE MIDDLE OF FEBRUARY, the round-the-clock efforts of the Dimock group were taking their toll on the members, especially on Victoria and on Jim. But there was also no doubt that they were having an impact on Cabot, and on Komorowski, the man Cabot had designated to be not only its spokesman but also its envoy to the troubled north. The folks around Dimock who had benefited from the drilling and had not been adversely affected by the migrating gas, people like Cleo Teel and Rosemarie Greenwood, were not rushing to the company’s defense. They had their own lives to live. Rosemarie, for example, had paid little attention to the whole uproar, pre-occupied as she was with finally selling off her herd of dairy cattle and preparing to begin her new life as a gas baroness.

  It didn’t help Cabot’s image, either, that Ken Ely, the guy who had become the beneficiary of the most prodigiously producing well that Cabot had drilled, was one of the leaders of the opposition. It certainly didn’t make the company look good to have what amounted to a full-scale insurrection going on among its landowners, Komorowski realized, and it didn’t bode well that the group’s efforts had also prodded the DEP to take a more aggressive stance. Even other drillers were watching the developments in Dimock with growing concern. As one of them put it to a reporter, the bad taste that the gas was leaving in people’s mouths in Dimock would, if left unchecked, contaminate their operations as well. “Something like that could ruin this for everybody,” the gasman had said.

  It’s not clear what, if any, pressure the other drillers put on Cabot. Drillers tend to be an independent bunch, and even the organizations that purport to represent them as an industry, such as the Marcellus Shale Coalition, which includes representatives from all the big companies in the play, tend to be more a confederacy of convenience, lacking any real power to enforce the will of the majority.

  All the same, Komorowski now had his orders. It was time to travel to Dimock to try to make peace with the natives.

  It’s no doubt true that the DEP would have taken action on the contamination of the water wells in Dimock had Ken and Victoria and their group not been riding them, and it is also probably true, as Cabot’s spokesman insisted, that the company would have taken steps to identify the problem and try to correct it. But it is far from clear that those things would have happened with as much alacrity had the ad hoc committee of the Marcellus in Dimock not been involved.

  Even DEP officials would later admit that pressure from the locals helped spur the agency and the company into action. And they also had to admit that locals like Ken Ely had known a good deal more about the operation and its consequences than they had been given credit for. In fact, at the end of January, less than three weeks after the initial explosion, DEP inspectors and geologists had pieced together an explanation and had zeroed in on a cause for the incident. It was exactly as Ken had predicted. The gas that had migrated into Norma’s well and the others was in fact thermogenic gas, the state concluded. But it had not drifted up thousands of feet through natural fractures in the rock. While that sort of thing had happened elsewhere in other parts of the United States, places in the western states where younger, less sturdy rock layers overlaid gas deposits, such a scenario was unlikely to occur in the hard, deep rock that lay atop the Marcellus. Rather, it was gas that had been trapped for millions of years in a layer of Devonian shale some 1,500 feet below the surface.

  At a hastily arranged meeting with the group a few weeks later, Cabot, in the person of Ken Komorowski, offered an olive branch. The company continued to insist that the DEP’s conclusions had been reached in haste and that, as Komorowski put it, “it was premature” to attach blame for the contamination to the gas drilling operation. All the same, a chastened Cabot agreed to re-cement the faulty well, and also several others in the area. Four of its wells, including two of its newest and best producing units, were temporarily taken offline to do it. This time, however, Cabot would go far beyond the minimal standards set by the state, Komorowski said. The company pledged that it would squeeze cement along the whole length of the wells, a process that adds tens of thousands of dollars to the price of every well drilled. “It’s certainly a cost,” Komorowski told the group, but in a moment of surprising candor he also noted that there was another calculation that had to be made. Yes, Cabot’s shareholders demanded the best possible return on their investment in the company, but there was also a price to be paid for what had, by that point, become a constant stream of news stories about how the poor folks in Dimock were struggling against the might of a major gas company. And that price was getting way too high. “We don’t want to be the centerpiece of public attention any longer than is absolutely necessary,” Komorowski told the group.

  It was not an outright victory for Ken and Victoria and their neighbors. But it wasn’t a win for Cabot, either. The two sides had battled their way to a kind of cold peace. There was, the DEP had told the group, no way of telling just how long Cabot would remain in that unwelcome spotlight. But they weren’t off the hook, either. It could take months, maybe longer, before they would know whether the steps Cabot had promised to take to mitigate the methane intrusion into the aquifer had worked, and to be frank, there was not a lot of trust among the members of the group that the company would be as good as its word. But in the meantime, Cabot would be required to include as
part of its routine tasks in the Marcellus the regular delivery of water, now to about half a dozen homes in Dimock.

