She shares the 150-acre property with her son, daughter-in-law, twins and pre-teen granddaughter, along with bears, coyotes, deer and more. Since 2017, he’s also shared the space with a roughly 200,000-square-foot drilling rig, enough space for seven natural gas wells, parking for dozens of trucks and a trailer, where he just discovered that one of the workers the night has passed
The noise is constant, and when I visit I have trouble hearing it clearly above the hum of the compressors, even though we are 200 meters away. “Don’t notice,” he says. He wears a royal blue cloth, shrouded shadows, and a sleeveless muscle shirt. His beard is pure white. “I just hate trucks.”
The Whitlatch deal was signed in 2017 and the process of flattening one of its hills and building the drilling rig was extremely disruptive. Then, fracking began. I imagined several trucks, for sand, for water, for workers, zig-zagging through tight turns in the hills to get to the rig for a week or two, and I could see how that would be annoying . Whitlatch corrected me. “It’s convoys. Trains of trucks. One after another. Truck, truck, truck. And it took them almost a year.”
Throughout the region, I noticed signs, both hand-painted and official-looking, warning truckers, “No Jake Brake” or “No J-Brake” in reference to the ear-splitting compression release brake which trucks usually use to brake. on steep slopes. The curves of the narrow roads here were never meant to be shared with hundreds of heavy trucks, and the people who live in this rural splendor never imagined hearing the snarl of truck brakes day and night.
To better enjoy his personal nirvana, Whitlatch bought two all-terrain four-wheel buggies that he drives around the property. He insisted that I board one of them for the full tour. Like Barbara Smith, he has some concerns, most notably the noise from the trucks, but generally doesn’t seem concerned about the fracking activity on his property. The monthly checks she receives allowed her to retire, provide a home for her son’s family, and generally not have to worry about money for the rest of her life. It’s a new feeling. Happy.
The summer sun blows us away, but the buggy’s partial roof provides some shade, and Whitlatch takes me up and down the hills at speeds that generate a cool breeze. He laughs and revs the engine, going up a hill that must have a 45 degree gradient. “You wanted the tour!” he calls me, smiling. I can’t decide whether the Hare Krishnas or the Whitlatches live in a deeper state of ecstasy. He stops our little vehicle and Turak, who is driving the other buggy, joins us.
After water and chemicals are pumped into the ground for fracking, the toxic liquid, often called brine, is pumped out. Brine is classified as radioactive by the EPA. According to Whitlatch’s deal, it’s supposed to be pumped out and off his property. It is up to the energy company to remove them. We see a thick black corrugated pipe that launches the sewage across the crest of a hill to its destination, where it will be stored briefly and then taken away by more trucks. Last year, “it broke,” he said. He noticed pressurized brine shooting into the air and pouring down the hill and called the company, whose representatives fixed the leak and replaced the top of the soil in that area. Whitlatch was still worried.
“They think of things to say to you that will make you happy and hope you can leave,” he said, laughing again. We got downslope from where the brine line had broken. All around us were variations of vibrant green, except for a 30-foot-wide stretch of dirt that ran the entire slope. Here, the grass—though it had been replanted by the gas company after the rupture—was dry and brown and the trees were leafless in an otherwise bright July. The company had replaced some of the top floor, but it was clearly not enough.
Turak says an ongoing part of his job is holding energy companies to account. After our visit today, Turak will call and find out why there is a worker sleeping in the trailer on the Whitlatch drilling rig, and follow up on the repair of the rupture site.
The dangers and discomforts are many and unknown. Fracture sites leak methane and occasionally spontaneous explosions occur in the drill pads. When one recently broke out at another client’s site, Turak tried to get the media involved to cover the story. “I told them it’s not for advertising for the law firm. This is a public service story,” he said. But no one covered it.
When my father He was about my age, in his mid-40s, when he made the radical decision to leave life as a businessman, enroll in a Lutheran seminary, and become a pastor. He made no formal vow of poverty, but the effect was similar. He was pursuing his own spiritual awakening, his personal search for an idyll on earth.
“The meek shall inherit the earth,” he would say sometimes, reminding me that “meek” could mean “the poor,” meaning us. He reminded my brother and I all the time that we were blessed in other ways. He never came across the term “mineral rights” in his entire life.
Late in the day, I finally made my way to the land of my ancestors. Before my trip, I noticed that Google Maps had updated the aerial photos around it. Now a white rectangle, a drill pad, was visible in the middle of the green, right next to the path I was told I partially owned. I assumed it was new construction following the permit that was approved ten months ago. I set out to see it, and to see what I could of the land whose minerals were partly mine.
