Amity and Prosperity_One Family and the Fracturing of America

by Eliza Griswold

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  Table of Contents

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  For Harley and Paige

  When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue faileth for thirst, I the Lord will hear them.

  —ISAIAH 41:17

  A NOTE

  The “Appalachian problem” doesn’t seem to me to be political, economic, or social. I believe it is a spiritual problem and its name is greed.

  —OUR APPALACHIA: AN ORAL HISTORY, EDITED BY LAUREL SHACKELFORD AND BILL WEINBERG

  Four hundred million years ago, dragonflies the size of crows drifted above a giant inland sea. The first sharks swam in its brackish currents, along with algae and other primordial creatures. As they died and sank to the seafloor, their remains petrified, turning into fossil fuel. Oil and gas were trapped in the silt that became a sedimentary rock called shale. Over the next sixty million years, as the sea receded and left behind freshwater bogs, the plants and trees that collapsed into them formed coal, the youngest of earth’s fossil fuels. At first these layers of oil, gas, and coal piled tidily atop one another. Then, under tremendous heat and stress, they twisted and buckled, in some places rising to the surface, in others, remaining miles belowground.

  In Appalachia, people have employed these fuels for centuries, albeit in unusual ways. There’s evidence to suggest that as many as six hundred years ago, the Native inhabitants of what’s now Western Pennsylvania dug pits along a riverbank to collect petroleum for the treatment of consumption and venereal disease. When George Washington rode westward before the Revolutionary War in 1753, he found that both coal and natural gas had already been discovered along the frontier. For the next hundred years, coal powered the young country’s growth. Natural gas proved harder to harness. It leaked from pits that miners had dug for salt. Some towns figured out how to pipe gas to light streetlamps; others managed only to blow themselves up. In 1859, Colonel Edwin Drake struck oil in Western Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania became the birthplace of the U.S. oil industry—the world’s first oil rush whooshed through the state and vanished by the 1870s. It wasn’t that the oil was gone; the rest was simply too costly to reach.

  America’s answer to its energy needs has always been to dig deeper; the question was how. Over the past several decades, a technological innovation called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has allowed the extraction of the gas embedded in deep rock. Fracking frees fuel from shale by drilling a mile or more straight down into the earth and then out sideways for as much as another two miles. The straw that Daniel Day-Lewis so fiendishly described in There Will Be Blood no longer has to go straight into the milkshake. It can bend and turn in nearly any direction.

  A decade ago, fracking kicked off a gas boom, which flooded parts of Appalachia with money. It also took a toll on those who lived where carbon was harvested. In March 2011, I attended a meeting of concerned farmers, who were also retired coal miners and steelworkers, at the airport in Morgantown, West Virginia. There, I met Stacey Haney, a nurse and single mother of two, who invited me to her eight-acre farm just over the border in southwestern Pennsylvania’s Washington County. She and her children, Harley and Paige, fourteen and eleven, feared they were sick from exposure to a toxic industrial site next door to their home. All three had low levels of gas-related chemicals in their bodies, but Harley, who’d recently been diagnosed with arsenic poisoning, was the worst off.

  When I went to see her the next day, Stacey drove me through the nearby towns of Amity and Prosperity, where her family had lived for 150 years, and around the countryside. Red and white drill rigs dotted the hillsides planted with timothy. Sandy access roads snaked through clover fields. Green condensate tanks shimmered in the distance. This was in the middle of the gas rush that spanned a decade from 2005 to 2015; there were five well sites within a mile of her home. It would be easy to cast the industrial incursion as a blight upon the bucolic, and to many it was. To others, however, the arrival of fracking was the solution to decades of decline.

  Amity and Prosperity don’t occupy a pristine landscape. The history of energy extraction is etched into Appalachian hollows. The wooden towers of oil wells have dotted Amity’s goldenrod fields since 1885, derricks nodding in wild peppermint. Following the Civil War, with wool prices low, sheep farmers sold the rights to the coal under their farms. Pennsylvania’s abundance of coal and iron, along with its network of rivers, made it an excellent place to produce steel. In 1875, Andrew Carnegie built the nation’s largest steel mill along the Monongahela River, which propelled Pennsylvania to becoming the steel capital of the world.

  Rural citizens lived alongside industry for generations, taking jobs and small payouts for mineral leases. Often, they acquired a sophisticated understanding of property and mineral rights, becoming well versed in the history and value of what lay beneath their feet. This arrangement also helped people remain on their land long after farming was profitable. Yet despite these small leases, which might provide free gas and a royalty of a few hundred dollars a year, most of the mineral profits went elsewhere. The wealth fled the land, leaving behind thousands of miles of incarnadine streams ruined by acid mine drainage, artificial mountains of slag heaps, and gutted coal patch towns. Company towns faced mass unemployment, along with the environmental and social problems industry left behind.

