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Working Watersheds

Thales says that it is water.

—Aristotle, Metaphysics

At the same time that my neighbors and I are learning new words—J1s, muds, and fracking, for example—we confront new acronyms such as MCF, MER, PIG.¹ And the terms, the terms keep coming. I discover that to drill on air is to sink a bare bit through the water table. A Christmas tree, I hear, is a collection of pipes on a well top. Someone mentions that horizontal drilling has revolutionized oil and gas production, and an expert reminds me that “all energy requires water; water requires energy.”² Even as I struggle to sort words and terms, big companies—Exxon, Hess, Chesapeake—bandy about big numbers: $6,000/acre and a 20 percent royalty. Two thousand drilled, four thousand permitted, maybe one hundred thousand more: a gas rush.

Searching for some clarity, I signed up for the August 2010 Marywood University forum “Marcellus Shale: Opportunities and Challenges.” Industry terms, numbers, and names dominated presentations about energy extraction, community impacts, and water quality. I heard my then representative in the U.S. House, who was up for reelection, declare that the “gold rush is here,” that “Marcellus Shale is a second chance,” and that “we can have it both ways.” A little more cautious, thankfully, one of my representatives in the U.S. Senate told me that “we need to invent the future in the right way” and that “we can’t repeat the mistakes of the past.” The president of a coalition of gas companies—its logo a water droplet encasing a green leaf—pointed out that Marcellus shale is a “long-term play”; when fully developed, by about 2020, it will have put tens of thousands to work and will have added billions to the state economy. On the other hand, the head of the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) reported that the state’s conservation efforts suffered a major setback in October 2009 when the state swiped money from the DCNR budget to shore up its general fund. If Pennsylvania wants a model for what might happen as the rush runs its course, a Penn State professor suggested, it should look to Texas and other shale areas; experience in these places has shown that boomtowns are not better off for the boom.³ He urged communities to ask a question that too many in the Anthracite Region failed to ask 150 years ago: “What happens when it’s over?”

I walked away as bewildered as before. Strolling across campus toward home, I realized that I had no category to absorb the immensity of what might happen. Like a slowly approaching hurricane might, the size of what was coming posed questions I couldn’t begin to answer. How does one person prepare? How do people “invent the future”? When the storm breaks, how do communities “have it both ways”? And the question I couldn’t shake: How do we keep the powers at play from wreaking havoc on us and the land?

Past is prologue, they say, which may be why at least two forum speakers urged me to think about the rush to drill within the context of the region’s history of resource extraction. In her opening remarks, for example, Marywood president Sr. Anne Munley insisted that we “recall our regional history at moments such as this.” What’s at issue, she asserted, is “balancing an economic opportunity with stewardship of the land for future generations. In a region long used to economic hardship, this is a difficult balancing act to resolve.” Citing acid mine drainage, U.S. senator Bob Casey reminded me that the region’s “history is instructive”; we’ve “been there, done that.” Both urged me to read attentively, think deeply, and act carefully. Amen to that, I said. But then again, how well can I read, think, and act when I’m in a rush?⁴

A lot has happened since land men began knocking on people’s doors. By mid-2010, they had leased one-fourth of Pennsylvania. Facing a 2009 budget crisis, the state allowed drilling on large blocks of state forest and game lands, much of which, we were later told, the state owned no mineral rights to anyway. During the same budget battle, Pennsylvania, unlike most states that have oil and natural gas reserves, refused to impose a “severance tax, a tax on natural resources ‘severed’ from the land.”⁵ Meanwhile, my brother, facing falling milk prices, signed a lease allowing Houston-based Southwestern Energy to drill on the homestead. A few miles to the south, at the Matousheks’ farm, Louisiana-based Stone Energy dropped the gas rush’s first drill in Wayne County, creating a well that joined seventy thousand others that dot the state, reminders that drilling is not new to Pennsylvania, which is, after all, the birthplace of the oil and gas industry.⁶

The terms, numbers, and names fade when someone mentions water.

People fear that natural gas drilling will contaminate drinking water. Sinking a gas well requires about three million gallons of water, which must be sucked from rivers, streams, or water wells. Once the water and its toxic additives have shot through shale, they resurface as wastewater that must be either treated or recycled. It doesn’t help to know that water from a fracked well is three to five times saltier than seawater, or that in 2007 scientists discovered that gas wells capped in 1920 have contaminated nearby water wells.⁷

Accidents happen. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection recorded between 2005 and 2010 “hundreds of examples of spills at natural gas drilling sites.” In March 2009, for example, DEP fined Cabot Oil and Gas for “allowing methane to escape into [Susquehanna County] residents’ drinking water.” Later that year, in September, a “spill of a hydrofracturing lubricant” in the same county may have contaminated Stevens Creek. An environmentalist’s aerial photographs sparked a 2009 state investigation of a Wayne County well; a preliminary report found that a “ ‘weathered petroleum product’ of unknown quantity was discharged... into a forested area.” In June 2010, a Clearfield County well on a private hunting club’s property in the “middle of a state forest” spewed for sixteen hours a “geyser of gas and wastewater.”⁸

Slapping firms with small fines and short stoppages, Pennsylvania has gone easy on gas companies. I would have expected a state with three major watersheds—the Delaware, Susquehanna, and Ohio, whose waters touch millions of lives—to exert a little more force. The Susquehanna, for example, drains 27,510 square miles, supports a population of over four million people, and makes up 43 percent of the Chesapeake Bay watershed.⁹ The Ohio watershed, draining the west end of the state, contributes water to the largest river system in the United States, and sends its waters to the Gulf of Mexico. With more miles of streams than any other state but Alaska, water-rich Pennsylvania suddenly must rely on the federal Environmental Protection Agency to initiate a “study of hydraulic fracturing that would consider... the whole life-cycle of a well.”¹⁰ Why?

