Amity and Prosperity_One Family and the Fracturing of America Read online

  Ill and ill-prepared for the winter weather, Washington was forced to turn back, while most of his men marched on, arriving in the town of Washington in an attempt to capture David Bradford, a leader of the Whiskey Rebellion. But Bradford had already escaped and was soon floating down the Mississippi. Washington’s men did manage to capture some other leaders and march them to Philadelphia, where they were eventually pardoned. It was the only time in U.S. history that a sitting president led troops against his own citizens.

  Each spring, this anti-federalist spirit flourishes in downtown Washington, where Whiskey Rebellion reenactors march beneath the uneasy gaze of George Washington, whose statue still perches atop the county courthouse. They march past vacant storefronts, a diner called Popcorn Willy, a statue of disheveled men standing by a parking lot that was erected as a tribute to the Whiskey Rebels, and the home of their leader, David Bradford, which sits across from a Suboxone clinic. The event used to culminate with a party hosted by Maker’s Mark at the George Washington Hotel, where an inflatable bottle of whiskey dominated the lobby. Now it takes place at a Hilton Garden Inn.

  The celebration is a gleeful way to reclaim a narrative of rebellion. In the past several years, a handful of artisanal distilleries have reopened in Washington. One, Mingo Creek Craft Distillers, produces Liberty Pole Spirits, named for the wooden staff that has been used since the days of the Roman Empire as an emblem of freedom from tyranny. When Washington’s troops marched into town, these poles hung from the windows of buildings and homes. Today, in the distillery’s tasting room, a portrait of Alexander Hamilton hangs upside down.

  8 | DOUBTERS

  In Amity, which lies along Appalachia’s suburban edge, one might find a developer’s McMansion next to an accomplished artist’s farm. But the world Stacey cared about was smaller: a network of families known for their ties to the land and its history. In both Amity and Prosperity, this history centered around the old country churches. At Thanksgiving, the parishioners from Lower Ten Mile Presbyterian joined those from Amity United Methodist and Liberty United Methodist to share a turkey dinner. Stacey’s mother, Linda, usually cooked the turkey. It was typically a joyful occasion, one that recalled a past when neighbors came together to help thresh wheat and barley on one another’s farms.

  In 2010, however, as news of Harley’s recent diagnosis spread through Amity, Stacey felt awkward making her way around the volunteer fire hall. When she talked about the latest with Harley, some people remained silent. She suspected that people who’d always supported her—including her cousins the Hartleys—were avoiding her. No one challenged her directly, but that wasn’t the way in Amity. She didn’t need to be openly contradicted to feel the lack of support. As the story circulated, there were those who thought Stacey was acting out of hysteria, and others who suspected she was angling for a payday.

  Her neighbors’ opinions about Harley’s health often had less to do with the boy’s welfare and more to do with their positions on fracking. Few wanted to challenge the benefits. For the first time, the people of Amity stood to make money from the mineral wealth beneath their corn and wheat fields. With coal and oil, most of that money had left, filling corporate coffers and leaving only costs behind. With fracking, however, people finally were cashing in on what belonged to them in the form of bonus checks and royalties. There was also something innately American—befitting the libertarian ethos that individualism was the root of success—in the new oil and gas wealth that sprang from the ground. The United States is one of the only countries in the world where people can own separate rights to the surface and what’s belowground. They can also own rights to the air above their heads. In Hoopy country, there’s a saying: “In America you own heaven to hell.”

  These differences showed up in the Sunday collection plates. The larger landowners, who were making more money, mostly belonged to the Methodist churches, and not to Stacey’s. The gas well checks allowed them the first chance in years to contribute more to their churches, but Stacey’s church, with members living in town or on small plots of land, continued to confront hardships. One former Range employee explained the newly sown divisions to me like this: “We’re going to give you a new road, but it’s going to cost you this forty-five-year friendship and you can’t pave over that.”

