The End of Country by Seamus McGraw

Author:Seamus McGraw [McGraw, Seamus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-60431-0
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

The End of Country

“Those roads can be treacherous at this time of year,” my mother hissed into the phone, sharpening every sibilant before driving it into my unfeeling filial heart. It was, after all, my fault that I hadn’t been able to find a babysitter so that I could make the 180-mile round trip from my house to the Keiserville Community Center, which sat atop a small rise along a stretch of perfectly snow-and-ice-free pavement roughly two miles from my mother’s house. But to her, it was unthinkable that I had asked her to haul her ten-year-old Buick out of her driveway and make the trip herself.

It was February, and even though the forecast called for only a remote possibility of a thin dusting of snow, that was enough to send my mother into a white-knuckled panic. If she had her way, she told me, she wouldn’t be leaving the house at all that night if she hadn’t run into her neighbor Anne Stang, who informed her that there was to be a meeting at the community center one hill over in Keiserville at which they were going to discuss the gas. It was essential that my family be represented, Anne had said. My mother decided that this was important enough that she even made an extra trip off the hill to drop in on Dorothy Sharpe, a part-time hairdresser, so she could have her hair washed and frosted especially for the meeting.

It had been only a few weeks since word of Terry Engelder’s estimates had hit the papers, but already the rules of the gas business had changed. The richest game of Texas Hold ’Em ever played in the history of American energy was on. And nowhere was the game hotter than in the hills and hollows around my mother’s farm.

Almost immediately the number of landmen in the region multiplied, setting off a frenzied bidding for land the likes of which had never been seen. Offers that only six weeks earlier had topped at $150 per acre had exploded to $1,500 by mid-January 2008. Even in Dimock, where Ken and Victoria and their neighbors had thought themselves reasonably lucky to get $25 an acre eighteen months earlier, offers were, by February, creeping up toward $1,500 an acre and more, adding to their already mounting sense of regret. And there was no end in sight. Landmen begin to ratchet up pressure. Oily Texans and fresh-faced country boys turned up everywhere, and the hills now echoed with their battle cry: “Beautiful place you have here …”

By late January, my mother and her neighbors were starting to feel under siege. Their phones rang constantly, their mailboxes were crammed with letters from agents representing Chesapeake and Devon and a host of other companies large and small that none of them had ever heard of. Some of the agents were aggressive, some obviously phony, though some were perfectly charming, like Marshall Casale, the nice young man with the Green Beret haircut and the altar boy’s smile who had approached my mother politely on behalf of Chesapeake.

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