Amity and Prosperity_One Family and the Fracturing of America

by Eliza Griswold

  For work, Harley was running the lawn care business he’d taken over from Cousin Mike. He’d renamed it Harley’s Lawn and Tree Service, LLC. The work was physically challenging and he was feeling up to it. He’d even gotten insurance to do high tree work, which involved dangling from a trunk with a live chainsaw. That was his favorite part; the rest bored him a bit, and the money was terrible, since he had to pay two young boys he’d hired as summer helpers before he paid himself.

  He’d like to do something else, but what? Getting a job with FedEx or UPS would be ideal, since those jobs came with benefits, but they were nearly impossible to procure. Coal miners made a great living, but mining jobs were even harder to get. Other than yard work, that left little else but installing gas pipeline or working in the gas fields, which he didn’t want to do. He’d tired of hearing people say, “You should just go get a job with the gas wells!” and “Oh, the gas wells are paying pretty good.” It was annoying but it wasn’t their fault, he said. “Yeah, a lot of the kids I know will end up with the gas wells. It’s not that they want to, it’s just what’s going to end up happening.” They were the only jobs. Harley didn’t talk much to his handful of friends about the lawsuit. “About all my friends will say, ‘That’s still going on?’ I say, ‘Yeah, we’re still dealing with it every day.’”

  Harley turned most to his girlfriend, Ciarra. She was from Washington, and her family was better-off, solidly middle-class. She’d known Harley since middle school, but not well. “I never really talked to Harley in middle school,” she said. “I just knew him as the sick kid in school and he was never there.” In high school, they’d friended each other on Snapchat and now they were inseparable—at least until Ciarra went to college at the University of Pittsburgh that fall to study international business. Harley wasn’t pleased about her leaving. “One of the hardest parts is his trust issues,” Ciarra told me. “He doesn’t want to go anywhere and he thinks that things are being hidden from him.”

  For Harley, now that he’d graduated, whatever anyone wanted to say about his life, they could keep to themselves. This included his pot-smoking. “Everyone smokes weed,” he told me, irritated that I still asked. “Even country songs talk about smoking weed.”

  Although Stacey didn’t like Harley’s smoking marijuana, she’d seen far worse at the hospital and elsewhere in Washington County. A few months after Harley graduated, during the 2015 fair, eighteen people in Washington County overdosed on opioids and three died. Stacey wasn’t sure of the cause of the crisis; likely there wasn’t just one. She kept hearing different things: doctors were writing scripts too easily; Washington was so near major highways that it was a convenient place for dealers; out-of-town oil and gas workers either brought in drugs themselves or created a market for dealers.

  Drug-related deaths in Pennsylvania spiked by 23 percent, with some of the highest rates occurring in Washington County. Inmates from Washington County Jail and from the federal prison inflicted horrible pain upon their bodies in order to get medication. They’d taken to swallowing things and inserting objects into every possible orifice. Toothbrushes, hunks of mattress, and whole apples—the hospital had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars fishing them out of esophagi, stomachs, and rectums. But the prisoners kept hurting themselves, hoping for fentanyl, despite orders to doctors not to give it. Stacey had learned to be tough with addicts; she wasn’t going to be part of the problem of too-easy access to medication.

  “These are God’s ways of telling me, Stacey, you’ve had enough,” she told me. Through with emergency nursing, she learned there was an administrative position opening for which she might be qualified. As a quality assurance nurse analyst, she’d serve as a kind of ombudsman, making sure patients received a high standard of care. Becoming a watchdog appealed to her.

  “This is a really big promotion, but you know what? I’ve put in twenty years,” she said. She got it. The job’s hours ran from 7:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., Monday to Friday. Working forty hours, she’d be making as much as she did as a nurse working forty-five to sixty hours.

