The End of Country (14 page)

T
HE FIRST LANDMAN TURNED UP
at Ken’s door in late February, as he recalled. Ken was not tempted. At $25 an acre, which was what the gas company was offering then, the best he figured he could hope for was to pocket maybe five thousand dollars for his 180-plus acres. He could have used the money, certainly. But Ken just couldn’t decide whether it would make up for the aggravation of having strangers—out-of-state strangers at that—poking around his precious mountain.

Part of the reason for his ambivalence was his carefully cultivated “hermit on the mountain” pose. It wasn’t entirely an affectation, of course. The truth was, except for his family, his dog, Crybaby, and the occasional visit from neighbors, Ken didn’t much care for company. He even found it intrusive when an occasional airplane making its approach to the Wilkes-Barre–Scranton airport down in the valley disturbed the peace by flying overhead. “I shake my fist at ’em,” he told me, only half-joking.

But there was another reason for him to be cautious as well, Ken told me, and that had more to do with what he saw as his fatal flaw as a businessman. As much as he hated to admit it, he was a soft touch. He knew it, and so did his neighbors.

He had been that way even when he had been running the little service station and general store down in Springville. As I well remembered, he ran that business on a “pay me when you can” basis, and before long he had $10,000 in IOUs, some of them moldering in his cash register, the rest committed to memory.

That, as much as anything else, was why throughout 2006 he had been playing a game of cat and mouse with the sixty-year-old West Virginian who had turned up as landman for Cabot Oil and Gas, a Houston-based exploration and drilling company. The man had first cornered Ken and Crybaby up at Ken’s quarry, and before Ken could even stick the man’s business card in the back pocket of his jeans, the
guy had launched into what even then was a very well rehearsed spiel about how the company was prospecting in the area, and while they couldn’t promise that they’d find anything, they were willing to pay good money to anyone who would be willing to let them have a five-year lease. If they found anything, they’d split what they found with the landowner. It wouldn’t be an even split, of course. Prospecting was an expensive proposition, and Cabot had to make its money back, but they’d give the landowner 12.5 percent of the money they got, minus miscellaneous costs, of course, and tough as things looked to be around there, that kind of money could come in pretty handy.

Ken had been fairly polite that first time, even though he knew there was nothing particularly generous about the man’s offer. After all, Ken had access to the Internet, and he had been curious enough to do a quick Google search and discover that 12.5 percent was the minimum royalty payment required by law in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania when it came to gas and oil deals. Ken didn’t tell the man he knew that. He just told him he wasn’t interested.

He was a little more forceful when the guy came back a few weeks later, and by the time the man from Cabot turned up the third time, Ken was all but out of patience. “Quit bothering me,” he had told him.

But the guy just wouldn’t quit. Each time he came, he tried to corner Ken, and each time, Ken vanished into the trees. Between his visits with Ken, the man from Cabot had dropped in on Cleo Teel, a quiet, serious, and generally cautious man who, like Ken Ely, hailed from a family that had laid down roots in the neighborhood back when the land was still new. Whereas Ken was rough and hard, Cleo Teel was the very picture of the gentleman farmer. He lived with his wife in a prim old farmhouse that had been deftly remodeled over the years but still bore all the charm that one might expect from a Pennsylvania farmhouse. It was nestled on a little rise halfway up what had been called Teel’s Hill forever, and from the gingerbreaded front porch there was a commanding view of Teel’s gaily painted red barn right across the road. Beyond that were the fields, with Meshoppen Creek lazily etching their boundary on one side and a series of intricately laid bluestone walls marking the interior boundaries. At the far edge of it all was Teel’s pride and joy, a stand of old-growth hardwoods and hemlocks.

Cleo Teel had been one of the first farmers up there to see the futility of farming. His epiphany occurred not long after the first energy crisis in 1973, and within a few years, he had liquidated his herd. He followed a few other paths that earned him a reasonably comfortable living. He would carefully harvest his timber, making sure to take only what he needed. And he still kept one hand in farming. Every summer found him behind the wheel of his tractor, cutting, conditioning, and baling hay that he then sold, usually for less than $2 a bale, to other farmers who hadn’t had as much foresight, or perhaps as many options, as he had.

