The End of Country

by Seamus McGraw

  Instead, just as Ken had anticipated, they turned tail and ran, straight to a high-priced law firm they had retained in Scranton, a firm that had plenty of experience in the federal court system, and began putting together a request for an injunction.

  Cabot was on solid legal footing. Ken knew that, and if he hadn’t, his own attorneys had done everything they could to advise him of that fact. “You’re making a tactical error,” Charlie had told Ken over the phone when Ken told him about it. Ken thought Charlie had missed the point. He also thought, considering Charlie’s heart, that the old lawyer needed to learn to relax.

  Yes, Ken clearly understood that the lease he had signed with Cabot three years ago clearly stated that Ken would provide access to the wells that would be placed on his property. But the way Ken figured it, there was another access road. Even though he had blocked the only route by which Cabot could bring in the big trucks to frack the Ely 5H, he hadn’t cut off access altogether. There was still a way that Cabot could get in with smaller equipment to service that and the other wells if they needed to. He understood as well that no judge was ever going to rule in his favor, but that didn’t matter.

  What mattered was that as far as Cabot was concerned, time was money, and at that moment, time was on Ken’s side. With Cabot’s money—the money they were even now funneling into his pockets—Ken could afford to buy the clock, or at least slow it down.

  It took nearly two weeks for Cabot’s attorneys to draft their complaint and file it in U.S. district court in Scranton. In the meantime, the court issued a temporary injunction ordering Ken to open the gate—which he had already done. Ken had finished his blasting, had taken the rocks he didn’t really want or need, and was already back at work, the delicate work of rebuilding that fallen dry stack stone wall at the top of the hill.

  The case wouldn’t formally be over until April 9; there were still a few legal loose ends to tie up before U.S. District Court Judge A. Richard Caputo made the injunction permanent, and while the whole process cost Ken Ely a few thousand dollars, he didn’t mind. The truth was, even if he had been broke, as he had been most of his life, he would have fought Cabot the same way. Emmagene had said it as well as he could have: “This is about what’s right.”

  And what was right was simple. Ken had forced Cabot to pay a high price for its role in the death of his beloved dog. By the company’s own estimates, as detailed in their initial complaint against Ken, Ken’s gambit had cost Cabot $3,000 an hour—$50 a minute—in lost productivity.

  But this was never just about Crybaby, even though Ken had told anyone within earshot, and might even have convinced himself, that it was. It was bigger than that. Ken had taught Cabot a lesson—that Cabot and all the drillers all over the state were welcome, so was their money, and so were the promises of a better future that they brought with them. But Cabot and the other drillers also needed to understand that the land and the people who had lived on it for generations were a resource, too, a seething and powerful resource that, like the Marcellus itself, could bring immense benefits if it was treated with respect and carefully harnessed. But if they were careless, the drillers might just face the kind of blowouts that drillers had long ago learned to fear from the Marcellus.

  As he worked to rebuild that fallen stone wall, balancing one rock skillfully against its neighbors, his ever present spit bottle resting on a rock nearby, Ken was feeling more than a little proud of himself, proud enough that he was almost able to forget the dull pain in his arm that had only recently cropped up and was now a steady though distant reminder that after sixty-two years of hard work and rough times, after three bouts with cancer and an ongoing battle with diabetes, he was getting old. Maybe he still had a fight or two left in him, he figured. Time would tell. But for the moment, at least, that domed hillock in Susquehanna County on which he stood was the top of the world, and in a place that had always had more than its fair share of Have Nots, Ken had finally become one of the Haves. He had money, he had respect—even if in some quarters it was the kind of respect that might be afforded a rattlesnake—and above all, he had his family: his children, his grandchildren, his great-grandchild, and his wife, the woman he had loved since he was nineteen years old.

  He cast a glance toward the rough cairn down the hill where Crybaby was buried. Even now, he still liked sharing his victories, great and small, with the bluetick coonhound who used to follow him everywhere. One of these days, he figured, he’d get his turn to follow Crybaby. But that was somewhere down the road. For now, he had a wall to fix.

  SIXTEEN

  A Moment of Silence

  The tumor itself wasn’t the problem. It was less than 1.4 centimeters, and it was nestled in some fatty tissue in her left breast from which it could easily be excised. The problem was that there were other, free-floating cancer cells in the breast, the surgeon told my mother, and in all likelihood she’d have to take the entire breast. My mother took the news in stride.

  That surprised me. For weeks, she had been pinning all her hopes on the idea that she could undergo a simple lumpectomy, maybe a little chemo or radiation therapy to erase any trace of the cancer, and then get back to her garden. She had summarily dismissed one surgeon who pressed her to have a mastectomy—my mother was convinced that the doctor was ordering the operation with as much forethought as she might order from a Chinese menu—but when the second surgeon, this one from Sloan-Kettering in New York, told her that there was little chance of avoiding it, my mother acquiesced. It was before dawn on a late summer morning when my sister and I drove her into the city, got her checked into the hospital, and saw her off to the operating room.