Not everyone agrees with Pennsylvania policy. In August 2010, the New York Senate overwhelmingly approved a moratorium on gas drilling in that state. Aware of the fifteen million people who drink water from the Delaware rivershed, which supplies New York City and Philadelphia, the Delaware River Basin Commission effectively declared in May 2009 a drilling moratorium.¹¹ Fearing that chemicals used in fracking wells would contaminate the city’s drinking water, Philadelphia City Council in March 2010 “unanimously approved a resolution that asks the Delaware River Basin Commission to conduct an environmental impact study of natural gas drilling in the Delaware River watershed prior to approving any permits.” At the time, the Commission was mulling a request from Stone Energy to draw water from the West Branch of the Lackawaxen River in order to frack the Matoushek well, an application the Commission approved on 14 July 2010. Water withdrawal from the Lackawaxen has brought “the City of Brotherly Love and this predominantly agricultural county much closer than ever imagined.”¹²

In November 2005, I stood 282 feet below sea level, looking out across the salt flats of Death Valley, thinking about Frank Norris’s McTeague handcuffed to a dead body. The moment expressed all I knew about deserts: hot, dry, deadly. Out on the flats, people appeared and disappeared in heat waves; I ventured not so far, studying what surprised me, the presence of water, as bad as it is, in Badwater Basin. Native to a humid place, I missed the sight of a good spring; I had no working category for knowing arid land. But then again, I was a tourist there, so I concentrated on the awful beauty: distant mountains, sharp rocks, sandstone colors. And I had a bottle of water, the van—not far—had air conditioning, and the paved roads in and out had signs. Glancing back at Badwater, I could imagine staying awhile, a day maybe. What I couldn’t imagine was living there.

West of Badwater, between the Sierra and Inyo mountains, stretches the Owens Valley, home for a time to Mary Hunter Austin; here she wrote The Land of Little Rain, essays about Death Valley and the Mojave, Lone Pine and Independence, land she named the Country of Lost Borders. A transplant from the Midwest, Austin kept her senses alert, for years, as she slowly came to know the country; only after she had “summer[ed] and winter[ed] with the land and wait[ed] its occasions” did she begin writing. As she wrote, she thought a lot about water, which keeps that arid land alive, no matter how “dry the air and villainous the soil.”¹³

Reading her essays in well-watered Pennsylvania reminds me of what I and many of my neighbors have for too long taken for granted: our access, so far, to good, clean, abundant water. With water at its heart, The Land of Little Rain pays careful attention to “precise place-based knowledge,” because getting right the details matters as much for one’s survival as for one’s aesthetics.¹⁴ As Austin points out, “Not the law, but the land sets the limit” (3). Accustomed to where they are, for example, western cattle “drink morning and evening,” and protect themselves by lying at night on “exposed fronts of westward facing hills.” At home in a water-starved world, they so closely resemble less domesticated animals that in “these half wild spotted steers the habits of an earlier lineage persist” (15).

Water drives desert dwellers: if you can’t find a sip, you’re dead. As Austin matter-of-factly points out, “To underestimate one’s thirst, to pass a given landmark to the right or left, to find a dry spring where one looked for running water—there is no help for any of these things” (5).¹⁵ People cannot depend on springs, “for when found they are often brackish and unwholesome, or maddening, slow dribbles in a thirsty soil” (4). For a human to get around, she insists, requires a sophisticated awareness of weather and wind, plants and animals, elevations and the position of the sun. If you don’t know the country, well, it might kill you. This is land that “forces new habits on its dwellers,” not the least of which is where to find water (7).

Close reading can help. Animal tracks lead to springs, which are few and far between, and cattle die with their noses pointed toward water holes.¹⁶ These are not the only signs of water, however: Austin describes a circle of stone with an arrow pointing toward a spring, a mark Shoshone made “near where the immemorial foot trail goes up from Saline Flat toward Black Mountain” (17). Another arrow sign, of an “older, forgotten people,” built closer to the spring, instructs the thirsty: “In this direction... is a spring of sweet water; look for it” (18).

People war over scarce water. In the Country of Lost Borders, upstream farmers defend irrigation ditches in dry years, holding water for themselves before it flows on to others, assuming any remains (86). Austin recounts that at the end of one summer, Amos Judson, for example, shot up Jesus Montaña, who dared contest Judson’s right to all the water in Tule Creek (87). A dozen or so years later, however, Mrs. Diedrick, Judson’s latest downstream neighbor, held Judson off with a long-handled shovel. These incidents lead Austin to point out, prophetically, that “some of the water-right difficulties are more squalid than this, some more tragic” (87).

Not a few years later, a more squalid and tragic difficulty afflicted Owens Valley when Los Angeles started stealing the heart of the country, siphoning its water to expand into what the city has become, a place where streams have gone underground, springs have been built over, and water trees run in concrete sluices. Grown beyond its place, Los Angeles stands at the end of a more than two hundred mile ditch that drains water “east away from the Sierras, south from Panamint and Amargosa” (3). For otherwise arid Los Angeles, it’s not land that sets limits; it’s law. The lesson: if a large number of people want what’s at your feet, they’ll take it, one way or another, whether it’s water, coal, or natural gas.¹⁷

Ditches keep no one for long.

A ditch bisects the farm. Well-meaning, I’m sure, the Soil Conservation Service engineered the gash in 1973 to catch runoff from the sidehill and divert it from racing down the driveway or coursing through the pasture behind the house to the Flat, where it had already carved a shallow channel. Steering the flow from one side of the farm to the other, the Ditch dumped water into the woods, out of sight. Before the bulldozer raised the bank, no one, I bet, walked among the hemlock and beech to find where the water would go, how it would get there, or what it would do as it found its way to Johnson Creek. Maybe the site supervisor assumed that trees and rocks would disperse the force of the water, or maybe he assumed eroding a woodlot a lesser sin than eroding the pasture, an old apple orchard. Or maybe no one thought about it. So now in the woods, the flow cuts deep gullies, in some places a dozen feet down through Lordstown stony loams. And no grass has reclaimed the gullies, which would blunt the loss, as grass had in the water’s former course. Between ditch and creek, a handful of hemlocks have lost their footing, and heavy rains plug the sluice pipe under the road near my brother’s house. The Ditch didn’t solve an erosion problem; it moved it, and maybe made it worse.