  Exploiting energy often involves exploiting people. In Amity and Prosperity, as elsewhere, resource extraction has long fed a sense of marginalization and disgust, both with companies that undermine the land and with the urbanites who flick on lights without considering the miners who risk their lives to power them. Today, the fracking boom has reinforced these convictions. This time, a handful of people have made significant amounts of money. With more to lose, they’ve become still more distrustful of state and federal authorities and environmentalists—as well as of neighbors who speak against the industrial boom. As they see it, the common outsider view that Appalachians are victims of forces they don’t understand is naïve and condescending. To them, opposing fracking is an ideological stance couched in a weak understanding of the actual technique and how it can be employed safely.

  Split fifty-fifty between red and blue, Pennsylvania is the one purple state in which fracking has flourished. This has rendered the technique as much a political question as a practical one. Fracking has deepened the schism between Democrats and Republicans. It has also brought with it the promise of energy independence and injected much-needed cash into struggling places. Yet it has fractured communities, dividing those making money from those whose water, air, and health are threatened.

  Stacey and her kids lost their land and a good part of their lives waging a battle against the oil and gas industry. For the past seven years, amid an ugly public fight, they allowed me to follow their family’s intimate challenges—the loss of an
imals, the nights spent on the bathroom floor, and the travails of a sick kid who doesn’t want to leave his basement room. They are among those paying the human cost of American energy.

  PROLOGUE

  TO THE IGNORANT MOTHERFUCKERS who keep breaking into my house: it’s bad enough that my children and I have been homeless for 2 and a half years but now I have to deal with this. Your greediness has cost me over $35,000 in damages and the bank has put a forced insurance of $5000 on my mortgage, so as of jan 1, my mortgage payment goes up $500 a month. I hope you feel good about what you have done and I hope you know that the contamination in this house causes cancer, so keep coming back you fucking losers. I hope you rott with cancer!!! And when your spending all your scrap money I hope you think about what you are taking away from my children.

  —A note Stacey Haney posted to the door of her abandoned farmhouse on November 3, 2013

  PART 1

  HOOPIES

  1 | FAIR 2010

  Most years at the Washington County Fair, Stacey Haney set up an animal salon outside her blue and white Coachman trailer. She and her younger sister, Shelly, would plug a blow-dryer into a generator and style their children’s goats in preparation for the 4-H competition. This year, the salon seemed too much effort, so Stacey readied the animals at home. She’d spent the past two days up to her armpits in a blue kiddie pool of freezing water and Mane ’n Tail soap washing, clipping, and brushing two goats, two pigs, and four rabbits. Then, that August morning, she’d hauled them ten miles to the fairgrounds.

  After registering the rabbits, she proceeded to Cowley’s lemonade stand with her eleven-year-old daughter, Paige. Thirty miles southwest of Pittsburgh, the Washington County Fairground was composed of two worlds. The lower realm contained the Tilt-A-Whirl operated by strangers, roustabouts who arrived from elsewhere. (Stacey’s son, Harley, who’d just turned fourteen, called it Carnyland.) The upper belonged to 4-H and agriculture—“ag”—types, many of whom, including Stacey’s family, considered themselves Hoopies, an insider’s name for the hill jacks or hillbillies who live in the borderlands of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia where Appalachia begins.

  These two worlds met midway up the ridge at Cowley’s, where Stacey and Paige were waiting for lemonade when they spied two familiar figures trundling downhill from the horse barn. The square woman with frosted hair and the spare man with a snowy mane and a limp were Beth and John Voyles. They lived next door at Justa Breeze, a fifteen-acre farm where they trained horses and bred high-end dogs. The two families shared a fence and a love of animals. Beth treated her boxers like children. She cooked them angel hair pasta, zucchini, and meatball sandwiches, and dressed them in tiny leather jackets, flight goggles, and scarves for professional photographs. She framed the photos and hung them around the ranch house where she’d lived with John for the past twenty-eight years.

  Say what one might about the Voyles, over the past year and a half, they’d proven excellent neighbors. While Stacey, forty, juggled full-time shifts as a nurse in the recovery unit of Washington Hospital and finalized her divorce from Larry Haney, the Voyles kept a quiet eye on her place. Their daughter, Ashley, often brought her new boxer puppy, Cummins, down to distract Harley when he was sick at home. At twenty-two, Ashley still lived at home and raced horses professionally. She’d also been teaching Paige to ride since Paige was two.

  As Beth and John approached, Stacey could see that mascara was running down Beth’s ruddy face. Stacey guessed it was the muggy heat; the air at the fair was redolent with popcorn and musk, which mingled with the scent of baby shampoo from the Mane ’n Tail lingering on Stacey’s arms. A rash blazed on Stacey’s left arm, where it had been erupting on and off for months. Although she was a nurse, she couldn’t determine its cause. She studied the welts, and when she looked up, Beth was in front of her, her face smeared with tears.

  Cummins is dead, Beth said. Poisoned.

  Stacey’s head swam. In her mind, she scanned the farmhouses and trailers that wended their way from the top of the valley where she and Beth lived down McAdams Road to the base of the hollow called the Bottoms. She knew nearly everyone. Many families were bound by generations of helping one another farm and, more recently, survive the economic collapse of the past several decades.

