The End of Country

by Seamus McGraw

  Liam had been unmoved by it all. He was busy scanning the woods just past the power line for any lurking bad guys he could use his superpowers on. But I was starting to feel the weight of the inevitability of it all.

  That weight got a bit heavier when the three men from Chesapeake showed me the map that indicated not just where the well would be placed but how six horizontal legs would span out, spider-like, siphoning out all the gas for a mile around. It was no longer an abstraction. I now knew what the operation would look like. I could see how this land that had owned me for forty years would be ripped open, how a five-acre gash would be torn into its side, a surgical scar that would take years to heal. I could almost hear the scream of the drill, the rumble of the trucks, almost smell the stink of the diesel generators. Once that pit was cut, it could stay open for as long as five years. That was the plan, anyway. They would spud two wells and cut the first two horizontal legs, and then, a year or two later, two more, and a year or so after that, the next two.

  I remember looking at the map and realizing that the first leg that they would drill was following almost the exact path that Ralph and I used to take when we’d vanish into the woods to sneak sweat-soaked cigarettes and explore the long-ago battlefield where we never found any arrowheads but found plenty of fossils. That leg would run beneath those woods, plunge down beneath a gully, and end just beyond a small creek that ran there. I could envision the spot where the leg ended. It had always been a special place to me. It was at that precise spot—right about this time of year, when the leaves were gone and the cattails along the creek had turned brown—that Ralph and I had spotted that white deer, an albino, foraging for grass. It’s still the only one I’ve ever seen in the wild. I shook off the superstitious Irish urge that lingers in me even now to read anything more into it, to see it as some kind of omen, but beneath the ancestral bog-trotting voodoo, I couldn’t help but wonder whether my son would ever have a chance to stumble across so magical a creature while walking through these hills, or whether the magic would be chased away by the din and dirt of industry.

  On the other hand, development brought so much promise. Looking as far into the future as I could, I saw those six wells bringing a level of reliable financial security to my kids. Maybe money is a talisman, too. And maybe my superhero son, who prizes Batman and Spiderman, will grow up to be skillful enough swinging between moral and cultural ambiguities to cull what’s good from it and avoid the dangers that it poses.

  It’s the rare man who can. Ken Ely was certainly one of the few I had ever known who could do it with grace. It was a rough grace to be sure, but grace nonetheless. Back at the beginning of the story, when I first started trying to track Ken down—we had played a game of cat and mouse over the telephone that stretched out several weeks—I had been afraid that Ken had remembered me and decided that, regardless of my long-ago connection to the neighborhood, I was now just another stranger asking questions, a guy who didn’t belong there. I was surprised by how much it bothered me that Ken would think that.

  And then one winter day I had run up to the farm to take care of a few errands for my mother, justifying the long drive by telling myself that I could catch a peek at some of the rigs in Dimock on my way. It was late in the afternoon, the winter sun had just set, and in the distance I could see a couple of derricks, brightly lit and glowing, rising above the barren trees on the hilltops, when he finally called me on my cell phone. The reception was poor—and I’m not just talking about the signal. He greeted me with a simple sentence: “If you want to talk, why don’t you come up here now.”

  As I made my way up his driveway, I could no longer see the derricks, but I could hear the distant rumble of their diesel engines from behind the trees at the hilltop, and their nearness was underscored by the sound of my footsteps on the gravel—fresh, clean gravel that had spilled onto Ken’s driveway from the old timber road that Cabot had widened and stoned to accommodate their trucks and equipment. I stepped onto the front steps and peered inside the two-room cabin just big enough to hold Ken, his wife, his 12-gauge for turkeys, the .30-06 for bucks, and a .22 for squirrel, which, as one young driver for Cabot had learned, could also be useful for scaring off other varmints.

  It took Ken a while to make it to the door. Time and distance have a way of freezing people in your mind. You imagine that they stay forever the way you last saw them. But the Ken who greeted me was not the same robust and barrel-chested pump jockey who had fronted me gas back in 1978. He was sixty-one now, a little deaf, which was an occupational hazard for a guy who had by then spent years blasting stone out of the earth and then scooping up the clattering remains from behind the controls of a screeching backhoe. He was heavier, his joints were stiffer, and he walked with a bit of a limp. He was more stoop-shouldered, too, and maybe it was the light in the place, but he seemed to have taken on a grayish blue hue, not just his hair or his mustache but all of him, as if he were turning into one of the stones that he spent all those years gathering.

