Gas Drilling and the Fracking of a Marriage
by
Stephanie C. Hamel
SMASHWORDS EDITION
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY:
Coffeetown Press on Smashwords
Gas Drilling and the Fracking of a Marriage
Copyright © 2012 by Stephanie C. Hamel
Coffeetown Press
PO Box 70515
Seattle, WA 98127
For more information contact: www.coffeetownpress.com
www.hamel.coffeetownpress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Photographs of the Hamel Family by Michelle Devens-Fitz
Cover design by Sabrina Sun
Gas Drilling and The Fracking of a Marriage
Copyright © 2012 by Stephanie C. Hamel
Lyrics from David Bailey songs used with permission
ISBN: 978-1-60381-114-9 (Trade Paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-60381-114-9 (eBook)
Produced in the United States of America
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* * * * * *
In memory of my dad, Joseph N. Corrao,
who loved the farm.
Acknowledgments
It will be difficult to thank everyone who has contributed, either by bolstering us while we were in the midst of our gas-lease dilemma, or by guiding the writing and publishing of the book. Some names have made it to these pages, but many others have not. Of the latter, I send my heartfelt appreciation to my long-time friend, Ms. Stephanie Harp, and also to my editor, Ms. Catherine Treadgold. I send a hug to Shelley Beck Ley and to other pals and sorority sisters who have encouraged me in this writing dream of mine.
It delights me to thank my Lehigh University connections: Dr. Ned Heindel, Dr. Natalie Foster and Dr. Pete Beidler, and I hope and expect that the spirit of Dr. Natalie Freeman, formerly of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, will be amused at my success. I express gratitude to Mrs. Leslie Bailey, who granted my request to honor the late Mr. David Bailey by quoting his music lyrics.
Notes and Disclaimers
This true story, written first in diary form and from notes taken during telephone conversations, reflects a developing knowledge of the natural gas industry and the legalities associated with land ownership and gas leasing. This is the information that was available at the time; however, my facts may no longer entirely hold true and therefore should not be quoted as legal truths.
Secondly, at the time my story unfolded, there was little, if any, open public concern in Pennsylvania (PA) over the negative impacts of drilling for natural gas. Appalachian PA has a long history of mining other forms of carbon-based fuels; the historical presence of the gas industry had been in the northwestern part of the state, where shallow drilling does not fracture, or ‘frack,’ the deep shale layers. When this story was unfolding, ‘fracking’ in PA was in its infancy.
Several of the people involved in this story have requested anonymity. I have changed their names, as I did for the one person who did not respond to my request for permission to quote. An asterisk* indicates a name that has been altered for this story.
Finally, the views expressed by Frank McLaughlin III are his own and do not represent the opinions of either the NJ Department of Environmental Protection or Ramapo College.
Gas-Lease Dilemma
Live the questions now, and perhaps, without noticing it,
You will live along some distant day into the answers.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
E-mail To: Frank McLaughlin, NJ Department of Environmental Protection
“From: Stephanie Hamel” September 10, 2008
Dear Frank,
I cannot recall the correct spelling for ‘dilemma,’ but that is what I am swimming in, at the moment, not to mention a few days’ worth of sick kids’ laundry. Frank, I have no time today for formalities, so here goes:
Two weeks ago, Tom and I were offered $2,500 an acre to lease our natural gas rights up in Wellsboro. The whole of northern Pennsylvania is singing the Hallelujah Chorus because there is gas under our land and it is now economically feasible to drill. There is a well within 0.50 miles of my property and I listened to the drilling during my quiet, reflective time—HA!—this summer; there are two more wells within a two mile radius.
Everyone in the area is seeing dollar signs and is signing up as fast as the lease agreement arrives on the doorstep. Tom Hamel has the unfortunate luck of being married to the only one who regards this windfall as a curse. Frank, it is very easy for me to criticize unrestrained fossil fuel consumption, but it is much more challenging to put my money where my mouth is when a large sum of my money is at stake. I am determined, however, to protect my land.
So, if it was that simple, Tom could simply kiss early retirement goodbye, stop singing “Oh, first thing you know ol’ Jed’s a millionaire ...” and conclude that he married the biggest fool, but unfortunately, it is not that simple.
(Pardon me, I just had to fish two popcorn kernels out of Michael’s mouth.)
Where was I? Oh, okay, so it appears that there is a “capture clause” in the law that makes it allowable for the gas company to deplete our subsurface gas and NOT pay for it, should we NOT sign a lease agreement for surface rights! So much for my “protection of the world” plan ... It won’t come to any effect (picture a bulldozer running over a tiny wooden peg). We are still trying to figure out what to do, and what our best option is. (That is, do we become traitors and take the money, then buy a hybrid car and solar panels for the house? It still doesn’t all add up for me, but it might be a way to salvage something.)
I would like to talk to you about geology, drilling theory and any other information you may deem pertinent to our decision. I need to learn about surface damage that has occurred at other drilling sites and where to get PA DEP [Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection] or EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] regulations …
Could you help us?
Let me know when I can call you. Friday is no good; this weekend will be fine.
I’ll be bugging you soon.
—Stephanie
I shouldn’t have been surprised when a lease agreement finally arrived in the mail or that there was a difference in opinion in my own home as to whether or not to sign it. The controversy of natural gas drilling had carved its mark in my marriage earlier in the summer. Local rumor insisted that natural gas, lying deep in the Marcellus shale under our part of the world, was now accessible and that the energy companies were in a mad, mad race to snatch large tracts of land that they might lease for drilling. If the chatter was true, land agents and gas leases were flying to every homeowner in northern Pennsylvania.
