Amity and Prosperity_One Family and the Fracturing of America

by Eliza Griswold

  Stacey went back outside and kept clipping Boots in preparation for the coming fair. Later, she and Beth would learn that they were being exposed to more than hydrogen sulfide. Up at the waste pond, workers in hazmat suits and respirators were applying 819 pounds of a liquid carcinogen and biocide to the sludge in an effort to control the outbreak, while just hundreds of feet away, the women worked outside in T-shirts. At much higher concentrations, the biocide, named Acrolein, was used to make chemical weapons.

  4 | ARSENIP

  From the basement, Chris called up to Stacey in the kitchen. He’d gone downstairs to change the water filter on her well, and wanted her to see what he’d found. The silver filter was coated with sludge. The hot water heater was also full of the stuff. The sludge crept into the dishwater, soiling her dishes, and water ran black from the tap.

  She and the kids had just returned from the 2010 fair awash in pride bred by Boots’s big win. She’d hoped that Harley’s victory would carry him happily back to school for eighth grade. They’d been absent from the house for two weeks: one at the fair, a second camping with her sister’s family in Emporium, Pennsylvania. Away from the dust and odors, Harley had continued to improve. Stacey had felt better too, a sudden surge of well-being brought about by relief, and maybe also by falling in love.

  But the black water ended that immediately. She called Range Resources, and instead of sending out Tony Berardi, who said he’d been pulled off her case when her complaints grew more serious, the company sent a young man so soft-spoken and polite he seemed almost afraid to speak to her. By the time he arrived, the sediment had acquired a smell worse than sewage—rotting sewage maybe, if Stacey stopped to describe it. She guessed it was the source of some of the mysterious stink that had pervaded the house for months. She told him that the sludge was also leaving a ring in the tub and toilet. But he reassured her that the black sediment and the bad smell were nothing to worry about. She should boil the water before drinking, but otherwise cooking with it was okay.

  Stacey wasn’t sure what to do. In Pennsylvania, private water wells aren’t subject to regulation. Some people liked it that way, viewing government intervention as both useless and expensive.

  Stacey didn’t think that the company would lie if the sludge was truly dangerous, so she followed Range’s instructions and boiled the water until the odor grew so nauseating that her mother, Linda, found a twenty-five-gallon water jug in the PennySaver used for washing dishes and clothes. Their animals kept drinking the sulfur-stinking water, and the stench still filled the house, so she kept up her Febreze spritzing and a potpourri campaign around the commode, the word many in Amity used for toilet.

  Stacey was also wrestling with whether to send Harley back to school. He’d gone back to the recliner, watching MTV Cribs. When Harley had returned from the camping trip, he’d discovered his dog, Hunter, was missing. After searching for days, they’d finally found Hunter dead in a hay pile up in the barn. It was impossible to know exactly what had happened, though it looked like Hunter might have fallen from the rafters and smothered to death in the hay. Hunter was Harley’s best friend, and he took it hard. As she watched his brief advances slip away, Stacey didn’t think she could take another winter of watching Harley curled up in front of that TV.

  It wasn’t like Harley was mean; he was hollowed out, absent. He’d always been shy, preferring the company of animals. But now he was drawing inside himself to a place she often couldn’t reach. Gone were the days of basketball, the one sport Harley liked. He’d stopped riding four-wheelers with Aunt Shelly’s sons, his first cousins J.P. and Judd. Since Harley wasn’t much of a talker, he’d relied on being active alongside other boys as a means of belonging. Now that he didn’t feel well enough to play, he felt more and more isolated.

  Dr. Fox, their family doctor, wondered if Harley might have a rare autoimmune disorder called Behçet’s disease. Its symptoms included eye irritation, rashes, and mouth ulcers, all of which Harley had. The doctor referred him back to Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh. Once, again, however, the tests came back negative. When school began, Stacey didn’t see how she could get Harley to go. So he stayed home.

