Last days in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania

I was driving around with my boss. “I could never live here,” he said, “there’s no adventure.” He is from Canmore, in the heart of the Canadian Rockies, and has been on the cover of climbing magazines.

I agree.  There’s no adventure here.  Or at least there’s no real wilderness.  No matter where you are, at least in this area, you never seem to be far from an old logging trail, never feel like you couldn’t pop out into someone’s back yard, and you’re never safe from tripping on an ancient, forgotten barbed wire fence. 

But climbers are a snotty bunch.

Drew and I, in one of the few tasks we’ve had all week, went to go check out a point that was marked as hazardous – a 100 foot cliff.  We parked at the corner of Burfield and Pleasant Valley Roads, and walked down through a hay field next to a house.  Behind the house was an open forest of young-mature hardwoods.  We walked past a tree house that looked like it doubled as deer stand, and a deer stand that looked like it doubled as a tree house. The forest sloped down open gullies to a small babbling brook, which ran past the cliff we were sent to find.  It was no more than 30 feet tall, of course, but what we found was one of the most pleasant spots I’ve seen here.  I couldn’t help but think that it looked like Calvin and Hobbes’ back yard, a thought I kept to myself.

“This looks like Calvin and Hobbes’ back yard” Drew observed.

The cliffs were not big enough to allow time to discuss the impermanence of existence while in free fall with a wagon and a stuffed tiger, but they were over 6 feet, which meant that we had to make sure the survey crews flagged a safe route around. We moved a couple of flags, an action that we duly documented in order to justify our paychecks.     

I’ve been to Canmore, and it’s beautiful.  And please do believe the hype – the climbing is really good.  But kicking around in a borrowed creek in a borrowed forest, I realized that this was the back yard I wished I had as a kid.  Fairbanks was hardly a place that deprived kids of activity, and I don't wish that I was from Pennsylvania instead of Alaska, so don't take that away.  But even as a kid growing up I knew that I was missing something – we didn’t have a creek in the back yard, and none of the trees in Fairbanks are conducive to climbing or to building tree houses.  We also didn’t run off on summer afternoons to go swimming; Sweet Baby Jesus, do you need to ask why?

I’m not saying I was deprived, but I could see how this forest, this decidedly non-wilderness, with no climbing and no Rad anywhere, could be a lot of fun for even a relatively unimaginative little boy, even a boy from the video game generation.

But I’m not a kid anymore.  I’m grouchy and cynical and picky about what I do, where I spend my time and who I spend it with.  Still, I think my boss wasn’t being fair to Pennsylvania.

That said, 3 more days.  I'm not certain how many minutes, though.

Pennsyltucky

A set of geophones on Main Street across from the Wellsboro Diner.

I’m still in Pennsylvania, though I had my parole hearing, and I’ll be released on the 26^th.  

I took a few more photos of the smattering of oil hardware throughout the otherwise quiet little towns.  There is so much more to see and get a feel for, but this is a little peek.

The same set of geophones, in an urban island of plantable ground.

The metal things attached to the cables are the phones themselves, the red pelican case is the lithium battery, and the grey box is the CPU that holds the data. 

Before I came out I mentioned to a friend that I was going to the east coast.  “Oh,” she said, “yeah, that part of Penn is really the mid-west.”  She was right, the area is rural, time moves slow, and the people are-salt-of-the-earth.  Your vocab word for today is ‘bucolic.’

This person, like most, signed a lease with Shell, so we entered the property.  It was actually a cute little place.

One major thing changed in our program since the last post, which is that every day (or almost every day) we have two of our six staff working in the forest with the “line crews”, or the crews that lay out, pick up, or “qc” (quality control) the geophones out in the forest.  Though they also work in town, we try to accompany them in “hazardous terrain” which basically means in Tioga State Forest, and the adjacent rural homes. 

I enjoy it.  I like chatting with the crews and it gives me a blessed chance to get out of the damn truck, from the front seat of which I have time to write these words. 

