He warned them the play would bring in all kinds of charlatans. Not just the fast-talking carnival barkers who were trying to separate them from their mineral rights, but a whole other breed of huckster who had no interest in gas itself, Clay told them. Instead, these guys would come in as money managers and brokers. They’d offer them can’t-fail investments that, Clay warned, almost certainly would fail. These schemes would make the carpetbaggers rich and siphon away the landowners’ gains as surely as if the brokers had drilled a well on the roof of the local bank.
But if the good people of Ellsworth Hill stuck together, trusted him, and were patient, there was a chance they might escape the clutches of these perfidious outsiders and reap real riches one day. The conditions of his help were stiff. He asked the neighbors to sign an open-ended contract that could be terminated only by him, and that entitled him to half of their royalties above the state-mandated minimum of 12.5 percent. In other words, if they got 15 percent, he’d be entitled to 1.25 percent.
Maybe it was all those years of being one of the few Catholics in the area, or maybe it was that even after decades on the farm, there was still enough of the old Scranton neighborhood in my mother to make her skeptical. Whatever the reason, my mother couldn’t bring herself to share the excitement and optimism in the room that night. She could see it in Anne’s face. My mother had considered it a testament to Anne’s character that as much as she could use the money that Clay claimed she was likely to get, whenever she talked to me or to my mother about the lease, she talked about how it would benefit her daughter’s in-laws. The Reverend Brian Williams’s father, Roger, was one of the last of the old-timers still actively farming on Ellsworth Hill, and he wasn’t doing it entirely by choice.
A taciturn man—few people ever heard him say more than seven words in a row, and not one of them was ever unkind—Roger Williams had always had a steely faith in his own ability to make things work. He was the kind of guy who could fix a rusted old-fashioned baler with nothing more than a pocketknife. But now, at seventy-six, Roger was starting to see that there were some things his raw will couldn’t control. He was getting older, and though four of his five children were doing all right for themselves, Lori, his youngest, well, that was a different matter.
Lori was in her mid-forties. She was legally blind, and even if Roger believed that by dint of his will he could keep the farm going, he knew that Lori would never be able to. Until the day the landmen started showing up, Roger quietly fretted that he’d have nothing to leave his handicapped daughter but the collection of rusted equipment that he’d managed to keep working long past its time, and the land itself, whatever that might be worth.
Early on in the play, Roger had leased some of his outlying land, the part that lay across Meshoppen Creek in Susquehanna County, for $25 an acre. He had received enough to pay the property tax, but there was nothing left over for Lori. He had held back most of his land, almost all of it on the Wyoming County side of Meshoppen Creek, hoping, maybe even praying, that something better would come along.
And now it looked as if it had. George W. Clay IV, a man who shared his values and who knew the industry, was on Roger’s side.
My mother kept her opinions to herself at the meeting, saying nothing about them until later that night when she was on the phone with me. “Well, what do you think?” she said at last. A thousand thoughts ran through my head.
I had learned enough about the Marcellus and the industry that was trying to exploit it, and maybe exploit us as well, to be cautious. I understood the environmental risks that drilling posed.
On the other hand, there was the promise. There were so many benefits that could come from this if it was done right. It wasn’t just the immediate riches that might be collected by those few people like my family and our neighbors who happened to be holding on to land that the gas industry would want to lease. It wasn’t just the royalties we might collect, if the gas really was as plentiful as Professor Engelder believed it to be, nor was it even the fact that it might, in the long run, provide the kind of opportunities that those kids who had been spinning their wheels in the middle of the night or spending their last breath in some distant desert had until now been denied. It was bigger even than that.
If nothing else, my amateurish study of the energy industry had convinced me that the age of oil was nearing its end, that now we were in the desperate final chapter of the history of the reckless pursuit of the stuff, a history of an addiction that had left vast swaths of the globe in ruins, places like Nigeria, where the sixty-year history of exploitation by Western oil companies had poisoned not only the coast of that country but the soul of its people. And the danger and the consequences weren’t going to be confined to those out-of-the-way corners of the third world. As long as Americans insisted on consuming fifteen times as much oil as we produced, we, too, would find ourselves taking greater and greater risks, drilling in more dangerously remote and environmentally sensitive areas, such as the Alaskan wilderness, or worse, far offshore in the Gulf of Mexico or off the continental shelf, places where we did not have the technology even to begin to understand the risks, let alone mitigate them. The whole idea that a new push to harvest all of America’s oil would somehow be our salvation, that it would somehow free us from our dependence on foreign oil, was nonsense. There is no such thing as foreign oil or domestic oil, I knew. It’s a fungible commodity. Oil is oil, regardless of where it came from, and it was beginning to run out.
And then there was the risk that America was running in trying to sustain its addiction to coal, that same ozone-eating poison that its proponents insist will someday burn clean and in the meantime can fuel our hybrid electric cars, fire the blast furnaces that might someday forge the steel that would become wind turbines, or transform silica into solar panels. But at what cost?