  One day before she left the ward for good, Stacey received a text message from Linda. Cousin Davy Hull was going to be on TV again. Recently paroled after serving seven years of his twelve-year sentence, he was appearing on Dr. Phil. Still on probation and unable to leave Kentucky, Hull joined the show by satellite. Stacey switched on the TV and stood among her fellow nurses to watch. The KKK leader’s twenty-year-old daughter, Peyton, had recently had a baby with an African American man, and Hull refused to acknowledge the child or the fact that he was a baby: “One drop of nonwhite blood, it ceases to be human,” he said.

  Peyton told Dr. Phil that growing up, she hadn’t really understood who her father was. “All I knew of the cross burnings was I just thought it was pretty, you know, like a big candle,” she said.

  Then Hull preached to Dr. Phil about the biblical sanctity of the Aryan race and furnished pictures of himself brandishing a pistol in front of a Confederate flag. Stacey and her colleagues couldn’t believe he was allowed to say some of those things on TV.

  By the summer of 2016, Trump fever was raging through Washington County. It bred strong feelings on both sides. One local high school teacher found himself under fire from parents for asking students wearing Trump gear to leave his classroom. But such opposition to the Make America Great Again moment was rare. Given its history of energy extraction, Washington was one of the places where Trump’s promises of reviving coal and bolstering the natural gas industry against attack by federal regulators were particularly resonant.

  David Wayne Hull also supported Trump. Hull, like Stacey, had grown up amid the industrial collapse of the eighties. “I would’ve pulled out two of my back teeth to get a mill job,” he told me over the phone. But there was no such job to be had. This was why he said he stood behind Donald Trump, attending rallies to drum up votes. “He wants to give white men jobs and we want to work,” he told me. Still, Hull preferred Putin to Trump, calling him “a man’s man—he rides black bears for God’s sake, swims in ice water. If he spoke English I could hang out with him.”

  In Amity, Trump’s antipathy toward the EPA was popular, along with his promise to cut the federal agency’s budget by $2.6 billion. Beth Voyles welcomed Trump’s message. Given her feeling that the federal agency had abandoned them, she cheered the gutting of the EPA. She was less sure about his silence on other protections for the environment, and emailed the Trump campaign numerous times to ask for specific positions on air and water, but no one responded. She decided to vote for him anyway, as did John Voyles. That fall would mark the first time in his life that he’d voted. Later, she came to regret her decision. “Unfortunately I did bite as always with not good choices,” she told me.

  Stacey didn’t buy the Trump craze from the start. Although she’d watched federal regulation fail her family, that didn’t mean she believed in obliterating the EPA. She was even more skeptical about his belief that fracking could save Appalachia. “I think probably no other business has been affected by regulation more than your business,” he told oil and gas employees. “Federal regulations remain a major restriction to shale production.” When she heard his empty messaging—“The shale energy revolution will unleash massive wealth” in America—she scoffed. He was just one more politician pandering to those with the deepest pockets.

  But Stacey was no fan of Hillary Clinton’s either. Stacey thought she was corrupt, and when it came to fracking, she was just as bad as Trump, if not as vocal. So Stacey decided that come November, she’d vote for the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein. Stein was farther to the left than anyone Stacey had voted for in her life, but one of Stein’s slogans was “Protect Mother Earth,” and Stacey decided she’d support her for that saying alone. She would be one of 16 people out of 1,861 voters in Amity’s township of Amwell to vote for Stein. Trump carried 1,336.

  33 | FAIR 2016

  Outside the goat barn, Harley glanced around uneasily as
he waited for Paige to clip Cashew onto a lead. “Coming to the fair drives me crazy now,” he told me. We were standing a few hundred yards uphill from Cowley’s lemonade stand. The scent of funnel cake was mixed with diesel. At twenty, he’d finally aged out of competition, and he was glad of it. His anxiety spiked in social situations, and none more so than the Washington County Fair. On this August evening, among pithy T-shirts like HILLARY FOR PRISON, FARM-RAISED, and LIFE IS BETTER IN THE COUNTRY, all around him there were royal-blue and white baseball hats, shirts, and banners emblazoned with the Range Resources logo. Even the mini water bottles that a girl was handing out read “Range Resources,” and that struck Harley as ironic: Range handing out clean drinking water.