  To many of the larger landowners, Harley’s story of arsenic poisoning also seemed far-fetched. Rick Baker didn’t know what to make of the test results. It was true that arsenic was naturally occurring. The poison may be dangerous in drinking water, but it was already in the ground. It also wasn’t used in drilling. So how could anyone be sure that Harley’s arsenic poisoning had anything to do with fracking? Baker didn’t live near a waste pond, but he did live only a few thousand feet from the compressor station. Around compressor stations, there were also health issues, which began with the simple act of building an industrial site—with dust laden with diesel particles—next to people’s homes. When the compressors were up and running, according to one Pennsylvania study, 27 percent of participants who lived between 1,500 and 4,000 feet away reported throat irritation. Other symptoms included dizziness, nausea, chronic bronchitis, and depression. Yet other than the fact that the compressor station could be noisy at night—much noisier initially than the company had prepared him for—Baker had none of the illnesses that people reported. He had no headaches, no nosebleeds; none of the Haneys’ symptoms, and they lived about half a mile farther away from the compressor.

  “It’s the people who aren’t benefiting from this who have nothing else to do but raise a stink,” Tony Berardi, the land man, said. “Stacey’s an anomaly because she does have skin in the game, but if she had fifty thousand acres and was making ten thousand dollars a month, I’m sure she’d feel differently.” Harley’s illness was also morally threatening. If he was in fact a guinea pig for industry while they were cashing life-changing checks, then it followed that the landowners were making that money at the cost of someone’s health. Not a random stranger’s, but that of Harley Haney, the great-great-grandson of Oliver Mankey and grandson of Linda and Larry Hillberry, members of the historical society, the volunteer fire department, and the altar guild. Nor was this experiment taking place sometime in the dusty history of resource extraction when no one knew any better. Whatever was happening to Harley was part of an industrial process that was just beginning and promised to cover more and more green hillsides.

  Outside of church, both sides crossed paths at the chainsaw repair shop that Stacey’s cousin Willard Mankey ran out of the old family business on Amity Ridge Road, which locals called 19. It was once a major thoroughfare not far from the National Road. Mankey Brothers used to be Amity’s only car dealership. Until 1967, the Mankey Brothers hosted one of the town’s most anticipated events: the annual arrival of the new-model Fords and Chevys. Before unveiling the cars, the Mankey Brothers hung gold curtains in the plate-glass windows and handed out Coca-Colas and rulers to kids. Then the interstate highway bypassed the town. The last car they sold was a 1967 Chevy. Willard made his living repairing chainsaws people already owned. There wasn’t much of a market in Amity for anything new.

  Then that changed: from 2007 to 2012, the gas boom brought fifteen thousand industry-related jobs to Pennsylvania. Alongside engineers and welders who arrived with expertise from places like Texas and Arkansas, the oil and gas companies brought with them a host of needs to fill. From motels to Laundromats to restaurants, the pass-on effects of industry lifted struggling businesses, including Willard’s shop. Due to the boom, in addition to repairing chainsaws, he was finally selling things. Willard stocked the kind of toys grown-up boys liked, most of which the farmers of Amity never could have afforded before. Lately, his most popular item had become a portable sawmill, which cost five thousand dollars. The sawmill allowed farmers who loved to tinker on their land a way to make fences by cutting their own logs.

  After Willard watched the first flush of gas-rush cash arrive, he witnessed a second. Firs
t landowners made money from leases; now they were selling right-of-ways for an underground web of pipelines. As the roughnecks who built the gas sites pulled out of town, a new slew of workers arrived: pipeliners. Building pipelines was big business, as well as a major controversy. Beneath Pennsylvania alone, there lay 77,000 miles of pipeline, enough to ring the earth three times. Sunoco Logistics had projects slated to generate nearly $4.2 billion in economic activity in Pennsylvania, support as many as 30,000 construction jobs, and generate nearly $62 million in new taxes to the commonwealth, according to a 2015 study by Econsult, a Philadelphia-based company. To lay these pipelines that would transport the primordial gas to urban markets, companies needed to dig trenches across farmers’ land. Once again, farmers were compensated, and the more money that flowed into town, the deeper the divide grew between those getting large checks and those left out of the rush. The funny thing was, Willard stopped selling chainsaws again. Farmers had so much money they could afford to turn up their thermostats and burn oil.

