I. Things as Themselves
The Marcellus Formation or the Marcellus Shale is a Middle Devonian age (read: between 393 and 382 million years old) unit of sedimentary rock found in eastern North America. In 2012, it was the largest source of natural gas in the United States, and production was still growing rapidly in 2013. The natural gas is trapped in low- permeability shale, and requires the well completion method of hydraulic fracturing to allow the gas to flow to the well bore. The surge in drilling activity in the Marcellus Shale since 2008 has generated both economic benefits and considerable controversy.1
When I was a teenager, the boreholes were where people went to make out. My high school boyfriend, Tyler, drove us in his mom’s 2012 Dodge Grand Caravan to the top of the hill outside of town, where you could park at the abandoned natural gas well pad and watch the sunset. The sun
pooled and dumped into the river, like a bucket of red paint. The line of cars sat vigil. We had our first kiss. I did not fall forever. At the same time as this shale was forming during the Middle Devonian, the shallow, warm waters of Devonian inland lakes provided the environment necessary for
certain early fish to develop essential characteristics such as well-developed lungs and the ability to crawl out of the water and onto the land for short periods of time, possibly in search of food.2 There is a famous 2010 documentary, Gasland, which references my hometown in Bradford County, Pennsylvania—the northern wing of Appalachia. In the film, you can see a man light his tap water on fire, to demonstrate how much methane had leaked into the drinking water. It all happened so fast, as they say. Eighteen-wheelers rumbled down dirt roads and lights flashed in the sky at night, deep in our backwoods, heralding the arrival of some alien entity. Over the course of five years, it was as if our landscape swelled and quickly dried. The well pads scabbed over like patches of dry skin. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment, Anna Tsing writes in The Mushroom at the End of the World. And then, the bugs peeking out from under the rock. We lay sunbathing in the cleared space.
At the same time, the earliest forest in the world grew in the Middle Devonian time.3
One of the perks offered to landowners was the right to name any drill pad cleared on their property. I took a walk around the block one day and saw that my next-door neighbor had dedicated his to his dead wife: the Lily Pad. There she was, poised atop water, waiting to slip.
In town, I started going to ballet class in the back room of a building that used to be a grocery store; I plunked in, sturdy and envious as an eight-year-old oak tree. I did not know in what order to wear my tights and leotard, but I was loud and muscular. On the other side of the wall, the grocery store was soon leased to make an administrative office for the gas drillers. On our side, I got my period for the first time. Oh, the leakage!
Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves. Unable to rely on a stable structure of community, we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as our others. We can’t rely on the status quo; everything is in flux, including our ability to survive.4
The gas man came to our 8th grade Earth Science class. He showed us a diagram proving the safety of the fracking procedure, unless there is some incredibly unlikely rupture. We asked questions, he left. We took cloud quizzes, where we had to go outside and name the types of clouds we saw. Follow my hand, Mrs. Putnam would say as she pointed to a cirrus, stratus. You had to answer fast because the clouds were moving, shifting, becoming new things. It was easy to accept the facts as they were presented, and if we were told them in school, there was a sturdiness, a boringness to the
facts. At home, in this place, things felt staunchly themselves. Young as we were, our lives were a small enough field of time and space that things still felt nameable. Still now, though I have been watching the sky fill and un-fill for a while, when I go home there is a sense of returning to reality.
In Iceland, we took the prerequisite bus from the airport, through the lava fields, to the abandoned biscuit factory-turned-hostel where we were staying. My dad sent me a link to an article about a volcanic eruption. You should be able to see it on the drive! I sent back a grainy video of a barren
gray landscape, suspiciously moonlike, with a scarlet flare in the center. The next day, our Icelandic tour guide, Floki, told us that these eruptions signaled the end of a cycle of 800 geologically peaceful years in Iceland. The lava field which we drove across to get to town was formed by a flow that occurred 2400 years ago—three cycles prior.
All day, Floki drove us, as well as a group of eight strangers, in his 2023 Mercedes Sprinter van across the southwest coast. Our companions included a middle-aged Norwegian couple (who were scolded for eating stinky fish jerky in the van), a British family with three sullen teenagers, and a pair of older Japanese ladies who told us, proudly, that they were on a Girls’ Trip. At the end of the day, headed back to Reykjavík, Floki pointed straight through the windshield. Do you see that cloud? It has been there all day. It is not a cloud at all. It is in fact the smoke from our eruption.
III. Things Are Their Opposites
retreat. We become the echo of what we define ourselves against. It makes me think of a poem by
Mark Strand, “Keeping Things Whole”:
In a field
I am the absence of
field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk I part
the air and always
the air moves in to fill
the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons for
moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
Notes:
2 Wikipedia entry for the Middle Devonian Age
3 Ibid.
4 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press.
2017.