The End of Country

by Seamus McGraw

  She had been jarred out of her trailer early one morning by the monstrous shriek of hard steel against soft wood, the lascivious grunting of diesel engines, and the anguished crack of decades-old trees snapped out of the ground like weeds, the sound one might imagine of bones breaking. It was coming from the woods just beyond the standing grove of hemlocks above her house. She and her dog headed up to investigate. She was stunned by what she saw. A massive piece of equipment with a whirring blade the size of a merry-go-round had leveled everything in sight, while just above the blades, mantislike claws were lifting thirty-foot timbers like pickup sticks and hurling them into a pile at the edge of the property. She stood across the broken stone wall that separated the still-wooded side of the hill, dumbstruck by the furious efficiency of the deforestation process. A few minutes later, one of the local men Cabot had hired for the job walked up to her and, over the howl of the machinery and plaintive shriek of fresh-fallen timber protesting against its destruction, tried to engage her in small talk, as if nothing really important was going on.

  As she looked into his face, trying to conceal her confusion and her anger, she wished she had her camera. Right from the beginning, Victoria had promised herself that she would document the changes that were coming daily to her new neighborhood, and she wasn’t just sticking her photographs in an album, either. She was circulating them among a small group of neighbors who, like her, were becoming increasingly unnerved by all the industrialized chaos around them. They had already started to meet informally, though at their first gatherings they had spent most of their time griping about how little they had been paid for their land, about $25 an acre in most cases, while those who were signing on now were getting five and six times as much. But as the operation ramped up, they realized how much larger the problem was than just a relative profit margin. As the members of the group became more and more acutely aware of how disruptive this whole process really was, they took it upon themselves to map out a response, in case something went seriously wrong. If that happened, Victoria’s pictures might come in handy. But in her haste to make it to the top of the hill that day, Victoria had left her camera behind. She would have loved to take a picture of the cheerful, friendly face of the Cabot contractor juxtaposed against the industrial-strength deforestation that was going on right over his shoulder. If only there was a way that Victoria could photograph her own growing rage, her anger over the stick-by-stone dissection of her precious sanctuary, and her own fear over what might come next, she thought.

  They were all but finished at that site and ready to move on, but Victoria knew that soon enough she’d get another chance to get her picture, and sure enough, a few days later and a few fallow farms down the road, while the contractors were chomping away at the woods where yet another drill pad was planned, Victoria got a second chance. This time, she did have her camera. She positioned herself carefully to make sure she got the proper angle, finding a location in a field across the road from the work site where she could get a clear shot. She was dozens of yards away—much farther away than she had been the last time during her pleasant chat with the Cabot man—and she wasn’t even on the same piece of property where Cabot was cutting. But as she panned her camera across the scene and stopped momentarily on one of the contractors, he turned his head and glowered at her.

  She snapped a few shots and put her camera away. A couple of days later, she got a call from the neighbor on whose land she had been standing. The neighbor told her that the Cabot man had given her a message for Victoria: “Tell her she could get hurt.” The comment might have been a genuine expression of concern. But Victoria had seen enough episodes of The Sopranos to wonder whether that was really a veiled threat, a warning not to become too nosy. Her neighbor wondered the same thing.

  Victoria was not the only one in the neighborhood who was starting to have concerns. Right across the stone hedge at the back of her property, her neighbor and sometime cultural adversary, Ken Ely, was having some second thoughts of his own, and not just because Cabot had been mowing down his trees. In fact, Ken was fast running out of patience. So was Emmagene, and so was Crybaby. It had all come to a head one morning while Cabot was getting ready to frack the first of what would ultimately be six wells on Ken’s land. Three times that morning, Ken had warned the young truck driver who was hauling water from the Susquehanna River up the serpentine mud track that led to the drill site at the top of Ken’s hill: Leave the damned wall alone. And three times the truck driver had ignored him. The kid’s job was to get the water up the hill, and the only way he could possibly get enough traction was to dismantle Ken Ely’s stone walls and stick the big rocks under the truck’s back wheels. He’d done it on the first trip. By the time he made it back with his second load of water, the first set of rocks had been sucked down into the ooze, and so he did it again, and now that those rocks were lost in the mud, he was doing it a third time.

  It galled Ken. The stone wall was older than he was, even older than his father would have been, and Ken was intimately familiar with every single rock and stone in it. They had cut his skin, calloused his hands, and all but broken his back. For years, Ken had been fighting a never-ending battle against time and gravity to keep that ancient wall together—he had no idea how long it had stood there, or who had built it—straining his back to heave a heavy bluestone back into place whenever one fell. There was an art to building stone walls, and an art to maintaining them, the way each individual stone had to be precisely balanced and shimmed against the next in an intricate pattern, almost as if the stones were braided. One rock fallen or removed would in time lead to the fall of the others.