My husband, who had been privy to the prevailing gossip of the golf course, enthusiastically adopted the possibility of easy money. His precarious job situation, combined with a normal human desire to have an enormous chunk of change stashed in the bank, had made him an enthusiastic proponent of gas leasing.
“Texas rich,” he’d murmur, with a gleam in his eye. “We’d be Texas rich.”
I, consumed with the parenting duties associated with young children, had neither time nor energy for such wild monetary dreams. Gas-lease fever may have struck Pennsylvania, but I was not going to be a victim of that disease. I snorted disdainfully whenever Tom broached the topic.
“Not on my land. Don’t even think about it.” After a pause I would add, “I don’t want the land destroyed. My dad wouldn’t have done it.”
It had been my parents’ land, and my childhood summertime memories are wrapped in its fifty acres. My own seven-year-old son, legs skinny and face aglow, races across the hilltop toward the barn, and I am struck by his knobby-kneed childhood gait, so similar to my own, and remember my father, his arms pumping as his long legs sprinted across that very field. In this transient era, few people have one location that links generations. Watching a living re-creation of memories, I realize what a treasure I have. Destroy it with gas wells? Never!
The lease conflict had led to a few vague arguments with Tom, resulting in our being rather miffed with each other; however, being purely hypothetical in nature, the discussions were quickly buried by other day-to-day joys and worries. When we arrived at the farm for our weekend visits and gas-lease talk surrounded us in restaurants, I silently congratulated myself for upholding the unique stance of placing the environmental welfare of the planet above monetary considerations. I, a scientist with all the credentials, knew better than to destroy the world by promoting fossil fuel burning.
“I would never accept such an offer,” I was quietly convinced. Holding my head at a righteous angle, I greeted the receipt of a gas lease offer in the mail with an emphatic “No!” No need to destroy the land or develop it. Tom, on the other hand, had stared in amazement at the lease amount and could not dismiss the possibility. He saw a life of ease on the horizon, if only I would capitulate. Our quarreling escalated.
In the midst of our bickering, I began to research gas drilling and uncovered an old Pennsylvania statute from the oil or maybe coal mining days, nicknamed ‘The Law of Capture.’ While at first it seemed unfathomable, closer inspection confirmed that although I could prevent the company from drilling on my land, I could not prevent it from extracting gas from under my land, should it be drawn into a neighbor’s well. My stomach flopped at the thought. My ability to protect the gas was legally non-existent. I could forego the money by ignoring a lease option, but that sacrifice might not prevent one molecule of gas from being captured and burned.
So much for saving the environment, I thought. Will I still act on principle? What on earth happens when acting on principle has no positive effect? Is an empty principle worth the fight?
Developing a Love of the Land
I am devoted to a small parcel of land in north central Pennsylvania. It isn’t an ideal piece of real estate; indeed it certainly has an abundance of negative attributes. The property, mostly overgrown with goldenrod, sits adjacent to a busy roadway, and the house is settled too near the neighbor’s overgrown hedge. The shape of the land and its topography make it impossible to get a decent view from the porch; only upstairs can we glimpse a smallish mountain across the valley.
Over one hundred and fifty years ago, when farmers first tried to eke out a living on the Appalachian plateau, the house was a starter home. Framed with hand-hewn logs, pegged into shape, it was floored and sided with wide hemlock planks. A quarter century later, a bigger home was constructed nearby, relegating the little post-and-beam building to house equipment instead of people. When the bigger farm prospered in the early twentieth century, two separate additions to the little house converted it into six rooms of living space for hired hands. It was lit by a few bare light bulbs and heated by a kerosene stove, and its walls were sided with yellow asphalt paper to repulse the drafts that sliced through its thin boards.
On a hot summer afternoon, my parents purchased the little house and fifty adjoining acres, for use as a summer ‘camp,’ as it is called here. I had slid off of the sticky backseat of the station wagon to wait alongside the car, while my parents introduced themselves to white-haired Mr. Penney. I was bored with this whole process of looking for a place. On the way to see a realtor, we had passed a ‘Farm for Sale’ sign, and my father had turned the car around. The sun beat down on my head as I absently began to pull seed tops off of nearby grasses. My little sister joined me in my task.
Mr. Penney took his time explaining that he and his wife had divided most of their hundred-acre rectangle of land into two interlinked ‘L’ shaped lots. Each included a small house and a large barn. He lifted a shaking arm to point to the lower half, which had recently been sold to "another ‘downstater," and indicated that they, the Penneys, would retain the big house, in front of the little tenants’ house, the latter being still available for purchase.
Mr. Penney paused to look in my direction. By then Natalie and I were filling little plastic milk jugs from the floor of the back seat with the grass seed. With a glimmer of a smile, Mr. Penney reached over to peel some seeds off of a stem.
“That’s timothy.” His voice was thick and heavy. “I was a seed dealer, and over the years the birds have stolen it from my piles up the corncrib and sowed it all over.”
My brother dropped his book and climbed out of the car to join us as we strolled across the lawn to see the little house. It was ugly from the outside, with its ‘fake brick’ tar paper siding, its roof peak that did not follow the line of shed roof of the attached porch, and three unsteady steps leading to a floor of peeling white paint. A half-wall of multi-colored shingles—perhaps a railing—gave the odd impression that a portion of a roof had avalanched to the front of the porch.
Long bereft of farmhands, the inside had reverted to a storage area, and grass seed lay in enormous piles on the floors. “Timothy,” I whispered to my sister, as we entered. Mr. Penney nodded.
The house was worse inside than out, with the lined plaster wallboard marked with water stains and cracked linoleum on the floors. Stifling heat that assailed us. After a quick run upstairs, we were back on the sagging porch with my father extending his hand. My parents had bought the place. Mr. Penney would hold the mortgage and I would not have to sit in any more realty offices, their only magazines filled with boring house pictures.
