No traffic sounds from the hard road behind the hill. A Saturday evening lull. I hear the sounds of my own breathing. Deep in the valley two miles away, I hear the rush of the creek.
I cherish the quiet. Sometimes when my son leaves, I'll sit at the top of the field and wait to hear him crossing the steel grate over the Laurel Hill Creek -- the singing bridge, some call it.
Sound travels a long way on a still country night, better when there's vapor in the air. When I hear the train whistle from the next valley over, for example, I know rain is coming tomorrow.
It may not always be so. Last summer, a few weeks after the "thumper"
trucks paraded down the roads and the first gas well was drilled on a neighboring farm a mile to the east as the crow flies, I could hear the drone of engines rise and fall, and I could hear the clanging, like a long chain slapping against a steel pipe -- none of it loud enough to keep me awake, really, but I knew it was there, and I'd listen for it. Nights here, you understand, are so quiet you can hear the surge of your own pulse.
On the front page of the local paper today, it appears staffers had been invited on a tour of a showcase drilling site -- good PR, I'm sure Chief Oil & Gas of Dallas, Texas, had figured, and maybe it was, until nearby residents stopped to complain.
"You hear the yelling and the clanging," said a woman who lives a few hundred yards away and stopped to talk to the reporter. "It just gets louder and louder all night long."
A neighbor, who had signed a lease, said she had so many vibrations she had to take pictures off the walls.
"It's been miserable," she said. "It wears you down. The saddest thing is that it turns neighbors against neighbors."
Yet the drilling is temporary. The hydraulic fracturing, called "fracking," comes next, and that's louder still -- three to five million gallons of water trucked in, mixed with toxic fracturing solution (containing benzene and hydrochloric acid, among other frights) and sand, and pumped two miles into the ground, then a mile out horizontally in several directions to open up the shale and release the gas. Only 600,000 gallons or so comes back out of the well, deadly stuff, and is stored in temporary ponds until it can be trucked out to authorized treatment plants, some of which have yet to be built.
The noise and the truck traffic and the general hubbub are short-term, even if all that lasts for years, and it could. The real worry is the poisons that stay in the ground. They cannot be deep enough to ease my mind. But then, I'm the guy who stays awake listening to his own heart.
copyright 2010 by J. O'Brien, all rights reserved