The way I saw it, natural gas—the gas that underlay most of Pennsylvania—could provide a temporary alternative, a bridge fuel that would buy us time, a generation or two, as much time as we had wasted since the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations had taken their first halting steps to reduce our dependency on oil and coal, time that we could, if we were wise enough, use to develop, at long last, real alternatives.
It wouldn’t be easy, of course. There was no infrastructure in this country to use the gas to fuel vehicles and fire steel mills, to convert it into nitrogen and fertilizer to feed ourselves and raise the crops we’d need to create biofuels. There was as yet no comprehensive plan to extract the hydrogen from it to operate fuel cells, or to use great amounts of it to run our electrical plants. Maybe I was unreasonably optimistic, but I wanted desperately to believe that this vast cache of gas in the Marcellus could, if we were wise enough to use it correctly, provide the impetus for the development of that infrastructure.
“Well?” my mother finally asked impatiently. “What about George?”
“To tell you the truth,” I said, “I’m not inclined to do business with anybody named George W. anything from Texas.”
My mother laughed. Though she couldn’t explain precisely why, she, too, had already decided to keep George W. Clay’s proposal at arm’s length. She began to cast about for some justification for her preordained position. “You know,” she said, “I just keep wondering what your father would have thought about all of this.”
I knew just what he would have thought. The late James Joseph McGraw was by nature a skeptic, with an incurable mistrust of the motives of anyone who offered to guide him through anything. Two days before he passed away, in the middle of one of the first of those fits and starts that soon led to his last breath, my mother had summoned a priest, a longtime acquaintance of my father’s, to administer the last rites. The old man lay there as the priest prayed and anointed him, making no movement at all as the priest rose and left the room. He waited until he heard the front door of the house close, then opened one eye and looked over at his wife. “That guy is a goddamned phony,” he snapped.
But my fath
er also understood the power of the inevitable. When the doctor diagnosed his pancreatic cancer in October 1998 and told him he had three months to live, the old man didn’t protest, he didn’t go through the five stages of grief—he accepted his death sentence. Bitterly, but he did accept it. Apparently he believed Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross to be a goddamned phony, too. I think he would have realized what was fast becoming obvious to me: that no matter what we decided, the gas and the changes that it would bring were as inevitable as death.
A few days later, I telephoned George Clay on my mother’s behalf and told him that we were not going to join his group. He accepted the verdict gracefully.
EIGHT
Step Right Up
My mother had been right about Marshall Casale, the young landman from Chesapeake. He was disarming. And it wasn’t just the polite but playful way he approached people. That was all salesmanship. The minute I met him, I could sense that there was something different about him, an easygoing frankness and self-deprecating wit that made you realize he did not take himself too seriously. He was a Pennsylvanian by birth, and maybe because of that he understood how much was really at stake here. I had to give him this much: the guy could tell a story that captured all the conflicting emotions that were now rising up all over the Marcellus. Take, for instance, the story about his face-off with a factotum in the Wyoming County Courthouse who had been blinded, in Casale’s estimation, by the glare of all that gold that was pouring into town.
The way Casale described the scene to me later, he had just parked his gleaming pickup on a side street near the old courthouse and watched with amusement as his young assistant enthusiastically hopped out of the passenger seat, stepped onto the slate sidewalk, tucked in his shirttail, and fixed his hair in the sideview mirror. It hadn’t been that long ago that Casale had had that first-week-on-the-job enthusiasm that made even the most mundane part of the business seem exhilarating. “He’ll get over it,” Casale thought as he, too, slid out of the front seat.
It was one of those spectacular early spring days that people in these hills spend their whole winters dreaming about, when the sky is as blue as the hyacinths poking up out of the freshly mulched flower beds, and as the kid preened, Casale lifted his head and let the warm sun wash over him. For a moment, he dreaded going inside.
There, it was still as drab as the first days of March. When Casale and his young trainee shouldered their way into the dingy first-floor record room at the courthouse, it was tomblike except for the fact that even now, at ten o’clock in the morning, the place was jammed with other landmen and their assistants. They were standing three deep at the counter, pacing in place as they waited their turn while the lucky ones, the ones who had gotten there early, pored over the musty record books that listed in arcane detail the precise property lines of every large farm and small building lot in this corner of northeastern Pennsylvania.
Now that the land rush was in full swing, every acre counted, Casale had explained to the trainee. As a matter of fact, now that the drilling apparatus was so accurate that it could target a deposit of gas within a few meters, every inch counted.
It had been like this for weeks now at the courthouse. When Casale had first turned up in this section of the state a few months earlier, he could have walked right in, filled his notebook with the names and addresses of the landowners he wanted to target for the day, and been on his way in a matter of minutes. Back then he could have had a couple of $25-an-acre leases signed before lunch-time. All he’d have to do was call a farmer or a landowner and chat him up on the phone, or sometimes just show up and flash that disarming country-boy smile of his, maybe drop a few local names, dangle a promise of cash, and before you knew it, he had a deal. He was happy, the farmer was happy, the bosses were happy. Everybody was happy, though it did seem like the more folks he signed, the more signatures the bosses wanted. Still, that was fine with Casale. There was a big part of him that thrived on competition, and he could tell that the bosses at Chesapeake saw things the same way. “I’m a sniper, man,” he liked to say. “I’m in there one meeting, maybe two, and I’ve got a deal.”