* * *
During the first years of ownership, our visits featured repairs to the little house, with Mr. Penney hobbling over to offer advice and tools. Dad soon had water running into the little house; he upgraded the electricity to accommodate a hot water tank and salvaged an old oil burner.
My brother, Mark, pried rows of nails from the huge old timbers we discovered under the old wallboards and my mother wore rubber gloves as she scrubbed the massive beams with a bleach solution. The strange porch accoutrement of multi-colored shingles was discarded, and on a sunny Saturday afternoon we repainted the floor with fresh white paint. My siblings and I began to spend our summers learning to fix things: to shingle roofs, mix cement, and spackle sheetrock.
On weekends we climbed into the loft of our own barn, and scattered the grass seed found in the corncribs for our pretend chickens. Mr. Penney showed us the wild raspberry brambles and reported a recent sighting of "an ol’ black bar." My sister and I were pleasantly frightened at the possibility of seeing one for ourselves.
We picked mint by the spring and caught tiny pollywogs in the neighbors’ pond; mud squished between our toes as we waded in the muck. On hot afternoons, Natalie and I used the dark, damp springhouse as a playhouse. On the upland, Mark and I hacked away the scratchy brambles clinging to an ancient, dilapidated pickup truck. Decaying amid the tall weeds, its rusty doors could be wrenched open enough to allow us to climb inside. We bounced on the cracked leather seat, imagining we were steering and shifting; however, the cab was protected from the wind, allowing volatilized oils in the grease to permeate everything, and their stomach-grabbing odors caused us to try—in vain—to crank the windows open. When the smell became unbearable, we would clamor over the wooden sides to the truck bed, or run down the hill to find something new to explore.
When I lay on the lawn, the wind made funny sounds in my ears and I watched fluffy clouds separate the blue sky into different shades. I picked the prettiest blue. The sky was bigger, the land was wilder, and my imagination traveled so much farther here than at home in the suburbs.
There is probably little need, then, to state that I have a sentimental attachment to the place. Those childhood memories are really why it is mine today. There could be no other logical reason, after my father’s illness and death, to purchase the property from my mother. The land—some wooded, some hayfield and the rest scrub—was not farmed, and the buildings were, by then, run-down and nearly worthless. Our farm’s value was that it held many of the happy memories of my lifetime, and that was enough.
To the Farm
It’s the life that I have chosen and I’ll suffer through my gain.
David M. Bailey, “Give me Your Today”
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Finally, for once, I would be spending more than a week at the farm. We had spent innumerable weekends here, but I longed to lose the sense of urgency that surrounded these short visits. I rubbed my hands together in anticipation: we would loll, relaxed, under no time pressure, in no rush to enjoy everything before having to leave.
It was going to be tiring, as Tom would be working and I would be alone with the boys, but I couldn’t wait to get started, and Tom might even join us for Saturday afternoon and Sunday.
It took a long time to get moving, for despite all of the exercises to stretch my aching back muscles, I hobbled about while I packed. Still, as I drove with the boys in the back seat, I was so happy that I decided to take a side trip en route: a visit to a little zoo. For years I had wanted to tour the place but, despite passing it a thousand times, my parents had never stopped. On those Friday nights it was always too late, and we would whiz past, cramped in the old station wagon with all the baggage for those two hundred miles. We were always racing to get there, or to return to Philadelphia. Because the turnpike narrowed to a single lane to enter the Lehigh tunnel, merging cars clogged the roadway. We had to beat the weekend traffic! As we sped past I would curiously glance through the car window at the wooden and screened animal cages.
Now, so, many years later—in charge of myself and the plans—I spent an hour with two excited little boys gawking at the snakes and Galapagos tortoises. It was nicer than what I had imagined all these years.
When we returned to the parking lot, the sun was ablaze overhead and the hot interior of the car smelled of gasoline fumes. The fumes that somehow entered the car were worst on hot summer days, especially after I filled the tank. There was, a mechanic had told me, a pinhole leak in the tank, at the top somewhere. He hesitated, not wanting to replace the tank for fear that other rusting metal parts would be irrevocably damaged in the process. I knew we needed a new car; the fumes couldn’t be healthy for any of us.
Despite opening the car windows, the smell did not completely disappear, and I was sickish and headachy when we arrived at the farm a few hours later. The boys, however, seemed to feel none of my ill effects, and were happily racing out of the car as I, with droopy shoulders and squinty eyes, unlocked the front door of the ‘camp,’ flipped on the electrical switches, and opened a few windows. I left piles of bags strewn in the kitchen, stowed only the leftover meal items into the refrigerator, asked Matthew to watch Michael, and then flopped on the bed upstairs.
Luckily the boys were engrossed in their toys, so I lay for a long, long time before mustering all of my strength to supervise teeth cleaning and help them into their pajamas and beds. I then sprawled across the double bed in my room, getting up only to answer Matthew’s call. He wanted me to see the spectacular sunset from his window. A gorgeous array of oranges, yellows and reds was splashed across the western sky. I was so happy he had noticed it, though I couldn’t really enjoy the sight myself. I kissed him and crawled back into my bed.
In later hours of darkness, Michael whimpered and cried, so I pulled him onto my bed, and for a few hours he kicked and tossed. When I groggily realized that I was getting no sleep at all, I carried him back to his crib. At dawn, Matthew woke me when he crawled in beside me, complaining of being cold. My night’s sleep was broken, yet I felt surprisingly and immeasurably better in the morning.
Opening the House
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made …
And live alone in the bee-loved glade.