From Honesdale to the state line, a ditch once cut a path parallel to the Lackawaxen River. Prior to 1849, the Delaware and Hudson Canal ended at the edge of the Delaware only to begin again on the other side, but after the construction of the Roebling aqueducts, Lackawaxen water went on to empty into a second river, the Hudson, eighty-four miles to the east.¹⁸ One hundred and eight total miles, the Delaware and Hudson Canal measured in 1851 six feet deep, forty-eight to fifty feet wide at the top, and thirty-two feet at the bottom.¹⁹ To float boats, canal tenders had to maintain its depth; to save its sides from erosion, canal traffic and water flow had to maintain walking speed. Opened in October 1828, the D & H, a symptom of the early nineteenth-century canal fever, carried for seventy years Lackawanna Valley coal to New York City markets. For seventy years, water from the farm, located along Johnson Creek between Hankins Pond and Miller Pond, fed four rivers that supplied industrial America: the Lackawaxen, the D & H, the Delaware, and the Hudson.

Water worries determined where the canal began. Fearing that local landowner Jason Torrey, who operated a sawmill on the river, “would not guarantee an adequate supply of water for the canal,” the D & H cut him from their plans to create a canal head. In August 1827, Torrey had contracted with the D & H to donate to the company half his land at the forks of the Dyberry for the canal terminus; in return he expected his remaining land to jump in value with the rise of the town that would support the canal’s operation. In September, however, D & H founder Maurice Wurts crossed the Dyberry and swindled Torrey’s neighbor, Samuel Kimble, convincing him that his land was worth little because the canal would begin on Torrey’s property. As historian Vernon Leslie notes dryly, “The brothers Wurts were not known for their generosity or integrity in regard to land deals.”²⁰ Early-day land men, I imagine.

Water supply was a serious and chronic issue for the new river. Constructed “during a season of unusual drought” in 1826, the sides of the canal had to be watered and allowed to settle before the basin could be filled. Hacked through sections of “porous, stony soil,” the waterway sometimes leaked, which meant lining the bottom with clay. Operating only from May to December, the ditch had to be refilled every spring, which meant that engineers put to work springs, creeks, rivers, and swamps.²¹ Despite raising reservoirs all along the route, including Belmont Lake, Hankins Pond, and Miller Pond, the company couldn’t keep boats afloat in 1851, 1854, 1870, 1883, and 1895.²² Finding enough water even after a flood could be tough; in recharging the canal following an 1862 flood, canal overseer Russel Lord, “in effect, attempted to pump dry the Lackawaxen.”²³

Along the canal’s feeder streams, water-intensive tanneries sprang up, each feeding not only on water but also on the area’s hemlock, whose bark produced tannic acid, a necessary component in tanning hides. The tannery that stood between Pleasant Mount and Belmont, along the West Branch of the Lackawaxen, was part of an international business that by 1860 accounted for two-thirds of the value of Wayne County manufacturing, a stat in large part attributable to the canal offering access to New York’s port. Supplying tanneries with hides from as far away as South America, in 1872 the canal floated 1,690 tons of leather and hides and 729 tons of tanners’ bark.²⁴ It’s a good bet that tanners simply dumped used vats of tannic acid into streams like the Johnson; a mix of acids, blood, and offal cannot be good for water quality.²⁵ By the mid-1880s, however, the industry, making mainly shoe leather, collapsed across the county after it exhausted the supply of hemlock.²⁶

With railroads delivering coal at an ever-faster clip, the canal lost ground. In 1880, D & H president Thomas Dickson approached the company board of directors with three reasons to shut it down: (1) it’s “expensive to maintain... liable to damage, and can be used a portion of the year only”; (2) the “question of a water supply is becoming more serious every year”; and (3) “traffic cannot be moved upon [it] as cheaply as by rail.”²⁷ At the end of 1898, the D & H finally closed the canal, and the Lackawaxen, Delaware, and Hudson rivers reclaimed their waters.

As the weather warmed in 1899, the canal became a “stinking, unhealthy ditch.” One seventeen-mile section sold to the Erie Railroad “bought the Erie considerable abuse over sanitary problems” because people feared malaria outbreaks. When operations ended, life along the canal banks changed almost instantly; mules disappeared into D & H mines, workers left for jobs elsewhere, and many of the busy towns that had sprung up along the towpath withered and died.²⁸

Our house sits on a lake we’ve never seen. As large as a Finger Lake and about one hundred feet beneath us, neither ice nor rain created it. An orphan of anthracite mining and a brainchild of the state Bureau of Mining and Reclamation, the Acid Mine Lake names a basin beneath a basin, a watershed of pollution cupping the watershed I glimpse from my front door. Not good.

