The End of Country (36 page)

T
he tumor itself wasn’t the problem. It was less than 1.4 centimeters, and it was nestled in some fatty tissue in her left breast from which it could easily be excised. The problem was that there were other, free-floating cancer cells in the breast, the surgeon told my mother, and in all likelihood she’d have to take the entire breast. My mother took the news in stride.

That surprised me. For weeks, she had been pinning all her hopes on the idea that she could undergo a simple lumpectomy, maybe a little chemo or radiation therapy to erase any trace of the cancer, and then get back to her garden. She had summarily dismissed one surgeon who pressed her to have a mastectomy—my mother was convinced that the doctor was ordering the operation with as much forethought as she might order from a Chinese menu—but when the second surgeon, this one from Sloan-Kettering in New York, told her that there was little chance of avoiding it, my mother acquiesced. It was before dawn on a late summer morning when my sister and I
drove her into the city, got her checked into the hospital, and saw her off to the operating room.

She was pensive, of course, but she did her best to conceal whatever fear she might have felt. That’s the way my mother has always been. She can crochet an afghan of pure terror out of thin air, but give her something real to worry about and she turns into Barbara Stanwyck. She insisted that she wasn’t afraid that the cancer might kill her. Her only stated concern was that her blouses might not fit as well when the operation was over, and that she herself might find her new appearance disturbing when the time came to bathe or change her bandages. But even that she kept to herself, for the most part. All she really wanted to talk about before they wheeled her into surgery was whether my sister and I had settled on a strategy to deal with the estate tax issue.

“We’ve got plenty of time to worry about that,” my sister told her.

The operation took four hours. It was a success. The next day, she was released from the hospital, and we took her to my sister’s house to convalesce for a few days. I knew that the danger had passed when my sister called me a couple of days later. “Oh, Babsy’s at it again,” she spat through clenched teeth. Now that the danger of the cancer seemed to be behind her, my mother could channel all that free-floating angst that she had courageously bottled up for weeks into the most inconsequential things—she could fret freely over her flowers and whether she had remembered to unplug every electrical device at the farm before she had left, whether a lightning storm might suddenly strike and knock out the power to the water pump, whether one of the neighbor kids might run over her mailbox while she wasn’t there—all of which, my sister had explained to the point of exasperation, might just as easily occur if she was there.

“So, she’s better?” I asked.

“She’s fine. But her cancer’s going to kill
me
,” my sister moaned.

The bout with cancer had sidetracked my sister and me. The energy we had previously spent understanding the mysteries of the Marcellus had for weeks been focused exclusively on understanding breast cancer in all its permutations. Now my mother was safe from that. But now we realized that the whole experience had been a warning shot, providence’s way of telling us that my mother had been right
when she told us she wouldn’t be around forever and that whatever happened at the farm wouldn’t be her problem, it would be ours.

My mother was already seventy-six years old, just three years shy of the age her mother had been when she died. She was twenty-one years older than her father had been when he died, and she had survived her husband by eleven years. She had faced this direct threat to her life with grace and courage, but now that she was freed from that and could indulge every fear and neurosis, this was her way of telling us, and herself, that we needed to get back to work on saving the farm from the dangerous effects of our own good luck. Soon thereafter, my sister, my mother, and I arranged a series of meetings with lawyers and financial advisers to finalize our plan to protect the farm, not just from the drillers but from the estate tax. We made sure that she was involved in every discussion, that every significant decision was hers as we built up a kind of corporate bulwark that would protect her and us. And if we still had any of those guilty old Irish misgivings about it all, we could tell ourselves that we were doing it not for ourselves but to give Mom something to think about that would keep her mind occupied and keep her from obsessing over minutiae.

My mother, of course, was far closer to her Irish roots than either my sister or myself, and I soon realized that we had wildly underestimated my mother’s capacity to (in the absence of real misfortune) turn any piece of promising news on its head and into a lurking disaster. I saw her do just that a few weeks after she had returned from my sister’s house to the farm. By that point, the drillers were already beginning to pore over the geological maps of her land and were getting ready to scout possible locations for the well. Once it was decided where the well would go, they had told her (through me) that they would pay her a couple of thousand dollars per acre for every acre they disturbed. They’d pay her more—more than ten thousand dollars—for the right to cut a road across her property that would lead to the well, and a subsidiary company would pay her several thousand more for permission to run a small pipeline across her land. As if all that wasn’t enough, she got another miraculous windfall out of the blue that summer when one of those pharmaceutical companies in which she held a thousand shares of stock—shares she had held on to because my father, on his deathbed, had instructed her to—was
sold and the buyer paid the shareholders a ten-dollar premium per share. In other words, $80,000 had simply fallen out of a tree and hit my mother square on her floppy straw hat.

But did my mother appreciate that spontaneous cloudburst of good luck? Of course not. “This has been a very hard year for me,” she told me on the phone the night that the drug company check arrived in the mail.

I couldn’t help myself. All the pent-up frustration of the past year and a half burst out of me. “Goddammit!” I said. “You need to look around, Mom. You just beat cancer, for chrissakes. You know why? Because you had the ability—financially, intellectually, personally—to get it detected early enough to be treated. I’ll bet that you’ve got more than a few neighbors without insurance who wouldn’t have been as lucky. You had the ability to rush off to New York to have it treated. I’ll bet a lot of them don’t. And now, in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression, the one you’re always talking about, people are dropping money on you from out of the sky, ten thousand here, eighty thousand there, a quarter of a million out of nowhere with the promise of maybe millions more to come, and you have the unmitigated gall to tell me how bad your life is? You know what? You keep talking like that and you’re really gonna piss off God. God doesn’t like ingrates.”