Teel had already accepted the Cabot man’s offer. To him, it was a solid business decision. Period.

But of all the neighbors, no one more clearly embodied the pressures that the local farmers were under to sign than Rosemarie Greenwood. A warm and friendly woman, she had immediately invited me into her house when I showed up unannounced and made me a cup of coffee—she would have offered me something more substantial, like a homemade muffin, but, she told me, her oven had broken months before and she couldn’t afford to replace it. There was no secret why she had signed on. Everybody knew it had been a rough couple of years for her.

She had been widowed two years earlier. Even though her husband had smoked three packs of Pall Malls every day of his adult life as he struggled from before dawn to after dark to keep the farm his family had tended for three generations from going under, it was ultimately colon cancer that killed him.

Looking at Rosemarie, it would have been hard to imagine that she could be from anywhere else. Though well into her sixties, and though the years of struggle had lined her face, she was still lithe in an almost girlish way, and in her barn boots and loose-fitting bargain store sweats, she seemed perfectly at home scampering up the slippery ladder of a silo or tossing hay from a mow. But the truth was that to Rosemarie Greenwood, farming was a kind of indentured servitude. As one of her neighbors once put it, “Dairy farming is a lot like being in prison except that in prison you don’t have to get up twice a day and milk the guards.”

Farming wasn’t really in her blood. Rosemarie had been born and bred in the valley, down in the coal mining town of Taylor south of
Scranton, and probably never would have set foot on a farm if she hadn’t been swept off her feet four decades earlier by a good-looking farm boy who had come down to a local dance in the valley. The next thing she knew, she was a bride and the next thing she knew after that she was cutting hay and milking cows and pitching ensilage—chopped corncobs and stalks—from the top of a fifty-foot silo.

And then, in the fall of 2002, her husband started to weaken.

Rosemarie had promised him on his deathbed that she would try to keep the farm going. That’s what he had wanted. That’s what her eldest son, Todd, wanted, too. And for a while, they were able to make a go of it.

But within three years of her husband’s death, things were starting to become desperate. That, too, was linked in no small part to the price of oil.

In the spring of 2005, as a result of a complex federal pricing structure that had been in place since the Great Depression, Rosemarie was getting about $11.40 for every hundred pounds of milk, regardless of what it cost a consumer on the shelf. That worked out to about one dollar per gallon of milk produced, at a time when the national average cost of a gallon of milk was about $2.32. Back then, it cost her about 26 cents to produce that gallon of milk.

But energy prices were spiking, and so were Rosemarie’s costs.

The cost of diesel for the Ford tractor was going up. They were now spending a few hundred dollars a week just to keep it running. Nobody could afford to run a tractor for long at those prices, she said. The cost of feed for their seventy-two head of Holsteins was going up, too, and that was also linked to the cost of fuel, more than 60 percent of which was now imported into the United States. The federal government estimates that fuel accounts for about 40 percent of the cost of growing corn, and that does not take into account the hidden energy cost as more and more corn is diverted from the great national food machine to be used as the feedstock for the energy-intensive alchemy required to create ethanol and other biofuels.

It had gotten to the point that grain alone cost Rosemarie and her son $3,500 every twelve days, and the price of seed corn was already starting its climb from $3 to $8 a bushel. It was only a matter of time, she knew, until for the first time in her life she would be in debt to the feed store. But what choice did she have?

Energy costs were taking a 30 percent bite out of the farm’s gross revenues, and that was just in terms of operating expenses. Like everybody else in America, she had to live, and living in a rural community like Dimock meant that she had to drive long distances, sometimes forty miles or more, to get to a shopping center or make a doctor’s appointment, and that meant buying ever costlier gasoline to fill the tank of the gas-chugging SUV she needed just to navigate these back roads during the snowy northeastern Pennsylvania winters or to slog through the axle-deep Pennsylvania mud in spring. The narrow profit margins that the farm had relied on had never been enough to put aside enough cash to adequately insulate the 150-year-old farmhouse she lived in, and it was now costing her $100 a month to buy the oil to heat the place. That, too, was going up.