The line crews are the low men on the totem pole around here.  They get paid the worst and they work the hardest, lugging the geophones and batteries out into the forests and up and down the hills.  Accordingly, they come from the least upwardly-mobile demographics in American society. After an adjustment period, during which time they basically needed to decide that we aren’t cops and weren’t sent to report back to the bosses about them, they became glad to have us.  Mainly because we help carry shit.

Angel

Chavez, one of the hardest workers around.

As a result, my Spanish is back up to full speed.  But I’ve never really spoken much to Mexicans, and was not familiar with their slang. For example, they commonly say “simón” (say simone, like the French for Simon) to mean si, or yes.  But I didn’t know this.

[in Spanish]

Me: Hey Flavio, is Chicano’s crew working this line?

Flavio: Simón.

Me: Simone, he is working here?

Flavio: Simón.

Me: Who is Simone?

[laughter]

So I’ve had the fun opportunity to pick up a few words, and can now throw out things like “pinche la chingadera wey”, which never fails to draw a smile or a subtle eye-roll from the crews.  Orale.  

Language barriers are common here.  For example it was incumbent upon me to translate even within our own crew, explaining to the Canadians that Americans (logically) assume that ‘hydro lines’ transport water, not electricity.  And explaining to the Americans that 'going to the rippers’ is the same as going to a strip club.

But I don’t always speak the language.  Some of my days with the line crews have been spent with black guys, mostly from Mississippi, but also Philly and New Jersey.  Usually, just listening closely is enough to understand even the guys from Mississippi, but not always.  For example, I asked Tre (New Jersey), if he liked Lil’ Wayne, assuming that no black people actually do.

“That’s that nigga,” he replied.

[pause]

 “...I don’t know what that means.”

[in his best white person voice] “It means he’s a cool dude.”

[again, laughter]

Picking up phones.

"Trayvon, is that you?"

edit: I thought of another cultural-communication moment that I have to add. We were giving a ride to one of the heli-drillers, a totally nice but doofy kid from Louisiana. He wanted to talk about knots, and asked us, with an embarrassed little smile, if we knew what a 'coon-ass come-along' was. We said we probably knew it by a different name, and we did; he was talking about a trucker's hitch. I don't believe that there is a racist bone in his body, he's just from a place where people talk that way.

I have no new insights into fraking or local people’s attitudes towards it.  People keep only the nearby realities in focus, and don't seem to worry much outside of their bubble.  This isn't a land of deeply politically people; an off-hand comment about Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania native, elicited a blank look, for example.  I once saw an Obama sticker on an old, beat up truck, but that's it for major candidates.  This is Ron Paul country - there aren't a lot of political signs on the roadsides and vehicles around here, but Ron Paul's name is on all of them, save that one old truck. 

By the time I go home I'll have been here six and a half weeks. The humble people here, that pretty much just want to be left alone, make sense to me. And when you drive through Pennsylvania, stopping to walk through people's back yards, Ron Paul even starts to make sense. He fits the people and their lifestyle and values.  People here don't read in the NY Times about contaminated aquifers and global warming, they just know that they talked to 'some boys from the oil company here a few weeks back, and they were real nice.'

By the time I go home I'll have gotten a much better understanding of seismic exploration, and have been glad for the opportunity to see places I wouldn’t have otherwise visited, brush up on my rescue-rigging and EMS skills, and get to know a lot of kinds of people that I don’t normally cross paths with. And the money, of course.

But I’m ready to go home. 

Impressions

On what I later found out was his birthday, Kyle instigated tequila shots. After a distastefully large number of them, I closed out the evening by including the following in an email to an old friend:

 I'm in Pennsylvania working to save the Frackers. Its like saving the whales, except they're mostly mexicans and hicks. 

