The End of Country (13 page)

The way Ken Ely saw it, the land he owned didn’t owe him a fortune, it owed him a living—and not necessarily an easy one. In return for every dollar’s worth of stone the land yielded, it was due a gallon of sweat plus a few pounds of aching muscle and a few feet of creaking bone. But if, in Ken’s calculus, the land owed him next to nothing, he owed everything to the land. He owed it his hard work, his constant attention, and most of all, his respect. And it was on the question of respect that he and Victoria diverged. To him, people who only visit the country from time to time, or who never visit it at all and only occasionally imagine it as a world wholly separate from their own, respect for the land often means leaving it untouched. To such people, it all boils down to one word:
preservation
. It’s an admirable idea, one that has been embraced by some of the great heroes of American history and has led to the creation of Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks, among other treasures.

But to people like Ken, respect for the land means something else entirely. It means understanding in a visceral way that the land can be an ally, it can be an adversary, and sometimes it is both at the same time. But always its fate and yours are linked. And so you push the land as hard as you can, and when you think it’s just about ready to start pushing back, you let it rest. You move to the next quarry, the next stand of hardwoods, the next pasture, and if need be, you nurture it back to health. You seed, you plant, and what you harvest is up to you. Do that, and the land will always come back. That was Ken’s guiding principle.

There’s a word for that, too:
conservation
. It’s stunning how often the words “preservation” and “conservation” are used interchangeably in casual conversation. It’s especially striking when you realize how different their meanings actually are.

Ken and his jury-rigged backhoe were different. Even if he didn’t care about the land—and he did, passionately, though he was never
one to show his passions publicly—Ken’s little operation could never do that kind of damage. I understood that. We both knew the land as a resource and a refuge, a place that, as the old saying goes, had been rode hard and put away wet. I couldn’t help but remember the old Groucho Marx line about Doris Day: “I knew her before she was a virgin.” That was Ken’s relationship to the rocky ground, and it was, in many respects, mine, too.

While Ken had wisely held his tongue during his first encounter with Victoria, he wasn’t entirely silent. The way he wryly remembered it, it wasn’t long afterward that he got the chance to offer a rebuttal. And it consisted of simply standing his ground. He had finished prying and scraping and dragging out every loose rock he could find in that part of the quarry, and now it was time to bring in the big guns, enough dynamite, placed just deep enough into the fractures in the rock, to blast free a new load, and he called in some local guys to do the job. Ken watched as the contractors pulled back a safe distance and then listened for the air horn to sound. An instant later, the ground shook and a massive, bone-rattling roar rolled up out of the ground and down toward the rusted old trailer at the bottom of the hill like an invisible wave. The bark of a German shepherd told him that he’d let Victoria know that he wasn’t going to change his ways just because she told him to.

L
OOKING BACK
, K
EN TOLD ME
, the carving and the blasting had opened up a kind of invisible fissure in the ground that seemed to run right along his property line. Though he would never put it quite this way, it laid bare the yawning chasm between him and Victoria, in temperament, in background, but most important, in the ways each of them viewed the land and their place in it. At that moment, it seemed as if that chasm could never be bridged. But the ground that each of them was so stubbornly holding was beginning to shift beneath them. Soon enough it would shift so dramatically and with such a din that it would drown out every other sound, and Ken and Victoria would find themselves standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the same side of that rock fence.

Though neither of them knew it then, large corporate interests were already drawing new maps of the land they both stood on. In faraway offices, those interests were setting up their own boundary lines
and setting in motion a chain of events that would, to everyone’s astonishment, turn Ken Ely and Victoria Switzer into lifelong allies.

It happened so slowly and quietly that at first no one seemed to notice. Nearly a year had passed since Range Resources had first tapped into the mighty Marcellus in the distant western corner of Pennsylvania, but no one had any idea yet how rich the discovery might turn out to be, and so, at first, Range’s success at the Renz well passed almost silently.

There was a reason for that. Pennsylvania still relies on a patchwork of maddeningly arcane and antiquated laws to govern its energy industries. Those laws were in large part written for, and very often by, the powerful coal companies that still exert such influence in the state. Among those regulations is one originally designed to protect the big coal barons from the unlikely possibility that an enterprising freelancer—a “dog patch” miner—might spot the next big deposit and stake a claim, or worse, that a predatory fellow coal baron might sniff out the coal gas in the air and start bidding up the land prices around it.

This law essentially gives the owner of a mineral claim the right to keep initial production rates—be it coal, oil, or gas—a closely guarded secret for five years. But it’s hard to keep secret a find like the one Range had stumbled across, and little by little, other gas companies began to notice that Range was leasing as much land as it could get its hands on, and they began to suspect that Range was onto something big.

They had no clear idea exactly what that something was. It could have been any one of the Devonian shales layered beneath the Appalachians. Even when enough of their own data poured in and their geologists finally figured out that it was the Marcellus Shale that Range was prospecting, they still had no clue how big it would turn out to be. The most recent USGS estimates, which were by then decades old, had guessed that about 1.9 trillion cubic feet could be recovered from the Marcellus, a respectable amount, to be sure, enough to supply about a tenth of the nation’s average gas use for a single year, but it was nothing to write home about. Even if the government geologists were being conservative—and that certainly was their reputation; after all, they didn’t really have any skin in the game, they were just bureaucrats with rock hammers and logbooks—there probably
wasn’t anything like the 6 trillion cubic feet that was just lying there for the taking in the Big Sandy in Kentucky, the conventional wisdom went.

All the same, there were a few gas companies—Chief and Cabot among them—that were willing to throw a couple of chips on the table. It was worth the $5, $7, up to $10 an acre for the most promising prospects, to lease a few thousand acres as close to Range’s holdings as they could just to see what might be under them. Under the prevailing rules of the market and the archaic laws in Pennsylvania that govern such things, those were actually pretty generous prices.