  Lying in bed at night, Stacey couldn’t sleep. Instead, she replayed scenes from Harley’s childhood, experiences she’d worked so hard to create. A decade earlier, when Harley was four, his favorite activity had been collecting eggs from their chicken coop. Stacey loved to watch him watch the eggs warm beneath the incubator she kept in their farmhouse basement. They began thin-shelled, nearly translucent, darkening as the chicks’ bodies grew inside until they ran out of room and had no choice but to hatch.

  He’d wanted to become a veterinarian, the first person in his family to attend college. Stacey encouraged that dream, and she raised him on stories of their family’s ties to the land. She drove him to her sister’s house three miles away to play Cowboys and Indians with his cousins. Their woods were rife with stories of Native Americans battling early settlers over land, small bands of Delaware and Shawnee fighting the white men who arrived from New Jersey and Virginia. Harley loved the old stories. He was proud of being “a little more backward” than other kids, as he put it, rooted in a frontier past he imagined as noble and strong.

  So that Harley could learn to track animals, Stacey hand-stenciled hoof and paw prints of deer, bear, and wild turkey on the walls of his bedroom. At night, he lay in his bottom bunk and followed their paths around his room. When Harley was nine, Pappy rounded him up, along with J.P. and Judd, and took them to a cattle farmer’s hillside infested with groundhogs. Groundhogs were pests; a Hereford could catch a hoof and break a leg in one of their holes. The boys lay on a blanket in the shade cast by Pappy’s truck. Passing a pair of binoculars between them, they peered at the greasy creatures scampering in and out of their burrows. Then Pappy gave them turns with his gun. That summer, the boys learned to be excellent shots.

  Stacey grew up following her father in silence through the woods, where he’d seemed most comfortable since returning from Vietnam. She knew that Harley also loved hunting, in part, because it necessitated quiet. When Harley was thirteen, Stacey took him deer hunting. In the dawn frost, he fell asleep. Shaking him awake, she pointed at a buck. He was shaking as he took aim, and Stacey told him to stay calm. Breathe. Find the buck through the scope. He squeezed the trigger. The buck bolted and started downhill for the creek. Harley raced after him as Stacey shouted for Harley to stay back. Wounded animals could be dangerous. By the time he reached the creature, the three-pointer lay dead by the stream and Harley cradled its head in his lap.

  Now the guns in the basement scared her. In her darkest moments, she feared Harley might hurt himself. She lugged the half-dozen shotguns and varmint guns she kept in the gun safe up the stairs and into her car and drove them to her parents’ house in Amity.

  * * *

  As the fall of 2010 wore on, Stacey worried about Boots too. A few days before Halloween, Boots came back to the farm pregnant. Yet by November, Boots, like her owner, was listless and dropping pounds. Stacey tried to coax her to eat too, but she refused. Between the goat and her son and daughter, Stacey felt she’d returned to parenting small children, her life devoted to filling mouths.

  Her farmhouse kitchen was her command center. From her place at the sink, she could turn and see Harley’s feet propped up at the end of the plaid recliner in the living room, and through the window over the sink she could see the dragon, the wood burner she and the kids fed to heat the house. Up the scraggly rise, the goat barn she couldn’t afford to replace stared back at her as an indictment.

  One afternoon, Stacey was standing at the sink, looking out at the dragon and worrying about Boots. Her phone rang. She glanced down at the number and saw it was Beth. Shit, she thought. Bob must be out again. Ready to apologize, she picked up. The Voyles had just returned from Louisville, Kentucky, where Ashley had competed in the world finals for barrel racing, a fast-paced country sport in which horses race a
cloverleaf pattern around barrels in fifteen seconds or so.

  This year’s competition had gone poorly, Beth told Stacey. Ashley’s horse Jodi, a world champion sorrel quarter horse, had stayed at home, too sick to travel to Kentucky. She’d stopped eating. From Kentucky, Beth called the vet six times a day. Jodi was severely dehydrated, so Dr. Cheney administered IVs, steroids, pain medicine, and penicillin. At first, he thought she had myelitis, an infection horses contract after exposure to possum droppings. He ruled that out, but couldn’t determine the source of her illness. Her back end was weak, which meant that Jodi was struggling to stand.