  “I don’t even want to go walk around. I feel like everyone is looking at me, judging me,” he said. “Everyone has something to say.” But no one said anything. He no longer felt like part of the community he was raised in, and that was hardest for Stacey, since a sense of belonging was one of the few advantages she’d thought she could give her kids. For Harley, however, it wasn’t all bad to be able to see beneath the surface of things. “It matures you faster,” he said.

  “Grow up and realize what’s going on in the real world. The whole Range Resources deal. It pretty much ran my life, having to move so many times. We don’t talk to Mr. Yeager now, period. I saw him at a dinner one time and I didn’t even like being at the same church dinner.”

  Stacey still remembered the night at Rinky Dinks a few years back when Toby Rice, the CEO of Rice Energy, talked to her about “a black mark” hanging over Harley. Stacey still felt it. “We didn’t do anything wrong, but we feel like nobody likes us because we’re not on the same bandwagon with everyone else,” she said. “It’s worse at the fair because so many fair people are gas well people.” She was right. The gas money had helped save many small farms, paying for much-needed equipment and barns like the one Stacey herself had wanted. She was also correct that the black mark still hung heavily over the family, perhaps even more so with the lawsuit dragging on and, with it, their claims of sickness. Over the past five years, Rice’s attitude about Stacey and the kids had changed as well. Standing in the arena’s sawdust, bidding on animals, Rice now doubted that Harley had been poisoned by gas production. He thought that Stacey was out for a payday. “Everyone who complains isn’t making any money,” he told me. It was always the small landowners who had trouble, like Stacey, never the larger ones, like Ray Day. It all boiled down to dollars. Soon Rice would sell his company to a competitor, EQT, for a reported $6.7 billion.

  A Rice Energy ice cream truck sat in a large barn nearby. Shows of corporate largesse were everywhere, and over the past decade, Range had raised $1 million for the fair. “It’s kind of the Super Bowl for them, right?” Mike Mackin, the soft-spoken Range spokesman, asked me later. It wasn’t just good PR, he went on. “We’re talking about the future of this region and the future potentially of our workforce,” he said. A new generation of jobs would go a long way here, and he was especially proud that amid the recent downturn in the price of natural gas, accompanied by a precipitous drop in drilling activity and revenue, Range hadn’t cut back on its presence at the fair or corporate giving. Beyond the fair, Range Resources had helped to raise $10 million for the communities where it operated. That money, donated through events like golf tournaments, clay shoots, and chili cook-offs, sustained the United Way of Washington County, supporting, in turn, CASA for Kids, Inc., which helped abused children; Domestic Violence Services for Southwestern Pennsylvania; the Washington Health Systems Children’s Therapy Center; and the Greater Washington County Food Bank. Range Resources was the largest donor to hunger-related causes in the county. Since 2011, the company had also paid more than $3 million in impact fees to Amity’s township and spent nearly $3.3 million on roads and infrastructure there. No matter what the long-term burden of abandoned wells and other public costs would prove to be, these were sizable contributions; one township supervisor, Wayne Montgomery, called them “a godsend.”

  To Harley, all of the above was blood money. “I hate them for what they did,” he said. Range’s seeming support for farming and agriculture was nothing but hypocrisy. Look what they’d done to their animals. Lately, he’d been constantly scolding Paige about how little care she took of her goats and pigs. Paige was staying overnight in her grandparents’ camper for the week on her own for the first time, managing Cashew and a pig named Ohmar. With Paige alone at the fair, Harley grew fearful for her. The past five years had bonded them closely in good ways and bad. Harley was crazily overprotective, wanting to keep her safe from the world that had hurt him so. Stacey had had enough of his temper, which was often directed at her shortcomings, especially when they’d been at the fair, where farm families were put under the microscope—everyone could see who had ribbons and bows, rhinestone-studded cowboy boots and belts, who was doing a better job at raising kids country.