Because Pennsylvania was, for much of its history, primarily a coal-producing state, most of the state laws governing mineral rights are specifically focused on making life easier for the coal companies. To that end, the state adopted a series of laws over the years that effectively severed coal from gas and oil and any other minerals that might be contained in the ground, thus helping coal companies to get their hands on it. But because gas and, to a degree, oil were for a long time considered the ugly stepsisters in the state’s energy tale, they were basically ignored. The state set a minimum royalty that must be paid to the landowner for the right to take his gas—12.5 percent—but other than that, they paid little attention to it. That benign neglect meant that gas companies and landowners were pretty much free to reach their own accommodations, and over the years, they did.

During the past century and a half, property owners have signed literally hundreds of thousands of leases with gas companies. When gas was found in one place, the gas companies would sometimes try to estimate the depth of the deposit, figure out the amount of work it would take to get to it, and then map out the land above it and divide it into drilling units, which usually ranged from forty to eighty acres. Then they’d set about getting the landowners to lease them the land. Until very recently, most of those leases were signed in the western part of the state, where gas was plentiful and close enough to the surface to be easily retrieved and where the locals had a long history with the gas industry. For the most part, they were small leases. A landowner would get maybe $2 an acre as a bonus payment, a little incentive to sign up in the first place. Sometimes the bonus could reach $5, and there were some really good years when the rate might get as high as $20 an acre, as it did in the mid-1970s, when geologists stumbled
across an ancient buried coral reef that showed some early promise (though it quickly petered out). And then things would settle back to normal.

Quite often, nothing would come of the lease. The landowner would sign over the rights to the drilling company for anywhere from two to seven years, the drilling company would lose interest, the lease would expire, and the landowner would do it all over again with somebody else. Or not. Even when the drillers did drill, no one was getting rich. In general, these were low-pressure wells targeting small pockets of gas. They would produce for a few years, maybe generate $25 or $30 a month for the landowner in royalties, then fade away. If a landowner was really ambitious, he might get the gas company to hook up a line from the wellhead to his house so he could get cheap cooking gas out of the deal besides, and if he was a really sharp negotiator, or if the driller didn’t particularly feel like dickering on a particular day, the landowner might even be able to persuade him to give him the trickle line for free and not deduct the gas he used from his royalty check.

All in all, it was a low-rent operation, so low-rent that in a lot of cases the landowners, believing it wasn’t worth their time to negotiate the leases themselves, turned to brokers or consultants to do it for them. Many, if not most, of the consultants were part-timers; there wasn’t enough money in the gas business in those days for them to give up their day jobs. After all, you had to broker a lot of leases to pay the rent when a typical lease would give the broker only 10 percent of the up-front payment—at best, that was going to be a few hundred dollars—and then a portion of the royalties, in many cases less than 1 percent, if there were any.

In fact, in my own research I had learned that it was such a common arrangement that nobody even batted an eyelash to learn that a geologist who also happened to be a high-ranking member of the state game commission was moonlighting as a consultant. That weekend job was generally regarded as no big deal. It was considered no more questionable than if he had been driving around the countryside throwing discarded refrigerators into the back of his pickup to sell for scrap, or had taken a night job as a greeter at the local Walmart.

Even as drillers, prodded by their geologists, began to focus on
the Marcellus Shale in late 2005, it was still a low-stakes game, at least the way drillers calculate such things. Yes, there was the scent of gas—and money—in the air, and yes, other drillers were starting to poke around. At first, it was contained to the area right around the Renz well, in southwestern Pennsylvania. In an effort to shore up its position in the region, Range started to bid up leases—in small increments, to avoid drawing too much attention. Twenty-dollar-an-acre leases went up to $50 an acre—in some really promising places, the price might hit $75 or $100 an acre—and the other drillers, again assuming that Range had a reason for this largesse, followed suit. Soon they were spreading out. Landmen were turning up like wisps of gas in places they had ignored for decades. And some of them were particularly intrigued by the prospects in and around Dimock, where company geologists, again relying on the old records, suspected not only that the rock in that area was thicker than almost anywhere else in the state, but that the gas it contained was likely to be so good, so pure, that virtually the only treatment the driller would have to give it was to “put the stink on it” (gas has no odor, and so, as a safety measure, an obnoxious stench is added so that all you need to detect a leak is a nose) before it could be shipped directly to the terminals on the Eastern Seaboard, heart of the richest and hungriest gas market in the nation. What’s more, the land around there could be had for a song. By the first day of spring in 2006, they were turning up on the hill Ken Ely had bought in Dimock with the proceeds from his gas station, and on Victoria and Jim Switzer’s dream property, and soon enough they’d be on that winding stretch of road that led to my mother’s farm.

Up in the northeastern part of the state, more than two hundred miles from the Renz well and the handful of others near it that were then the only proven wells in the play, the landmen were still trying to be cautious in other parts of the Marcellus. Even toward the end of 2005, after Range in its annual report let slip that it was churning out 12.5 million cubic feet of gas per day from a handful of wells in the southwestern part of the state, the landmen played it safe, offering in some cases as little as $7 an acre for a seven-year lease. By the time they made it to Dimock, they were offering $25. It seemed a reasonable price at the time. After all, there was still a chance, and a damned
good one, that this whole thing would turn out to be another disappointment, just like the once-promising buried coral reefs the USGS surveyors had been looking for a few decades earlier.

The landmen who were now prowling the back roads of Dimock had one big thing in their favor at that point: as little as they knew about the vast potential of the gas play, the locals—Ken Ely, Victoria Switzer, my mother, and her neighbors—knew even less.