W.B. Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
Thursday, August 21, 2008
I served the boys toast and juice for breakfast and then drove us to town for more groceries. After my headache the day before, I decided to make things easy, to do only one errand each day, especially since I would be on my own as a parent for so long.
“No big projects!” I kept reminding myself. “Nothing new until Tom arrives.”
This little house did require attention every time we opened it, but the day before I had done only the bare minimum. I could clean and tidy, I reasoned, after we returned with the groceries. After all, the work needed now was nothing compared to the chores that had awaited us upon our arrival when I was kid.
* * *
We never discovered why—and I have never made scientific inquiries into the reason—that so many flies lived and died in this little house. All I know is that there were thousands of them dead on the upstairs floors when we would arrive on Friday nights, and others were buzzing around the suddenly bright light bulbs.
My mother soon reserved space in the car to transport a loud and ancient vacuum cleaner that had once belonged to my grandmother. Before she managed to squeeze the extra appliance into the station wagon, we ventured downtown one hot Saturday afternoon to shop for flypaper. Wellsboro, the seat of a rather remote Pennsylvania county, boasts an imposing courthouse, vintage gas lights lining Main Street and a well-tended village green, but no flypaper could be found. We instead purchased an unheard of number of flyswatters—five—and drove home to swat. We swatted and continued to swat, and, even years after the old vacuum clogged the night stillness with its deafeningly hollow monotone, we still attack the living flies with those swatters.
Fly removal, however, wasn’t the first chore on those dark Friday nights. The car tires would crunch over the sparse pebbles of the driveway until it reached the tenants’ house and Dad parked on the grass. The brushing sound of the grass against the bumper was an indicator of Saturday’s lawn care chores, and the softness of the ground revealed a recent history of rainfall. We would quit the messy car to stretch and enjoy the chilly air—a relief after the warmth of the enclosed car. I would stiffly shift from one foot to the other, glad for the motor’s silence. Starlight pricked the velvety black sky, frogs burped in the pond below, and our footsteps made a distinctive clopping sound on the rickety wooden steps.
I would hold the flashlight for Dad as he fumbled with the leather key wallet at the front door, and we would all wait while he turned on the flashlight and ventured inside. At the time it seemed a heroic act to me—Dad’s entering such an empty, dark house.
After turning the corner of the living room, he could lift the hook and eye latch of the utility room door, open it, and walk to the electrical main switch.
When its snap resounded and light flooded from the bare bulb on the ceiling, he would deftly flip on other lamps. In the comfort of the light, my apprehension evaporated. Blinking, we’d trudge into the musty warmth of the house, our hands filled with those odd things that accumulate in a car—squashed paper tissues, a soda can, a book—each holding the door for the next person with foot or elbow.
Dad hurried down to the basement to prime the water pump. A galvanized bucket, half-filled with water, waited next to the pipe wrenches, but sometimes there wasn’t enough water for the job. One of us would be summoned to take the bucket across the dew-damp lawn. There, under the green apple tree, the ground abruptly sloped to a little wooden springhouse.
Years of water damage had taken its toll on that gray building. The thin cement floor had cracked; the rotting bottom of the door was jagged against the doorsill. Sliding down the slippery wet grass, I would reach for the elegant, brown-swirled china knob, smooth under my hand and so out of place there. The knob was not even needed to turn the door, yet I held onto it for comfort as I unfastened a rusty metal latch and shone the flashlight inside the tiny building. One evening I startled a small snake, which promptly slithered away, and once we found a delicate, translucent snakeskin curved on the floor. I always looked for snakes.
The ‘spring’ is really a stone-lined well not more than six feet deep, yet by staring straight down into the blackness I could imagine it to be a hundred feet. As the rays of my flashlight pierced the surface, I saw a frog bend and scrunch, bend and scrunch his legs, then disappear under a crevice deep in its stone wall.
A dip of the bucket shattered the smoothness of the water; then, carefully—to prevent the bucket from sloshing cold water onto my legs—I walked across the lawn toward the shining light escaping from the cellar, my dew prints following me. There I would find Dad, crouching over the pipe to the well, adding water, paper cupful by paper cupful, until it overflowed at the juncture. After replacing the cap and tightening it with the littlest pipe wrench, he would stick his head up through the trapdoor in the utility room and holler, “Give it a try, men!”
It was always fun to be the one in on the action, running to switch the heavy handle of the electrical breaker then standing guard to flip it back, in case the pump’s motor ran too long without being cooled by the flow of water. For all of us, it was a time to pause from unloading the car trunk, emptying the contents of the metal ice cooler, or sweeping the mouse droppings. We would listen to the sound of the intensity of the pump, hoping to hear a change in the pitch, a change in pressure. If the priming didn’t succeed, we might not have water that night, and Dad would be spending the next day under the house with wrenches. Everything depended on whether the pressure rose. With a reassuring click and Dad’s triumphant, “There she goes, men!” we would exhale and get back to unpacking. Tools in hand, Dad would happily offer to reposition the boards above the spring in ‘the well house.’ That was a relief to me. Outside was so dark, and a little scary; I would rather be inside, in the bustle.
From the squeaky spigots rushed rusty water that swirled down the drains for several minutes before running clear. The counters and sinks were wiped. We collected shoes, towels and clothes spilling from duffel bags and clumped up the narrow wooden staircase from the kitchen to the attic bedrooms. As we ascended, we were assaulted by stagnating hot air, our discomfort increasing with each step. When our heads popped level with the wide wooden floors, we would marvel aloud at the vast black ocean of dead flies on the floors.
Mom stepped gingerly over these dead flies to open the old wooden-framed windows, one in each upstairs room. She inserted metal screens under the open windows to allow a cross-ventilating breeze. By morning, the heat would dissipate and the air would be chilled, but for now, sweat broke on our foreheads as we pulled thin plastic coverings from the beds and unrolled sleeping bags onto bare mattresses.
