The End of Country (35 page)

That night, as he went to bed, Ken went over the checklist of items he’d need and the steps he planned to take the next morning. He had left nothing to chance, and as he drifted off to sleep, he couldn’t help but smile as he thought about the look he’d be greeted with the next morning when Cabot saw what he was up to. It was a shame, he thought, that Crybaby wouldn’t be there to see it.

Then again, maybe, in a way, she would.

K
en Ely’s old backhoe grumbled and cussed and complained as he forced it, throttle wide open and engine wailing, up the last few yards of the mud and gravel access road to the gate at the top of the hill. A pallet of rocks—bluestone he had sweated to pry out of the ground—teetered at the end of the jerry-rigged forks. A lesser man, a man without Ken Ely’s intimate familiarity with the machine and lacking his deft mastery of the delicate art of balancing a half ton of stones at the end of a flexing tuning fork, might have been worried. After all, one false move and the whole load, stones and backhoe and Ken himself, could go tumbling back down the gravel sluice in one great rolling rockslide, hurtling past the cairn that marked the fictitious grave of the imaginary Chief Red Rock and right into the pond in front of Ken’s cottage, further distressing his fish, who still (they had told him) weren’t feeling very well.

But Ken wasn’t worried. He had faith in his skills at the controls of the backhoe he had basically built himself out of the detritus of farm equipment that had lain rusting for years in these hills before he
rescued it. But more important, Ken Ely had supreme faith in the justice of his cause. He was on a mission. Today, March 10, 2009, was the day he was going to do what he had wanted to do for a long time.

Poor old Charlie Memolo, the lawyer who had narrowly cheated death, would probably have another heart attack when he heard about this, Ken thought. This was exactly what Charlie had been trying to warn him against when he told Ken over the phone “Don’t do anything rash.” Charlie and the other lawyer Ken had retained up in Montrose on Charlie’s recommendation had been urging Ken to be patient, to let the state’s legal system run its course. Of course, neither of them knew Ken very well. If they had, that would have been the last advice they would have given him. The way Ken saw it, that process had gotten hopelessly bogged down in the sucking muck of legal procedure in state court, and Cabot, with its platoon of lawyers already on retainer, had barely felt the sting of it. The company would feel this, though. Of that Ken was certain.

He had timed it perfectly. Cabot had just finished drilling the new horizontal well that promised to be even bigger than the one that had made Ken a rich man. The company was in a very big hurry to begin fracking it. Crews were already on the clock, at a cost of thousands of dollars an hour, and the longer it took them to get the job done, the smaller Cabot’s profit would be.

The truth was, Ken really didn’t need the few tons of bluestone that lay underneath that extra two or so acres that the well site, spreading like a muddy cancer, had now effectively commandeered. He certainly had enough rocks. And if it was just about money—well, every stone in that part of the field, if it sold for top dollar, wouldn’t have been worth as much as a couple of hours of uninterrupted flow from the yet to be completed well. But this wasn’t about money. Or stones. Or even gas. This was about principle.

That’s why Ken had decided that he needed to blast those stones out of the ground, and that he needed to do it right now, right at the moment that Cabot was most desperate to get its frack teams onto the site. He had done his homework and decided that those irritating state regulations, the ones that prevented him from doing his own blasting, the ones that forced him to hire the boys from down in Factoryville to do it for him even though he was perfectly able to do it himself, might have a good use after all. They did include a provision
that barred blasting within a hundred yards of an active well. And since, in this temporary lull between drilling and fracking, the well was not technically active, and since the land he was going to blast was not technically included in the acreage that Cabot had claimed it needed, Ken figured he had a legal reed to which he could cling. Even then, he understood that there wasn’t a chance in hell that any court in the country would see it his way. But that was irrelevant. By the time a court got around to deciding the obvious, Ken would have already gotten the blasting done, gotten the rocks out, and more important, made his point.

It took some maneuvering to get the pallet of rocks in place once he reached the flat spot near the gate. He had to lay the pallet just right, so that when the truck carrying the frackwater came rumbling up the hill—as it would any moment—the first thing the driver would see would be the massive roadblock. With an artist’s eye, he laid the pallet on the ground. It sank a bit into the mud, in essence cementing itself into place. Ken was pleased. The rocks now completely blocked the gate. He cut the engine on the backhoe, climbed down from the cockpit, and inspected the barricade.

There were a lot of other things he could have done with those stones. He could have used them to fix the broken stone wall at the top of the hill. He had been meaning to do that for the longest time. God only knew how long that wall had been falling into disrepair. A good dry stack stone wall is a like a braid made out of rocks, each stone interlinked in balance and design with the next, and when one falls, sooner or later they all do. It can take decades, but eventually the whole deeply interconnected structure will come tumbling down if it isn’t maintained. When he was finished with these stones, he thought, maybe he would go back and finish fixing that wall. And whatever was left over he could sell. In fact, Victoria had asked if she could buy a pallet from him to build a patio outside her still under construction dream house. She had been hoping to get a discount, offering him a hundred dollars for the load. And while Ken no longer needed the money, it was a matter of principle to him that the rocks he pried out of his ground with his own hands would never be sold at a discount. It was $125, period. At the moment, however, those rocks weren’t for sale. They had a higher purpose.

Ken took a critical look at his roadblock. It was formidable, to be
sure, but it lacked that certain something. It was missing that final over-the-top operatic touch, that primal and elemental warning of danger. It was missing the rattle on the rattlesnake. But he had planned for that as well. He grabbed a brightly colored gas can from the back of his rig and clutched it as he stood in front of the pallet. And then, as the first of the frack trucks turned off the main road and began its perilous ascent to the drill site, Ken grabbed his spit bottle, and he waited.