I'm working for a mountain safety company, whose name I'll keep off of my blog, doing rope rescue for seismic workers in technical terrain. You are correct to think that there isn't a lot of technical terrain in Penn, but safe ground-based extraction from the hills around here does require a team that can arrive on scene quickly and do industry-standard rope rescue in remote areas. This is our job. But nobody ever actually gets hurt, so we spend a lot of time sitting in trucks or driving around getting to know the roads in order to be near the crews. In this time I've gotten a pretty good look at a tiny little slice of Pennsylvania.

Practicing a lower with the dummy, Hosé

Looking up from attendant position on a two-rope lower.

A newt, I believe.

But none of that is what this blog post is about. Seismic? Industrial? Pennsylvania? My west coast environmentalist friends are certainly asking themselves, hackles up. What is he doing, exactly?

Fracking. We're under contact of shell oil.

Before you wonder what my opinion of fracking is, I'll tell you that I don't have one. I do, however, have an opinion about proceeding with caution when using new technologies, whose environmental ramifications are not well known or understood, to extract fossil fuels.  And though I know almost nothing about what is going on in capitals and corporate board rooms, I can offer the anecdotal observation and uninformed opinion that things in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania don't have the feel of moving slowly. And that is what this blog post is about.

Seismic has nothing to do with the actual extraction of gas, but simply exploration. First come the mappers who make maps of the area. Then the surveyors who fill the woods with flagging and spray paint (later meticulously collected) to tell the other crews where to go. Then the drillers come in - we've mostly worked with the heli drillers, who sling their drills around with the aid of a Bell 212. They drill holes approximately 20 feet deep, put about 2 pounds of dynamite in the bottom, refill the hole with packed gravel, and move on.

A foggy morning while I was out hiking around to find one of the line crews.

Next the recording crew comes in, putting geophones on gridded lines throughout the area. Then the shooters come in and detonate the dynamite, and the geophones record data about how the sound traveled though the earth. A helicopter then flies over and wirelessly uploads the data from the geophones. The data are used to draw a picture of the underground rock strata, the morphology of which reveals the gas's location, a fact that had been secret for tens of millions years. And the bomb in the baby carriage was wired to the radio.

A creek-crossing practice that probably doesn't meet Shell's rigorous safety criteria.

I watch all of this from the front seat of a pickup truck, waiting to run if anyone gets hurt.

And I've been fascinated. Its interesting and its fundamentally weird. Though watching the pilots sling the drill rigs into the dense mixed hardwood forests without breaking a branch is a remarkable demonstration of skill, its fairly normal. The weirdest thing is how much all of this happens right in people's backyards.

A proper photojournalist could come out of here with great photos. If you know any, tell them to start a blog. I'll post what few photos I've taken here, and I'll try to do better in the future.

Strange things include seeing the geophones sitting between the road and the sidewalk in wellsboro and watching the helicopter sling drill rigs into fields right behind people's houses.

Tapping the sugarbush.

The whole place has the feel of being over run by an invading army. Men (almost exclusively men) in high visibility vests drive pickup trucks that fill the roads. And cement trucks. And water trucks. Fuel trucks. Welding trucks. Supply trucks. And trucks with other trucks in the bed.

One of Shell's countless safety rules is that you have to back into every parking spot. So when you go to restaurants and hotels, you can get a good idea of what percentage of the traffic is oil related.

But invading armies aren't usually welcomed (much to the surprise and chagrin of a recent secretary of defense). Which maybe makes the feel a bit more like being on the front end of a gold rush than an invasion.

All this, and people seem to love it. My sampling has been unscientific and highly biased, but people have actually stopped to tell me that we should put a well on their property, as though I have anything to do with it. One good natured fellow told us that the quarry right by his house (unrelated to oil) muddied his well, so they drilled him a new one. "There's gas," he said, "you couldn't drink the water there was so much gas. The water actually caught fire. Damndest thing," he said, "boy I'd never seen that before. And it smelled terrible."

"yep," he said. "you'll want to put a well here. I could use the money, too."