  Victoria believed her group had accomplished something else. It had sent a message, not just to Cabot but to all the drillers across the state, that even if the state bureaucracy lacked the resources to oversee them, even if the federal agencies had abdicated their responsibilities, somebody was watching.

  It was, she realized, a small victory, and one that would no doubt have to be won again. But by that point, Victoria was ready to let someone else win it. She was exhausted, and at last she was ready to take her husband’s advice. There were still some loose ends to tie up, some additional research to be done and some follow-up calls to be made. But once those were done, she would be, too. It was a promise she made to herself. “I’ll give it until April,” she told herself one night not long after the battle with Cabot had shuddered to its conclusion.

  ACROSS THE TOP OF THE HILL, sitting in front of the television in his little cottage with his wife, Ken Ely was also contemplating the future. He was also seething over the past. It had been five months since Crybaby had been killed and her remains surreptitiously stashed in the rocks. And though Cabot had now expressed remorse, and had even offered to buy him a new bluetick coonhound, Ken Ely still believed there was a debt to be paid. The way Ken saw it, there were a few basic rules of conduct that governed the behavior of everybody in these hills, locals and strangers alike. No one should ever threaten a man’s home or his family; it would always be a mistake to ask too many questions about a man’s guns; and above all, one should never, ever, do anything to a man’s dog. Cabot had violated that last and most sacred rule, and for that transgression, there would be consequences.

  That night, as he went to bed, Ken went over the checklist of items he’d need and the steps he planned to take the next morning. He had left nothing to chance, and as he drifted off to sleep, he couldn’t help but smile as he thought about the look he’d be greeted with the next morning when Cabot saw what he was up to. It was a shame, he thought, that Crybaby wouldn’t be there to see it.

  Then again, maybe, in a way, she would.

  FIFTEEN

  Crybaby’s Revenge

  Ken Ely’s old backhoe grumbled and cussed and complained as he forced it, throttle wide open and engine wailing, up the last few yards of the mud and gravel access road to the gate at the top of the hill. A pallet of rocks—bluestone he had sweated to pry out of the ground—teetered at the end of the jerry-rigged forks. A lesser man, a man without Ken Ely’s intimate familiarity with the machine and lacking his deft mastery of the delicate art of balancing a half ton of stones at the end of a flexing tuning fork, might have been worried. After all, one false move and the whole load, stones and backhoe and Ken himself, could go tumbling back down the gravel sluice in one great rolling rockslide, hurtling past the cairn that marked the fictitious grave of the imaginary Chief Red Rock and right into the pond in front of Ken’s cottage, further distressing his fish, who still (they had told him) weren’t feeling very well.

  But Ken wasn’t worried. He had faith in his skills at the controls of the backhoe he had basically built himself out of the detritus of farm equipment that had lain rusting for years in these hills before he rescued it. But more important, Ken Ely had supreme faith in the justice of his cause. He was on a mission. Today, March 10, 2009, was the day he was going to do what he had wanted to do for a long time.

  Poor old Charlie Memolo, the lawyer who had narrowly cheated death, would probably have another heart attack when he heard about this, Ken thought. This was exactly what Charlie had been trying to warn him against when he told Ken over the phone “Don’t do anything rash.” Charlie and the other lawyer Ken had retained up in Montrose on Charlie’s recommendation had been urging Ken to be patient, to let the state’s legal system run its course. Of course, neither of them knew Ken very well. If they had, that would have been the last advice they would have given him. The way Ken saw it, that process had gotten hopelessly bogged down in the sucking muck of legal procedure in state court, and Cabot, with its platoon of lawyers already on retainer, had barely felt the sting of it. The company would feel this, though. Of that Ken was certain.

  He had timed it perfectly. Cabot had just finished drilling the new horizontal well that promised to be even bigger than the one that had made Ken a rich man. The company was in a very big hurry to begin fracking it. Crews were already on the clock, at a cost of thousands of dollars an hour, and the longer it took them to get the job done, the smaller Cabot’s profit would be.

  The truth was, Ken really didn’t need the few tons of bluestone that lay underneath that extra two or so acres that the well site, spreading like a muddy cancer, had now effectively commandeered. He certainly had enough rocks. And if it was just about money—well, every stone in that part of the field, if it sold for top dollar, wouldn’t have been worth as much as a couple of hours of uninterrupted flow from the yet to be completed well. But this wasn’t about money. Or stones. Or even gas. This was about principle.

