A Mother Near the West Virginia Line Considers Public Health
The industry thinks I’m too dumb to back down; they don’t know
I do this for my mom and dad. They were 69 and 71.
He had pulmonary fibrosis, worked with asbestos all his life. She grew up
near the coke ovens back when kids were sent into the mines to pick coal.
So they both had lung problems, but their home, the next hollow over,
sits 350 feet from a compressor station. We sealed the house,
set up an air scrubber, but—four of their neighbors passed last year, too.
*
We bought the coal rights to our 115 acres because we know
the company will come up to your front door, but we let the gas go,
just didn’t see this coming. A gentleman from New Jersey leased our land.
One day we come home to find pink ribbons tied in the field. Then bulldozers.
They put in four shallow wells and a Marcellus well on a five-acre pad
700 feet from our porch. The workers come by the busload. All those strangers
on our land 24/7, could have been rapists or pedophiles. For about a year
they didn’t have a Por-a-John. I looked out my window one morning
to a guy peeing in the driveway. The dog brought in used toilet paper.
The workers have to be young, strong. Kids in trucks 12 to 16 hours a day
that should be placarded “hazardous waste.” They live on junk food;
I know because we picked up the wrappers. Then our dog disappeared.
We saw Sara’s tracks in the snow go right up to the well pad.
*
When crayfish died in our spring, we knew the methane had migrated.
Now you can light it on fire. Our neighbors put in a water line; we guessed
their well had gone bad and they’d settled, but they paid for it themselves.
We had water buffaloes two years before we paid to run a line in from the road.
When they laid the gas pipeline, those big trucks drove over our water line
and busted it all up. I hollered at the drivers and got dragged into court;
me and our son, four years old then, both got an injunction.
They tried to say I’m an unfit mother too, but the judge wouldn’t hear it.
I look at pictures of my little one from that time, and he has the same dark circles
under his eyes as the Hallowich kids. He’d get terrible stomach pains, nothing
we could do but hold him. My older boy had the nosebleeds and rashes.
I couldn’t keep him inside all the time. I’ll show you pictures. If you speak up,
you get more security. We had guards here 24/7, armed and unlicensed
in Pennsylvania. They got real interested in my walks down by the crick.
One asked me, What do you do down there in the evening? I said, I walk
and I have pawpaw trees. Want to come along? So I got to know
the night guard. He could have used the exercise, so he walked with us.
His mom was sick the same time mine was. We’re still in touch on Facebook.
*
They drilled the gas pipeline on a weekend, didn’t go where the dep said,
so it blew out in our crick—bentonite and “residual waste” clouding
clean water stocked with trout. That’s when I cried. That crick flows
into the Mon, and people get their drinking water out of that river.
Another side effect of the drilling no one thinks about is all the swearing.
And it’s not just the men.
*
“Alternate waste disposal on site” means they can bury radioactive
drill cuttings on your land. When they drained the frack pits,
they shook the tarp and bulldozed the sludge into the ground too.
There are places we mow now, but we don’t feed that hay to our horses.
I can’t dig or plant a post there. Why don’t they tell us
not to grow food or let beef graze back there?
The stock sale registers animals now, so if I sell hay to a neighbor,
he sells his steer, and someone’s sick from the meat, that comes back on me.
*
People collect royalties on this well a mile away. We just care for the place
and pay taxes. The well tenders come about once a week
to the shallow wells and every day to the Marcellus. Two or three
times a week water trucks come in here and draw brine, and every two weeks
they blow it down, so whatever’s on the line goes into the air.
Once the brine tank vented for 45 minutes. My horses’ eyes swelled shut,
and one went blind. They’ve had the nosebleeds. There’s a big gum tree
near the well that loses its leaves in the middle of summer.
*
We saw clouds of silica sand blow off train cars over the Little League field,
and someone was holding a newborn there with us in the stands.
When I complained about them parking silica trains by the elementary school,
the gentleman said, “It’s just sand; your kids play in it.”
*
We didn’t have Internet before this, but you have to follow the permits
because the industry tells you nothing. You have to go to the courthouse
and pull your file, and when you find out what they did to your land,
you’re just sick. Let them think I’m too dumb to back down. My son
won’t play on any t-ball team with industry logos on their shirts.