Live flies wakened to hum with erratic whines around the bare ceiling bulbs. From the top of the stairs, Mom would request a broom, dustpan and brush, and we soon had little black heaps all over the floors. Mark would begin the swatting in his little room and continue until bedtime, but the buzzing of flies was always hard to stifle.
Over the years, the swatters deteriorated, but two survived. Limp and tired though they might be, they are still our primary means of insect control. The piles of flies on the floor disappeared once the house renovations began a few years ago. Tom and I had to replace the water pump and the new water pump doesn’t need to be primed at the start of each visit. Yet, still, every first evening upon arrival, we are relieved to hear the pump click, and can be heard calling from upstairs, “I need a flyswatter up here!”
* * *
Now, on a morning decades removed from my childhood, it took over an hour to shop for groceries, because I kept stopping to pass juice, crackers, and bananas to my children in front of the cart. Still, I was so delighted to be feeling myself again that, after shopping, I impetuously pushed them and the cart, at top speed, careening wildly around the vacant lot behind the store. They screamed with delight as we passed the silent trailers, circumvented clumps of weeds, then slowed to enter the busy part of the parking lot. I paused, panting, near the car.
“No other mother,” I gasped, “ever does that! You have the only mother on the planet who plays like this.” Exhausted, and feeling that I had already aggravated my bad back, I refused their enthusiastic entreaties to “Do it again, MOMMY, do it AGAIN!”
I helped Michael into his car seat, loaded the groceries, and, once home, stowed food in the refrigerator and cabinets. I wiped the kitchen counters, as I feared some live virus in the mouse droppings I had found there in the morning. We ate lunch and napped; then I vacuumed the floor and re-wiped the counters before heading outside. Matthew and I picked blueberries in the sun, while two-year-old Michael hit golf balls on the lawn near us. Most of his shots landed in the tall weeds, so I kept an eye on his hitting, to know where to search when he cried for the lost ones.
Much later, the sun slanted across the hall floor as I washed the kitchen counters again with hot, soapy water. Thinking proudly that I had managed a good dinner—and day—I heard a woman’s voice at the screen door. Becky Dodson’s face appeared. Becky is a professor of music at a nearby university; now everyone calls her ‘Rebecca.’ This woman—who in our college days pledged our sorority while reciting insipid jingles and wearing a baby blue jumper and beaky hat—will always be ‘Becky’ to me. Last year, I had been tickled to discover that she was living in town; today, she was making a surprise visit to dig bee balm from our overgrown patch. I was silently thankful that she hadn’t appeared the evening before to discover me in a droopy, pathetic state.
I went to search for an old cardboard box for the plants, while Michael hit more golf balls across the lawn and Matthew located our shovel to help dig. Returning with a somewhat bedraggled cardboard box, I chattered to Becky, glad for the adult conversation. There aren’t many neighbors here, and so we rarely see people when we come. Becky is an outsider, too, a ‘flatlander,’ as the locals refer to us, but she is now part of the fabric of the community, something that Tom and I are not. We arrive unheralded, stay just the weekend, and are mostly left to ourselves.
For thirty summers, we managed to conduct our vacation lives without a telephone, our guests arriving announced only by previously expressed intent. Farm business arrangements were performed in person. After my college years, I spent weekends alone here, and drove miles to town to call my parents or Tom from a pay phone on the village green. Distance from people—both from crowds and from our own connections—does remain one of the reasons we go to the farm, but we are not disconnected anymore.
We installed the first phone line when Matthew was a baby, agreeing that it would be prudent to have contact with the outside world in the event of an emergency. We had it switched on at Memorial Day and off after September. There were occasional miscommunications or troubles having the phone activated, so when Tom’s new job came with a cell phone, we neglected the land line. The damage, however, had already been done. I groaned the first night when, sitting on the porch with our weekend company, Tom took a phone call—nothing important, just a chatty call from his mother. Not that I don’t love my mother-in-law, but it was a harbinger of a loss. A distinction that once existed was suddenly and irrevocably gone. We could be reached, even on vacation, for any reason.
Cell phones now allow us continuous contact with others, and while these phones promote security, they interfere with ‘getting away from it all.’ I have fought the tendency to have constant communication. It was only last winter, when I had sudden car trouble, that I bought a simple cell phone for emergencies. I have never learned the number, and would have difficulty accessing it without a manual. People assume that working for years in laboratories and running instruments with state-of-the-art technologies makes me adept at working electronic devices. Becky was amused when I mentioned that I didn’t know my cell phone number. I suppose that in some peculiarly passive way, I am simply trying to retain a little of what I once had: seclusion.
Lately though, I’ve felt that my success has been double-edged, especially at the vacation spot. When I was a child visiting the farm, my family was here with me to provide any desired companionship that I might want. As an adult in the working world, I found relief in a weekend away from other people. Now, with so few adults in my life, I am lonely at times for intelligent communication, and thus feel even more isolated here at the farm. I extended an offer to Becky to return without any prior notice. She laughed, accepted and, with a box of shaggy red bee balm in the backseat of her car, disappeared.
Quiet Stillness and Noisy Motion
Love the time it takes to find the truth,
Love the time you dance with the mystery,
Love the wisdom of the old and the vision of the youth.
