The End of Country (22 page)

And locals like Anne Stang were more than willing to be schooled. A widow like my mother—her hundred-plus acres border my mother’s farm—Anne Stang is an intelligent, well-read, savvy woman. But nothing in her books and nothing in her years in the hills had prepared her or her grown children for the decision with which they were now faced. She knew about farming, she knew about a lot of things, but neither she, her son, Kurt, nor her daughter, Karen
Williams, knew the first thing about natural gas. But they did know that what they needed was someone like Clay, who was still one of them, to guide them.

For many of them, there was a sense of inevitability about the whole thing, a conviction that whatever doubts they might have about the advent of leasing and drilling, those things were going to happen, and that if they weren’t going to be swept away by the flood of money and gas, they’d need someone to shepherd them through the process, to make sure they signed the right lease, with the right company, with the appropriate protections for their property and their progeny.

So the Stangs and a dozen or so of their neighbors were mightily relieved when Clay agreed—modestly, of course—to be that guide. He was frank and unassuming, and the crowd—all but my mother—leaned forward to catch every one of his soft, drawled words.

The up-front lease payments, he told them, though they might be tempting—though they might even seem unimaginably generous to them now, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars—were, in the grand scheme of things, little more than chump change. The real money would come when the wells were drilled and the royalties started pouring in. Back in Texas, he had seen people who had collected tens of thousands of dollars a month in royalties, in some cases more. That was the real Promised Land, he told them. But it’d be a long road to get there.

He was far more blunt than any but the most honest landmen had been. Drilling is a dirty and noisy business, he went on, in language that was far more direct than any of the landmen had used. Soon their peaceful hills would echo with the noisy rumblings of massive trucks. They’d be kept up at night by the hellish jackhammer drumming of the drill bit and the glaring lights of the rigs. Pipelines would cut beneath their fields, and though the lines themselves would be buried, they’d leave scars. And then, of course, there were the unsavory characters that the enterprise would bring into the close-knit community. As Clay told the crowd, “some of these oil field workers are not what you’d call the best citizenry that you can bring into a community. You know, they live hard lives, they work a hard job, and they earn good money and spend it in bars.”

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 father 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.

M
y 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.