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.