David M. Bailey, “Love the Time”
Dehydration, from the heat I supposed, had rendered Matthew bleary-eyed and apathetic, so we spent most of the next day lolling on the porch, in the shade, with me reading story after story to the boys. Road noise zapped some of the pleasure: motorcycle convoys of retired people whizzed past, headed for a nearby scenic overlook, and the locals buzzed home for their weekends. The weekend rush hour started earlier than I had ever suspected: traffic sounds diverted our attention from our books around the noon hour! This year seemed the worst ever; additional truck-engine noises and back-up warning beeps in the valley continued during all of our visits. They had to be building an enormous house down there, but the hedge dividing Mr. Penney’s original farm shielded the construction from our curiosity.
* * *
Years ago, it was so quiet that we were almost spooked by the stillness, especially at night. The valley clung to the noise of a lone car as its engine droned, mile after mile, approaching from the west. The sound got louder until headlights finally flashed past the house, and both sound and noise disappeared over the hill and faded into the dark. Flatlander families, such as ours, headed to their summer ‘camps’ on Friday nights. Long after we’d arrived and settled down to sleep, automobiles continued to fly past, the Penney’s house temporarily blocking their reverberation. The racing stream dwindled for the remainder of the weekend, that is, until Sunday afternoon, when everyone began to hurry home.
Once, Aunts Betty and Dottie drove up to Wellsboro for a few days, bringing my cousin with them. After lunch and a grand tour of the place, Dad spent his afternoon repairing an old lawn mower, while under a cloudless sky, the rest of us sauntered across fields. The aunts told stories and laughed at their own jokes. My brother and cousin ran ahead then raced back breathlessly, claiming they had seen “the ol’ bar.” From their ill-disguised mimicking of Mr. Penney’s pronunciation, I thought it must be a lie, but still—could it be true? Aunt Betty waved them away with a disdainful snort, and they turned around and ran back to the woods.
“A clear indication,” Aunt Dottie remarked, giving me a side-long look, “that there is no such bear.”
Deep in the woods, hidden under a clump of hemlock trees, water seeped from the rocks of a little spring in the hillside. Amid the stealthy mosquitoes, we dipped our hands into the cold water and slurped, interrupting the serenity of the scene. Mom and Natalie expanded the tiny clear pool by rearranging the surrounding rocks. The water momentarily clouded, and the rest of us busied ourselves by constructing rock steps that led to the spring. As we searched the woods for flat stones farther up the hillside, we ran over little mounds beneath the towering white pines. They were fun to race up and over, but what were they? Aunt Betty suggested that they were Indian burial grounds. My eyes widened.
“You must pay homage to the Indians before stepping over them,” she added solemnly. I had a queasy but curious feeling in my stomach. Dead Indians? Aunt Betty paused at the base of one little hill.
“ARR-rahh-RAH-RAH. ASSSIAMO-BU-BON-no,” she chanted. Then she glanced sideways at me and burst into a merry peal. I giggled happily. Aunt Betty always made things fun.
We fashioned a wobbly railing alongside the steps by resting a beech limb on two ‘Y’ shaped crooks of thick sticks pushed deeply into the soft earth. Aunt Dottie jauntily stuck the white bone of an old deer skull onto the lowest crook. “To ward off evil spirits,” she winked. I stared, wondering if she meant it. Our walk back across the sunny fields revealed no sign of dead Indian spirits or bears—although the boys were still shouting their warnings.
Dinner was lively and when darkness settled, it found us lounging in aluminum folding chairs or lying on the wooden porch boards. We gazed at the stars and, while we all listened, Aunt Betty entertained my dad with a story. Mom asserted that Aunt Betty always exaggerated, and that every time she told the story she remembered the details differently.
“How could you remember anything?” Aunt Dottie interjected. “You were always sick, getting Mother to baby you.” Aunt Dottie added that she, herself, didn’t remember the story at all; then Aunt Betty silently threw her head back and shook with mirth. She turned my cousin in the direction of the car and directed him to fetch some fireworks.
Now, fireworks were illegal in Pennsylvania, though everyone had access to sparklers and little smoking balls. Aunt Betty, however, had acquired more momentous explosives—probably by crossing the Maryland border on one of her many excursions—and soon the rockets and flaring lights lit up the lawn. For the final hurrah, we trudged across the dew-damp grass to light “The Screamer,” as it was henceforth dubbed, on the road.
“Five dollars is an unbelievable sum to waste on a firecracker,” my mom remarked, but with Aunt Betty, extravagance for unnecessary entertainment was to be expected. In the quiet blackness, Mark lit the top of the cone and then leaped back onto the embankment.
An ear-piercing shriek emanated and my heart pounded at that shrill, inhuman sound, layered on the surrounding quiet. I imagined distant neighbors cowering in their beds. When the noise finally faded, the ensuing stillness hovered and finally sank into my shaking frame.
* * *
The voices of motors, construction and my children are all searing into my soul these days, rendering me slightly disoriented and as weary as Matthew was today. I left home in quest of the peace and quiet I have experienced here in an era past, but all in vain. The distractions of my life follow me.
Stream of Projects
Spend all you have for loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost …
—Sara Teasdale, “Barter”
The farm was a five-hour car drive away from home. The big Penney house, purchased from their estate by my parents, had sat empty for years and was in need of extensive work. Its restoration was halted by my father’s illness and I never will know his exact plans for it. He simply liked to fix things, and the farm provided an endless stream of projects. His hammer, which I have saved, has a smoothness of handle caused by frequent use. I remember, one time, standing in the glaring morning sun when Dad allowed us to help him to mix mortar. His long fingers curved around the handle of a pointed trowel as he deftly spread the thick gray cement. A flicker of a memory of a poem—something about the tools becoming an extension of work-roughened hands—teases me, reminding me vividly of my father.
A year after Dad’s death, I turned a deaf ear to all reasonable objections to purchasing this land. Every time my husband lamented the ridiculousness of buying a “second home before the first,” I would quote Mark Twain: “They aren’t making any more land.” The memories and my need to feel attached to them and the land were stronger than practical considerations.
