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“Possessing himself of the high points of the city, Marcellus, about break of day, entered Syracuse through the Hexapylum, all his officers congratulating him. But looking down from the higher places upon the beautiful and spacious city below, he is said to have wept much, commiserating the calamity that hung over it, when his thoughts represented to him how dismal and foul the face of the city would be in a few hours, when plundered and sacked by the soldiers.” – Plutarch

Upstate New York is sprinkled with little towns named after famous Greeks and Romans. I know, in general, that the names are just that – names – and there is not much that can be described as Homeric in Homer, New York, or Vergilian in Vergil, or Fabian in Fabius. But since I love the Classics so, I can’t help but think, when I see these hallowed names on the map – Cincinnatus, Marcellus, Cicero, Manlius – that if I just could be there I would fall in love, perhaps with the towns themselves, perhaps with the special people who would be lured to Ovid or Vergil or Pharsalia. It never ends this way, of course. A friend of mine had a keychain from Ovid, New York, and the thing that amazed me was that it featured a picture of a hummingbird, which I’m sure was a generic image which was paired with hundreds of town names and sold all over the country the same way you can buy a keychain with your own name and a picture of a beach. The town of Ovid had a natural image – Ovid, the man himself – but instead it used a hummingbird. It had no particular connection to its namesake. I had a similar experience in Rome, New York. I was mightily entertained by finding out that its very humble Catholic church was named “St. Peter’s.” But when I expressed my joy in this fact to a clerk at a Seven-Eleven there he stared dumbly at me for about fifteens seconds and then asked, “Are you here for the Woodstock Festival?”

The incongruity is pleasingly pleasant in itself, however, and on a recent trip through the area I went to every classically named town I could and tried to get some local souvenirs. Most places had none at all, unfortunately, but I did find some Christmas tree ornaments from Fabius which said, “Township of Fabulous Fabius.” In the center was a smiling cow equipped with skis and ski-poles. I thought Quintus Fabius Maximus, the Roman tactician who fought Hannibal to a stalemate over the astonishing ten years the Carthaginian devastated Italy, might get a chuckle out of the absurdity.

But when I came to Marcellus, New York – named after the Roman general whose army destroyed Syracuse, then considered the most beautiful city of the ancient world (and how odd that Marcellus New York should be just outside Syracuse) – I had more in mind than my quest for incongruous classicisms. I asked in town for any notable outcroppings of rock. And I was directed to the southwestern part of town, where the main road hemmed a round hill. The road cut slightly into the slope, and in the cut were thousands of black rock-flakes. This was what I was looking for.

Rock formations can stretch for hundreds of miles under the earth, but they are generally named for the places where they come to the surface. The Rondout Limestone, which built so many nice houses in the Hudson Valley, is present under Slide Mountain, but beneath thousands of feet of shales and sandstones. The Hudson River had eroded away those shales and sandstones, however, exposing the older limestone near the mouth of the Rondout in Kingston, where it was quarried and whence it takes its name. The formation I was looking for, which stretches clear across New York State into Pennsylvania and Ohio, comes to the surface at Marcellus, New York and hence is known as the Marcellus Shale.

Marcellus Shale is an oil shale, a highly carboniferous rock formation which probably derives its carbon content from organic deposits – fossilized vegetation. It is not the richest oil shale in the country – that honor goes to Wyoming, whose oil shales – “one and a half trillion barrels… the world’s largest deposit of hydrocarbons… nine times the amount of crude oil under Saudi Arabia” – were featured in John McPhee’s 1986 book Rising from the Plains:

Distinct in the long suite of cuts at Green River were the so-called mahogany ledges, where oil shale is particularly rich. They looked less like wood than like bluish-white slabs of thinly bedded slate. Oil shale always weathers bluish white but is dark inside, and grainy like wood. The thinner the laminae the higher the ratio of organic material. The richest of the dark oleaginous flakes – each representing the sedimentation of a year – were fifteen-thousandths of a millimeter thick. [Wyoming geologist David] Love dropped some hydrochloric acid on the rock, and the acid beaded up like an arching cat. “It’s actually kerogen,” he said. “It converts to high-paraffin oil. It’s not like Pennsylvania crude.”

