Amity and Prosperity_One Family and the Fracturing of America Read online

  In 2004, Range Resources, which was based in Fort Worth, Texas, had successfully fracked the first well in Washington County. Now, six years later, the billion-dollar company was the largest producer of natural gas in the southwestern part of the state. Forbes magazine was calling Range “the King of the Marcellus,” the gas-rich shale deposit that stretched from New York State to West Virginia and contained enough natural gas to power America for a decade. Range’s stock price reflected its success in the Marcellus, rising from just under seven dollars in 2004 to fifty dollars in 2010, as the natural gas boom approached its apex. With its sudden bounty and low price, natural gas was a great bet for the future. It also burned cleaner than coal, releasing less carbon into the atmosphere. And soon, Pennsylvania would be producing one-fifth of America’s supply.

  The Washington County Fair provided a place where companies could speak directly to farmers whose mineral rights they coveted. Range Resources began to attend in 2006, thanks to Ray Walker, who’d graduated with a degree in agricultural engineering from Texas A&M and now headed the company’s new Marcellus Division. Walker was known to be a man of principle. He seemed less concerned with Range’s public appearance than with simply enjoying the fair. He also bid on pigs and goats.

  Most locals saw the gas company’s involvement in the fair as a gesture of neighborliness. They cheered industry’s return. It marked a new era in a long-depressed place, and the lease money Range and other companies paid helped people replace roofs, build fences, and hang on to their farms instead of being forced to sell to developers. Corporations were also generously filling the pockets of Washington County’s kids, including Harley Haney’s, buying up their animals at auction.

  Stacey was skeptical. It made her uneasy to watch these corporations come in and toss money around, and she suspected that Range Resources wanted something in return for its mini water bottles and freebie seat cushions. Stacey was convinced that the animals that fetched the highest prices tended to belong to the children of large landowners whose farms were most attractive to oil and gas companies looking to sign leases. Stacey had signed her own lease with Range two years earlier, but that hadn’t turned out like she’d planned.

  When Harley stepped into the ring with Boots, however, Stacey’s irritation vanished. In his red shirt and dark jeans, Harley led his goat on a short leash without having to tug her along like the rest of the kids did. The goat heeled as a dog does and then stood on command as Harley set her feet squarely in the sawdust. When the judge took her back leg in his hand to examine her, she stayed still. Harley smiled down at her and at the judges, not the ear-to-ear grin of the boy showman, but the self-conscious half smile of a young man proud of his animal. Together, he and Boots won Grand Champion Showmanship.

  The 2010 fair marked a good year for the family. Pepsi and Phantom, two of Paige’s rabbits, tied for second place. Paige also took second in the junior SPAM-cooking contest with her southwestern-themed Mexi-SPAM Mac and Cheese. Pappy won a blue ribbon for his butternuts for the second year running.

  Packing up the trailer at the week’s end, Stacey was relieved. The fair had gone better than she’d dared to hope. In addition to the kids’ wins, there was the successful visit by her friend Chris Rush. Chris, who was six years younger, had grown up in Amity. Although they’d been dating nearly a year, she wouldn’t call him her boyfriend until she was sure that he was going to stick. At the fair, he’d shown up for Harley’s and Paige’s events. In his reticent way, he offered support by just being there, and that pleased her. She was also so happy with Boots and the rabbits that she decided not to sell them. Although, as a Boer, Boots was raised for meat, Stacey now wanted to breed her with their neighbor’s billy. Selling the babies would bring in some helpful cash.

  After five nights in the camper away from home, Harley had improved in both body and spirit. Striding around the fair with ease, he was still a scarecrow, but a happy one. He clearly felt better, and Stacey hoped that she was watching his illness recede for the last time, returning him to the boy he’d been before he got sick.

  2 | WHEN THE BOOM BEGAN

  Stacey had long wanted to replace the battered lean-to that housed their animals, exposing them to wind, rain, and snow. But on the six hundred dollars she made a week as a nurse, the dream barn remained a dream. When oil and gas leases began to appear in people’s mailboxes in the early 2000s, she thought that this lease money might finally pay for it. No one knew what these new leases would yield, but at work at Washington Hospital, her fellow nurses told stories—rural myths really—about this or that elderly hayseed with hundreds of rocky acres who’d suddenly become a shaleionaire.