To mine coal below the water table, companies continually pumped water from their mines, even when mines were idle due to labor strikes, accidents, or money troubles. Owners, strikers, non-miners: everyone respected the pumps because they knew that if the pumps stopped mining would end, forever. In 1960 the pumps stopped.²⁹

In January 1959, Knox Coal Company miners chipped away at a coal seam near Pittston to within six feet of a buried valley under the Susquehanna River. Left by the Wisconsin ice sheet, “water-bearing, quicksand-like sediments” broke into the mine, pulling the river with it, sweeping away twelve men, and sending seventy more scrambling for the surface. The resulting whirlpool, 120–50 feet wide, defied for days all attempts to plug it, including running into the abyss thirty or more railroad cars loaded with coal. By the time the river surface smoothed, ten billion gallons of water had been sucked into Wyoming Valley mines.³⁰

A massive pumping and propping operation cleared the mines, but by then the three major coal companies had discovered that deep mining here was no longer profitable. Deciding to pull out, Glen Alden, Moffat, and Hudson agreed among themselves that the last outfit left would shut down the pumps. After the last switch flipped to off on 1 November 1960, water gradually collected in mine gangways and rooms, crosscuts and hoisting sheds, its level rising by January 1962 to 609 feet above sea level. Mine water soon gushed “from numerous bore holes and seeps along the Lackawanna Valley,” coursing down hillsides and collecting in basements.³¹

Called in to solve the flooding problem, the state decided that siphoning off the water would relieve the underground pressure. Near Old Forge, where the river spills over the Moosic Saddle anticline, workers drilled down four hundred feet, creating a hole that “drains all of the flooded mine tunnels from Olyphant through Scranton and Taylor.”³² The resulting gush daily spews into the river one hundred million gallons of water laced with a ton and a half of iron oxide (i.e., rust), along with “iron, aluminum, manganese and sulfur.” If you wanted to stab a river in the heart, this would be one way to do it; from Old Forge to the Lackawanna’s confluence with the Susquehanna, no “fishery or any significant aquatic community” survives.³³ The river rusts, lifeless, in its last three miles, its water and rocks a surreal, bright orange. The price for my dry basement is a long stretch of dead river.

Scranton and its river have always had an uneasy relationship. In the early 1850s, the river may have, just may have, “flowed deep and strong, with an abundance of water, that came sparkling pure from the thick forests and wooded hills of the upper valley,” but this, the Scranton family knew, would not last. In 1854, the Scrantons, scrambling to supply their growing village with water, organized the Scranton Gas and Water Company, which began four years later to pump water from the Lackawanna River, near today’s Scranton High School, uphill to a reservoir at Madison Avenue and Olive Street.³⁴ By 1866, the year of the city’s founding, the river was officially “declared unfit for public water supply.” With river water undrinkable, in 1867 the company dammed Roaring Brook, a Lackawanna tributary, but in 1870 these waters so corroded flues at the Lackawanna Iron and Coal furnaces that an explosion killed eleven workers.³⁵ The water company quickly retreated farther up the mountain, making reservoirs as it went. Meanwhile, garbage, industrial waste, mine runoff, and sewage smothered the river, so much so that by the 1920s much of the Lackawanna was dead, and, aided by state and local government, remained so for years. A 1937 Pennsylvania clean streams law “exempted coal companies,” and as late as the 1960s local officials resisted state and citizen efforts to clean up the river, arguing that “pollution from the mines neutralized the health threats from the sewage.” For too long, the city knew only a wasted waterway.³⁶

Despite its troubles, the Lackawanna is beautiful. Sixty-two miles long, it drains 350 square miles, flows through twenty-three municipalities, and passes through an area populated by nearly 250,000 people. From sources atop the Moosic Mountains, the river drops “an average of 39 feet per mile” on its trip to the Susquehanna, cutting rock that was once the “ocean floor in the Devonian period, the great swamps of the Carboniferous period, [and] the folded and uplifted sedimentary rocks of the Permian age.” The river rises from glacial ponds in Wayne and Susquehanna counties: Lake Lorain, Bone Pond, Independent Lake, and Dunns Pond feed the east branch; the west branch carries water from Fiddle Lake, Lake Lowe, and Lewis Lake. Through parts of Scranton, just north of the Old Forge borehole, the river has recovered enough in the last thirty years to offer excellent trout fishing; north of the city, a section between Jessup and Jermyn—and many people refuse to believe it—the Pennsylvania Fish Commission classifies as Class A Trophy Trout waters. Despite this resurrection, more than a dozen major outfalls still empty mine acid into the watershed.³⁷

As I worked on this chapter, I followed the “cleanup” of the largest oil spill in U.S. history. When the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded on 20 April 2010, killing eleven workers and gushing millions of gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico, I couldn’t help but see it as a larger version of the Old Forge borehole. Every day, long into July, oil washed ashore along the coast, crippling the Gulf economy, all for a few barrels more. Guardian writer Naomi Klein put it exactly right when she noted that the spill was less an industrial accident than a “violent wound in a living organism.”³⁸ The Earth bleeds, we watch, and little changes but the scale of disaster.

Every other day, usually, I run up Richmont Street, sprint across North Washington Avenue, jog up Electric Street, swing around the Oral School, and pass through the gates of Forest Hill Cemetery, where I wind my way among the dead. With the original cobblestone roads paved, thankfully, running in the cemetery is less dangerous than it might otherwise be. The six mausoleums look like cottages, with maples shading their front doors; two of them, Barnes and Lucas, back into a hillside. Along my route, I glimpse marble stumps and vases, Egyptian towers and sleeping lambs. I cross a stone arch bridge, pass beneath towering oaks where owls nest, and duck mountain laurel that hangs over the way. Although enticed to linger and listen, I head home, my running shoes slapping pavement between the stone and wrought iron entrance.

Civil engineer J. Gardner Sanderson designed Forest Hill as a rural cemetery, a parklike escape from the work world.³⁹ In the post–Civil War era, when the rapidly expanding industrial economy shifted into high gear, “rural cemeteries represented society’s desire for stability.” With more people alienated from their work, they needed a place to rest, relax, and recreate. An important part of the rural cemetery, water “not only provided a natural break in the scenery but also encouraged meditation and relaxation.” Its life-giving symbolism suggested the mid-nineteenth-century shift from the colonial fear of fiery damnation to an assurance of “happy eternal life.”⁴⁰

In the late 1860s, west-running Meadow Brook left Gypsy Grove swamp, meandered through the woods, and flowed into Forest Hill, where it spilled through three eye-shaped ponds; leaving the cemetery, the stream slipped across new house lots, pooled in another pond, and then slid off an esker to find the river. The clear running brook, then home to trout, is now no more than a ditch funneled into a concrete pipe. Already forced underground as it entered town, Meadow Brook lost its water in 1962 when the federal highway system built Interstate 81.⁴¹ Except for storm runoff, these days Forest Hill is bone-dry.