To mining engineers, oil shale had presented an as yet unsolved and completely unambiguous problem: how to remove the shale without destroying the face of the earth. So far, three principal methods had been considered. One was to strip-mine it, crush it, separate the oil, then smooth out the tailings – a process that could result in the absolute rearrangement of twenty-five thousand square miles. Another was to go under the ground, excavate a percentage of the rock, and refill the caverns with tailings. That was known as the “modified in situ” approach. And finally someone thought of drilling a hole, pumping in propane, and starting a fire. The heat would cause liquid oil to run out of the shale. The oil could be forced up through another well before the fire destroyed it. A burn would not, like a clinker fire, continue indefinitely. If oxygen was not fed to the flames, they would die. This was known as “true in situ mining,” and there in White Mountain, a few miles away, the federal government had been perfecting the technique. The experiments thus far had brought down the recovery cost to a million dollars a barrel. (193-4)

That was written in 1986, before fracking made recovery of the energy economically possible. McPhee knew, however, that fracking – or something – would be invented to get at the energy:

The one-and-a-half-trillion-barrel estimate was somewhat extravagant, because it included every last drop – referring, as it did, to all shale with any content of kerogen. In the richer rock – in the shales that contained from twenty-five to sixty-five gallons of oil per ton – were no more than six hundred billion barrels. That wuld do. That was more petroleum in place than all the petroleum produced in the world to date. Love remarked that oil shale had been “trumpeted to the skies” but, with the energy crisis in perigee, both government and industry were losing interest and pulling out. Temporarily pulling out. Sooner or later, people were going to want that shale. (194)

Fracking would come to Wyoming after the book was written, but it would be just another chapter in the brief but eventful history of energy extraction in the state. There was coal, which had dictated the train routes through Cheyenne; there was oil; there were “the Gas Hills;” and there were some of the world’s most impressive deposits of uranium. When we think of Wyoming, we are liable to think of ranches and cowboys, but honestly, they were important to the economy of the state for perhaps two or three decades, over a century ago; energy extraction, however, has powered Wyoming’s fortune for a hundred years. The type of the modern Wyoming power broker is Dick Cheney, not Butch Cassidy.

The genius of McPhee’s book is that it is centered around a single individual who was a kind of bridge between Butch Cassidy and Dick Cheney: David Love, the head of the United States Geological Survey in Wyoming for several decades. Love’s parents were pioneers – his father John, when he staked his claim on Love Ranch in the nineteenth century, slept out in the open for seven years before having enough money to build a cabin, and knew Butch Cassidy. As a child around the time of World War I, David remembers oil explorers coming through the area. When Love worked for the USGS, the government put high priority – as you might imagine – on such questions as where uranium deposits might be found (as well as oil). The government would do the research, map the formations, search for important deposits, and make the research public – in essence, an encouragement for energy companies to “have at it.” For reasons of temperament and perhaps character, Love remained at the USGS when he could have made the ever-so-common government-to-industry transition and made millions as an oil company geologist. Something in me almost wishes he had. The money went elsewhere. What little Love had left over is to some extent the subtext of Rising from the Plains, which remains the only truly disturbing McPhee book I have ever read. McPhee is an excellente but dry and scientific writer; drama and tragedy are not for him. But the tragedy of David Love, and Wyoming generally, comes through even in a book supposedly about geology. It is well worth reading for anyone who cares about the future of all those places unfortunate enough to have been blessed to sit on top of the energy-rich deposits – places such as Marcellus, New York.

McPhee brings out the tragedy of Wyoming by creating an alternate focus in his book: not only is the book about the geology of Wyoming, it is also about the Love family, and their pioneer story. He includes copious amounts of material from the journal of Ethel Love, David’s mother, who came to Wyoming in 1905, fresh out of Wellesley College, to teach in a one-room schoolhouse. She ended up marrying a particularly hard-working and almost-successful local rancher. The life was hard. Each year it would be forty degrees below zero for several weeks, and keeping cattle alive in such conditions was a horror. There was no running water, no indoor toilet, and not much rain either.

