My backyard - what a fracking mess it was

My backyard, what a fracking mess It was on an early Sunday morning, near the town of Lancaster, in the central part of Ohio, where my buddy Ethan, lived in a shack, a two room home built with his own two hands shack. This abode, as humble as it was, sat on a two acre piece of rolling grasslands with tree covered hills and a small stream running smack down the middle of it. Up above, you could see the birds making their nests in the trees as water was aplenty and the stream provided fresh spring water all year around. I suppose my friend was one of the lucky ones. He was in the middle of nowhere back in the days when people minded their own business and what he did or what he saw was totally his own and nobody else cared. It was fly-fishing country, with a herd of cows nearby and a field filled with dung that made you watch where you stepped when you went for a walk. His shack was rain proof and didn’t get wet inside even during the strongest storms. He got his groceries once a month as he loaded his Ford pickup truck and gassed it up to last him a week or two if he didn’t have any chores to do. Mesmerized by the unspoiled beauty of his land, he sat there at night, counting stars and watching meteors streak through the sky. Down the stream was a small clean and free-flowing river that linked up with the big one down the stretch. He got his water right here from the land. He was lucky to have a clean underground watershed that gave him fresh clean water as he pumped it out of the ground, every morning, filling up his barrels that gave him enough water to drink for weeks at a time. Unmistakably heaven, he drove these country roads to the city not as often as he used to but there were no reasons for him to do so since he retired and no longer worked. A retired prison guard, he worked in the city. He had so many years behind those stone cold walls, he often felt he was in prison even when he was off duty, so he found this piece of land and build himself a two room shack with the outhouse close by to give him comfort. Down the road there were large swaths of land-private land and public land. Filled with quail, pheasants, and other fowl, he took his shotgun out a few times a week to feed his desire for meat so he and his dog, Axel, could eat. Life was simple for a very long time. The dusty roads were empty most of the time and he didn’t have to worry about people stopping by. Why, a week or two would go by, before someone would stop and ask for directions. Ethan was a pleasant fellow, never said a bad word about anyone and he treated his dog, Axel, like it was a member of the family as all he had was him and the dog. One day, Ethan woke up to a loud and vibrating noise down the road. Annoying as it was, there was a lot of questions why such a convoy of trucks were coming down this road that passed the shack located about a quarter mile from the turnoff. Something told him there was trouble and as he looked with suspicion at the convoy traveling by, he found himself with a tear in his eye. He had moved from town to avoid the crowds and noises. He felt an intrusion that would leave him shocked and awed at what was happening nearby. A day or two passed by as he noticed his hand pump had run dry and the water he had relied on was no longer flowing as it did before the convoy of trucks came down the once empty road, now filled with dust a flying and deep ruts where the big trucks drove through the dirt as the rain caused the sandy wash road into a mud filled pond stretching a few miles before it became paved. The real shock came when his neighbor up the road stopped by and asked him if he had trouble with his water. Seems the problem was plaguing every house around and it appeared the underground aquifer had been tampered with for those who relied on the fresh water for everything they had including babies and livestock. Weeks went by and the water that had undergone a metamorphic state in smell and looks, was coming out brown, smelly and sometimes very distasteful when you drank it even in a cup of strong dark coffee. It didn’t taste at all like it did before. Then he noticed the duck were dying, the birds were leaving and the cows were laying down on the grass, like never before. Not long ago, a rumor was told in town, that the brown water had sickened a pregnant woman and that the horses, the pets and the chickens were losing their hair and feathers. Ethan was concerned about his dog, Axel, as he had not been himself for a while now as he slept more than usual and his eyes were getting glossy. Sensing it was the water, Ethan bought four cases of bottled water and loaded them in his truck as he went about his business to buy some groceries and head back home before dark. One day, a man came by and asked Ethan to sign a petition. It was a document that stated clearly the purpose was to have the trucks stop rolling, the water start flowing again and the land returned back to where it was before the trucks came down this road. His shack, his outhouse, his dog, and his land was all he had and today, he realized how close he was to losing it all. That man’s name was Charlie, a neighbor who carried a sign on his truck that opposed a thing called “fracking.” It seemed there was a process going on down the road situated about five miles down that impacted the entire valley and landscape. He started to talk about this “fracking” business and how this company, a natural gas and oil business was setting up shop down the road, using this fracking method to make the money as they were buying up mineral rights left and right up and down the road. Charlie asked Ethan, if he had signed a lease, and with wide open eyes and a very solemn face, he nodded no saying softly, “no sir, I haven’t signed anything and nobody has come by here to ask me to either.” Charlie started to explain the problem and told Ethan how this “fracking” works but what really got Ethan mad was when Charlie told him that if he refused to sign a lease, gas would be taken out from under their land anyway, since under Ohio law a well drilled on a leased piece of property can capture gas from neighboring, unleased properties. He added, they were offering the land owners a one-time fee payout of $3,000 dollars or $300 an acre whichever was more plus royalties on each producing well. “Fracking,” as it’s commonly known, involves injecting millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals, many of them toxic, into the earth at high pressures to break up rock formations and release natural gas trapped inside. Ethan was worried about his two room shack, his hand pump that was failing him on an occasional basis, the sometimes brown water and the landscape around him down the road was changing into a scarred, barren, square-shaped clearings, jagged, newly constructed roads with 18-wheelers driving up and down them, and colorful freight containers labeled “residual waste.” Drilling operations nearer to his property commenced in August of that year. Trees were cleared and the ground leveled to make room for a four-acre drilling site less than 1,000 feet away from his privately owned land. Ethan could feel the earth beneath their home shake whenever the well was fracked. Ethan knew, sooner or later, his shack and land would be worthless and unsafe to live on. All his neighbors were up in arms as their water had become tainted and contaminated. All the land around him, all of which sit atop large repositories of natural gas trapped in shale rock deep underground were targets of the drillers down the road. An army of concerned residents and activists marched in protest to show how fracking is an example of what can go wrong when this form of drilling is allowed to take place without proper regulation. Some are pointing to a wave of groundwater-contamination incidents and mysterious health problems out West, in Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming, where hydraulic fracturing has been going on for years as part of a massive oil-and-gas boom, and saying that fracking should not be allowed at all in delicate ecosystems. Conventional vertical drilling cannot retrieve shale gas in an economical way, but when combined with hydraulic fracturing, horizontal drilling—whereby a deeply drilled well is bent at an angle to run parallel to the surface of the Earth—changes the equation. Meanwhile, the returned fracking fluid, now called wastewater, is either trucked off or stored in large, open-air, tarp-lined pits on site, where it is allowed to evaporate. The other portion of the fluid remains deep underground—no one really knows what happens to it. Fracking is an energy- and resource-intensive process. Every shale-gas well that is fracked requires between three and eight million gallons of water. Fleets of trucks have to make hundreds of trips to carry the fracking fluid to and from each well site. In Ethan’s neck of the woods, there were more than 60 gas wells were drilled in a nine-square-mile area, all kinds of ugly things transpired after that drilling outfit came to town. Sadly, the shack was eventually abandoned as Ethan had moved back to town. His dog, Axel, had passed away from an unexplained illness and the water he once bragged about as being clean, pristine cool spring water, was now smelly, brown and filled with chemicals and contaminants, all approved by government officials who reaped the profits and lived in big stone walled houses far away from the smell, the shaking and the destruction of what turned out to be a fracking backyard mess.