I could almost feel my mother flinching on the other end of the line. There was a long pause. And then she said, “You’re right.”

There was more than simple contrition in the way she said it. There was also a hint of maternal defiance, as if she were demanding to know whether I, who had so long pretended that somehow none of this really affected me, was ready at last to accept the benefits and the consequences of it myself. As I hung up the phone that night, I realized what my mother had done. Without saying a word, she had taken my self-righteous indignation and turned it back on me, leaving me panting under the weight of the same question I had asked her.

“Damn, she’s good at that,” I thought.

V
ICTORIA
S
WITZER MIXED HERSELF
a martini, fixed another for Jim, and shouldered her way out the door of the trailer. Though the yard that led to the front of their soon-to-be-completed house was still littered with construction debris, cinder blocks, and odd ends of lumber
scattered here and there along with a few rusted pieces of rebar, at last the place was starting to look like a home, if only from the outside. The metal roof was on, and so was the cedar siding, and the elaborate leaded glass door that she and Jim had almost broken their backs trying to install lent a certain elegance to the place.

Inside, of course, it was still a shell. The soaring fireplace that Jim had handcrafted using local stone and a hand-hewn timber mantel were finished, but the plumbing and the electricity and the interior walls had yet to be installed, and for now it remained a cavernous playground for the half dozen or so cats that Victoria had managed to attract.

But outside it was different. A few months earlier, Victoria and Jim had begun work on a singularly beautiful feature, a bluestone patio, built of rocks they had bought—at full price—from Ken Ely. They were, in fact, the same stones that Ken had used to block Cabot’s access to his well during his showdown with the company back in March. With them Victoria and Jim created an outdoor refuge, a place where on autumn afternoons they could someday sit and listen to the wind in the old hemlocks and the water tumbling over the rocks in the nearby creek, much as Ken had conjured his own protector, Chief Red Rock, out of a similar pile of stones.

Funny thing was, it already seemed to have worked. Sitting there sipping cocktails on an autumn afternoon, Victoria and Jim didn’t speak much. They just soaked up the silence, the only sounds the wind in the hemlocks, the song of the creek.

It had been like this for a couple of weeks now, ever since the DEP, angered by the latest and most egregious infraction at Cabot’s local wells—a nearly eight-thousand-gallon spill at the Heitsman 4H well two hills over on Route 29—had ordered the company to suspend all operations in Dimock until it could come up with a plan to guarantee that nothing like that would ever happen again. For the company, the timing of the spill—it was actually three separate spills, all at the same site and all within a few days—could not have been worse. It happened just as the DEP’s Bureau of Oil and Gas Management was preparing to release its long-awaited 23-page report on the methane contamination that had begun on New Year’s Day at Norma Fiorentino’s place. Now the company was facing not only more than $150,000 in fines—that was small change to a big company like Cabot—but
also the far more formidable financial hit from having to shut down its fracking operations all over Dimock.

The suspension was temporary, of course. Within a few days, a chastened Cabot would present its plan to the state, would agree to submit to a level of scrutiny that no other driller in the state had to endure, and would again be permitted to resume its operations. But for the moment, that was all in the future. Now the only thing that disturbed the whisper of the wind and the chirping of the creek was the occasional rumble of tires on the road above Victoria and Jim’s house, and the only time those tires were attached to a Cabot vehicle was when the company was making one of its now mandatory deliveries of fresh water to the homes that had been affected by the methane leak.

“You know,” Victoria said to Jim, “right now, it almost seems like this was all a dream.”

Jim was silent.

“Well, maybe some good will come of it,” she said.

A
CCORDING TO THE DEP
’s own engineering report, the incident at the Heitsman well was not as bad as it could have been. But as far as the agency and the locals were concerned, it was bad enough. It began about 2
P.M
. on September 16. The company had carved out its pad and drilled its well on a rugged chunk of fallow farmland off Route 29, just a hill or two over from Victoria’s place, and had finished drilling a horizontal well that plunged a mile deep and a mile out, when they summoned their contractors to frack the well. Two of the best-known names in the business had signed on for the project. Halliburton was handling the frack job itself, while Baker, another well-known contractor, was handling the water supply. The project was going along as planned when a worker threw open a valve to release water from one of the 21,000-gallon mixing tanks and a coupling on a hose failed, sending somewhere between 1,050 and 2,100 gallons of frackwater surging onto the ground. The water had already been treated with the fracking compound, and while the chemicals—which included Halliburton’s own secret formula gelling agent LGC-35 CBM, which the company itself describes as a potential carcinogen—accounted for only about 0.05 percent of the fluid, it was more than enough to cause the DEP to take notice.

While about 800 gallons of that initial spill was contained on the drill pad—before the fracking began, the driller had built berms around part of it—hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand, gallons had reached a wooded wetland that fed nearby Stevens Creek. By the time the DEP arrived, the contractor had already built a hay and dirt dam to keep any more of the liquid from reaching the creek, and another had been built in the creek itself to prevent the tainted fluid from drifting downstream. All the same, the spill did kill a number of small minnows and frogs, though larger fish seemed to be spared any immediate problems.