  Stacey knew that horses that can’t stand don’t live long.

  By the time Beth and Ashley came home, Jodi was having seizures and foaming at the mouth. She was beating her head against the ground. Dr. Cheney told Beth that a lethal injection was the most humane option. They buried her on the farm below the horse paddock. Her blood tests showed that Jodi had liver damage and a condition called blood dyscrasia, a killing-off of white blood cells. Dr. Cheney thought that this kind of toxicity likely indicated she’d consumed something poisonous. His findings were consistent with metal poisoning—exposure to mercury, lead, or arsenic.

  “Arsenip,” Beth called it, but Stacey knew she meant arsenic. Dr. Cheney told Beth to call the Pennsylvania Department of Health. The Department of Health told her to call the Department of Agriculture. The Department of Agriculture told her to call the Centers for Disease Control. On call after call, Beth felt she got a bureaucratic runaround. Meanwhile, she didn’t know what to do about Ashley. Rawboned and athletic, Ashley was a loner like her father. She relied on her animals as companions. She’d already lost her puppy, Cummins, and now Jodi, the horse she’d ridden for the past fifteen years. Ashley was despondent. She wouldn’t get out of bed. After missing a week’s work, she went out and got a winged cross tattooed up the left side of her torso in Jodi’s memory. It read “I can do all this through Christ who gives me strength.” Philippians 4:13.

  Boots is sick too, Stacey told Beth.

  Cummins. Jodi. Boots.

  Maybe whatever was sickening the animals was sickening her son, Stacey thought. She hung up immediately and called Dr. Fox, repeating to him what the veterinarian had told Beth. Maybe there was a link between the sick animals and the drilling next door. Maybe the noxious water was more than a nuisance.

  She listed their ailments: her foot that wouldn’t heal, Paige’s nausea, her fatigue and rashes, their nosebleeds and headaches. For the first time she thought to talk to Dr. Fox about the foul-smelling water and that the company had instructed her to boil it. He listened in disbelief. This family had been through the wringer, he thought. Dr. Fox told her that Harley needed to be screened for metals. From now on, when children came into his office with flu-like symptoms, he was going to ask immediately if they lived near fracking and if it had affected their water.

  Stacey called Pappy next. She asked him if she could borrow a water buffalo, and if he could help her start to haul water.

  Then she texted Chris at the warehouse where, for ten to fourteen hours a day, he unloaded pallets of nails made in Bangladesh. He’d gone to college and majored in environmental science. All his life, he’d wanted to work as a warden in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, but the job didn’t pay enough to support him.

  Soon after, the Dukes of Hazzard theme blared from her phone. It was Harley’s ringtone, which she’d also recently bestowed upon Chris. Stacey recounted to Chris what Beth had told her about Jodi and how she thought it might be related to whatever was making Harley ill. At first, Chris doubted that the drill site could have sickened Harley. He listened to the radio on his way to and from work and had heard the “My Range Resources” ads. Hearing his neighbors talk about their experiences with fracking had helped to convince him that it must be safe. And it wasn’t in Range’s interest to make people sick.

  Still, he’d seen Harley at his worst. Under normal circumstances, a proud fourteen-year-old boy from Amity—from anywhere, really—would’ve been mortified to have his mother’s boyfriend carry him to his mom’s car, cradling him like an infant, but Harley’d been too sick to care. Those moments stuck with Chris. So did the water filter full of black and gray chunks.

  They waited a week for Harley’s test results. On November 18, 2010, Stacey’s forty-first birthday, she was out back feeding the dragon when her cell phone rang. It was Dr. Fox’s office. Harley’s urine contained 85 mcg/g of arsenic. A favorite poison of the Borgias, arsenic is naturally occurring and can be found in rice. Levels of up to 25 mcg/g are normal in an adult. Harley’s levels concerned the pediatrician, and he diagnosed him with arsenic poisoning.

  Oh dear Lord, Paige probably has it too, she thought to herself. Paige had been whining about her stomach when she got out of the shower. She wouldn’t eat breakfast. She’d kept telling Stacey that her belly hurt while Stacey scooted her off to school. Maybe it wasn’t just Jodi; maybe the Voyles were sick too.

