The End of Country

by Seamus McGraw

  Other times, the farmers would make their way to their mailboxes and find an official-looking come-on. Those could be deadly, because buried in the fine print there were sometimes poison pills, clauses written in impenetrable legalese that, while they looked like the same leases that other, more reputable land agents were offering, actually stripped the farmer of his ownership of his own buried minerals, gas included.

  My mother kept me informed of each new offer. She had promised me that she’d sit tight and give me time to finish my research. But every time she got a visit or a telephone solicitation or an impressive envelope, she’d call me and in her “important” voice, a voice rife with the clipped cadences of a community theater diva, would either recite the details of her latest encounter or read aloud the latest proposal she had found in the mailbox, right down to the salutation at the top of the letter: “Mrs. Barbara McGraw … Dear Mrs. McGraw …” At first it was amusing, sort of like listening to Dame Judi Dench read the phone book. But as time went on, each call took on a little more urgency. Little by little, the heat was being turned up on my mother and her neighbors. “As you know,” she would read, “many of your neighbors are already taking advantage of this opportunity …” Honey-toned though these collective pitches might have been, they were still a hard sell. At that moment, the land agents claimed, the gas companies were eager to stake their claims, to snatch up as much land as possible, and they were in a generous mood. Once they had a big enough stake (as if such a thing were possible), well, who knows, they might not be so generous. What’s more, once the exploration started in earnest, the gas companies would have a better idea of which properties were the most promising and which they could afford to ignore. Any landowners who waited were, they suggested without coming right out and saying so, shooting craps with their future. “You need to make a decision and you need to make it now” was the not-so-subtle subtext.

  That is not the kind of pressure my mother responds well to. But rather than resist it herself, she was trying, frantically, to push the urgency off onto me.

  I counted myself lucky that I had the luxury of distance. I could afford to be deliberate as I sat in my home, a prow-front cedar house my wife and I had built a decade earlier on several acres in a rocky canyon ninety miles to the east of my mother’s farm, a place that straddled two worlds, where I could keep one foot in the country and still be close enough to New York City to get there in an hour and a half if I needed to. My poor wife, unfortunately, was not nearly as enamored of the place as I was. She had been, at first, seeing it as a retreat from the hectic urban life we had been leading. But that was before she realized that it would bring out a side of me I had carefully concealed when we lived in the metropolitan area. Suddenly, a guy who could with reasonable competence discuss current events, world history, politics, and the arts—the entire breadth of the Sunday New York Times—and who was also a pretty decent cook had turned into a skinny, balding version of Jeremiah Johnson. Just how far I had fallen in her eyes became clear one autumn afternoon when I heard that my youngest daughter, Seneca, had answered a telephone call while I was busy (let me put this as delicately as I can) field dressing a deer in front of the garage. Seneca had politely informed the caller that I was indisposed, just as she had often been instructed. My wife’s pride in my daughter’s phone manners turned to utter horror when Seneca explained in graphic and remarkably precise detail exactly how I was indisposed. There was no mistaking the look on Karen’s face when she told me about the phone call. It was the kind of look people get with they’re struck down with a migraine, only in this case, it was a throbbing “Who-is-this-lunatic-in-my-driveway-with-a-musket-and-a-buck-knife?” headache. I know that headache still crops up from time to time, usually at the tail end of hunting season, though most of the time she manages to hide it. I take that as a testament of a love far greater than I deserve.

  All in all, my privileged perch on the cusp of the urban and the rural not only allowed me to indulge those rougher aspects of my personality, but it meant I could monitor the developments around my mother’s home on Ellsworth Hill through a distant and academic prism. The dramas of the modern-day Marcellus were still as far removed from my day-to-day life as the histories of it that I had been collecting.

  And yet this wasn’t a distant problem, and it wasn’t hypothetical. By the time the woman with the nose ring pulled into my mother’s driveway in the autumn of 2007, the advance guard of the natural gas industry had already been in these hills for two years. They had staked their claim in the rocky ground just outside the nearby village of Dimock, less than five miles from my mother’s house, and their presence had already meant significant changes for the people there.

  I had learned from poring over the records and reports about the Marcellus that the Cabot Oil and Gas Corporation of Houston, Texas, one of the biggest players in the natural gas industry, had been amassing a vast tract of land in Dimock one parcel at a time, a hundred acres here, three hundred there, an odd-shaped two- or three- or four-acre lot between them—most of it at bargain prices—and a year earlier had even begun drilling. They were sinking vertical wells, straight shafts bored down a mile or so into the shale to test the waters. Cabot had been in such a hurry to get started that the company hadn’t done a lot of preliminary work, and so these exploratory wells were their best barometer of how good the land they had leased was likely to be. Initial reports circulated informally among the drillers indicated that those early wells had produced respectable amounts of gas, hundreds of thousands of cubic feet a day, and that each new one was going better than the last. Cabot wasn’t confirming that; the company liked to keep such things close to the vest. But the growing number of shiny new gas company pickups was, as they say in the business world, a reliable leading indicator. Even in those earliest days, what little information there was about what was going on in Dimock was not all good. There had been no serious problems, no blowouts, no explosions. But already there had been a smattering of newspaper reports about minor issues, inconveniences really: water wells that had started fizzing soon after the drilling began, or tap water that looked cloudy or smelled odd. There were other complaints as well, mostly about noise, or wear and tear on the roads.