Robert Frost writes about the hubris behind a similar channeling in “A Brook in the City,” a poem that opens with a farmhouse, once nestled in the stream’s “elbow-crook,” now swallowed by a “new-built city” (4, 24). Representing a dying life that hangs on, the farmhouse sits in town off-kilter, cockeyed to the street, a reaction against the expectation that it must adjust to an artificial order, one that pins it down with a number and no name. Although the house may have once freely used the stream as a water source, the city system must now pipe a metered supply indoors. Unlike the farmhouse, which had conformed to the land, the city demands that the land conform to its idea of itself. A farm—at least the better ones, these days—works within nature’s seasons, but a city refuses to accept such limits, imposing on the ground an out-of-time grid.

To extend the grid, planners pave meadows and burn apple trees, but a brook is another story: “How else dispose of an immortal force / No longer needed?” (13–14). Flushing “cinder loads dumped down,” the speaker notes, cannot stop the stream “at its source” (14, 15). A living thing, water will find a way, planners know, so instead, “The brook was thrown / Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone / In fetid darkness still to live and run” (15–17). But, as the poem’s central line wonders, “Is water wood to serve a brook the same?” (12). How many gardens must go? Are we not mad to channel the brook after we’ve burned the orchard? To cut up an apple tree may be a sin, but to straiten a brook is to erode our being.

Out of sight, the brook is, however, not out of mind. Its absence haunts us because a built environment doesn’t help us to answer ultimate questions about being and knowing. We made the city, we know, but the brook that we cannot destroy is not of our doing. Despite its current “kept forever under” streets, the water leads us to “thoughts... that so keep / This new-built city from both work and sleep” (22, 23–24). The fact that the stream can now be found only on “ancient maps” tells us how far we’ve come in separating ourselves from nature, the wellspring of life (20).

We may demand that the brook “go in fear,” but, deep down, we know our own bluster: we can never discover all the answers (19). Poetic imagination, however, leaps beyond the handmade; it checks our hubris by placing our work within larger patterns, wider contexts. Nodding to this idea, the speaker, a poet who once knew the long-gone brook’s “strength / And impulse,” dips his finger in the stream to make “it leap [his] knuckle”; afterward he tosses into the “currents where they crossed” a flower, an aesthetic object, an emblem of art (5–6, 7, 8). Symbolic of inspiration and creativity, the brook’s energy—unpredictable, uncontrollable, unstoppable—challenges our rage for order with the intimation that there are forces beyond reason. All we can make within life’s flow is a momentary stay.

Can buried brooks inspire?

Can wastewater sustain us?

Without water, Forest Hill desiccates hope. When Meadow Brook ran free and clear, the place represented transition, life to come. Without living water, the cemetery stockpiles bodies with nowhere to go. Although designed to balance “civilized dominance of nature and sublime wilderness,” Forest Hill long ago lost its wildest thing, erased in favor of easy travel, leaving us only a fake wild, as nice as that may appear. Accumulating moments in time, Forest Hill once gave place to community memory, but with its water gone, a key link in that memory has evaporated.⁴² Meadow Brook, the most natural and ever-changing tie between the cemetery and its community, was thoughtlessly destroyed, making the cemetery not for the living but for the dead. Although the stream once knitted, in time and space, the cemetery and its neighborhood, from the start mine acid tainted the link.

On 30 July 2010, I interviewed Forest Hill superintendent Norma Reese. Her office occupies the west end of her long and narrow house, which sits tucked under a row of trees a hundred feet inside the cemetery gates. Baskets of flowers hung from the front porch and stood in pots on the front steps; inside, wind chimes hung from the ceiling, cemetery files lay open on the desk, and a 1915 map of the grounds hung from a wall. A collector of angels and unicorns, Norma sat behind George Sanderson’s bank desk, her graying hair pulled back. She wore a “Merry Christmas 2008” T-shirt, silver-wire glasses, and clogs. Having overseen Forest Hill for twenty years, she’s become part of the place; she’s not only its caretaker but also its defender and historian. She’s fond of the Forest Hill sassafras tree, the hemlocks and ground pines, and the red and white oak; not long ago, she discovered something she’d never seen in the cemetery, a red berry elder. Recognizing me as someone who runs in the cemetery, someone she had long ago named the pusher for helping her to get a riding lawnmower unstuck, she now had a name for the face.

Norma informed me that in the mid-1860s J. Gardner Sanderson and his father, George, convened their next-door neighbors to form a cemetery board of trustees, which included Elisha Phinney, two doors to the east; J. Atticus Robertson, who lived next to Phinney; and C. Dupont Breck, who owned the parcel directly opposite George. In 1868, the board bought land from the Pennsylvania Coal Company to found Forest Hill because culm banks were quickly overshadowing the city’s Pine Brook cemetery.⁴³ Not only fears of being twice buried, but also the hilltop ground’s geology may have guided their purchase. Cemeteries tend to occupy moraines, glacially deposited piles of earth and stones that are often “steep and hummocky, with erratics and boulders. Yet it’s easy ground to dig in, and well drained.”⁴⁴ And the topography didn’t invite culm dumps.