There were periods of drought, and more floods, and long, killing winters, but John Love never sold out. He contracted and survived Rocky Mountain spotted fever. One year, after he shipped cattle to Omaha he got back a bill for twenty-seven dollars, the amount by which the cost of shipment exceeded the sale price of the cattle. One spring, after a winter that killed many sheep, the boys and their father plucked good wool off the bloated and stinking corpses, sold the wool, and deposited the money in a bank in Shoshoni, where the words “STRENGTH,” “SAFETY,” and “SECURITY” made an arc above the door. The bank failed, and they lost the money. Of many bad winters, the worst began in 1919. Both David and his father nearly died of Spanish influenza, and were slow to recuperate, spending months in bed. There were no ranch hands. At the point when the patients seemed most in danger, his mother in her desperation decided to try to have them moved to a hospital (a hundred miles away), and prepared to ride for help. She had the Hobson’s choice of a large, rebellious horse. She stood on a bench and tried to harness him. He kicked the bench from under her, and stepped on her feet. She gave up her plan. [From her journal:] “The bull broke into the high granary. Our only, and small, supply of horse and chicken feed was there. Foolishly, I went in after him and drove him out down the step. Cows began to die, one here, one there. Every morning some were unable to rise. By day, one walking would fall suddenly, as if it had no more life than a paper animal, blown over by a gust of wind.” [McPhee:] The bull actually charged her in the granary and came close to crushing her against the back wall. She confused it, sweeping its eyes with a broom. It would probably have killed her, though, had it not stepped on a weak plank, which snapped. The animal panicked and turned for the door. (In decades to follow, John Love never fixed the plank.) [Her journal:] “Snow hissed around the buildings, wind blew some snow into every room of the closed house, down the chimney, between window sashes, even in a straight shaft through a keyhole. The wood pile was buried in snow. The small heap of coal was frozen into an almost solid chunk of coal and ice. In the numbing cold, it took me five hours a day to bring in fuel, to carry water and feed to the chickens, to put out hay and cottonseed cake for the cattle and horses.

McPhee adds, “Somewhere among her possessions was a letter written to her by a Wellesley friend asking, ‘What do you do with your spare time?’”

Even acquiring the simplest supplies and materials was a serious struggle. Wood was needed for all building and most heat, but there were no trees:

To cut cedar fence posts, they went with a wagon to Green Mountain, near Crooks Gap – a round trip of two weeks. In early fall, each year, they spent ten days going back and forth to the Rattlesnake Hills for stove wood. They took two wagons – four horses pulling each wagon – and they filled them with limber pine. They used axes, a two-handled saw…. For its [the cabin’s] twenty tiers of logs, John [Love, David’s father] had journeyed a hundred miles to the lodgepole-pine groves of the Wind River Range, returning with ten logs at a time, each round trip requiring two weeks. He collected a hundred fifty logs. [79-80, 83]

Ethel was the only woman in the area – she would go six months without seeing another female – and because she could sew she became the local surgeon. We like to think of the pioneer life as being wholesome and healthy, but of course it was in many ways horrible. David Love described the cowboys he knew as a child – “hard-muscled, taciturn bachelors” – thus:

Many were already stooped from chronic saddle-weariness, bowlegged, hip-sprung, with unrepaired hernias that required trusses, and spinal injuries that required a “hanging pole” in the bunkhouse. This was a horizontal bar from which the cowboys would hang by their hands for 5-10 minutes to relieve pressure on ruptured spinal disks that came from too much bronc-fighting. Some wore eight-inch-wide heavy leather belts to keep their kidneys in place during prolonged hard rides. (89)

There were hard times. One winter where the Loves very nearly lost everything: the bankers came and made off with all the remaining animals and everything liquid. The only remedy was more labor: and here nature came to the family’s assistance, as there were wild horses out on the range which could be trapped and sold. Each improvement to Love Ranch was hard-fought-for and bought with tribulation. These tribulations are chronicled in detail by McPhee, which is why the end of the book, which describes Love Ranch today, is so disturbing. Love Ranch happened to be on top of a uranium formation.

