The End of Country (5 page)

Then, in 1973, with the first Arab oil embargo, America’s sense of complacency began to crack. The newspapers and nightly news broadcasts were filled with images of gas lines, and the farmers up around Ellsworth Hill began to feel the pain as the cost of diesel fuel for their tractors, fertilizer for their corn, and everything else shot up, while the government-controlled price they got for their milk failed to keep pace. Suddenly, there were a lot more dairy dispersals advertised in the local paper, there were a lot more bargains on antiques to be had, and the shoebox full of money in Cousin Keat’s dining room cupboard was running perilously low.

T
HAT DIDN’T MEAN MUCH
to me back then. It didn’t mean much to Ralph, either. In 1974, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania gave Ralph his driver’s license, and a year later, unchastened by that experience, they gave me one. We sought out every challenging stretch of two-lane within ten miles of Ellsworth Hill, often finding ourselves a hill or two over, on a perfectly pitched stretch of tarmac that ran along the creek bottom in the nearby village of Dimock. This was where, after Ralph finished his chores, we’d go to race. Ralph drove a beat-to-hell ’71 Mustang and I had my own baby blue death trap, a ’69 Ford Torino with pot resin layered thick enough on the inside of the windshield to sign your name in it. As we’d travel, he’d be blaring Lynyrd Skynyrd from his 8-track and I’d be blasting the Allman Brothers. But first, we’d fill our tanks and stock up on munchies at Ken Ely’s service station up the road in Springville. It cost about $5 back then to fill your tank—big money for the time—and if we didn’t have the money, as was often the case, Ken was the kind of guy who would give you a dirty look but let you slide until you had the cash—and then we’d head out. You had to be careful back then. There was always the risk that you would come hurtling over a rise and suddenly find yourself nose to ass behind a slow-moving hay wagon or a manure spreader, a leaky wagonload of wet shit sloshing around behind large steel blades that look like the kind of thing Indiana Jones had to slide through in order to get to the Holy Grail. If that happened, you were screwed. If you hit your brakes too hard, your wheels would lock up and your tires would skid on the slick manure and you might well
find yourself in a drainage ditch that as likely as not was also filled with spilled manure. In fact, precisely that happened to Ralph. Several times.

With all of that to think about, it was easy for Ralph and me to ignore the fact that the two things absolutely essential to drive a ’71 Mustang or a ’69 Torino way too fast on treacherous two-lanes—fossil fuels and youth—are both finite resources.

Of course, even then, there were people who understood such things far better than we did. In fact, by the time Ralph and I got our licenses, both the government and private industry were scouring every remote corner of the country where gas or oil might be lurking, looking for some hidden cache that might stretch America’s dwindling supply of domestic fuel. In the fall of 1974, they had made their way up to Ellsworth Hill. That was when a team of geologists from the United States Geological Survey turned up, pulling into the neighbors’ driveways unannounced, knocking on doors, asking if they could poke around. I wasn’t there when they showed up, but as my mother explained it to me, they told the locals that researchers had located an underground formation—the remains of a coral reef, they said, left over from some long-buried sea—north of these hills in New York state and to the west, and they wanted to take a quick look at the lay of the land around here to see if maybe that formation stretched this far to the east.

They were primarily looking for oil. But it was clear to the locals that these clean-cut and officious-looking men with their clipboards and their monitors and their furrowed brows didn’t hold out much hope that they would find anything of value. Still, there was something about their manner that made the locals nervous. There has always been a deep mistrust of government in these hills, and every bit as much mistrust of big business. So, for a few tense weeks, the party lines on Ellsworth Hill and beyond were humming as one neighbor alerted the next that the government geologists had come by and were heading toward the next farm. “Let ’em look around, but whatever you do, don’t sign anything,” one neighbor warned my mother.

As it turned out, there was nothing to sign. The geologists took a few samples of earth; they cored out a few rocks and did a few calculations as wary farmers looked over their shoulders; they squinted at tables of figures; and finally they came up with their conclusion: that
elusive cache of oil they were hoping for was not here. As for the gas, they told folks that the wisps that they had encountered over the years were, just as they suspected, nothing more than nuisance gas, small upper-level deposits of methane that would come and go, never amounting to much. However, deep down, thousands of feet below that gas, the geologists said, they believed there was an ossified sea of the stuff, as volatile and rich as anything this part of the country, maybe even the world, had ever seen. It was locked in a stratum of shale called the Marcellus, which had been discovered a century and a half ago and named for a small town in New York where that layer of shale had, through a series of geological upheavals, been wrenched to the surface. Up in Marcellus, where the rock was exposed to the air, the gas had long since drifted away. But everywhere else it remained deeply buried in a subterranean incubator. That was all academic, though, the geologists told them. There was no way that the full power of this deeply buried and tightly compacted sea of gas could ever be unleashed.

W
hen my mother first called to tell me about her visit from the young woman with the nose ring, I knew virtually nothing about natural gas or the techniques used to capture it. I wouldn’t have known the difference between Marcellus Shale and Cassius Clay.

I knew even less about the men who spent their lives in pursuit of the stuff. If I imagined them at all, I pictured them as they appeared in movies, as arrogant and insidious oligarchs, the shadowy vanguard of rapacious corporatism bent on stripping away any public constraints, befouling the land and raking in enormous profits, venal crooks who cloaked their infamy with cowboy kitsch. Part of that was my own prejudice. I had spent most of my career as a crime writer, rubbing shoulders with all manner of con men and criminals, and so I’d conditioned myself to start from the premise that anything presented as “the next big thing” is likely to be just another fetid swamp of corruption.