In the same year that the association bought land for the cemetery, J. Gardner and his wife, Eliza McBriar, purchased property along Meadow Brook, about three blocks from where Bridget and I live. Drawn by the purity of the water, which they traced to its source, the Sandersons built an impressive house on Meadow Brook’s north bank, excavated a fish pond—similar in size and shape to the Forest Hill ponds—and piped water into their home.⁴⁵ Surrounded by flower gardens, a fountain, and an arcing drive, they had a sweeping view of the river as it curved gracefully along the valley floor, a view soon interrupted, however, by new-built homes, the billowing smoke of a D & H rail yard, and the black breaker at Centennial mine.⁴⁶

At about the same time, maybe in the same year, the Pennsylvania Coal Company opened the Gypsy Grove mine, two miles upstream from the Sanderson property. Water pumped from the mine coursed through a company ditch into Meadow Brook, polluting it. Corroded pipes, dead fish, and undrinkable water forced the couple to abandon brook water sometime in 1874; in November 1875, they sued Pennsylvania Coal for damages. First heard in the Luzerne County Court of Common Pleas in 1878, the case reached the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which in 1886 ruled in favor of the coal company.⁴⁷ Ruling against water quality, Pennsylvania Coal turned property law on its head.

Pennsylvania Coal advanced several arguments. The company asserted that water pumped from its mines was natural—“its impurity arises from natural, not artificial causes”—and that it reached Meadow Brook by natural means, gravity. Company lawyers discovered no one else in Scranton complaining about water, and, besides, the Sandersons were “supplied with abundant pure water from other sources.” The company conceded that Meadow Brook water may be impure, but its impurity comes from elsewhere: prior mine openings, barnyards, or the old section of Dunmore Cemetery. Advocating fairness to all, the company claimed that if it cannot use its “land for the natural purpose of mining coal because our neighbor cannot keep his tame fish in his pond, the same rule should apply to him. He should not be allowed to maintain a fish-pond so near our mine that we cannot use it.”⁴⁸

What is natural? Pumping water from a mine is not a natural act, I believe, but neither is raising a “large dam” across Meadow Brook to create a pond. From the pond, the Sandersons also built a fairly elaborate “water-works” that included two hydraulic rams, one “for the purpose of raising water from a lower to a higher level,” in this case from the pond to a storage tank in the house’s attic, the second to force “water upon the lawn for the purposes of irrigation there, and for the purpose of supplying a fountain.”⁴⁹ Drinking directly from Meadow Brook is a natural act, I suppose, but I enjoy drinking water piped into my house as much as I like electric lights and a heated home. At what point do my accumulating preferences undermine their sources? When does my land use rob others of their use?

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court had to choose between coal and clean water. They chose coal. In a 5–2 decision, the justices ruled that the Sandersons suffered a “mere personal inconvenience,” which “must yield to the necessities of a great public industry, which although in the hands of a private corporation, subserves a great public interest.” Scranton, after all, had prospered solely because of coal. And this was a mining region, the judges reminded everyone; the Sandersons simply should have known that mines poison “mountain streams.” Pointing out that the couple has benefited from the wealth mining has created, Justice J. J. Clark found “no great hardship, nor any violence to equity, in their also accepting the inconvenience necessarily resulting from the business.”⁵⁰

The court also agreed with the company that mining is a natural operation with natural consequences. Polluting—destroying—Meadow Brook was simply one result of a natural process, mining. Writing for the majority, Justice Clark asserted that “the defendants introduced nothing into the water, to corrupt it; the water flowed into Meadow Brook just as it was found in the mine; its impurities were from natural and not from artificial causes.” It didn’t matter that the company pumped the water to the surface or that sulfuric acid killed the stream. Clark simply noted that a miner “may upon his own lands, lead the water which percolates into his mine, into the streams which form the natural drainage of the basin, in which the coal is situate, although the quantity as well as the quality of the water in the stream may thereby be affected.”⁵¹ This reasoning gave coal companies a green light to mine with abandon.

A closely watched case at the time, Pennsylvania Coal Company v. Sanderson has come to symbolize how nineteenth-century courts struggled to meet legal challenges created by the rise of new industries and technologies. Had the decision gone the other way, coal companies may have faced scores of lawsuits based on the effects of their mining operations, but with its ruling in favor of Pennsylvania Coal, the case signaled that the law was moving from protecting individual property rights to protecting corporate property rights. The Sanderson case marks the culmination of a movement in property law from an agrarian to an industrial point of view; after Pennsylvania Coal, “property law was no longer about the right to remain undisturbed in one’s lawful use; it was now chiefly about the right to use land for maximum gain.”⁵²

The dispute wasn’t a big guy/little guy battle. The Sandersons were well known and well connected; they and their neighbors were not innocents swallowed by urban and industrial life. An 1877 map of our neighborhood shows that J. Gardner and his father, the original developer of our Green Ridge suburb, occupied stately homes on three-quarters of a city block on Seventh Street, which was soon after christened Sanderson Avenue. Depicting the pond that the Sandersons created to trap Meadow Brook water, the map shows the stream as a thin, nervous line lost among the Sandersons’ ruled and numbered lots, which wait for buyers and builders; after leaving the pond, the brook passed under four rail lines, crossed two city blocks, and skirted the Centennial breaker before escaping into the Lackawanna River.⁵³

George Sanderson, Sr., C. Dupont Breck, and Elisha Phinney laid those gridlines and actively promoted coal and railroad interests. Sanderson, a Pennsylvania Senate colleague of George Scranton, “with whom he co-operated in securing needed legislation,” founded the city’s first bank, made a pile of money in downtown real estate, and built a railroad to his suburb.⁵⁴ Breck represented the Duponts in the local manufacture of mine explosives, and Phinney ran flour and feed operations that supplied “food to the industrial city’s expanding population.”⁵⁵ Powerful men connected to powerful people, these guys understood land as money, not life. Like the rest of us, they were both creators and destroyers.

I confront this fact about myself in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, a novel whose lessons about land use I’m still learning. The story depicts a Native American farmer coping with an acute awareness of the world’s suffering, vividly symbolized by the first atomic explosions, which a local uranium mine fueled. Tracing his healing process, the novel follows Tayo, a traumatized World War II veteran, as he gropes toward wholeness through remembering his and the Laguna Pueblos’ stories, patterns at whose heart rests human oneness with the land. As he recovers, Tayo learns that his life tells one part of a single, communal, human-and-land story, one that others want erased. To remember, to put story and place back together, Tayo must relearn to pay attention to the land, its flora and fauna, its rocks and waters.