In the autumn of 1953, he [Love] and two amateurs, all working independently, found uranium in the Gas Hills – in the Wind River Basin, twelve miles from Love Ranch. By his description: “Gas Hills attracted everybody and his dog. It was Mecca for weekend prospectors. They swarmed like maggots on a carcass. There was claim-jumping. There were fistfights, shootouts. Mechanics and clothing salesmen were instant millionaires.”
As it happened, he made those remarks one summery afternoon on the crest of the Gas Hills, where fifty open-pit uranium mines were round about us, and in the low middle ground of the view to the north were Muskrat Creek and Love Ranch. The pits were roughly circular, generally half a mile in diameter, and five hundred feet deep. Some four hundred feet of overburden had been stripped off to get to the ore horizons. The place was an unearthly mess. War damage could not look worse, and in a sense that is what it was. “If you had to do this with a pick and shovel, it would take you quite a while,” Love said. The pits were scattered across a hundred square miles.
We picked up some sooty black uraninite. It crumbled easily in the hand. I asked him if it was dangerously radioactive.
“What is ‘dangerously radioactive’?” he said. “We have no real standards. We don’t know. All I can say is the cancer rate here is very high. There are four synergistic elements in the Gas Hills: uranium, molybdenum, selenium, and arsenic. They are more toxic together than individually. You can’t just cover the tailings and forget about it. Those things are bad for the environment. They get into groundwater, surface water. The mines are below the water table, so they’re pumping water from the uranium horizon to the surface. There has been a seven-hundred-percent increase of uranium in Muskrat Creek at our ranch.”
We could see in a sweeping glance – from the ranch southwest to Green Mountain – the whole of the route he had taken as a boy to cut pine and cedar for corral poles and fence posts. An hour before, we had looked in at the ranch, where most of the posts were still in use – gnarled and twisted, but standing and not rotted. (210-11)

Besides the fact that Love Ranch had been turned into a uranium-pit wasteland, the book details other notable features of Wyoming’s unfortunate wealth of energy:

We left the interstate there and went north on a five-mile road with no outlet, which followed the flank of the Rock Springs Uplift and soon curved into a sweeping view: east over pastel buttes into the sheep country of the Great Divide Basin, and north to the white Wind Rivers over Steamboat Mountain and the Leucite Hills (magmatic flows and intrusions, of Pleistocene time), across sixty miles of barchan dunes, and, in the foreground – in isolation in the desert – the tallest building in Wyoming. This was Jim Bridger, a coal-fired steam electric plant, build in the middle nineteen-seventies, with a generating capacity of two million kilowatts – four times what is needed to meet the demands of Wyoming. Twenty-four stories high, the big building was more than twice as tall as Federal Center in Cheyenne, which is higher than Wyoming’s capitol dome. Rising beside the generating plant were four freestanding columnar chimneys so tall that they were obscured in cumulus from the cooling towers, which swirled and billowed and from time to time parted to reveal the summits of chimneys, five hundred feet in the air. “This place is smoking the hell out of the country,” Love said. “The wind blows a plume of corruption. In cold weather, sulphuric acid precipitates as a yellow cloud. It’s not so good for people, or for vegetation. Whenever I think of this plant, I feel sadness and frustration. We could have got baseline data on air and water quality before the plant was built, and we muffed it. He blames himself, although at that time he had arsenic poisoning from springwater in the backcountry and was sick for many months.

“The idea behind Jim Bridger,” McPhee explains, “was to ship energy out of Wyoming in wires instead of railway gondolas.” The plant was built in the middle of a coal seam, which was mined by a single massive machine called the Marion 8200.