  Talk of who was cashing in and how they were doing it became part of daily chatter in the recovery unit, a fourteen-bed open bay hung with pale green curtains, which Stacey and four other nurses on duty kept open unless they were emptying bedpans or changing a catheter. Patients arrived directly from the operating room, asleep or emerging from sedation’s murky depths. The nurses’ main job was to make sure that no one stroked out, which was rare. More often they woke up nauseous and confused. Clad in scrubs of blue bottoms and white V-necks, the nurses moved among their patients as machines monitored vitals automatically. Every fifteen minutes, the machines issued a series of bleeps measuring blood pressure.

  Stacey was happiest working a shift alongside her best friend, Kelly Tush, a soft-spoken redhead. Both liked their jobs, although they complained about the long hours. A shift could last from twelve to twenty-three hours straight with no breaks. Still, even when exhausted, Stacey possessed a natural tenderness with patients, an empathy with the infirm. There was something about a vulnerable person lying in bed, often a neighbor or someone she knew, that elicited a calm in her. She was also that way with animals and small children.

  The nurses kept their voices low until they were in the break room, where amid the lingering aroma of urine, bleach, and blood they ate lunch and talked about whatever was going on in their lives. Stacey often entertained her colleagues with tales of farm life, which involved the latest antics of her animals—stories of her donkey, Bob, who kept breaking down the fence between her place and the Voyles’ farm next door. Bob was in love with their high-class mare, Doll, and kept trying to mount her.

  Since Stacey lived farther out in the country than most, where leasing was at its peak, she was the first with the chance to sign. When the shiny SUVs of the land men who negotiated the leases appeared on the back roads of Amity, Stacey plotted a course of action. In 2004, as the buzz of Range’s groundbreaking success with fracking in Washington County trickled down to its residents, few locals understood what fracking was, or what these leases entailed. On signing, people could earn a bonus from five dollars to seven thousand dollars an acre; there were few rules governing such deals, and Stacey, with eight acres, was hoping for the going price of a thousand dollars each, nearly the nine-thousand-dollar price tag of the barn she wanted to build.

  Yet signing a lease wasn’t just about money. Stacey also saw it as her patriotic duty. She, like many Americans, was tired of the United States sending troops to fight wars for oil. Her father had served the country’s dubious needs in Vietnam, and she saw the war in Iraq as more of the same. Once again, poor Americans were fighting on behalf of the rich. “My dad lived through Vietnam,” she said. “I’m totally about getting soldiers home, and not relying on foreign oil.”

  It wasn’t just about ending wars. Relying on domestic energy could also help restore America’s place in the world, possibly returning Amity to its former standing. She’d heard the news reports about how natural gas could revive the region’s industries, and thought of her father and those of his generation who’d lost their jobs. And although Stacey had her doubts about the full-throated corporate messaging, this had little effect on her desire to sign a lease. These new leases sprang from the ground—a rare win in a place that had been losing for generations.

  She also hoped that signing a ga
s lease might block the coal company from undermining her farm. She, like others, didn’t want Amity to become like Prosperity, the village seven miles away where a kind of industrial coal mining called “long wall” had cost many farm families their water by damaging the aquifer below their land. In response, the coal company bought up people’s property and some residents left. Once empty, the houses were stripped of their copper wiring by scrap metal thieves, which made them unlivable and risked turning Prosperity into yet another coal patch ghost town. Maybe, Stacey and others thought, the gas companies would trump the coal operators, and drilling would stave off mining. The unknown realities of drilling for shale gas seemed preferable to the familiar toll coal mining levied.