  The kid grabbed another stone, and Ken could feel his anger rising. He might have been a little more tolerant of the gear jammer’s dilemma if he hadn’t been up most of the night, kept awake by the constant rumble of one massive truck after another clattering up the hill past his cottage. It wasn’t just the noise that bothered him, though that was bad enough. Many of these drivers were just kids, farm boys imported from other parts of the state or from out of state. They didn’t know these roads. They probably didn’t even know the trucks all that well. It was only a matter of time before one of them flipped over, spilling God only knows what kind of contaminants they might be dragging up from the river onto his land, where they might seep into his fresh, clean, spring-fed pond. And he feared even more what might happen if one of the trucks carting the chemically enhanced used frack fluid overturned.

  For the life of him, he couldn’t understand why a big company like Cabot would stake the future of a $3 million well on a kid’s ability to handle a tank truck with as much finesse as he handled his ATV on the first day of hunting season.

  In a way, Ken felt a little sorry for the kid behind the wheel. In all likelihood, the kid was a lot like him at that age. He had no doubt been raised in a place a lot like this, and just as Ken had done when he was younger, the kid had probably latched onto the first opportunity for a steady paycheck that came his way.

  That sense had been one of the things that Ken had clung to as he tried to keep from losing his temper. But at last, his patience was wearing thin.

  And now, as he watched this kid steal yet another of his precious stones—for the third time—his impatience was about to erupt.

  “Don’t touch my stone!” he yelled one last time. And once again the kid ignored him.

  With Crybaby at his heels, Ken walked in the front door of his cottage. He put his spit bottle on the table and ambled over to his gun cabinet. He grabbed the .22 and threw a round in the chamber, then walked back out front and waited. And when he spotted a little gray squirrel scampering up a tree not far from the spot where the stone thief labored, Ken took careful aim and squeezed the trigger. He dropped the squirrel. The driver dropped his rock.

  “You’re shooting at me!” the kid squealed.

  “Naw,” Ken responded as a sudden, self-satisfied calm descended on him. “I was just barking a squirrel. But if you th
ought that, maybe you shouldn’t have been stealing my stone.”

  IT WASN’T MUCH OF A spill this time, probably not more than a few dozen gallons of diesel fuel from a truck on a field where Cabot had been drilling a new well. But it was disturbingly close to Victoria Switzer’s trailer, close enough that she could hear it when the driver shut down the engine and clambered, cursing, out of the cab, and in a heartbeat she was there, camera in hand, ready to record the trickle of oil turning into a small stream as it poured out of the bottom of the truck, so she could add it to the growing file of such mishaps—most of them so far thankfully small, and all of them so far correctable—that had occurred since Cabot began drilling in earnest.

  “You need to stay back,” the truck driver shouted over the roar of machinery as he waved her away with a gloved hand. Victoria could feel her anger rising. He may not actually have used the words “little lady,” but Victoria felt the condescending sting of them all the same.

  Victoria wasn’t trying to provoke anybody. But as she clicked away, she knew very well that she was doing just that. It was becoming fairly well known in the neighborhood that the Cabot workers were beginning to regard Victoria and her camera as a nuisance and maybe even as a bit of a threat. They couched their displeasure with her in the most benign terms, as if they were only interested in her well-being. She had been told before that it was for the locals’ own good that they maintain a safe distance—say, just outside camera range—from the drilling operation.

  Victoria had to admit that there was some merit to the company’s concern. Drilling, as she had painfully learned, could be a dirty and dangerous business. It wasn’t just the potential hazards posed by the fracking fluids; those, at least, were contained, and thanks in part to the alarms that Victoria had raised with the local office of the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), there was some scrutiny of the company’s handling of them. There were other dangers as well: the very real threat of getting run over by one of the heavy pieces of machinery or being permanently injured by a falling pipe wrench or bolt from the top of a rig. There was a reason the rig workers wore hard hats. Even those would offer little protection if one of those heavy iron pipes that were stacked up like thirty-foot-long toothpicks was to suddenly drop from its moorings.

  And as hazardous as drilling was in general, she couldn’t help but feel that it was particularly risky here in Dimock, a place so far off the beaten path it seemed as if no one but she and the few members of her informal vigilance society was watching. She wasn’t really wrong. After all, though there were more than a dozen wells drilled or being drilled, this was still technically an exploratory operation, and outside Dimock, few people were paying close attention. What talk there was about the Marcellus was still largely among the drillers themselves, and it had more to do with developing the technological prowess needed to extract the gas than with any safeguards that might be needed in case something went wrong. At the top of the agenda for Cabot was trying to figure out the best, most cost-effective way to unleash the power of the Marcellus, to bring all that clean-burning gas to a market that desperately needed it, and that meant there was a lot of experimenting going on.

  And now, as she studied the face of the Cabot man who was waving her and her camera away from this latest minor mishap, this small spill, she received that same icy glance that she had seen on the face of the man on other side of the road, and her anger started to bubble up.