  I needed to find out what was really happening, what the place looked like now, and what all this creeping industrialization was doing to the old way of life up there, so I decided to do what any journalist would do. I took a ride up there myself.

  It’s such a classic reporter’s maneuver that it’s almost a cliché, but the first place I decided to stop was a local luncheonette-slash-service-station at the crossroads in Dimock. I knew the place. Over the years I had stopped there from time to time to fill up my tank and, over my own reservations, choke back a cup of the watery brew that passes for coffee in this corner of Pennsylvania. For most of my adult life, the place had usually been just about empty when I’d shown up. Maybe one or two local men would be sitting at the counter, sipping coffee and talking livestock, their backs turned to the pegboard wall and shelves filled with unsold bottles of transmission fluid and power steering fluid and bungee cords. There’d hardly ever be anyone in the so-called dining room, a bleak white expanse filled with a half dozen or so burnt-umber plastic benches bolted to faux wood tables.

  But this time it was different. Though it was not quite noon, the place was jumping, and the cash register was beeping like a Geiger counter. I exchanged a brief greeting with the harried young woman behind the register. The poor woman barely had time to breathe. I felt guilty about just ordering a coffee. “Always like this?” I asked, trying again to spark a conversation.

  “These days,” she replied with a weary smile.

  “It’s all the gas?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Everybody around here happy about that?” I asked.

  “I am,” the owner barked from behind the griddle, not looking up from his work. “It’s doing a lot of good here.”

  It wasn’t easy t
o sustain a conversation with the man. It wasn’t that he was reluctant to talk; he wasn’t, especially not after I dropped a few new names and a few other hints that, as far as he was concerned, proved my bona fides as a local in exile. It’s just that he was busy. But he tried. Gamely.

  Between plating tuna melt sandwiches and burgers slathered with American cheese, he allowed that there were a handful of people in the area who were not as enthusiastic about the developments in Dimock as he was. There were those who warned that the constant influx of trucks would alter forever the rhythms of the place, that there were environmental dangers that no one was calculating, that the wealth that everybody was talking about would not be evenly distributed. They worried that the gas companies would ship most of the profits out of state and then, sooner or later, head out themselves. But there were few of those voices, and the guy hunched over the grill wasn’t worried about any of that. He was doing well, and he wasn’t the only one, he told me. All the local service stations, the restaurants, even the few motels in the area were getting a lot of business. And that wasn’t even taking into account all the folks who had signed leases with the gas companies.

  I asked him for some specific names, and he rattled off a few people in the neighborhood; some I knew, some I knew slightly, and some I knew not at all. Among them were those who, in his estimation, were well on their way to wealth, folks like Cleo Teel. The first well up there had been drilled on Cleo’s place. Another was drilled on the land belonging to the widow Rosemarie Greenwood down the road.

  And what about the opponents?

  There was, he said, one woman—he couldn’t remember her name, she was a newcomer, a retired teacher who didn’t seem too happy with the developments around there and hadn’t made a secret of it. Some of the locals had even wondered publicly whether she might be some kind of radical. And then of course there was Ken Ely, who was sitting on some of the most promising land that Cabot had leased. He didn’t get terribly specific about Ken’s reservations. I still couldn’t see the man’s face, but I could hear the amused, affectionate aggravation in his voice when he said the name. The girl behind the register had the same reaction to the name, letting out a little chortle, as if her boss had just mentioned a crazy but beloved uncle. I couldn’t help but smile myself. “Ken sort of sees things his own way,” the man said, as if that was all the explanation I needed.

  In a way, it was. I had already heard from a neighbor of my mother’s that the drillers were working on Ken Ely’s place, and I had been more than a little pleased by the notion that the sometimes cantankerous self-described hermit and occasional quarryman whose service station had been down the road from my mother’s house, the guy who in his pump jockey days had been far more generous to me and to others than he could afford to be, might be sitting on a gold mine. In fact, I had been hoping to catch up with Ken when I made the trip up to Dimock. And now I had some more names to add to my list. Rosemarie Greenwood and Cleo Teel—I hadn’t known either of them when I was growing up; it was time to get acquainted. But most of all, I wanted to meet that unhappy teacher. From what little I had been able to divine about her, she struck me as the kind of fire-eating liberal who might provide an interesting afternoon’s worth of conversation.