  Willard himself, having seen how sick Harley was, didn’t doubt the veracity of his illness, but he also didn’t want to cost himself the business of the larger landowners, like Stacey’s neighbor Ray Day and her cousin Bill Hartley, who were highly respected in Amity and suddenly had money to spend in his store. Hartley, who ran a barbershop out of a trailer on his great-grandmother’s farm, doubted Stacey’s story. His son worked for Range Resources, as did many of the people he knew, and he just thought it sounded extreme. Hartley was hard-set in his conservative politics. Above all, he adhered to the essential argument that landowners like him believed in and often repeated: over centuries, Amity and Prosperity had paid full well for the energy that city folk consumed, and now city folk who didn’t own land and didn’t stand to make any money off of fracking were jealous. As Hartley saw it, Stacey’s story served as ready fodder for outsiders who opposed fracking. And anything that served as fodder for outsiders who thought they had the right to judge the lives of people about whom they knew nothing filled Bill Hartley with disgust.

  Willard tried to stay out of it. “I’m in the middle of everything,” he told me. “I make money off of farmers making money, so I’m okay with it,” he said. “But with all that’s happened to Stacey, she isn’t.” And nobody said anything bad about Harley directly, not once—“Nobody wanted to be smart-asses,” he said. As Willard saw it, his first responsibility was to feed his family. His girlfriend and her two teenage daughters moved from the town of Washington to his home on Amity Ridge Road. At least three times a week, he had to haul water from Ruff Creek to fill his cistern for their showers. The city girls didn’t understand its scarcity, and Willard preferred to haul more rather than to fight. With his newfound busyness, he saw less and less of Stacey and the kids. Willard’s absence proved hardest on Paige, who’d seen her cousin as a father figure since her own father was largely out of the picture.

  Behind these small domestic dramas, Stacey was deeply unsettled by the feeling that she was losing her place in the world. For so long, she’d prided herself on being a daughter of this soil. Now she feared that soil was turning against her.

  This applied in particular to Stacey’s most powerful neighbors. Among them were Ray and Jon Day, who, with their sisters, owned a three-hundred-acre cattle farm planted with orchard grass less than two miles from Stacey’s. The Day Farm had been in the family for more than a century, and the Days were well-off even before the gas wells came. They were part of the local elite, which existed quietly in Amity and Prosperity. Some like the Days had earned comfortable pensions from full-time careers doing something other than farming. Every summer since their father passed away in 1980, they’d held an annual Beef Roast for 350 of their friends and neighbors. Stacey didn’t know the Days very well, so she’d never been invited.

  Ray and Jon Day also worked to preserve local history that recalled an earlier, more prosperous time. They collected Duncan Miller glass, which had been produced in Washington during the nineteenth century, before mechanization helped drive the factory out of business. Along with Stacey’s dad and other people from Amity, they’d also restored the historic log cabin that once belonged to Thaddeus Dod. On nearly every Thursday morning over four and a half years, the men had taken the cabin apart, log by log, then rebuilt it. When Range Resources donated two thousand dollars to the historical society, Ray took it as a sign that the company intended to be a good neighbor.

  He was less sure about Stacey. Although his sister worked as a nurse with Stacey at the hospital, and he knew Linda and Larry from the historical society, he didn’t know Stacey well. In his opinion, if she were a true daughter of Amity, he’d see more of her at things like Amity’s annual historical tour, alongside her parents. But he didn’t. Stacey was aware of racking up community absences, and it made her self-conscious; it bothered her to be less active at church. But if she was working seven days a week, how was she supposed to be there?