  Stacey first asked her neighbor Rick Baker for advice on leasing back in 2006. He lived a mile from the Haneys’ farmhouse and taught Harley guitar. He also cut an unusual figure in Amity: a mild-mannered church-choir director who wore wire-rimmed glasses, he was a registered Democrat. As he grew older, he grew more committed to progressive politics, mostly around social issues, including gay and transgender rights. Historically, being a Democrat here wasn’t unusual, due to the legacy of the coal and steel unions that once held sway. Over time, however, many union members had moved to the right out of hostility to the federal government, which they felt was both failing them and invading their lives. Baker was one of the few he knew who voted for Obama.

  Although Baker had some concerns about the environmental hazards related to fracking, he was pro-gas. As he saw it, the benefits to the country outweighed the potential personal costs of contaminated water. Every industrial practice came with risks. “If we don’t take chances we’re not going to continue to be the greatest nation in the world,” he said. He also believed it was time for landowners to share some of the risks that coal miners had borne for centuries. Those who campaigned against fracking were mostly environmentalists who had no experience with extractive industry and stood to make nothing off of leases. They knew nothing of what it meant to live atop a coal mine, of poisoned streams, of how a coal company’s bankruptcy devastated a town, of how a farm could lose its water when the coal was mined from beneath it.

  Baker also had other reasons to favor fracking over his region’s legacy of coal: he stood to make hundreds of thousands by leasing his land for a compressor station. The station would place the gas under enough pressure that it could hurtle another fifty to one hundred miles toward the East Coast markets of Philadelphia and New York City. From the start, Baker had enjoyed good relations with Range Resources. He found the employees who came out to survey his pastures to be up-front, and liked it when the higher-ups took him into confidence regarding their plans. For a time, the money would change the lives of both Baker and his wife, Melinda, a housekeeper. Melinda was able to stop cleaning houses. Baker, like others, wasn’t going to rush off to Florida with a big wad of cash. He would stay on the land, and continue to live his steady life, giving guitar lessons.

  He was confident enough in Range Resources that when the company approached him to ask if he’d make a television commercial for their “My Range Resources” campaign, Baker said yes. On radio and television ads, Range wanted to show local people enjoying the outdoors while talking about the benefits of leasing. In his spot, Baker wandered his land against a backdrop of his own guitar picking. For the ad, he was paid two hundred dollars. Baker was bright: he knew the fee was a pittance. But he loved composing, and hearing his music on TV was enough to make him happy. There were others, far more vociferous than Baker, who made public salvos on the company’s behalf. “Farmers around here couldn’t afford a tractor,” Mary Dalbo, a Range leaseholder said in her “My Range Resources” advertisement. “Now since they leased their farm to Range Resources, they’re driving tractors with air-conditions. It’s wonderful they got this opportunity, because, believe me, them boys worked hard just to survive.”

  Baker was happy to share what he was learning from Range with Stacey. Through Baker and others, Stacey learned that the companies were looking for larger lots to make it easier for them to consolidate leases and infrastructure. The bigger the plot, the more the company might be willing to pay per acre. So one summer evening in 2006, Stacey drove up and down her dirt road to speak to her neighbors. She stopped next door at Justa Breeze to see Beth and John Voyles. Outside their ranch house, a miniature white picket fence surrounded a life-sized statue of a boxer. The dog sat beneath a sign that read BOXER HEAVEN. The Voyles didn’t intend the rock garden to look like a cemetery, just a tribute to the dogs they considered family. Beth moved around a lot as a child; her father was in the military, and she’d originally come to Amity to visit her grandmother’s farm. Now she stayed put, leaving only for horse shows, veterinary appointments, and trips to the Giant Eagle supermarket in nearby Washington. Beth loved to cook, and she usually had a stew pot bubbling on the stove.