K
EN ALWAYS INSISTED THAT
he never actually threatened to firebomb Cabot’s equipment, as the frightened truck driver and company officials alleged. Anyone who knew Ken knew that wasn’t his style. But then again, if the young driver, weaned on the job, no doubt, with tales of how the crazy old coot on the hill—the codger who talked to his fish and had had to be forcibly ejected from the courthouse grounds—had once barked a squirrel right over the head of one of Cabot’s drivers, was inclined to embellish the story of the showdown on what Ken had come to call “Lazy Dog Hill,” Ken wouldn’t mind. He liked the idea that he was becoming a legend. It never ceased to amuse Ken that to one group of people, he had managed to portray himself as the voice of reason and moderation, while to another group, he was considered a dangerously unstable backwoodsman capable of almost anything.

In fact, by the time word of the showdown reached Cabot’s satellite office over on Route 29, the legend of Ken Ely had already started to grow to the point where company officials believed that Ken was up there not only barricading their access to the all-important Ely 5H well, but, armed like some kind of petroleum-soaked Ted Kaczynski with a battery of gas-soaked rags and Molotov cocktails, stood ready to blow their entire operation—maybe even the whole top of the hill—to kingdom come.

They probably would have been surprised if they had known how comparatively peaceful Ken’s plan actually had been. He hadn’t intend to blow up anything other than a couple of square meters of bluestone, and that in strict accordance with state guidelines. And they might at least have been embarrassed by their own near hysterics over Ken’s carefully stage-managed antics had they taken the time to really think about it. But they didn’t.

Instead, just as Ken had anticipated, they turned tail and ran,
straight to a high-priced law firm they had retained in Scranton, a firm that had plenty of experience in the federal court system, and began putting together a request for an injunction.

Cabot was on solid legal footing. Ken knew that, and if he hadn’t, his own attorneys had done everything they could to advise him of that fact. “You’re making a tactical error,” Charlie had told Ken over the phone when Ken told him about it. Ken thought Charlie had missed the point. He also thought, considering Charlie’s heart, that the old lawyer needed to learn to relax.

Yes, Ken clearly understood that the lease he had signed with Cabot three years ago clearly stated that Ken would provide access to the wells that would be placed on his property. But the way Ken figured it, there was another access road. Even though he had blocked the only route by which Cabot could bring in the big trucks to frack the Ely 5H, he hadn’t cut off access altogether. There was still a way that Cabot could get in with smaller equipment to service that and the other wells if they needed to. He understood as well that no judge was ever going to rule in his favor, but that didn’t matter.

What mattered was that as far as Cabot was concerned, time was money, and at that moment, time was on Ken’s side. With Cabot’s money—the money they were even now funneling into his pockets—Ken could afford to buy the clock, or at least slow it down.

It took nearly two weeks for Cabot’s attorneys to draft their complaint and file it in U.S. district court in Scranton. In the meantime, the court issued a temporary injunction ordering Ken to open the gate—which he had already done. Ken had finished his blasting, had taken the rocks he didn’t really want or need, and was already back at work, the delicate work of rebuilding that fallen dry stack stone wall at the top of the hill.

The case wouldn’t formally be over until April 9; there were still a few legal loose ends to tie up before U.S. District Court Judge A. Richard Caputo made the injunction permanent, and while the whole process cost Ken Ely a few thousand dollars, he didn’t mind. The truth was, even if he had been broke, as he had been most of his life, he would have fought Cabot the same way. Emmagene had said it as well as he could have: “This is about what’s right.”

And what was right was simple. Ken had forced Cabot to pay a high price for its role in the death of his beloved dog. By the company’s own
estimates, as detailed in their initial complaint against Ken, Ken’s gambit had cost Cabot $3,000 an hour—$50 a minute—in lost productivity.

But this was never just about Crybaby, even though Ken had told anyone within earshot, and might even have convinced himself, that it was. It was bigger than that. Ken had taught Cabot a lesson—that Cabot and all the drillers all over the state were welcome, so was their money, and so were the promises of a better future that they brought with them. But Cabot and the other drillers also needed to understand that the land and the people who had lived on it for generations were a resource, too, a seething and powerful resource that, like the Marcellus itself, could bring immense benefits if it was treated with respect and carefully harnessed. But if they were careless, the drillers might just face the kind of blowouts that drillers had long ago learned to fear from the Marcellus.

As he worked to rebuild that fallen stone wall, balancing one rock skillfully against its neighbors, his ever present spit bottle resting on a rock nearby, Ken was feeling more than a little proud of himself, proud enough that he was almost able to forget the dull pain in his arm that had only recently cropped up and was now a steady though distant reminder that after sixty-two years of hard work and rough times, after three bouts with cancer and an ongoing battle with diabetes, he was getting old. Maybe he still had a fight or two left in him, he figured. Time would tell. But for the moment, at least, that domed hillock in Susquehanna County on which he stood was the top of the world, and in a place that had always had more than its fair share of Have Nots, Ken had finally become one of the Haves. He had money, he had respect—even if in some quarters it was the kind of respect that might be afforded a rattlesnake—and above all, he had his family: his children, his grandchildren, his great-grandchild, and his wife, the woman he had loved since he was nineteen years old.

He cast a glance toward the rough cairn down the hill where Crybaby was buried. Even now, he still liked sharing his victories, great and small, with the bluetick coonhound who used to follow him everywhere. One of these days, he figured, he’d get his turn to follow Crybaby. But that was somewhere down the road. For now, he had a wall to fix.