Thomas Mills, Pennsylvania is a farm town of a hundred families nestled into the Laurel Mountains, on a bed of Marcellus shale. But when I visited my mom’s hometown, I only knew it as the place I loved as a kid (Grass! No shoes! Grandma driving me on the back of her four-wheeler through the cornfield!) and loathed as a teenager because of its bucolic (read: boring) setting. I called it, Deliverance, The Place Time Forgot, but mostly Cowtown.
Cowtown is a place that has remained pretty much the same since my Anabaptist ancestors emigrated from Germany. And while my mother gets misty recalling games of pick-up baseball with her million cousins, chasing the cows back to the barn when they escaped, Mennonite church picnics with whoopie pies and snickerdoodles, I found the constancy of the place stifling.
But now Cowtown might join the 21st century in the worst possible way and I find myself becoming protective of it. “The men from Texas have been going over property lines and evaluating the land,” says Jeanne Cober, my aunt and lifelong resident. “The people who own the farm up the hill live in a different town, and they are thinking about selling the rights.” She’s referring to the right to drill for natural gas, a dubious process called Fracking which is known to cause widespread groundwater contamination, cancer, and yes, tap water so polluted with chemicals you can light it on fire. Even more complicated, if a homeowner like my aunt wants to protect her land but her neighbor sells their drilling rights her water supply can be destroyed anyway (Vanity Fair).
Fracking is a class issue—land targeted for fracking is most often owned by low-income families, who are the least likely to be able to afford lawsuits and extensive water testing.
Fracking inflames community anxieties about what is really for the common good. In a tough economy, hefty payments from the gas company can seem like hitting the jackpot; but although each family has the right to sell their rights, one family’s decision can affect a whole town. Once fracking has begun, getting a settlement for polluted water takes years of litigation. Residents have to pay $300-$400 for a baseline test of the water before the first drill. Then, six months after fracking, a resident shells out the fee again to test for contamination (New York Times Magazine). For struggling farmers and families this is not an option. Fracking is a class issue—land targeted for fracking is most often owned by low-income families, who are the least likely to be able to afford lawsuits and extensive water testing.
“We might as well sell our property now because it won’t be of any value if they start fracking,” Jeanne told me. It saddened me to think that my kids might not know the glory of kicking off their shoes and running barefoot until packing up the car and returning to civilization—when they turn the outdoor spigot to slurp water directly from the hose, the smell of methane will meet their nostrils. Fracking has the potential not just to poison residents’ wells, but also poison them against each other for money. One day maybe I’ll drag a sullen teenage daughter to Cowtown only to discover there aren’t even any cows.
- Elizabeth Greenwood is a writer living in New York. Visit her at elizabethgreenwood.wordpress.com, follow her on twitter @lizgreenwood4u