  That’s why Ken had decided that he needed to blast those stones out of the ground, and that he needed to do it right now, right at the moment that Cabot was most desperate to get its frack teams onto the site. He had done his homework and decided that those irritating state regulations, the ones that prevented him from doing his own blasting, the ones that forced him to hire the boys from down in Factoryville to do it for him even though he was perfectly able to do it himself, might have a good use after all. They did include a provision that barred blasting within a hundred yards of an active well. And since, in this temporary lull between drilling and fracking, the well was not technically active, and since the land he was going to blast was not technically included in the acreage that Cabot had claimed it needed, Ken figured he had a legal reed to which he could cling. Even then, he understood that there wasn’t a chance in hell that any court in the country would see it his way. But that was irrelevant. By the time a court got around to deciding the obvious, Ken would have already gotten the blasting done, gotten the rocks out, and more important, made his point.

  It took some maneuvering to get the pallet of rocks in place once he reached the flat spot near the gate. He had to lay the pallet just right, so that when the truck carrying the frackwater came rumbling up the hill—as it would any moment—the first thing the driver would see would be the massive roadblock. With an artist’s eye, he laid the pallet on the ground. It sank a bit into the mud, in essence cementing itself into place. Ken was pleased. The rocks now completely blocked the gate. He cut the engine on the backhoe, climbed down from the cockpit, and inspected the barricade.

  There were a lot of other things he could have done with those stones. He could have used them to fix the broken stone wall at the top of the hill. He had been meaning to do that for the longest time. God only knew how long that wall had been falling into disrepair. A good dry stack stone wall is a like a braid made out of rocks, each stone interlinked in balance and design with the next, and when one falls, sooner or later they all do. It can take decades, but eventually the whole deeply interconnected structure will come tumbling down if it isn’t maintained. When he was finished with these stones, he thought, maybe he would go back and finish fixing that wall. And whatever was left over he could sell. In fact, Victoria had asked if she could buy a pallet from him to build a patio outside her still under construction dream house. She had been hoping to get a discount, offering him a hundred dollars for the load. And while Ken no longer needed the money, it was a matter of principle to him that the rocks he pried out of his ground with his own hands would never be sold at a discount. It was $125, period. At the moment, however, those rocks weren’t for sale. They had a higher purpose.

  Ken took a critical look at his roadblock. It was formidable, to be sure, but it lacked that certain something. It was missing that final over-the-top operatic touch, that primal and elemental warning of danger. It was missing the rattle on
the rattlesnake. But he had planned for that as well. He grabbed a brightly colored gas can from the back of his rig and clutched it as he stood in front of the pallet. And then, as the first of the frack trucks turned off the main road and began its perilous ascent to the drill site, Ken grabbed his spit bottle, and he waited.

  KEN ALWAYS INSISTED THAT he never actually threatened to firebomb Cabot’s equipment, as the frightened truck driver and company officials alleged. Anyone who knew Ken knew that wasn’t his style. But then again, if the young driver, weaned on the job, no doubt, with tales of how the crazy old coot on the hill—the codger who talked to his fish and had had to be forcibly ejected from the courthouse grounds—had once barked a squirrel right over the head of one of Cabot’s drivers, was inclined to embellish the story of the showdown on what Ken had come to call “Lazy Dog Hill,” Ken wouldn’t mind. He liked the idea that he was becoming a legend. It never ceased to amuse Ken that to one group of people, he had managed to portray himself as the voice of reason and moderation, while to another group, he was considered a dangerously unstable backwoodsman capable of almost anything.

  In fact, by the time word of the showdown reached Cabot’s satellite office over on Route 29, the legend of Ken Ely had already started to grow to the point where company officials believed that Ken was up there not only barricading their access to the all-important Ely 5H well, but, armed like some kind of petroleum-soaked Ted Kaczynski with a battery of gas-soaked rags and Molotov cocktails, stood ready to blow their entire operation—maybe even the whole top of the hill—to kingdom come.

  They probably would have been surprised if they had known how comparatively peaceful Ken’s plan actually had been. He hadn’t intend to blow up anything other than a couple of square meters of bluestone, and that in strict accordance with state guidelines. And they might at least have been embarrassed by their own near hysterics over Ken’s carefully stage-managed antics had they taken the time to really think about it. But they didn’t.