  She was pensive, of course, but she did her best to conceal whatever fear she might have felt. That’s the way my mother has always been. She can crochet an afghan of pure terror out of thin air, but give her something real to worry about and she turns into Barbara Stanwyck. She insisted that she wasn’t afraid that the cancer might kill her. Her only stated concern was that her blouses might not fit as well when the operation was over, and that she herself might find her new appearance disturbing when the time came to bathe or change her bandages. But even that she kept to herself, for the most part. All she really wanted to talk about before they wheeled her into surgery was whether my sister and I had settled on a strategy to deal with the estate tax issue.

  “We’ve got plenty of time to worry about that,” my sister told her.

  The operation took four hours. It was a success. The next day, she was released from the hospital, and we took her to my sister’s house to convalesce for a few days. I knew that the danger had passed when my sister called me a couple of days later. “Oh, Babsy’s at it again,” she spat through clenched teeth. Now that the danger of the cancer seemed to be behind her, my mother could channel all that free-floating angst that she had courageously bottled up for weeks into the most inconsequential things—she could fret freely over her flowers and whether she had remembered to unplug every electrical device at the farm before she had left, whether a lightning storm might suddenly strike and knock out the power to the water pump, whether one of the neighbor kids might run over her mailbox while she wasn’t there—all of which, my sister had explained to the point of exasperation, might just as easily occur if she was there.

  “So, she’s better?” I asked.

  “She’s fine. But her cancer’s going to kill me,” my sister moaned.

  The bout with cancer had sidetracked my sister and me. The energy we had previously spent understanding the mysteries of the Marcellus had for weeks been focused exclusively on understanding breast cancer in all its permutations. Now my mother was safe from that. But now we realized that the whole experience had been a warning shot, providence’s way of telling us that my mother had been right when she told us she wouldn’t be around forever and that whatever happened at the farm wouldn’t be her problem, it would be ours.

  My mother was already seventy-six years old, just three years shy of the age her
mother had been when she died. She was twenty-one years older than her father had been when he died, and she had survived her husband by eleven years. She had faced this direct threat to her life with grace and courage, but now that she was freed from that and could indulge every fear and neurosis, this was her way of telling us, and herself, that we needed to get back to work on saving the farm from the dangerous effects of our own good luck. Soon thereafter, my sister, my mother, and I arranged a series of meetings with lawyers and financial advisers to finalize our plan to protect the farm, not just from the drillers but from the estate tax. We made sure that she was involved in every discussion, that every significant decision was hers as we built up a kind of corporate bulwark that would protect her and us. And if we still had any of those guilty old Irish misgivings about it all, we could tell ourselves that we were doing it not for ourselves but to give Mom something to think about that would keep her mind occupied and keep her from obsessing over minutiae.

  My mother, of course, was far closer to her Irish roots than either my sister or myself, and I soon realized that we had wildly underestimated my mother’s capacity to (in the absence of real misfortune) turn any piece of promising news on its head and into a lurking disaster. I saw her do just that a few weeks after she had returned from my sister’s house to the farm. By that point, the drillers were already beginning to pore over the geological maps of her land and were getting ready to scout possible locations for the well. Once it was decided where the well would go, they had told her (through me) that they would pay her a couple of thousand dollars per acre for every acre they disturbed. They’d pay her more—more than ten thousand dollars—for the right to cut a road across her property that would lead to the well, and a subsidiary company would pay her several thousand more for permission to run a small pipeline across her land. As if all that wasn’t enough, she got another miraculous windfall out of the blue that summer when one of those pharmaceutical companies in which she held a thousand shares of stock—shares she had held on to because my father, on his deathbed, had instructed her to—was sold and the buyer paid the shareholders a ten-dollar premium per share. In other words, $80,000 had simply fallen out of a tree and hit my mother square on her floppy straw hat.

  But did my mother appreciate that spontaneous cloudburst of good luck? Of course not. “This has been a very hard year for me,” she told me on the phone the night that the drug company check arrived in the mail.

  I couldn’t help myself. All the pent-up frustration of the past year and a half burst out of me. “Goddammit!” I said. “You need to look around, Mom. You just beat cancer, for chrissakes. You know why? Because you had the ability—financially, intellectually, personally—to get it detected early enough to be treated. I’ll bet that you’ve got more than a few neighbors without insurance who wouldn’t have been as lucky. You had the ability to rush off to New York to have it treated. I’ll bet a lot of them don’t. And now, in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression, the one you’re always talking about, people are dropping money on you from out of the sky, ten thousand here, eighty thousand there, a quarter of a million out of nowhere with the promise of maybe millions more to come, and you have the unmitigated gall to tell me how bad your life is? You know what? You keep talking like that and you’re really gonna piss off God. God doesn’t like ingrates.”

  I could almost feel my mother flinching on the other end of the line. There was a long pause. And then she said, “You’re right.”

  There was more than simple contrition in the way she said it. There was also a hint of maternal defiance, as if she were demanding to know whether I, who had so long pretended that somehow none of this really affected me, was ready at last to accept the benefits and the consequences of it myself. As I hung up the phone that night, I realized what my mother had done. Without saying a word, she had taken my self-righteous indignation and turned it back on me, leaving me panting under the weight of the same question I had asked her.