The machine was so big it had to be assembled on the site – a procedure that required fourteen months. Now working within a mile or two of the generating plant, it could swing its four-chord deep-section boom and touch any spot in six acres, its bucket biting, typically, a hundred tons of rock, and dumping it to one side…. Although the chassis was nine stories high, it could not begin to contain enough diesels to make the machine work. Only electric motors are compact enough. Out of the back of the machine, like the tail of a four-thousand-ton rat, ran a huge black cable, through gully and gulch, over hill and draw, to the generating plant – whose No. 1 customer was the big machine. Once every couple of hours, the 8200 walked – raised itself up on pontoonlike shoes and awkwardly lurched backward seven feet, so traumatically compressing the dirt it landed on that smoke squirted out the sides and the ground became instant slate….
For a steam-driven water-cooled power plant, this one seemed to have a remarkably absent feature. It seemed to be missing a river. The brown surrounding landscape was a craquelure of dry gulches. In one of them, though – a desiccated arroyo called Dead Man Draw – was a seventy-five acre lake, fringed with life rings, boats, and barbecue grills. At a rate of twenty-one thousand gallons a minute, Jim Bridger was sucking water from the Green River, forty miles to the west. To cool an even drier power station, some hundreds of miles away in northeast Wyoming, a proposal had been made to pump Green River water [a notable tributary of the Colorado] over the Continental Divide to the Sweetwater River, which runs into the North Platte, from which the water would be pumped over a lesser divide and into the Powder River Basin. Love said, “That would destroy the whole Sweetwater regimen, destroy the Platte, and destroy the Powder River, all for coal in the Powder River Basin – a slurry pipeline or something of the sort. It’s very much on the books. If they go in for the gasification of coal they’re going to need it. It’s known as the trans-basin diversion of the Green River. The water has fluorine in it. Wherever it gets into the ground, it can pollute the water table in ten to fifteen years. The river also picks up sodium from trona…. If they decide to pipe the water over the Continental Divide, water quality could be lowered in the Powder River Basin to the point of needing a desalinization plant.” [186-8]

Trona, another important Wyoming industry – sodium sesquicarbonate, used in “ceramics and textiles, pulp and paper, iron and steel, and most importantly, glass” – was another source of environmental degradation. It was mined and shipped off in railcars, the sodium on which would be washed off, putting “two tons of sodium into the Green River every day.” Lake Powell, the fifty-mile-long dammed section of the Green River, brought the water level into a trona deposit, which was largely responsible for putting salt into the Colorado River.

Love said that Lake Powell and Lake Mead – reservoirs downstream – were turning into chemical lakes as a result. “And a lot of it winds up with the poor farmers in Mexico,” he said. “We are going to have to desalinate their water.” Some miles along the interstate, when we crossed the Black Forks River, we would see alkali deposits lying the floodplain like dried white scum. On both sides of the road were abandoned farmhouses, abandoned barns, their darkly weathered boards warping away from empty structures out of plumb. The river precipitates and the abandoned farms were not unrelated. This was the Lyman irrigation project, Love explain – a conception of the Bureau of Reclamation, an attempt to make southwestern Wyoming competitive with Wisconsin. The Black Forks River was dammed in 1971, and its waters were used to soak the land. The land became whiter than a bleached femur. It still appeared to be covered with light snow. “Alkali sours the land,” Love said. “The drainage here is just too poor to flush it out. Imagine the sodium those farmers drank in their water.”
Meanwhile, west of Green River, a tall incongruous chimney seemed to rise up out of the range, streaming a white plume downwind. Below the chimney, but hidden by the roll of the land, was a trona refinery, and, below the refinery, a mine. I had gone down into it one winter day half a dozen months before, and I now remarked that the people there had told me that the white cloud issuing from the chimney was pure steam.
“It goes clear across the state,” Love said. “That’s pretty durable for steam.”
He said that fluorine, among other things, was coming out of the refinery with the steam. Settling downwind, it could cause fluorosis. He thought it might be damaging forests in the Wind River Range. The afternoon sky was cloudless but not exactly clear. “The haze you see is the trona haze that goes across Wyoming,” he continued. “We never used to have this. You could clearly see distant mountains on any average day.” (195-7)

Extraction industries of these sorts were first placed in Wyoming because they were easy to access and because there were few people in Wyoming to complain. But it is important to remember one thing about such industries: our society has found as of yet no way to make these industries compatible with traditional human life: farming, husbandry, living off the land and with nature. Where these industries move in, they poison the land, and make living with nature impossible. This is obviously true of fracking as well. If fracking could be done without poisoning the water – essentially turning arable land into desert – then it would need no exemption from the Clean Water Act. The businessmen were unwilling to frack without that exemption.