But all of a sudden the job had gotten a lot tougher, and Casale could pinpoint the moment that it happened. It was when Engelder’s estimates went public. The farmers, the bosses, the landmen themselves suddenly became hard-nosed negotiators and, in their minds, gas mavens.
Just a few days earlier, as a matter of fact, there had been a well-publicized meeting at the local high school, one of those “informational” seminars that Penn State had been holding all over the Marcellus, a traveling circus of the burgeoning gas industry, and even Casale had been surprised not just by the turnout, which was staggering, but by the tenor of the whole thing.
It was chaos. The local newspaper was there, and television crews had come all the way up from Scranton, and no matter which way he turned, Casale, who had made the mistake of putting on a freshly pressed shirt with a Chesapeake Appalachia logo on it, was besieged by landowners, reporters, even other landmen, coming at him so fast and furious that he found himself retreating to the edge of the lobby, near the cases filled with trophies, where he and all the other landmen were passing out prospectuses and trinkets—baseball caps, pencils, Frisbees—as fast as they could in the hopes that that might satisfy the mob.
It was no better inside the tiny auditorium, where gas experts and lawyers who had already picked up on the value of this new gas play droned on about the history and science of the Marcellus. Casale knew that those guys were wasting their breath. No one was interested in the specifics of gas; the only thing that anybody in that room really wanted to know was who was going to get rich.
And it wasn’t just the locals who were obsessing over that question. The New York Times had even sent a reporter to the hills, and in typical Times fashion, the reporter, who probably wouldn’t have been able to find the new gas fields of Pennsylvania with a Geiger counter two days earlier, was now marveling at how these poor hardscrabble famers were suddenly poised to become wealthy.
Thanks to Engelder and the press he generated, there was blood in the water, and now every landman from every company in North America seemed to smell it, Casale had told his young trainee. There sure as hell weren’t going to be any $25 leases anymore. If he could get somebody to sign for $1,500 an acre, he’d consider himself lucky.
On the plus side, the fact that Chesapeake had decided to go all in to become the largest leaseholder in the Marcellus meant that no matter how stiff the competition got, Casale could almost always outbid the other guys.
Of course, that was also starting to dawn on the landowners, and it seemed that the more money Chesapeake and the other companies offered the more money the farmers and the landowners demanded. The more they demanded, the more Chesapeake was willing to cough up. And of course, every time Chesapeake raised, the others had to see that raise or fold.
It was becoming a vicious circle, and Casale was caught in the middle, trying to fill in the space between the gas guys—“guys who spent a million dollars before breakfast,” as he described them—and the increasingly big dreams of the locals, a lot of whom, before this land rush began, “couldn’t even afford to get their toasters fixed so they could have breakfast.” What was starting to bother the native Pennsylvanian in Casale was the nagging sense that the mad rush to pump money into the place was starting to poison the community.
Most of the other landmen—gas field migrants brought in from Oklahoma and Texas and West Virginia—seemed less bothered by the impact their truckloads of cash were having on the locals. They had no connection to the place. But Casale had been born and bred in Pennsylvania. He had grown up two hundred miles to the west in Clarion County, a rugged and fairly hidden corner of Pennsylvania, a mirror image of this place on the other side of the state, where people had spent their whole lives going without. That kind of life teaches people to depend on themselves and on each other. But now all this money—tens of millions had already been s
lathered around these hills, and there were perhaps billions more to come—was starting to take its toll. He could certainly see the promise in it all. This land boom, and the money that it brought, could be a godsend for people who had been scraping by for decades, and there was no doubt in Casale’s mind that not only would it bring prosperity to the landowners, but it would also bring good luck to the folks who didn’t have land. There would be jobs, there would be commerce, there would, for the first time in a long time, be hope. This place needed something like this, he thought, and it had needed it for generations. In fact, it made him feel downright virtuous when he could give an old farmer who didn’t know how he was going to hold on to the land his father had left him for another year without carving it up and selling it off in ten-acre chunks to vacationers, one last chance to hold on in exchange for a five-year gas lease.
But it was a double-edged sword. People who have nothing often learn to expect nothing. But once you raise expectations, all hell can break loose. Casale had already witnessed one case in which a pair of brothers who had never lived more than three miles from each other in their six decades on this earth had cut each other off entirely because of a dispute, not over whether to lease, but when and for how much. And it wasn’t just that that troubled him. He also feared the effect the money was having on those who actually got some. Casale had tried not just to educate his trainee in the delicate art of deal-making, but to open his eyes to the dark side that was all too often becoming part of the daily routine. “I’ve signed farmers who were sitting there with broken-down equipment, a broken roof, losing money because they couldn’t put a fence up to keep critters out of their corn silo,” Casale had explained. “You go and write them a check and they’ve got a brand-new tractor and a brand-new Ford truck, and the corn silo’s still the same. You know that old adage: The shoemaker’s kid goes barefoot? It’s still a farmer with new equipment. I hate to say it but I see a lot of them worse off than when they started, because they get that one check, they change their lifestyle.”
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