Tayo’s troubles—and his healing—have much to do with water. Early on in the narrative, he flashes back to the scene of his psychic wounding, the Bataan Death March: as he and a corporal struggle to carry the former’s wounded cousin Rocky, an effort that an incessant storm makes more difficult, Tayo damns “the rain until the words were a chant... he could hear his own voice praying against the rain” (12). If Rocky dies, Tayo thinks, “it would be the rain and the green all around that killed him” (11). To save Rocky, he “made a story for all of them, a story to give them strength,” its words like “pebbles and stone extending to hold the corporal up” (12). But the words fail: the corporal falls, Rocky slips from their grasp, and a Japanese soldier clubs the wounded man to death.

When he returns to his Laguna Pueblo home, Tayo believes that his curse has caused a long drought, although similar droughts had afflicted the area after World War I and in the Roaring Twenties (10). Droughts happen, Uncle Josiah had taught a young Tayo, “when people forget, when people misbehave” (46). His stories teach the boy that if people forget that the land is “where we come from... This sand, this stone, these trees, the vines, all the wildflowers,” the earth—the “mother of the people”—will get “angry at them for the way they [are] behaving. For all she care[s], they could go to hell—starve to death” (45, 101). Warning Tayo against killing another fly, Josiah tells him, “Next time, just remember the story,” the story of the “green-bottle fly who went to her, asking forgiveness for the people” (101, 102).

Trading war stories, the adult Tayo and his veteran friends substitute Coors beer for the waters of home. Realizing they had just served as pawns in another’s story, in “defending the land they had already lost,” they get drunk because beer is “soothing... The sky, the land were distant then”; the past lost “its impact and seemed like a vague dream” (169, 241; see 159). Just as they had accepted U.S. Army appeals to patriotism, they accept the image of purity that Coors peddles: to assure customers that its beer is brewed with “pure Rocky Mountain spring water,” the company labels bottles with an outsized—fake—spring (55). To feel whole again, Tayo must first vomit beer, sweeping from his insides the lie on the Coors bottle, and with it the ritual of telling war stories, which had crowded from his mind the life lessons in Josiah’s stories (168, 200, 250).⁵⁶

Instead of beer, Tayo must drink the waters of home, which heal. On the way to a bar, he and his friend Harley stop beside a spring that flows “even in the driest years” (45). Kneeling at the water’s edge and closing his eyes, Tayo “tasted the deep heartrock of the earth, where the water came from, and he thought maybe this wasn’t the end after all” (46). Even within times of deep despair, the kind he experiences, such springs represent hope: “The people relied upon them even when the sky was barren and the winds were hot and dusty” (94). As he watches a spider drink from one spring, Tayo recalls the life-affirming stories of Spider Woman, who “had told Sun Man how to win the storm clouds back from the Gambler so they would be free again to bring rain and snow to the people” (94). Spider Woman, the “universal feminine principle of creation,” reorients Tayo to his home (94).⁵⁷ It is Spider Woman, in the form of Ts’eh, who asks him the central question that Silko asks us: “What are you doing here?” (176).⁵⁸ In other words, are we destroyers or creators?

Creators.

I mean, I create. I plant a vegetable garden, I teach English, I write. Don’t I?

I forget how young I was, but I know I was old enough to know better.

In for the morning milking, the cows drank from their water bowls, the pipes pounding.

“Didn’t you count ’em?” my father said.

“For what?”

“That second-calf heifer. She’s not here,” he said. “Go look on top of the hill; between the gates.”

I’d just come from there with the rest of them; my work shoes were soaked with dew.

“I didn’t see her,” I said.

“She had trouble calvin’ the first time,” he said. “I don’t wanna lose her. Look again.”

He turned away, heading for the milk house.

“What about feedin’ the calves?” I called.

Over his shoulder: “Do that when you get back.”

I hiked back up the hill, looking neither right nor left. She’ll be all right; cows have calves all the time. And they’re better off having them outside, naturally. In the barn, sometimes a new calf slips into the gutter and drowns, or smothers.

I crossed through the first gate and looked around. Nothing. Keeping to the road, I reached the ledges on top of the hill. I could see no black and white against the brown. Annoyed she wasn’t there, I wheeled toward the woods, glancing through the trees. There weren’t too many places she could be; the woodlot was small, the dry pasture pretty open, except for clumps of thorn bushes here and there. On the other side of the trees a lane divided the meadow from the Miller Road; from there I could see the hilltop above the barn. Nothing.

On the way down, I ducked in and out of the woods along the fence, checked the far side of the Ditch, and came back to the barn.

“Didn’t see her,” I said.

“Jesus Christ,” my father said, pulling a milker from a cow. “What’re you back for? She’s hidin’ somewhere.”

“I looked.”

He stood at the door and named places she could be. I said I’d checked every one.

“I don’t know why you didn’t bring her with the rest,” he said. “It doesn’t take long for somethin’ to happen.”

“She’ll be all right.”

He shook his head at me. “You feed these calves and get those milkers hung up. I’ll go goddamn look for her.”

Before I finished feeding the calves, he was back, coming down the walk like he meant it.

“Goddammit all to hell,” he shouted. “She’s right against the wall inside the first gate. How could you miss her?”

“I...”

He slapped his cap across his thigh.

“She needed help!”

“I...”

“Dead. Her and the calf both.”

“But...”

His look jumped at me.

“You gotta start payin’ attention!”

As with each of us, a capacity for destruction lurks within Tayo. When he breaks a beer bottle and attacks his buddy Emo, shoving the shards into Emo’s belly, Tayo “got stronger with every jerk that Emo made, and he felt that he would get well if he killed him” (63). Later, hating whites for “what they did to the earth with their machines,” he assures himself that “he was not one of the destroyers,” even though he “want[s] to kick the soft white bodies into the Atlantic Ocean” (203–4). If killing promotes the magic that seeks to destroy the world, the ultimate sign of Tayo’s healing is when, at the end of the novel, he refuses to succumb to the cycle of violence and decides not to attack Emo, who is torturing and killing their friend Harley (252, 253).