  “I could kick myself for not recognizing this sooner,” she told me later, “but no one was asking about our water. No one had ever seen anything like this.” The nurse informed Stacey that the doctor wanted her to call Range Resources again and demand they supply an alternate source of water. The company agreed. The same day, she called the Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Health. “The Department of Health told us they didn’t know what to do,” she said. “If this was lead poisoning, they’d have a protocol, but they have no protocol for this.”

  That evening, having already planned to celebrate her birthday with her parents, she drove the kids five miles to Amity. Stacey stood in the kitchen with her mother and sister, piecing together the story of Beth’s sick animals with Harley’s illness. Harley sat at the kitchen table listening to the three women talk. He didn’t know what arsenic poisoning was, but it sounded serious. In addition to Cummins, Jodi, and Boots, there was Hunter. It seemed so odd that a dog would fall into a hay pile and smother to death, unless maybe he was already disoriented by illness.

  At home that night, Stacey sat down with a piece of loose-leaf paper. In the childlike block letters she used to chart as a nurse, she began a journal: Thurs. 11/18/10 Harley tested (+) for high levels of arsenic 85 mcg/g co-pay $40. The next day, Range sent the local water purveyor, Dean’s, which was owned by a family in Amity, to deliver a 5,100-gallon water buffalo to the Haneys’ farm. It sat just outside the dining room by the crack in the house’s foundation.

  From the day of Harley’s diagnosis, Stacey began to gather every fact she could about what was happening to her family. First, she had Paige’s arsenic levels tested, along with her own. Stacey’s came back 64 mcg/g and Paige was negative. Relieved that Paige was in the clear, Stacey wondered why her daughter would show no signs of exposure if they were all living in the same house. Then she thought of all of those days that she’d pushed Paige onto the bus—days that Harley’d stayed on the recliner. She thought of that brain fog she’d felt descend over her too when her foot wouldn’t heal and she stayed at home along with him. She realized that keeping Harley homebound might have compounded his exposure.

  Within days of the buffalo’s arrival, she and the kids began to feel better. After two weeks, a spray of acne over Stacey’s cheeks and nose cleared up, as did the rash on her arm. At three weeks, when Harley went back to Dr. Fox’s office to have his arsenic levels retested, the results came back negative. Soon, Harley felt well enough to return to school. Late that fall, he began playing basketball for the first time in a year and a half. Yet some of their symptoms persisted. All three still had headaches, and Harley’s mouth was riddled with ulcers. He kept refusing food, so his doctors prescribed Zofran, an anti-nausea medication for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy.

  5 | AIRBORNE

  One day that fall, Paige’s sixth-grade teacher assigned the class the task of finding their houses on Google Earth. Paige came home from school and pulled up what sh
e’d found on the family laptop. A black void eighty times the size of their house sat carved into the hilltop across the road. It looked like a pond: its surface shimmered as if filled with something wet. Around it sat a handful of trailers and another smaller pit. There appeared to be oversized black plastic garbage bags around the sides of the pond. The connection was poor and the image fuzzy; Stacey couldn’t see clearly, but there were white polka dots spread across the pond’s surface. She wondered what the dots could be.

  As the fall days shortened, Stacey came home from her shifts at the hospital in darkness. At the back door, she kicked off the white Brooks sneakers she had to wear to work. Even though nine months had passed, her foot was still aching from surgery, and she feared the slowness to heal had something to do with chemical exposure. Still wearing scrubs, she went through the mounting stack of urine tests with a yellow highlighter, noting what she thought might be a problem and what she didn’t understand. She also sifted through scant medical information online to parse what she could. There was almost nothing reliable to read. It was too early in the Marcellus Boom for peer-reviewed medical studies to be completed, let alone published. So she combed the Centers for Disease Control website for the health effects of arsenic and other metals on children. What she found disturbed her. Given their small bodies and developing nervous systems, children were at higher risk of being affected by exposure.