It wasn’t just that I had given my mother my word that I would research the Marcellus. I’ve promised my mother I’d do lots of things over the years that never got done, from painting the old hay
rake rusting away in the front-yard barn red to locating her great-grandfather’s discharge papers from the Army of the Potomac. But this time there was something critical riding on my promise. We might have known next to nothing about the Marcellus or the gas companies that were courting us, but we knew enough to realize that we couldn’t take anything anybody told us at face value. The gas companies had an agenda, so did everyone else involved in this, and my family needed one, too. It wasn’t enough that we might get some money, maybe a lot of it. And it wasn’t enough that we wanted to protect the farm. We needed to learn everything we could to figure out how, and even whether, we could do both. And because I had spent the last three decades as a journalist looking for the flaws in every great promise, pulling together the disparate data from a thousand sources so we could develop that agenda became my job.

I
N NO TIME, THE CRAMPED
corner of my basement that serves as both my children’s playroom and my office was crammed with all manner of maddeningly inscrutable documents—scholarly treatises on arcane geological principles, impenetrable papers on the mechanics of drilling, and histories of the frantic, never-ending hunt for energy that had played such a critical role in the development of this part of the country. It was the history of it all that first captured my attention. That’s only natural, of course. I’m not a scientist, or an engineer, I’m a storyteller, and I didn’t even set out to do that; it had just happened, through a long series of accidents in my own life, and the more I looked at what was written between the lines of all those inscrutable reports, the more I came to realize that the whole history of the Marcellus Shale, from its genesis at the dawn of time to the present, was itself a history of random accidents and improbable coincidences that stretched across a hundred thousand millennia to create this vast sea of buried energy. I might not have been able to pierce the veil of numbers and formulas and theories that made it all possible, at least not at first, but I had it in me to understand on a gut level how, over hundreds of years, hundreds, thousands of men—losers, many of them—guys just like me—had spent their lives struggling to master it, to subdue it. I could understand how, in the end, it took an almost desperate stab by a geologist—a Pennsylvania boy named Bill Zagorski who, much like me, was staring at the business end of middle
age without a lot to show for it, a guy who, also a lot like me, was at the end of his rope, but who was above all a guy with the grit and savvy to turn that frayed rope shank into a lifeline.

The deeper I dug, the more I came to see that at its heart, this was a story I recognized, a story about characters and character, that it was all about a peculiar breed of men and their obsession, an obsession that pulsed through the deepest layers of American history, shattering the bedrock before it until finally it would emerge through the fractures and fissures it had created on my mother’s rocky driveway and innumerable places just like it, in the form of a young woman with a jacket that was too tight, a nose ring, and sheaf of legal papers.

I soon came to understand that while there were plenty of examples of ravenous greed and wanton destruction writ large in America’s energy history, there was something else concealed beneath the text of all those dry tomes as well. It was the story of an endangered species, a kind of American that was fast disappearing, guys who had the hard-earned skills and rough wisdom to make something out of nothing.

In short, what I found buried under all those dry calculations was an epic story about men who in many respects were just like the guys I grew up with at the farm.

E
VERY GOOD STORY BEGINS WITH
“Once upon a time,” and in this one, it is the early 1820s in the rustic little village of Fredonia, New York. If you had seen Fredonia back then, it wouldn’t have seemed like much more than a wide spot in the road between the great eastern forest and Lake Erie, a tiny village of modest but sturdy houses built out of the same trees that had been cleared to make way for them. But from the beginning, it was a place that reflected a kind of restless and purely American energy.

The village itself had been founded by a handful of settlers who had streamed into the region following the Holland Land Purchase in 1792, when a group of investors from the Netherlands, barred by law from buying land in America and so using Americans as front men, bought a vast swath of virgin land, nearly two-thirds of all the land in western New York, cut a deal with those Native Americans who remained, and began selling pieces of it. But if the men who sold the land were classic European oligarchs, those who bought it were anything
but. Those early settlers, fueled no doubt by the kind of revolutionary spirit that motivated so much of the fledgling republic in those days, had apparently dreamed of building a village that they believed would reflect the ethos of democracy and free enterprise, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century they had re-created a rustic version of a stout, no-nonsense New England town in the hemlocks along Canadaway Creek, right down to the village green complete with a wooden platform in the center reserved for civic functions. In a zealous attempt to claim this outpost for the republican principles they espoused, they jettisoned the original name of the place—the earliest pioneers had called the place Canadaway, after the creek, a bastardization of an Algonquin word meaning “nestled in the hemlock.” They redubbed it Fredonia, a pompous and synthetic name that took the word “freedom” and added a high-toned Latin suffix to it to make it seem more awe-inspiring and pseudoclassical. The name was once considered (and quickly rejected) as a possible name for the new United States.

The casual visitor to Fredonia in the early days of the nineteenth century could be forgiven for thinking that the name was the most impressive thing about the town. There wasn’t much in the way of commerce—a general store, a mill, a gunsmith’s shop that by the standards of the time was fairly prosperous—and every chore was an ordeal, from hacking down enough firewood to cook to making sure the flinty land yielded enough to make a meal worth cooking at all. Like most of America back then, Fredonia was a place that ran largely on sweat and sinew, the kind of place where a man was measured by the amount of work he could get done in a day and where the day was measured by the progress of the sun, because when it set, the whole community was plunged into darkness. Life was a constant race with the sun, and when winter approached and the days grew short, that race would always become more desperate as the Fredonians scrambled to lay in enough fuel to warm themselves against the frigid winds and blinding snows that blew in off the lake.