Thus, the farm continued to be our summer camp. The best word for the big house was—and still is—‘dilapidated’: jagged glass adorns the windows, and paint peels from the wooden siding. The little house was deteriorating, too, from lack of care. We spent many weekends mowing the lawn and frantically repairing breaking windows.
Living two hundred miles away and busy with our careers, we began to realize that the place was something of a burden. We spent many weekends mowing the lawn and frantically repairing breaking windows. Still, it was a retreat where I could garden and wander the fields, and Tom could relax as he golfed nearby. Most of all, Dad’s presence seemed to be there. One autumn, while I was ostensibly writing my PhD thesis, we re-shingled the roof by ourselves, a repeat of the project my siblings and I had tackled with Dad twenty-five years earlier—a testament to the power of confidence established by undertaking ambitious tasks in childhood.
After my own children were born, my free time was even more limited than when I had a career, so our slap-bang fixes were fewer and the houses fell further into disrepair. As my father’s daughter, I found and still find these projects to be enjoyable challenges. My husband most assuredly does not. Tom’s parents pay for even the simplest home repairs, and he is uncomfortable attempting unfamiliar projects. It is still a challenge to convince him that we can fix something ourselves, and then an even bigger challenge to actually fix it.
Tom would argue that his free time was finite, and he didn’t want to waste it learning to install a water pump; he would rather golf. I slowly realized that his argument had value. I wanted to be in my vegetable garden, planting herbs or picking blueberries, more than I desired to attempt to fix a frayed electrical wire. The little house was beyond our bandaging; the need for some major renovation was discovered at nearly every visit. So we increased the planting and gardening work but delegated the heavy construction to outsiders. After dealing with shoddy work done by poor carpenters, we hired an excellent craftsman and spent two years watching the little house undergo a miraculous transformation.
Linoleum was stripped from the floors to reveal their original wide planks, a new hand-hewn beam porch and new siding were added. Upstairs one bedroom was converted to a bathroom and an addition over the kitchen provided space for a new second bedroom. We still marveled that we had “bought our second home before we even had the first,” but, despite the cost of the renovations, we were pleased with the results. Our sons would learn how to watch the clouds for weather conditions, plant potatoes and sunflowers, and catch the descendants of the ‘hoppy’ toads Mr. Penney had shown us. The little house, no longer sporting that asphalt siding that had so rankled my sensibilities, was pleasing to our eyes, both inside and out.
My dad would have approved.
What Dream, Next?
Life never leaves you with your conquests, does it?
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh, The Flower and The Nettle
I love being at home with my sons, watching them grow and being a part of their lives. I see myself in seven-year-old Matthew—his joy of discovery, his quiet reflective side, his imagination. Baby Michael is not a baby anymore, but a chubby being full of gurgling happiness. We live amid a forest of towering hemlocks, with a pasture in front and beautiful views of the mountains across the creek, in the northeastern corner of Pennsylvania. The boys turn over rocks to look for salamanders and my husband has a challenging but well-paying job.
Three years ago, Tom sold his accounting practice in New Jersey to take a permanent job as a chief financial officer. We relocated and rented a lovely house in a year-round lake community in the Pocono Mountains, a hundred miles closer to Wellsboro. Now that we could visit the farm without sacrificing an entire day in transit, our visits were becoming more frequent.
He belongs to the golf course of his dreams. I’m home now—with a relaxed schedule and few demands from the outside world. My back, injured years before, is healing, thanks to regular exercise.
In many ways my life is idyllic. Yet, somehow, despite all this, two healthy children and a nice husband, I am not completely satisfied. I somehow lack a creative outlet. I had been considering, lately, that all my scientific learning, which I spent years acquiring, is locked inside me with no outlet.
I worked hard for my degrees in the fields of chemistry and pharmaceutical chemistry and then in human exposure assessment—a program that linked medical issues and environmental science. I studied the effects of pollution—everything from lead paint to pesticides, indoor air quality to tropospheric ozone—on humans. I, along with more talented colleagues, spent years teasing out scientific details that were entangled in complex and complicated systems. It was fascinating and challenging and ever-changing. I liken it to making discoveries at the end of the universe while everyone else was staring no farther than the moon.
Now at home with the children, I miss being on the cutting edge and knowing the latest discoveries first-hand. No longer in the research world, I feel somehow trapped. All my knowledge is bottled up inside my small body, unavailable for dissemination, and therefore useless and unappreciated.
* * *
Saturday, August 23, 2008
The boys and I spent the hot day picking blackberries and staying on the hammock in the shade, playing ‘Coast Guard rescue,’ a simple game concocted by Matthew. He insisted that we all repeat the drama over and over, to his satisfaction, jumping onto the hammock, yelling the commands. At times I could hardly conceal my boredom, although I adore his earnestness and enthusiasm. I cannot decide if I am resolutely encouraging imagination or merely too spineless to curb my children. I fear the latter, but was too exhausted to stop him. Alone for four days with the boys, I felt dull-witted and despondent.
I expected that Tom would arrive to spend the afternoon and stay the night, but the day dragged on with no sight of him. We wandered up to the barn, poked around through the piles of dusty old things, then climbed onto the hay rolls that dot the field on the hill. Finally, wearily, I realized that Tom had to work all day after all and wouldn’t be coming. I left the boys to push toy trucks in the stone trench alongside the house while inside I stared absently into the refrigerator, trying to plan dinner.
Car tires crunched the gravel on the driveway. Tom was here! I shut the refrigerator door and hurried after the boys, who had deserted the trucks to run to him pell-mell. I lifted one eyebrow as I noticed his long, plaid shorts: he had said that he would be working all day. He greeted us with large and enthusiastic hugs, glowing with good-will and red-faced with sunburn.