  That first night when we had sat down, he eventually opened up, talking with me about hunting and about his fish and about his land and his dog and about his lifelong and complex love affair with Emmagene. He also talked about hope. The gas “is gonna do a lot of good for a lot of people up here,” he said. “Land-poor people, they’re going to get something now, and that’s good.” It wasn’t just the locals who would benefit. If things worked out the way everybody figured they would, maybe there would come a time when no more kids from the New Milford National Guard would have to ship out to some far-flung corner of the globe and none would come back in body bags. “There’s a lot of good that can come from it,” he said.

  As I got ready to leave his cottage that evening, I caught Ken studying me. A look of recognition finally flickered in his eyes, followed by a look of triumph. He had figured it out.

  “Hey, didn’t you go bankrupt once?” As a matter of fact, I had. Eighteen years earlier, after my first failed marriage. “I remember you. You owe me a hundred bucks for gas and bullets.”

  I didn’t remember that. As far as I knew, I had paid Ken every cent I ever owed him. But I wasn’t going to dispute it. Ken Ely had a long memory. I didn’t have a hundred dollars on me, but I promised I’d write him a check. “Don’t bother,” he told me. “I don’t need the money anymore. Wait till you get rich on the gas and then give it to somebody who needs it.”

  THE TALL MAN WITH the honeyed Texas accent pressed the four-pound mallet into Liam’s hand, and the poor kid nearly toppled over from the weight of it. “Hold on tight, Superhero,” the man said, as with one hand he helped Liam heft the hammer while with the other he held the stake in place. “Now, give it a shot.” Liam let go of the hammer, and as the man drove the stake into the ground, the superhero broke free and scrambled back to the comparative safety of the overgrown raspberry bush.

  It took me a while to talk Liam out from behind the bush, and once I had, we walked the Chesapeake men back to the house where their trucks were waiting. We said goodbye and I left Liam with my mother and walked back up the hill. I followed the path of the first leg of the soon-to-be-drilled well as it snaked across the lane, past the spot where I had stood guard, at my father’s behest, over the remains of our dead calves all those years before, past the abandoned bluestone quarry where the rusting carcass of that ’49 Plymouth lay on its roof, until I reached the edge of the half-acre pond my family had dug there thirty-five years ago. I don’t know how long I had been standing there, lost in thought, when I heard a sound behind me, a frantic rustling in the brush near the barbed-wire fence line my father and I had run thirty years ago, and I turned to catch a glimpse of brown fur scuttling through the undergrowth and diving into a partially obscured hole in the ground. It was a woodchuck, a descendant, no doubt, of one of the critters my father had tried so hard to run off the land by pouring used motor oil into their dens. He had never been a particularly superstitious man, but at the end of his life, when pancreatic cancer
had all but hollowed him out, my father had come to believe that he was paying some kind of karmic penalty for his actions. And as I traced in my mind’s eye the path the drillers would take beneath this land, I found myself wondering what karmic lessons my father might imagine were now in store for the rest of us.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I never intended to write this book. In fact, back in the summer of 2008, when I began work on it, I had more or less decided that I was never going to write anything ever again. Nearly three decades of writing for newspapers and magazines, in a career that had never provided more than a meager and unreliable income, had left me frustrated, angry, and pretty much dead broke. I had decided that I was going to chuck it all and go work for Walmart as a greeter when my wife, Karen Phillips, and one of my oldest and dearest friends, Sharon Guynup, persuaded me to take one last stab at my career. Sharon can be very persuasive, and Karen can be downright intimidating, so I agreed.

  To my utter surprise, there was great interest in the proposal, and I was overwhelmed. I had no idea how to even begin to evaluate the offers of representation I was now getting. I reached out to a guy I respected, a guy I had worked with and who, unlike most guys in the magazine world, knew what it was to work, and whom I knew I could trust, A. J. Baime, then articles editor at Playboy.