  “Sometimes when I’m in the thick of dealing with all of this, I can’t deal with one more thing,” she told me. “I’ve got to get the laundry done. I’ve got to get the food that we need for the house. I can’t do the historical tour. Mam doesn’t get it. I used to be able to do it all—take care of everything and go to the historical tour, and go to church on Sundays.”

  From a distance, Day didn’t see Stacey’s being a single mom working full-time and raising two kids as much of an excuse. Loyalty in Amity meant showing up for the community no matter what. He had even less faith in the Voyles. “They’re not farmers,” he said. They may have horses, but they didn’t grow anything. What’s more, they didn’t join the Grange, a national organization founded in 1867 to promote new farming techniques and safeguard the welfare of farmers. Day had also heard the tales about the Voyles’ litigiousness. Sob stories didn’t go down well in Amity, where lots of people had it hard. Until the gas wells, Ray Day—who was sixty-three and wore the raw squint of hard work outside in all weather—had worked two full-time jobs. The first time I met him, when he gave me a tour of the farm, he chided me gently. “You haven’t asked me what my profession is,” he said. No one here could afford to farm full-time. For thirty-four years, until he retired, Ray taught science at Trinity Middle School, taking his place at the blackboard and looking out at the earnest faces of children whose parents he knew well. Over decades, much of Amity had passed through his classroom. Day had developed a knack for noticing a fatherless boy or one who might not be getting enough to eat. He’d hired these foundlings as farmhands to come help put up hay or do other small jobs, which also allowed him to offer a generous word, a meal, and enough money to help a family get through a rough patch. These days, however, Day couldn’t afford to hire local boys in need. Due to regulations, the state required the Days to carry workers’ compensation for everyone on the farm, and they couldn’t pay for the insurance.

  Instead, the Days turned to machines to run the farm. This pained them: they knew there was a need for local work. But smaller farms like theirs were being squeezed out by this kind of regulation that mandated expensive insurance. At the same time, the average age of local farmers climbed to fifty-six. Over the years, his experience of regulation and the excesses of unions, which he’d seen firsthand as a teacher, helped turn Day into a conservative Republican.

  Like other farmers’, Day’s distrust of the federal government and of regulations was embodied in a dislike of the Environmental Protection Agency. As people in Amity saw it, the EPA didn’t fix problems. They created them, by pointing out issues that required residents to pay for expensive alterations or face government fines. This helped to explain why the EPA was so unpopular. Here was a typical scenario, Day told me. When drilling started on his land, the dust from the access road was so bad that a neighbor kept complaining. The easiest solution would’ve been to pave the dirt road, but the EPA wouldn’t let Range do it. “They’d have solved all the problems if they’d just blacktopped it,” Day said. It got so bad the man h
ad to move, which exemplified the stupidity of paper pushers in faraway places making decisions for Washington County.

  As Day saw it, the recent return of gas had been a boon. For years, their barn’s roof “needed replaced,” in the local parlance, and the fence that, by law, had to keep the cows out of his stream was falling down. Money from signing a mineral lease made these fixes and others possible. Although Ray and his brother Jon expected little when they signed with Range Resources, they’d been astounded when their first check arrived.

  “It was more money than I made in the first twenty years of teaching combined,” Ray told me. He preferred not to share the exact figure, as that would be crass. Regardless, he put all of it back into the property: replacing two roofs, buying a new hay baler, building his ninety-four-year-old mother a first-floor bathroom so she wouldn’t have to climb the stairs and could remain in her home. Farmers like him didn’t buy sports cars with their windfalls. They bought health insurance.

  “We don’t go to Florida,” he told me, echoing his neighbor Rick Baker. He still spent his chilly mornings mucking cow stalls alongside Jason Clark, a former student now in his thirties and helping the Days in exchange for keeping his pigs in their barn. Clark was also making money off the gas boom. He had a small lease on his two acres of land. The few thousand dollars from Range had changed his life, he said, allowing him to buy better stock and breed stronger pigs.