“I played eighteen, which is why I didn’t get here ’til now,” he admitted, as he left the boys to their trucks and followed me into the house to help with dinner and catch up on the news. His freedom to decide to do something fun without making extensive babysitting arrangements vaguely annoys me, especially today, because he ostensibly stayed home to work. However, I was too tired and hungry to start an argument.
It was good to see him. After we’d eaten and the dishes were washed, he began playfully wrestling with the boys on the living room floor. Their excitement soon escalated into a raucous, tumbling affair as I pleaded for them to stop, to be just a little quieter; my head ached. Realizing the futility of my requests, I grabbed the lone piece of mail addressed to me that Tom had brought from home. I plopped into the wooden rocker on the front porch, took a deep breath and sighed.
Peacefully still, I was alone for the first time in four days; no one demanded my attention. True, Tom was leaving tomorrow, but he would be back on Wednesday, so we could spend the Labor Day vacation together. I had longed to spend such an extended visit here, and now it was happening, though it was slightly more exhausting than anticipated.
I watched the sky’s peach-tipped clouds as I gently rocked the snarls out of my soul. Into my mind flitted an advertisement from the latest journal of a distinguished publication. I had scanned it briefly, last week, but hadn’t had a moment to contemplate the possibility:
The Pennsylvania State University, College of Medicine, Department of Public Health, seeks a tenure-track Assistant Professor to expand its epidemiology research program in the area of Environmental Health … Priority is given to applicants with strong experience in Environmental Exposure Assessment …
My brow had furrowed as I considered the possibility: “Why, my degree is in that very field!”
It was a position in a small Pennsylvania city; the job would be reasonably close to our families and to this farm. The science would be easy to grasp and interesting, although I might have to establish a lab. I ruefully recognized that I lack the patience and likely the skill to maintain state-of-the-art equipment. Still, I had been considering applying for the position. They were searching for a scientist with experience right up my alley!
In this free moment alone, I mulled over the possibility of a job interview.
Well, I would have to generate an extensive formal presentation on my thesis topic, which was now—what?—nearly ten years old. I would have to read the current literature to be prepared to discuss new research on that subject … Oh, and any recent ‘hot’ subjects in the field, too. I would have to skim the journals published over the past year. I would have to be abreast of the research that the Penn State faculty was currently performing and generate a strong idea for my own future research plan.
Oh, and funding sources … I would need to compile a list of potential funding sources. Good luck with that one. I sat, dully, now transfixed not by the beauty of the scene, but by the enormity of the challenge.
When on earth will I find time to do even the first of those?
I shook my head slowly. I never seem to sit down, except for a few minutes at the end of the day when I collapse on the couch and stare at the walls before finding one last chore that needs to be done before bed. True, I cannot pinpoint just what I do with my days, but then, what woman, staying home all day with a toddler, is able to point to anything tangible? Everything I do is repetitive—feeding and washing little mouths, diaper changing, laundry, cleaning—and it needs to be done today, tomorrow, and every day after that.
I think of something a woman in a quilt shop once said to me: “When my kids were little, the quilting I did at night was the only thing I did that stayed done.” Now I understand what she meant.
Nothing stays done in my parenting job, I thought, rocking the chair faster.
My present life is not structured to allow me to be successful as a university faculty member, not even, it seems, to interview for the position. I spend my days at home with finger paints and mud pies.
“When would I even find time to locate an outfit for the interview?” I murmured. The one suit I still have hangs in the back of Matthew’s closet, behind his stuffed animals. It is a relic of those scientific days, of the cutting edge research I presented here and in Europe. I am not sure why I keep the suit, except as a reminder that I once lived a different life.
I imagined trying to grab a few minutes with the boys while slapping pans around the kitchen—still wearing that suit—after a harried commute in the rain. I could not do it well enough, and, truthfully, I do not want the associated stress.
I do not want to be a professor, now, at this stage of my life. I would hate being trapped in an office on the sixth floor of some city building, frantically juggling five grant proposals and dealing with all the faculty politics, fixing laboratory equipment and struggling with demands from all angles. I have watched skilled researchers founder under the pressures of seventy-hour work weeks, hoping to be considered for tenure.
But, if a faculty position was written for me, this would be the one.
I sighed again.
“What I really want,” I mused, staring at the sky, “is to write. I want to write!”
I have wanted to write since childhood, but not to make up stories. “I want to write about Wellsboro, to capture and lock all those memories of this place and of my dad onto paper, for myself and for my children.”
I said it aloud.
Derrick
And all the Noise, Noise, Noise … how I hate all that noise!
—Dr. Seuss, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas
My thoughts returned from gyrations about job opportunities to notice the spectacular sunset and the warmth of the evening. It was my favorite time of day, when the earth seems still and peace reigns. I noticed the envelope on my lap and opened it—a letter from Matthew’s school. Likely some fundraiser, I thought, rocking gently. Unfolding the top page, I glanced, squinted more closely, then scrambled out of my seat with my heart pounding.
“School starts the day after tomorrow!” I nearly shrieked. “School starts THIS Monday, not next Tuesday!” I breathed shallow, shallow breaths.
Somehow I had misinterpreted Matthew’s school calendar.
“I couldn’t have!” My eyes seared across the white page as I tried to understand. With a sinking heart, I found my error. I had interpreted the ‘phase-in’ days to be only for new students, when it was to be a ‘phase-in’ for the whole school. I never seem to understand those private school letters; they seem so vague, as if reminders for a routine whose pattern is clear to everyone but me.
My heart flopped as a sudden, drastic realization chilled me.