  “You know, Har, I’m the only single mom up there,” she said. “After everything we’ve gone through, I think I’ve done pretty well.”

  * * *

  Chris and Stacey were still engaged and still putting off the wedding. Stacey felt she couldn’t handle the expense, or the emotions, in the midst of the ongoing suit. Waiting was hard for Chris. He wanted their life together to officially start, and frankly it felt weird to him that he wanted to get married while Stacey didn’t. They’d been engaged so long now. Chris was proving to be as stalwart as he was quiet. He was coming that evening to the fair with Linda and Pappy to watch Paige and Cashew walk in the goat sale. When they arrived, Linda called Stacey, who was standing outside the goat barn with Harley and Paige, a few steps from the lemonade stand. As she took the call, Stacey waved at Beth Voyles, who was coming down the hill toward the exact same spot where, six years earlier, she’d told Stacey that Cummins was dead. Beth was wheezing fiercely. She’d been diagnosed with asthma, as had her dog Diesel. He’d had an allergic reaction to the albuterol used to treat asthma and died. Although it was the medication rather than the asthma that killed Diesel, Beth blamed Range for the underlying cause. Dogs didn’t get asthma. Now she was also having trouble with her heart.

  “I have to have a heart catheterization,” she told Stacey. “There’s some kind of bundle in my heart.”

  “Oh, that’s okay,” Stacey reassured her. “Lots of people have bundles. It’s just a block.”

  That afternoon one of the defendants in Haney v. Range had called to talk about settlement. Five, in all, had initiated discussions, but the figures they’d offered were low, so talks had gone nowhere. And settlement, in general, was like a game of chicken: no one wanted to flinch first. These conversations were also highly confidential. John had admonished Stacey and Beth to talk to no one outside their families about settlement. If it got out that defendants were willing to offer money, it would make them look guilty. That’s why if they ended up going to trial, settlement talks couldn’t be used in court: they were potentially prejudicial to the defendants, and their disclosure could also harm the plaintiffs if it shut down their prospect of settlement.

  Over the past four years, Haney v. Range, which began with seventeen defendants, including two water-testing labs and two individuals, had passed through the hands of three judges. In the endless shuffling the case seemed doomed to undergo, it would soon circle back to the judge who’d first heard it. From the start, several defendants had attempted to get out of the suit by arguing that in Pennsylvania, under the terms of strict liability, they bore no responsibility to Stacey, Beth, Buzz, or their families. This was the argument Halliburton and others had advanced during preliminary objections.

  In 2012, that argument hadn’t won over the first judge to hear it, Debbie O’Dell Seneca. She’d found that even if the families were not the intended endusers of their products, the companies did bear a responsibility to them. In 2016, the third judge assigned to the case, William Nalitz, reversed O’Dell Seneca’s earlier decision. He all
owed several defendants out of the case—including a chemical manufacturer and one of the two testing laboratories. The other testing laboratory had succeeded in getting out of the case too, but on different grounds. The suit alleged that the company, Test America, had committed conspiracy and fraud by allowing Range to alter test results through its computer system. To support this claim, Kendra argued that in Test America’s user manual, there was a section called “Hiding Results” that walked a user through how to do exactly that. This, along with the fact that Range was paying Test America’s legal bills under an indemnity clause, Kendra argued, was enough to demonstrate that Test America had committed both fraud and conspiracy. But Judge Nalitz found otherwise, ruling that neither of these charges applied, so Test America was soon out of the case as well. So were the two engineers included in the original complaint—Scott Rusmisel, who’d designed most of the site, and Carla Suszkowski. Both had been released from the case on the grounds that their respective employers bore responsibility for any possible misdeeds.