Flux, chapter 4
Flux Current
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⬅️ Previous chapter
Mid-May 2009
A moth is trapped in the taillight of the flatbed stopped in front of Grace. The moth’s motions mesmerize. Wings flap, then still. Flap and still. Bouncing against the milky round prism. You must have gone to some trouble to get inside, she whispers. And now you will end as dust. Grace feels like that moth. Stuck in this world of trucks, tankers, and taillights.
The five-high stack of fat steel pipes fills her windshield. Strapped and secured by a guy making $20 an hour. Probably hungover. Pissed at his boss or his girlfriend or both. Please don’t slide off.
It’s only mid-May, already approaching ninety. The bloated air resists the release of rain. Grace pulls her thick hair together, twists it at the back of her head and reclips it. She’s sweating in jeans and long sleeves, required at gas well #256, known as Warbird. Work boots are hot enough, but her left foot bakes in the Bledsoe boot stabilizing her sprained ankle. A stupid sloppy landing after hang gliding last week. Still a bit rusty from her seven-year absence.
In her teens and early twenties, Grace logged nearly twelve hundred hours of flight. During her first summer break at Cornell, she hitched to the FAI Women’s Worlds in Chelan Butte, Washington. Placed third behind the legendary Kari Kastle. When she returned, high on flying, her PhD advisor gave her an ultimatum: science or flying. “Get serious or get out.”
Her body itches to be airborne, but she keeps it at bay with meetings, deadlines, proposals, reports, data analysis, and the endless stream of adult responsibilities. Since her outing with Barbara, every soaring hawk, every creamy cumulus teases her longing. Beckons her aloft.
Her choice to research in the Marcellus was driven by a confluence of industry, opportunity, and funding. Barbara keeps reminding Grace that the terrain makes for easy launches and long flights. She won’t leave it alone. It’s no coincidence. . . will be on the woman’s gravestone.
The crossroads light turns green, the flatbed disappears in a black cloud of diesel exhaust. Too late to roll up her windows. She passes him on the straightaway. The driver grins and makes an obscene gesture. Eighteen if he’s a day. Not bad looking. He could be one of her students.
It’s not lost on her that she began flying again after a week when four funding proposals were denied. She’s never had such poor outcomes. Her contact at the National Science Foundation was compassionate on the phone, listening to her frustrated rant with the patience of a favorite aunt. “We’ve been through worse together, Grace. We’ll get through this.” She suggested some foundations that, with creative spin, might be a fit. Grace needs to write five more grant proposals like she needs a second PhD. But there’s no alternative.
The project has been gluttonous for money. She’ll go broke by July. Then what? She buried her anxiety with the freedom and intimacy of flight. Her absence from flying hasn’t blunted her desire or her instincts. She’s renewed her fascination with micrometeorology, her body and variometer all the feedback she needs to navigate changes in air pressure, thermals, wind speed.
She looked up a Penn State meteorologist she’d met at a conference. Flying with him was a thrill, even better than their inventive but earthbound after-activities. He’s been ghosting her now that she’s grounded by her injury. Last night, she dreamed of coupling with him in the air, like dragonflies.
Grace’s dating history is a climate science career-day panel. There was Larry, the astrophysicist who would only make love in the dark. The fling with rising star paleoclimatologist Gary during her postdoc at Princeton. He was a gaunt, serious man most at home trekking on frozen tundra to core into climate history. His paper on Eocene polar warmth caused a sensation, but in bed he was as cold as one of his ice cores. After Gary, she dated a forester and a biogeochemist, then had a brief fling with a theoretical physicist who, even after three weeks, couldn’t remember her name. The truth is, as diverting as men can be, she doesn’t have time for a relationship.
“Plenty of women balance career and family.” Her mother’s refrain at every Sunday dinner.
Last time, Grace shut it down. “Mom, that’s a lie. Women can’t have it all because men make the rules. The game is rigged.”
“Honey, that’s so defeatist.”
Her mother has no idea how hard she works. Not that Grace tells her much. The woman left when Grace was seven. She can count on one hand the number of times they got together during her childhood. Their one vacation to Miami when Grace was fourteen ended in a fight after she stayed out all night with two boys she’d met on the beach. During the past nomadic decade of school, post-docs, fellowships and adjuncts, maintaining their estrangement was easy.
