this and that excuse. Until finally she confessed that her heart was not on college – not at that moment. Perhaps some time in the future she would consider it. Nana Moira knew that there would be no time in the future. She might as well give up on any notion of having the first college graduate in the Boucher family, and be stuck with another itinerant musician – albeit a very bad one this time.
“Don’t be so sad about it, Nana Moira,” said Rachel. “Hocking College can do without my money. I’d rather use it to take care of you.”
Rachel is the only one who brings some reasonable livelihood home, thanks to her busking. Everyone at the Jensen Community Centre is a volunteer, including Nana Moira. The only reward for her selfless work is the free food that she gets from the Food Pantry and a small stipend that is far below minimum wage.
“Sweet grief, child, I don’t need nobody to look after me,” said Nana Moira adamantly. “I managed all right from the time you was little without your help.”
It is not just Rachel’s music that Nana Moira worries about. After all, she is taking after the rest of the Bouchers before her and there is nothing anyone can do about that. Perhaps she should just accept it. But now Rachel – and Nana Moira blames Schuyler’s bad influence for this – has taken to running around all over the county at her own expense, attending meetings and yelling slogans against the government, which is none of her business. She has joined Appalachia Active, a group of concerned citizens of southeast Ohio who protest against fracking.
Nana Moira complains that Rachel spends too much time attending anti-fracking demonstrations instead of focusing on the more important things in her life. She is afraid that one day the law will come knocking at the door to tell her that her granddaughter is in jail for chaining herself to fracking equipment. That’s the sort of thing these crazy people do; you read such stories in the Athens News all the time. Or worse still, she may end up like Schuyler.
Although Rachel refuses to discuss Schuyler, Nana Moira has heard the gossip that she is either doing time or has done time for some crime and is now crippled for life because of her wayward behaviour with men. Not that Rachel is one of those man-crazy girls you see running around with other people’s husbands. No, not her Rachel. She is raised too well for that. But with a friend like Schuyler, who knows what bad influence she may exert on her?
Rachel is very headstrong. Stubborn just like her father. Whenever Nana Moira talks to her about this anti-fracking business and about Schuyler’s bad influence she throws a tantrum and tells her grandma to mind her own business, that she is not a kid any more and should be left alone to make her own decisions. She says she is entitled to her own mistakes. Whoever heard such moonshine?
2
Members and supporters of Appalachia Active, and some curious citizens, have assembled in the Arts West theatre building. Rachel sits in the front pew – this used to be a church some years back before the community bought it as a multipurpose performance space; it still has rows of pews for theatre seats. She is among a group of young women from the city and outlying townships. She sits next to Schuyler, her best friend from Rome Township. Occasionally they throw a glance at the two men and two women at a table on the stage, but most of their attention is on the people who are trickling in, filling the pews.
“Hey, there’s Jason. You remember him, don’t you? We called him the stinky kid,” says Schuyler, glancing at the two men walking down the aisle and looking for space in the opposite pews. One of them is Jason and the other is Genesis de Klerk, his father.
“I didn’t. You and the other yapping yentas called him that,” says Rachel. “Is that him? Where has he been?”
“Yapping yentas” elicits screams of excitement from Schuyler, and the girls forget all about Jason as they reminisce about high school and the lisping teacher who gave Schuyler and her friends that label because indeed they were busybodies. They mimic the teacher and the other young women in the pew join the conversation with their own memories of the trouble they used to get into as a result of not minding their own business.
One of the women on the stage, the older one, uses her clenched fist as a gavel to call the meeting to order and the assembly falls silent. She welcomes everyone to the workshop, especially the visitors from West Virginia who have come to help the people of Athens organise against the fracking companies.
“I always have a flashback to the sixties when I’m with members of Appalachia Active,” she says, rubbing her hands together with glee.
She then introduces everyone on the stage: the young woman is from the university where she recently graduated with an engineering degree; and the man is a legal practitioner in Athens, “a lawyer to love” because he fought for the Wayne Forest. Everyone laughs at the characterisation of the handsome middle-aged man because lawyers are generally reputed to be unlovable. This is quite a good generational mix because the fourth facilitator on the stage is a young man, Skye Riley, perhaps in his early twenties, who is a coal miner from West Virginia.
The young engineer is the first to address the meeting. She is using Microsoft PowerPoint to illustrate what hydraulic fracturing is all about. She tells the assembly that fracking technology has been in existence for sixty years, but horizontal drilling is a new technology.
“You get oil and gas, but you also get a lot of waste water that no one knows what to do about,” she says.
She shows slides of the different classes of wells and explains in detail how water is injected into them, and the potential for pollution this presents. And then she talks about the abandoned and orphaned wells throughout southeast Ohio and the ground water contamination that they cause, besides the fact that they are great conduits of this poison to the surface.
Although this is called a workshop, it is really a lecture. All the technical stuff cannot hold Rachel’s attention for much longer and she begins to fidget. Her eyes wander and catch Jason de Klerk gazing at her. He smiles. She smiles back.
People have lots of questions after the engineer’s presentation. Rachel is most impressed by her age – she is definitely younger than Rachel and yet here she is on stage addressing all these people, talking with eloquence and authority, and teaching people far older than her, some of whom are respected professionals in the county, things they knew nothing about. Because of her education she is more of an asset to Appalachia Active than Rachel is.
All of a sudden she now sees her role as only to increase the numbers at demonstrations and protest marches. She does not add much value to the organisation. Nana Moira was right, she concludes, she must go back to school. She may not be an engineer like the young lady, but she can be something that people look up to. She is even more impressed when the engineer answers the questions with confidence and humour, and how she tries to be fair and honest. When she has no information on the advantages and disadvantages of a specific fracking method she says so, and directs the questioner to other sources that are more knowledgeable than she is.
The lawyer to be loved takes the stage with more panache. Perhaps he imagines he is addressing a jury. He talks of well blow-outs that release millions of gallons of polluted water into creeks, of how natural water streams are hit when fracking companies prepare the ground for fracking, and of numerous occasions when the valves of trucks are “accidentally” left open so that the brine can be spilled along the road. All the while he gives specific examples of towns, villages and townships where these things have happened, and what the response or lack of response of Ohio government agencies was.
This angers the people; some yell that this must not be allowed to happen. Rachel steals a glance at Jason. She catches him still staring at her. She wonders if he is paying attention to the proceedings