  When Stacey pulled into the drive, Beth, surrounded by a swarm of slobbering boxers, came out of the basement and greeted her warmly. Stacey explained the virtues of signing a lease together: more money and greater influence than going it alone with a corporation. To Beth, this sounded like a smart idea. She went out to the garage, where her husband liked to retreat to the quiet of a chaise longue. The farm had been in his family for seventy-five years, and this was his refuge. He sat beneath a ceiling fan and next to an antique Ford tractor, which he’d restored himself and painted with the confederate flag. John said yes, as he always did. Whatever Beth wanted was fine by him. A kind and taciturn man, he’d lost his leg at seventeen when he was hit by a car on the way to school. Then he’d worked as a mechanic for seventeen years before getting hurt on the job. Between this incident and a fight with Beth’s half sister, the Voyles had been involved in two personal-injury suits, which gave them a reputation for being litigious. The story was that the Voyles were always suing somebody, but this story, like another about Beth shooting a man in California, was untrue, nothing more than country prattle. John Voyles attempted to avoid such gossip, preferring the solitude of his farm, his family, and his bees.

  “Keep to myself kind of,” he said later under oath. “And that ain’t working too good.”

  To continue their discussion about signing a lease together, Stacey invited Beth and John down to her farmhouse one evening. She baked sugar cookies for John Voyles, his favorite. Over cookies and coffee, Stacey, the Voyles, and Derrick Puskarich, who lived with his wife down McAdams, discussed the advantages and possible pitfalls of selling off the right to the gas beneath their property.

  Stacey was most concerned about protecting the quality of their water, since she’d grown up without any. Her family had relied on rainwater to fill a giant cistern outside their house, or they hauled water. This involved loading a huge plastic tank called a water buffalo onto the bed of a pickup and driving ten miles to fill it at the nearest water station, in a village called Ruff Creek. She hated hauling water; growing up, it had symbolized all her family lacked. When Stacey went looking for a home of her own, the quality of its well and an abundance of clean water had been her top priorities. In any lease she was going to sign, she wanted to include a clause that guaranteed that if anything went wrong with their wells, the company would pay to fix the problem and to supply them water. The Voyles and Puskarichs agreed. So Stacey called Range Resources to discuss the group lease and the clause she wanted to include. After she went back and forth on the phone with Range’s leasing agents, the company drafted the following provision, which Stacey approved: Lessee, at Lessee’s expense, agrees to provide Lessor with potable water until such time as Lessor’s water source has been repaired or replaced with a source of substantially similar quality.

  On December 30, 2008, their lease was ready to sign. That day, the families planned to meet together at Range’s corporate offices in Southpointe, the industrial park twenty miles north of Amity, which served as headquarters to nearly every major oil and gas player in the region. Beth and Stacey wanted to start
in the morning, so they’d have plenty of time to read the lease carefully. Instead, they were given an appointment for late afternoon, which miffed Beth. She didn’t think they could review legal documents at 4:30 p.m. if the office closed at 5:00. When the families arrived, both Stacey and Beth felt they were being rushed through the stack of documents on the conference table between them. They’d risked not hiring an attorney to keep their costs low, and now Stacey regretted it.

  Stacey glanced at Beth to assess whether she looked uneasy too. She wanted to speak to Beth privately, but there were Range employees in the room. She didn’t want to seem rude, so she kept quiet and turned the pages of her lease looking for the water clause. It was missing. When she asked, however, an employee went to fetch a copy of the addendum.

  Across the table, Beth also felt they were being treated shabbily. There was no notary there to countersign in front of them, which Beth thought was another indication that the company took them for bumpkins. She considered putting up a fuss and not signing, but there was a risk. All of their neighbors were signing leases, and she was concerned that their little collective plot might get left out. If Range could get what they wanted from others, the company might not need their land. So, reluctantly, she signed. By 5:00 p.m., they were back in the freezing parking lot, unsure they’d done the right thing.

  Weeks later, when their fully executed leases arrived in the mail, Beth and Stacey discovered another problem. Now that they had the chance to comb the fine print, they realized the royalty rate in the contract was lower than the one they’d remembered discussing on the phone with the company before signing. According to the contract, they were going to receive a 15 percent royalty rate only after the company had deducted a list of expenses the two women didn’t understand. “It’s so complicated and confusing, you just rely on them that they’re doing the right thing,” Stacey said. She and Beth wondered if the hasty appointment and the practice of rushing them through might have been a tactic for screwing them out of percentage points.