  I didn’t really know what I’d gain by talking to them. I figured it would be helpful just to find out about their experience with the gas, and if nothing else, I hoped maybe I could collect a few amusing anecdotes that I could string into a story to sell to a magazine. I reached into the pocket of my jeans and fished out a couple of crumpled singles to pay for my coffee. I had better sell a story, and soon, I thought. My cash reserves were running perilously low, low enough that when she handed me back a few pieces of silver in change, I pocketed them instead of leaving them for a tip. I tried not to make eye contact as I did it, and then I stepped outside and climbed behind the wheel of my car just as a large tanker truck lumbered past me, heading down the rutted back roads toward the hollows where Ken and Rosemarie and Cleo and that woman lived. I followed it.

  THAT TEACHER’S NAME, I would soon discover, was Victoria Switzer, and she seemed like the last person you’d expect to find in the rusted old house trailer in Dimock where I met her for the first time. There she was, all decked out in a beige woolen tunic, muted and sophisticated over dark slacks. She had been expecting me, and in a way, I had been expecting her, too, because from the minute I had first telephoned her, introducing myself as both a neighbor from right across the county line and as a writer, and heard her voice, sharp but charming in a Katharine Hepburn sort of way, effervescent and self-assured, the voice of a woman who’s used to speaking to people who, in her mind, are not nearly as well informed as she, I had developed a distinct mental image of her. The Victoria I imagined was lean and angular, with sharp features and sharper eyes, and there would be, I had no doubt, more than a hint of judgment in those eyes.

  I pulled off the road and into her driveway late on a Sunday morning, down a rutted gravel track to what would someday be the yard of her seven and a half acres of paradise, though now it was little more than a giant pothole brimful of construction debris. A German shepherd in a rusted chain-link kennel eyed me cautiously as I parked and stepped over cinder blocks and discarded rebar and empty cement bags, picking my way to the front door of the trailer. I knocked—politely, I thought, but apparently it was hard enough to make the whole trailer boom like a steel drum—and an instant later, after some tugging from the other side, the jalousied door flew open, and there she was.

  She extended a delicate hand, a doyenne in the backwoods. Even with construction debris lapping the very doorsill of her trailer, she oozed Kate Hepburn urbanity from the top of her auburn hair, scented with top-shelf hair care products, to the toeless tips of her fashionable shoes. She was almost exactly as I had pictured her. But there was one thing I had gotten wrong. Her eyes. They were sharp, all right, but there was no judgment in them. Wariness, perhaps, and maybe a little weariness, but there was also something warm and welcoming in them, mixed with the kind of curiosity that you find in people who take great pride in their willingness to learn new things and to meet new people. She almost apologized for the way she was dressed, as if she knew what I was thinking. “We have a luncheon to go to later,” she explained as she extended her hand.

  The way she anticipated my judgment touched me. And I thought for a moment that I caught something familiar in it, something that maybe we had in common. Call it the outsider’s need to belong. Call it the faith of the convert. Call it whatever you like. Maybe it was presumptuous of me, but I thought I sensed something in her that was in me, too, just as it had been in my mother. There was a quiet, fierce rebellion against the common idea that just because Victoria wasn’t born here, just because she hadn’t been stranded here by some accident of fate, she didn’t belong. This small patch of woods and rocks along the banks of a narrow mountain brook meant as much to her as to anyone, maybe more, because she had chosen to be here. She, not fate, had chosen it. And so had her husband, Jim, and now, out of all that construction debris, they were raising what was literally their dream home that would tie them in cedar and concrete to this land for the rest of their lives.

  She invited me inside the trailer and poured me a cup of coffee—strong and dark, an unusual offering in these parts. She seemed pleased, and maybe relieved, when I waved off her offer of milk, dumped a couple of packages of less than refined sugar into the thick black liquid, downed a quarter of the mug in one hot gulp, and then let out an involuntary sigh of caffeinated contentment.

  We didn’t make much in the way of small talk. Apparently my near silent praise of her coffee was enough. In fact, almost immediately, and without any real prodding from me, Victoria got down to business, launching into the story of her life and the land, speaking in deeply personal tones, the way you speak when either you’re absolutely certain that you’re speaking to someone who understands, or you really don’t give a damn whether they do or not.
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  All her life, Victoria told me, she had pined for a house like the one they were building, rustic and sturdy but open and modern, with a great room and a prow filled with windows to let in the light that would filter through the trees on some remote plot of land. She was in her fifties and had never had a place of her own until now. She and her first husband had always rented, and in the twenty years since they had been divorced, Victoria had been far too busy with the demands of her students and her daughter to spend much time on her own dreams. Then she met Jim. Like her, he was divorced with a now grown child, and he, too, was a teacher. Like Victoria, he hailed from a part of West Virginia that was very much like her hometown of Falls, at the southern end of Wyoming County, not far from Wilkes-Barre, a place that was neither fully country nor fully city, and like her, he was drawn to both. He was a craftsman, a guy who could look at a piece of wood with an artist’s eye, imagine what it could become, and then coax it into becoming whatever he needed it to be.