I do not wish to dispute the importance of energy extraction. I live off the grid, but do use a gas generator, and the feeling I have when it is running must resemble what the cave man felt about his fire: it is security and comfort in the wilderness. I have a propane stove as well, and I drive. All these things require energy, and it must come from somewhere. Even a person like me, who lives an extremely simple and frugal life, cannot imagine living comfortably without extraction industries. But I also know that we can do much more to reduce their impact. Wyoming could easily – easily – be powered by wind energy, entirely. Its wind energy is astonishing. The reason why it has not already happened is that extraction energy sources are so cheap – Jim Bridger is already there. Arizona, which has no energy deposits at all, could easily be run on solar power. But nothing is being done on that score. Countless housing-development covenants prohibit solar panels, just as they prohibit clotheslines (everyone uses electric-powered driers – in the desert). This kind of waste is criminal, and it scars the land – and scars it in a way which in human terms may as well be called permanent.

Fracking threatens to bring the first such industry to New York State. It is worth thinking about what will become of the farms and little towns that stretch between the Hudson and the Cuyahoga, where the Marcellus Shale is found. I feel that many will end up looking like Love Ranch, with its radioactive water and wilderness of pit mines in every direction.

I will close this essay with the last scene in McPhee’s book. The full emotional effect comes from knowing the full story of the family life that had sanctified every item in the below description, but I will provide it, presuming that the imagination can fill in the details. Many of the things we do in the attempt to improve our lives are the things we most regret later on.

Over the low and widespread house, John Love’s multilaminate roof was scarcely sagging. No one had lived there in nearly forty years. The bookcases and the rolltop desk had been removed by thieves, who had destroyed doorframes to get them out. The kitchen doorframe was intact, and nailed there still was the board that showed John Love’s marks recording his children’s height. The green-figured wallpaper that had been hung by the cowboys was long since totally gone, and much of what it had covered, but between the studs and against the pine siding were fragments of the newspapers pasted there as insulation.

POSSE AFTER FIVE BANDITS
BATTLE NEAR ROCK ISLAND TRAIN

Robbers Are Found in Haystack
and Chase Becomes Hot

BOTH SIDES ARE HEAVILY ARMED

Fugitives Are Desperate, but Running Fight
Is Expected to End in Their Capture

… The corrals had collapsed. The bunkhouse was gone. The cottonwood-log granary was gone, but not Joe Lacey’s Muskrat Saloon, which the Loves had used for storing hay. Its door was swinging in the wind. David found a plank and firmly propped the door shut. The freight wagon was there that he had used on trips for wood. It was missing its wheels, stolen as souvenirs of the Old West. We looked into a storage cellar that was covered with sod above hand-hewn eighteen-inch beams. He said that nothing ever froze in there and food stayed cold all summer. More recently, a mountain lion had lived there, but the cellar was vacant now.
In the house, while I became further absorbed by the insulation against the walls, Love walked silently from room to room.

Bizerta, Tunis, May 4 – At a reception tendered him by the municipality, M. Pelletan, French Minister of Marine, in a brief speech, declared that France no longer dreamed of conquests, and that her resources would hereafter be employed to fortify her present possessions.

Cattle chips and coyote scat were everywhere on the floors. The clothes cupboards and toy cupboards in the bedroom he had shared with Allan were two feet deep in pack-rat debris.

Have you lost a friend or relative in the Klondike or Alaska? If so, write to us and we will find them, quietly and quickly. Private information on all subjects. All correspondence strictly confidential. Enclose $1.00. Address the Klondike Information Bureau, Box 727, Dawson, Y.T.

David came back into the space that had been his schoolroom, saying, “I can’t stand this. Let’s get out of here.”
In the Gas Hills, as we traced with our eyes his journeys to Green Mountain, he said, “You can see it was quite a trek by wagon. Am I troubled? Yes. At places like this, we thought we were doing a great service to the nation. In hindsight, we do not know if we were performing a service or a disservice. Sometimes I think I might regret it. Yes. It’s close to home.”