  No one would poison a puppy, she told Beth gently. Beth thought otherwise. The vet had told her that Cummins’s insides had frozen up, she said, crystallized, as if he’d drunk antifreeze. The vet couldn’t rule out cancer, either, but Beth suspected foul play. She also thought she knew where the poison had come from: she’d seen the dog drinking from a puddle of water left on the roadside after a truck came through to spray down dust earlier that summer. Wondering what the liquid was, she’d tried to follow with a glass Mason jar, but the driver stopped. Screeching his air brake on the steep dirt hill, he yelled at her to back away.

  Later, Beth and Stacey would mark this conversation about Cummins’s death as the beginning of solving a mystery. But at the time, Stacey was sweaty and distracted. Paige stood by, crunching the sugar at the bottom of her cup. Stacey hugged Beth and watched her continue down the hill with John toward the field of neon. She wanted to get back to the trailer to check on Harley. She dreaded telling him the news.

  Harley loved Cummins, and he was so sick. Over the past year and a half, his stomach had churned with an undiagnosed illness. He’d missed most of seventh grade sitting at home in a recliner watching his dog, Hunter, play with Cummins on the living room floor. Harley had gone from being a shy and handsome basketball player who shambled easily through life to a listless stick figure. At six foot one, he was 127 pounds. A few days earlier, when Harley weighed his goat, Boots, for competition at the fair, she’d weighed nearly the same as her master.

  Stacey hoped that this year’s 4-H competition would lift his spirits. She and Harley had ambitions for Boots. Instead of being skittish, as most goats are, Boots was friendly. Harley’d spent every day with her since he was home, which may have been why the brown and white Boer goat enjoyed people. When Harley went up to the Haneys’ ramshackle barn to feed her, Boots slung her hooves over the wooden pen to lick his face.

  With Boots, Harley had a chance at winning a large prize, maybe Grand Champion Showmanship, Stacey thought. She loved the fair and spent most of the year preparing for it, phoning in to goat auctions through the winter and trying to make sure she got her kids the best goats and pigs she could for $150 to $200, which wasn’t a lot. Other people spent $600, and she’d heard of a family that paid $5,000 for a pig they hoped would win Grand Champion.

  “Even if I could spend five thousand dollars on a pig, I wouldn’t,” she said. It was flashy and wrong, and went against the spirit of the 212-year-old fair, which had helped to pattern their family’s lives for three generations. Her father, Larry Hillberry, whom everyone called Pappy, grew up poor on a small dairy farm nearby. He’d attended but didn’t show animals. “We couldn’t afford to. We ate them all,” he told his grandchildren. Pappy was twenty when he went to work in the local steel mill and then left for Vietnam, returning two years later with feet too riddled with warts from wet combat boots to stand at the steel mill’s assembly line. Forced by the condition of his feet to take a few months away from the mill, he came courting at the fair. He played bingo, winning a set of blue-trimmed Corningware dishes for his soon-to-be bride, Linda. A year and a half later, on November 18, 1969, Stacey was born.

  By the time Stacey and Shelly, a whip-smart hellion who came along two years later, were old enough to participate in 4-H, the steel mill where Pappy worked was shuttered. With Pappy out of work, the family scraped by. He took every odd job he could find, chopping wood and putting up hay, and Linda, along with a generation of Amity women, left the house to work as a housekeeper, but it still cost too much to let the girls show animals.

  Stacey was thirteen when she went to work. She mucked stalls and sold ice cream at the family end of the bar in the Amity Tavern. As soon as she co
uld drive, she got a job as a seamstress in a men’s store in the Washington Mall. At seventeen, Stacey graduated from high school and left home for good on a full scholarship to beauty school. It didn’t hurt that she was striking, with large blue eyes below a thicket of black lashes. At nineteen, she was married and cutting hair at Someplace Else Salon, where her elderly clients encouraged her to go back to school and join the throngs of young women entering the health care industry. This wasn’t just Stacey’s personal narrative; this was the story of the region. With steel gone and coal on its way out, communities were turning to “meds and eds,” hospitals and universities, now the largest employers. As a nurse, Stacey, in scrubs, would have a demanding but stable place in the sterile halls of a postindustrial landscape.

  With two small kids, Stacey preferred cutting hair to the midnight shifts, but steady work as a nurse allowed her to give Harley and Paige the middle-class trappings her parents couldn’t afford, the fair first among them. Paige and Harley’d been showing at the fair since they could walk. At five, Harley won first place with his eggs. As the kids grew, their full involvement in country activities also marked a return to Stacey’s vision of her family’s history. She wanted farming to be once again a way of life rather than the expensive hobby it had become.

  As the goat show began, Stacey stood by the ring’s steel railing and waited for Harley’s number to be called. She scanned the crowd. In front of the silver bleachers, filled with the usual shaggy-haired ag folk in Carhartt overalls and trucker hats, she spied a small group of clean-cut outsiders wearing blue polo shirts that read RANGE RESOURCES. They sat close to the ring in red plastic chairs. Stacey knew who they were: gas executives had recently arrived in the region with the shale gas boom.