  “I’m not some tourist from New Jersey!” she shouted. “I live here. Here, right in the middle of all this.”

  Her tone seemed to anger the already frustrated truck driver, and Victoria thought she saw him stiffen his back, as if he were about to try to chase her away. She braced herself for the confrontation, when suddenly a plume of dirt and gravel, kicked up by the churning wheels of a speeding ATV, cut right between the truck driver and Victoria.

  Only a few months earlier, before the drilling began, the sight of Ken Ely would have made Victoria’s heart sink. Back then, she would have dreaded the sight of him at such a moment, fearing that he would join in a tag-team attack on her tree-hugging meddling. But little by little, as they both became more frustrated over the unanticipated consequences of the drilling, their frosty relationship had started to thaw. A couple of times, when she caught sight of him in the distance while she was walking through the woods, she actually thought he might have smiled at her. And finally, on one of those walks, Ken and Crybaby approached Victoria. She had been slightly uneasy when he walked up to her, started in on some small talk, and then, almost casually, added, “I hear you’ve got a little group together.”

  “Yes,” Victoria replied cautiously.

  She wasn’t sure what to make of the remark, and she didn’t want to let on more than she had to. The grim reality was that there wasn’t that much to let on about. There was a group, yes, but it was small, only about seven members, a tiny sliver of the community. There were small landowners and some with larger tracts of land in the group. But most of the local landowners, folks like Cleo Teel and Rosemarie Greenwood, had little use for Victoria’s group. They were less concerned about the noise and the potential damage, and when they did have a problem with Cabot, they preferred to handle it themselves, one on one with the Cabot men.

  Victoria understood that. Those folks had a lot to gain from Cabot’s work, and they had no desire to antagonize the big gas company. There was always the possibility that if the boat got rocked too much, Cabot could find some reason to delay the royalty payments that they were counting on, and if squeaky wheels like Victoria made too much noise, who knows, Cabot might just pull out of the neighborhood altogether. As much as Victoria might wish that the drillers and their contractors and their equipment would just go away, she knew that was never going to happen. There was simply too much at stake.

  In fact, her group’s meetings hadn’t produced much. But since then, Victoria had pulled together a lot more information about what was going on, and she had a new vision for the group. Rather than being just a forum for complaints about the unfortunate terms of those early leases, Victoria imagined it as a local clearinghouse for accurate and useful information about the drilling process. If need be, it could also serve as an informal watchdog group, an organization that could be the eyes and ears of the understaffed and overworked state authorities who were supposed to be overseeing the work in Dimock and elsewhere in the state. If there was a spill, even a minor one, her group could spot it and report it, and maybe prod the state into action.

  Even without much help from the group, Victoria had been able to make some progress in that direction. She had been providing her reports to the DEP—her official envoy a fresh-faced young man who, when she first met him, was dressed in a snowsuit that made him look like a little boy—and the local office had been impressed enough with her observations that when she reported something, there was generally a prompt response, like the time when the DEP came racing up to Dimock after Victoria notified the agency of a diesel leak.

  But Victoria also knew that she and the group could be a lot more effective if they persuaded somebody who had the respect of everyone in the neighborhood to join, somebody who had deep roots in the community and who had skin in the game, somebody who stood to gain or lose a lot depending on how things played out with the Marcellus, and yet who still had the backbone to stand up to the company when that was necessary. In short, the group needed somebody like Ken Ely.

  Ken, it turned out, had been thinking more or less the same thing. As effective as the .22 might have been, maybe, Ken thought, he needed a better way to express his concerns when they arose, and maybe Victoria’s little “environmental club,” as he dubbed it, might be useful. The way he explained it to Victoria, he and his neighbors had noticed that the DEP seemed to respond with stunning alacrity whenever she placed a call, and that was, he told her, more than most other folks around there had ever been able to accomplish. Ken quickly became a full-fledged member of the group; no
t only that, he and Victoria began to have regular conversations over the stone wall that separated their properties, usually about the drilling, but every now and then about other things, like how much she admired the quality of Ken Ely’s stone, and how one of these days she might even buy a pallet or two of rocks from him and build a patio outside her dream house.

  But even now, standing a few feet from the ruddy-faced Cabot man, and knowing Ken as she did, Victoria almost flinched when Ken leaped from the seat of his ATV with surprising vigor for a guy who everybody knew had survived three bouts with cancer and had recently been diagnosed with diabetes. Before she could stop herself, Victoria let off a quick string of colorful curses at the Cabot man. Ken pretended not to hear them. And then, much to Victoria’s amazement, Ken stalked toward the truck driver, his fists clenched and pumping, his eyes wide and wild, and shouted at the top of his lungs, “You’re ruining our land!”

  The driver who just a moment before had seemed so menacing to Victoria now seemed to shrink. No longer facing just a “little lady,” he turned nervously back to his rig and, with a lot more attention and energy than the task really required, resumed his search for the source of the leak.