  “Damn, she’s good at that,” I thought.

  VICTORIA SWITZER MIXED HERSELF a martini, fixed another for Jim, and shouldered her way out the door of the trailer. Though the yard that led to the front of their soon-to-be-completed house was still littered with construction debris, cinder blocks, and odd ends of lumber scattered here and there along with a few rusted pieces of rebar, at last the place was starting to look like a home, if only from the outside. The metal roof was on, and so was the cedar siding, and the elaborate leaded glass door that she and Jim had almost broken their backs trying to install lent a certain elegance to the place.

  Inside, of course, it was still a shell. The soaring fireplace that Jim had handcrafted using local stone and a hand-hewn timber mantel were finished, but the plumbing and the electricity and the interior walls had yet to be installed, and for now it remained a cavernous playground for the half dozen or so cats that Victoria had managed to attract.

  But outside it was different. A few months earlier, Victoria and Jim had begun work on a singularly beautiful feature, a bluestone patio, built of rocks they had bought—at full price—from Ken Ely. They were, in fact, the same stones that Ken had used to block Cabot’s access to his well during his showdown with the company back in March. With them Victoria and Jim created an outdoor refuge, a place where on autumn afternoons they could someday sit and listen to the wind in the old hemlocks and the water tumbling over the rocks in the nearby creek, much as Ken had conjured his own protector, Chief Red Rock, out of a similar pile of stones.

  Funny thing was, it already seemed to have worked. Sitting there sipping cocktails on an autumn afternoon, Victoria and Jim didn’t speak much. They just soaked up the silence, the only sounds the wind in the hemlocks, the song of the creek.

  It had been like this for a couple of weeks now, ever since the DEP, angered by the latest and most egregious infraction at Cabot’s local wells—a nearly eight-thousand-gallon spill at the Heitsman 4H well two hills over on Route 29—had ordered the company to suspend all operations in Dimock until it could come up with a plan to guarantee that nothing like that would ever happen again. For the company, the timing of the spill—it was actually three separate spills, all at the same site and all within a few days—could not have been worse. It happened just as the DEP’s Bureau of Oil and Gas Management was preparing to release its long-awaited 23-page report on the methane contamination that had begun on New Year’s Day at Norma Fiorentino’s place. Now the company was facing not only more than $150,000 in fines—that was small change to a big company like Cabot—but also the far more formidable financial hit from having to shut down its fracking operations all over Dimock.

  The suspension was temporary, of course. Within a few days, a chastened Cabot would present its plan to the state, would agree to submit to a level of scrutiny that no other driller in the state had to endure, and would again be permitted to resume its operations. But for the moment, that was all in the future. Now the only thing that disturbed the whisper of the wind and the chirping of the creek was the occasional rumble of tires on the road above Victoria and Jim’s house, and the only time those tires were attached to a Cabot vehicle was when the company was making one of its now mandatory deliveries of fresh water to the homes that had been affected by the methane leak.

  “You know,” Victoria said to Jim, “right now, it almost seems like this was all a dream.”

  Jim was silent.

  “Well, maybe some good will come of it,” she said.

  ACCORDING TO THE DEP’s own engineering report, the incident at the Heitsman well was not as bad as it could have been. But as far as the agency and the locals were concerned, it was bad enough. It began about 2 P.M. on September 16. The company had carved out its pad and drilled its well on a rugged chunk of fallow farmland off Route 29, just a hill or two over from Victoria’s place, and had finished drilling a horizontal well that plunged a mile deep and a mile out, when they summoned their contractors to frack the well. Two of the best-know
n names in the business had signed on for the project. Halliburton was handling the frack job itself, while Baker, another well-known contractor, was handling the water supply. The project was going along as planned when a worker threw open a valve to release water from one of the 21,000-gallon mixing tanks and a coupling on a hose failed, sending somewhere between 1,050 and 2,100 gallons of frackwater surging onto the ground. The water had already been treated with the fracking compound, and while the chemicals—which included Halliburton’s own secret formula gelling agent LGC-35 CBM, which the company itself describes as a potential carcinogen—accounted for only about 0.05 percent of the fluid, it was more than enough to cause the DEP to take notice.

  While about 800 gallons of that initial spill was contained on the drill pad—before the fracking began, the driller had built berms around part of it—hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand, gallons had reached a wooded wetland that fed nearby Stevens Creek. By the time the DEP arrived, the contractor had already built a hay and dirt dam to keep any more of the liquid from reaching the creek, and another had been built in the creek itself to prevent the tainted fluid from drifting downstream. All the same, the spill did kill a number of small minnows and frogs, though larger fish seemed to be spared any immediate problems.

  Six hours later, it happened again. Again, it was a combination of mechanical and human error. According to Baker’s own reports to the DEP, “a 12-inch diameter mechanical coupling … fitted upstream of the feed tank manifold failed,” and before the contractor could shut the system down, another 5,880 gallons of frack fluid poured onto the drill pad. With the berms and the makeshift dam still in place, only about 580 gallons of that spill made it to the wetlands and the creek beyond it.