  I knew A. J. had just written a book that was doing better than just all right, a riveting tale about the rivalry between Ford and Ferrari during the heyday of Le Mans, a book called Go Like Hell, and I had heard through the grapevine that he had gotten a pretty good deal for the book and an even better one for the movie rights. I explained my predicament to him. “I’m in way over my head, A. J.”

  “Who are you talking to?” he asked.

  I started reciting the list of agents in reverse order, the most recent first. I didn’t make it any farther than the third name on the list—the Waxman Agency—when A. J. stopped me. “They represent me,” he said. “They did a great job. Who are you talking to over there?”

  “Byrd Leavell,” I said.

  “Don’t go anywhere, I’ll call you right back.”

  A few hours later, Byrd and I spoke on the phone. I told him that he was my agent.

  Thanks to A. J., I had made a good choice. Over the next few weeks, Byrd worked tirelessly—and with more patience than I had any right to expect—to turn the emotional but unformed query I had written into a full-blown proposal of which we could both be proud.

  I was still trying not get my hopes up when the first offers came in. I had one for twice what I had imagined the book might possibly be worth, but Byrd urged me to remain calm. “Let’s see what else comes in,” he told me. He knew what he was talking about. Soon, two major houses were bidding against each other, and all I could do was sit on the sidelines and wait until they finished going at each other. Had it not been for Byrd’s patience, his guidance, and his skill, this book never would have happened.

  In the end I decided to go with Random House, because the editor, Tim Bartlett, seemed to have an almost preternatural calm about him, at least on the telephone. He struck me as the kind of guy who could be patient enough to guide an aging neophyte like me through the daunting process of writing a book. He was originally from Pennsylvania, too, assuming you count Philadelphia as part of the commonwealth. There were going to be obstacles. I’d have to become at least conversant in Mainline WASP if I really wanted to communicate with him, but that was okay. I’ve always been adaptable. And given the fact that I had spent a good portion of my career working with editors who were either flamboyantly overwrought or downright nasty when they were working, I was really looking forward to his steadiness.

  Over the past two years, Tim has not disappointed me. He has been a stellar editor, and whatever the failings of this book, they’re all mine. This book is incomparably better as a result of his tireless work. But Tim did not do it alone, either. He had the help of remarkable fellow editors at Random House, especially Millicent Bennett and Andy Ward. We also had the direction of Susan Kamil and Tom Perry, not to mention the tireless work by the assistants at Random House, Jessie Waters, Ben Steinberg, and Tim’s former assistant Lindsey Schwoeri, whom I believe I single-handedly burned out. A special note of thanks goes to Emily DeHuff, who, armed only with her copyediting skills, managed to hack a trail through my dense prose that readers could follow.

  I owe a deep debt of gratitude to friends such as Leopold Zappler, Dennis McGrath, and Paul Gallagher, who patiently read the manuscript and made insightful suggestions. I need to thank Doug Heuck of Pittsburgh Quarterly magazine, who gave me a chance to explore some of the larger issues of this book in print. And I am forever in debt to my wife and my four children, the older ones, Miriam and Yona, and the younger ones, Seneca and Liam, who endured my lunacy as I obsessed over this project.

  But most of all, this book is the direct result of the generosity of spirit of the people in it, people like Bill Zagorski and Ray Walker at Range Resources and Professor Terry Engelder at Penn State, who has given generously of his time to try to make me understand the mechanics and mysteries of the Marcellus. That there is a book at all is a testament to the character of the people along Meshoppen Creek, people like Roger Williams and his wife, Jean, and Anne Stang, and Victoria Switzer, and especially Ken Ely and the love of his life, Emmagene. And of course my mother and my sister. In the end, this book is theirs.

  About the Author

  Seamus McGraw lives in the woods of northeastern Pennsylvania with his wife, his four kids, and his as-yet-unnamed flintlock rifle. He’s a frequent contributor to a number of publications, including Playboy and Pittsburgh Quarterly, and his work has appeared in Reader’s Digest, Maxim, Radar, Spin, and The Forward. He has won a number of journalism awards, including honors from the Associated Press Managing Editors, the Casey Foundation, and the Society of Professional Journalists. McGraw is currently working on a documentary about his family’s experiences as they unfold.