Everybody else on the dairy farm food chain could factor all those costs into their price. And they did. While the price of a gallon of milk on American store shelves was fast approaching $4, farmers were still getting a buck, and unlike the big corporate farmers, who could use economies of scale to guarantee their profits, many, like Rosemarie, were falling behind.

Most of the other farmers on the road from Dimock had seen the writing on the wall after the first fuel crisis (the Arab oil embargo of 1973), or after the second one (the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979), or the third one (the run-up to the first Gulf War in 1991). Just like Cleo Teel, they had thrown in the towel.

Some had retired. Some had found other jobs, though those were getting harder to come by. As the farmers went under, at least in part because of the cost of fuel, so did the companies that relied on them. Local mills that for a hundred years had ground the corn that the farmers grew into grain had gone belly-up. Local dairies that processed the milk had gone out of business, too.

There were other costs as well, costs that are harder to factor into ledger books. These were the hidden price we pay to try to keep those foreign energy sources flowing, those intangible costs we don’t speak of generally when we draw a line between the price of a gallon of gas and the price of a gallon of milk, costs that are calculated not in dollars but in lives.

In places like Susquehanna County, when jobs get scarce, so do the young people who used to live there. Those who can leave do, and
those young men and women who don’t have the resources to move away have to find some way of getting by.

In the spring of 2005, the local paper had run a story about how fifty-nine young men and women from Susquehanna and two adjacent counties, all attached to the National Guard unit in nearby New Milford, had just shipped out to Iraq. A lot of people in Susquehanna County lingered a little longer over the news pages that day before turning to the coupons.

So it was no surprise that when the West Virginian in the white pickup truck showed up at her place at the end of 2005, Rosemarie was only too happy to invite him inside. To her, the $6,400 he was offering for a five-year lease on her 256 acres of land was a godsend. It wasn’t a fortune; there probably wouldn’t even be enough left over after she paid her property tax to settle the bill at the feed store, let alone replace the old electric stove in her kitchen. The oven had given up the ghost not long after her husband had, and ever since, Rosemarie had been living on canned soup, hot dogs, and anything else she could heat up on the top burners. But it was enough money to keep them going for maybe another year. And if it turned out that there really was gas down there, there could be a lot more money. “You wouldn’t even have to milk your cows anymore,” the West Virginian had told her. “You could just turn ’em out and let ’em go.”

She liked the sound of that. Rosemarie inked her name at the bottom of the contract.

I
T’S HARD TO IMAGINE
now why a passionate, some might even say militant, environmentalist with an individual-versus-the-corporate-complex attitude would agree to lease her precious 7.2 acres of paradise to a big out-of-state gas and oil company. As with almost everything about Victoria, the reasons were complicated.

Jim and Victoria certainly didn’t do it for the money—the bonus payment, the up-front payment to a leaseholder, for their small patch of land was, after all, only going to net them a couple hundred bucks at most. Instead, they seemed to have been seduced by a larger promise, the promise of the big picture. Back then, the big picture included a lot of talk about the comparative advantages of natural gas over ozone-munching coal and dirty and dangerous foreign oil. You couldn’t turn on the television in those days without seeing a picture,
usually of happy-go-lucky children frolicking on a swing set, with an inconspicuous wellhead squatting benignly in the background, reassuring Americans that natural gas was not only cheaper, cleaner, and domestically produced but somehow friendly. The promise then was all about how we could someday power our cars with compressed natural gas or liquefied natural gas, which would produce less pollution at the tailpipe, or could use the gas to generate electricity to run plug-in hybrids as well as everything else we plug in. Mass transit could be fueled directly or indirectly by natural gas, and the byproducts of the gas, such as nitrogen, could be used to make fertilizer to grow vast harvests of corn or saw grass that could be turned into biofuels. No one talked much in those days about the downside, about the greenhouse gases that were generated aplenty by the act of drilling itself. Nor was much said about the fact that there was no infrastructure to speak of in the country to accomplish any of those lofty goals of changing the way America uses gas. It was just taken as an article of unspoken faith that once the gas started flowing, entrepreneurs and engineers would find ways to use it, just as J. Paul Getty and John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford had done in the early days of oil. It was that bedrock American belief in the limitlessness of our own imagination, a petroleum version of “If you build it, they will come.”