The End of Country

A
grassy lane, rutted and rocky, ambles up past the weathered barn, guided by a sagging bluestone wall on one side and hemmed in by a steep rise to the top of the mountain on the other. Up ahead, there’s the old quarry, where the farmer who used to own this place pried out the rocks that came to be that wall. The quarry is a dump now, strewn with old canning jars and oil cans slowly rusting to dust. In the middle of it all, the carcass of a ’49 Plymouth lies on its crushed roof, now pierced by sumac saplings and stalks of Joe Pye weed. Beyond the quarry, there’s an open field, ten acres or so, and beyond that, a pond that, little by little, the land is trying to reclaim. Every year, it seems, the cattails sprout up farther into the water, and every year, the forest beyond it seems to inch a step or two closer to the water’s edge. It’s only a matter of time.

Four hundred million years ago, this land was part of a vast inland sea ringed by what were then the highest mountains in the world. This sea spread out over some 80,000 square miles, from what is now the Finger Lakes region in New York state all the way south to
modern-day Kentucky, from the foot of what is left of the Appalachian Mountains just west of the Delaware River all the way across modern Pennsylvania and New York to the shores of Lake Erie. The drifting landmass that would become this part of North America occupied the same tropical latitude as modern-day Fort Lauderdale, and the sea was warm enough and broad enough and deep enough—more than three hundred feet deep in some places—to create its own swirling weather systems.

Near the surface, this massive sea teemed with life. Tiny plants and primitive shellfish lived and died in the warm water, their remains drifting down into the darkness below. But a couple hundred feet down, beneath a certain invisible line—known to scientists as a pycnocline—it was a colder, lifeless world. Down there, the water was dense enough that it squeezed out almost every molecule of oxygen, which meant that every dead plant and animal that fell to the muddy bottom became preserved and its most essential element, carbon, frozen in the rich black muck.

It took millions upon millions of years, but the detritus of countless trillions of tiny deaths piled up until finally the seabed was filled and what little water remained evaporated. In the eons that followed, the world continued to change, and so, too, did the remains of this ancient buried sea. Countless geological events over countless millennia molded the land above it into what it is now, and each event left behind a reminder of its presence: layers of sandstone and limestone, seams of coal. In time, the mountains that once edged the sea fell, burying it still deeper.

Deep down, a mile below the ground, remnants of this sea continued to transform. Under the unfathomable weight pressing down on it, the muddy sea bottom gradually turned to stone. At its deepest levels, where all that rich organic matter had settled, a smooth, brittle, deep black shale was formed. And within that shale, the remains of those ancient life forms, the algae and the conodonts, the brachiopods and the primitive jawless fish, were becoming something else, too.

It was warm down there, between 160 and 270 degrees Fahrenheit, precisely the right temperature for a kind of transubstantiation to take place. Had it been just a few degrees cooler, the change would not have occurred. Had it been a few degrees warmer, the essence of those life forms, their carbon, would have been cooked out. As it was,
some of these remains liquefied, becoming oil, most of which eventually dissipated. Far more of it turned to methane—natural gas—a volatile, unimaginably powerful force that still works on the rocks that surround it, forcing its way a millimeter at a time through the shale that nurtured and contained it, fracturing the rocks, until today, trapped deep in the earth, all across that former sea, there is an ocean of natural gas.

For hundreds of millions of years it’s been there—by some estimates, the third-largest cache of natural gas in the world, potentially worth billions of dollars—unknown, untapped, unexplored, seething deep beneath these peaceful hills, showing only rare and fleeting glimpses of itself, and that only to people who couldn’t imagine the vastness of its power.

And then, one day, that changed.

A
s usual, the day had gotten away from her, and as usual, my mother had no idea how. She had risen at the crack of ten, as always, and followed her morning routine, which consisted largely of winding the dozen or so clocks she kept scattered around the house. There were cuckoo clocks and elaborate mechanical clocks that chirped or warbled or chimed, and all needed to be wound and set by hand. She kept the key to the first clock atop her alarm clock, and she set the first cuckoo clock to the time flashing digitally on the alarm clock, which generally was more or less the correct time. She would then palm the key to the next clock—she kept the second key atop the first clock—and make her way to set that second clock. But along the way she would invariably get distracted.

Eventually, she’d remember that she was clutching a clock key in her hand. She’d make it to the second clock and set that to precisely the same time she had set the first, and then she would do exactly the same thing at the next clock after some more aimless wandering. The result was that it took her virtually all day to set all the clocks in
the house, and no two were set to the same time. The house was a constant cacophony of seemingly random bells and birdcalls and tunes from old movies played on the perforated tin drums of music boxes. Most visitors found it maddening, but my mother would always cheerily dismiss them. “It’s a big house,” she’d say. “Different time zones.”

It was autumn. The first frost hadn’t yet hit, and so the dirt—or what passes for dirt in that rocky corner of northeastern Pennsylvania—was still pliable enough for my mother to get next spring’s bulbs in. And she had even set her floppy straw hat and paisley gardening gloves on the old blue rocker on the back porch the night before so she could be ready to go bright and early. But by the time she had donned them and made it out of the house, the sun was already slipping behind the old hemlocks that ringed the west side of the house.

She didn’t really mind. On late falls days like this, her rambling old house with its green gables and ivory-colored clapboard siding, its weathered wood granary and the brooding barn, all looked like a photograph in one of the albums she keeps in her cedar chest, along with her wedding dress. That garden and this house were the only things that had kept her in this remote corner of northeastern Pennsylvania after my father died. It had been nine years. The pancreatic cancer had been a hell of a shock for a guy who had never smoked a cigarette or taken a drink in his life, and he blamed the oil for his disease.

From the moment my parents bought the place in 1970, my father had been at war with the woodchucks. He hated the little critters, not just because they looked like obese rats, but also because their unsightly burrows pockmarked his fields, offending my father’s sense of order. Moreover, he had convinced himself that the insidious beasts were laying traps, that it was only a matter of time before a cow or horse stepped into one of those holes and snapped its leg. But my father, a crack shot with his .22 when it came to plinking soda cans off fenceposts, didn’t have the heart to dispatch the chucks the old-fashioned way. He preferred a more asymmetrical warfare. When he changed the oil in his cars or tractor, he would carry the used oil to the nearest chuck hole and dump it in. Thing was, the woodchucks didn’t seem to mind it. The periodic oil baths did nothing to reduce their population. But as my father, who had never been a particularly
superstitious man, drew closer to death, he got it into his head that his disease was some kind of karmic punishment for poisoning the earth.

M
Y MOTHER WAS ONLY A
few spadefuls into the job when a rusted old import with bad shocks came rattling up her driveway, a young woman—couldn’t have been more than twenty-three—at the wheel. Though my mother had never seen her before, she recognized the young woman at once. Maybe it was the trim brown leather jacket—rumor had it that she started wearing it after realizing that the local farmers were paying no attention to her spiel and were instead focused entirely on her tattoos. Maybe it was the sheaf of papers she carried. More than likely, though, it was the little gold nose ring, which now glittered in the sun. That nose ring had become pretty famous around Ellsworth Hill that autumn of 2007. They didn’t see many of those around there.