Emo represents the story of the destroyers; he carries a tobacco bag filled with human teeth. During the war, he “fed off each man he killed, and the higher the rank of the dead man, the higher it made Emo,” whose name suggests his self-centeredness: o, me (61). Destroyers like Emo want to “gut human beings,” to empty us of all feeling (229). Attempting to erase creation, they “work to see how much can be lost, how much can be forgotten” (229). To end our common story, to separate people and place, they “choke the life away... the killing soothes them” (232). Tayo has witnessed this evil at its worst, “the dismembered corpses and the atomic heat-flash outlines” (37).

Emo kills Harley at a uranium mine.⁵⁹ No more appropriate place represents the destroyers: here men mined rock that ushered in our era of mutually assured destruction, a “monstrous design” drawn within Tayo’s homeland, at Los Alamos, a design that threatens all grounds, all homes (246). When subterranean springs flooded the mine in 1943, the U.S. government pumped it dry (243). But by the time it flooded again that summer, the Manhattan Project had had its fill, though “guards remained until August 1945,” when bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki (244). As the horror of wholesale slaughter comes home to him, Tayo recognizes that “from that time on, human beings were one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers planned for all of them, for all living things” (246).

Storytelling connects our stories with those of others, and places all stories within the context of the human story. It teaches us that we’re not alone. This is why only storytelling can save us: stories are “all we have to fight off / illness and death” (2). Clutching a stone “streaked with powdery yellow uranium,” Tayo cries at seeing this pattern, “the way all the stories fit together” (246). Affirming the time immemorial link between story and world, he sees this design written in the stars, which had witnessed “mountains shift and rivers change course and even disappear back into the earth” (254). Reoriented by this long view, he can now embrace Ts’eh, who weaves a creation story, one that makes “the Universe / this world / and the four worlds below”; in her story, “There is life here / for the people. / And in the belly of this story / the rituals and the ceremony / are still growing” (1, 2).⁶⁰ After turning his back on the uranium mine, Tayo plants for Ts’eh the seeds of a “tall dark green plant with round pointed leaves, deep veined like fossil shells,” a living offering he knows will “grow there like the story, strong and translucent as the stars” (226–27, 254).

By the time he recounts his story to Laguna elders, “Tayo has come home, ordinary in his being, and they can get on with serious business, the day-to-day life of a village, which is what the land, the ceremony, the story, and time immemorial are all about.”⁶¹ Tayo’s serious business, a realization of his Uncle Josiah’s dream, is to raise cattle, spotted cattle that “could live in spite of drought and hard weather” (187). Able to adapt to changing conditions, his cows can eat cactus to survive, unlike white-faced Herefords, which “would not look for water” and would die expecting it to come to them (10, 79). Instead of raising “weak, soft Herefords” to conform only to a distant market, Tayo breeds “special cattle” that are, first, one with their place; his animals descend from “generations of desert cattle, born in dry sand and scrubby mesquite, where they hunted water the way the desert antelope did” (74). A mixed breed, his spotted cattle represent “everything that the ideal cow was not”; they could “tell a good place when they found it: springs and good grazing” (75, 225). Hill country, pastureland.

In late July, my mother and I picked my father’s headstone. We chose a square marble piece, rough edged, set on a simple base. An engraved name, dates, and a Celtic cross were all the ornamentation. The wake was in Forest City, a town undermined, its pillars robbed. While we were at the funeral home, waiting to make the trip to the cemetery, the undertaker received a call from the church. The gravesite was occupied. Where should he go? Next to the family plot was a swale, the ground sometimes wet. I chose the spot, despite the undertaker’s caution. I thought, my father was a farmer, for Christ’s sake; he understood wet years and dry years, loams and gravel, life in death. I wanted to say, if you accept what we’re doing, a wake and a burial aren’t about warehousing something; they’re about transition and transfiguration.

St. Cecilia’s, at Hilltop—the mission church of St. Juliana’s at Rock Lake, where an Irish settlement grew in the 1830s—closed in 2009. Constructed in 1865, St. Cecilia’s may have been built to serve a rising population of tannery workers at Tanner’s Falls. Positioned on a plateau, the Hilltop churchyard sits on solid earth; no mining here. The Morris and Wellsboro loams have slow permeability, the water table in wet times rises to a depth of twelve to twenty-four inches, and erosion is a concern when the ground gets disturbed.⁶² Among the stones, Irish names (McCormick, O’Neill, McGraw) predominate. Touched little by the rural cemetery movement, ironically enough, the ethos of this rural cemetery is vastly different from that at Forest Hill; Hilltop reminds one that death is an awful, sublime calamity. Bound by stonewalls and the Bethany Turnpike, the graveyard huddles tight to the little clapboard church. No mausoleums, no obelisks, no Ozymandian blocks. No shade trees, no flowering shrubs, no gently curving roads. No one runs here. Once a congregation of farmers, the dead at Hilltop knew no separation of work and home; rest, relaxation, and recreation were homegrown, work related. One with the fields that back it, this field, the vacant half still cut once a year, doesn’t invite one to linger; it waits for you to stay, to turn its soil, to plant and grow.

For too long, I’ve occupied space and called it living in a place, but, like a lot of people, I don’t really know much about my home or even fully realize that I’m from here, and there. A reorienting experience, paying closer attention to home helps me to see what I’m doing in the world. These days, I find myself relearning my home grounds, their histories and soils, their tendencies and possibilities, and the arguments about them, which has been an education unlike that promoted in the institutions I’ve attended, K–12 and B.A. to Ph.D., which have taught me to leave home, even at home.

With yet another reworking of this place underway, I have to ask, when we drill, do we create or destroy?