Warbird’s new well casing is throwing off crazy high methane readings. So are Dazzler and Beast. Three out of her eight sites. It’s alarming. She suspects the casings are cracked, but given the gaps in her instruments’ readings, she needs more data. And more reliable equipment, but that’s not happening. She’ll make the best of it. She always does.
Grace peers around the site through her infrared camera. After two years at this, she’s able to predict methane’s distinct heat signature even before the camera’s confirmation. Telltale plumes gush from storage tanks and wisp from valves like morning mist off a lake. Compressors billow oily clouds like smoke from a warehouse fire. Leaks are everywhere. Nobody—not in industry, not in climate science—is paying attention. Grace will change that or die trying.
She whispers to the methane. Keep up your ruse of being elusive and shy. Hiding in the rancid goo of animals and plants who died ages ago. Clever of you to hitch rides upward with the mud and rock the drillers call “cuttings.” Quaint word for the quiet flesh that’s slumbered unmolested miles underground for millennia.
Grace begins at the shallow evaporation pit. One hundred yards long, it’s lined with heavy black plastic. Once the well drilling is complete and fracking begins, fluids will be pumped from the wellbore to bake here in the sun. Such magical thinking offends Grace. Molecules from dozens of dangerous chemicals don’t simply disappear1. They rise and mingle with the air like delinquents on a joyride, colonizing healthy cells and disrupting hormones.
Methane is so present here, it might as well have a union card. When did you first realize it’s you they’re after? They’re going to all this trouble for little old you. Admit it, you’re honored to get the call. Proud.
Grace thinks of methane as the backup DJ at Earth’s party of fecundity and abundance. You ooze from dying marsh plants, belch from ruminants, fart from termites, trickle from compost, seep from sewage. Since before fish crawled on land, you’ve had a serious job. You keep this place habitable for us former-fish land walkers. You’ve sequestered in seabeds and bedded in bedrock. You’ve burrowed deep into permafrost. Grace scratches her eyebrow, adjusts the bulky safety goggles. Ironic name now. Not so perma after all.
A gash in the pit liner exposes a vulnerable patch of ochre earth. Grace squats down to tug at the torn edges. Her ankle screams. She curses it and whoever invented such a stupid “solution” to the drillers’ monstrous waste problem. Bare earth will absorb whatever they pump into this pit, with disastrous implications for groundwater. Her usual vigilance against scope creep is no match for this. She calls Pete Hollinger at the state’s Department of Environmental Protection’s Eastern District office to ask after his inspection schedule. His recording answers with the hrrrppp of a duck hail. Can’t talk now. Once I bag this mallard, I’ll get back to you.
He really needs to change his outgoing message. The season ended months ago. Predictably, his mailbox is full. He cares about the environment, an avid outdoorsman, thirty years at the agency. With the explosion of drilling permits, his workload will double this year. And triple the next. He calls himself a water protector, but he’s overmatched by industry.
Because her instruments have been glitchy, Grace has held back recent datasets from her guy at United Energy Holdings. Guaranteed the gladhanding PR guy Hank Cowan doesn’t read her monthly reports. Yes, she wants them to see what’s happening on their sites, but not until she’s more confident of the trends and implications.
Grace places new air sampling instruments at each end of the pit. That done, she hobbles to her car for a roll of duct tape and two capped vials. Back at the pit, she tapes the gash to mark the needed repair. Then she scrambles downhill to collect two water samples from the stream. Not her job, but it’s the least she can do for Pete. He’s a good guy and his daughter Barbara has been a godsend in her lab.
Air not water, she reminds herself. She’s here to study air. Focus was drilled into her early by her father, where it paid off in a four-year sweep of every high school science fair.
Grace’s electrochemical sensor beneath the first platform of the drill rig sniffs out methane from the wellbore itself. This one needs recalibration and a more rugged cover to keep the dust out.
Here you are, she says to methane, riding their well shafts, escaping from pipelines. Crowding into the atmosphere bloated with too much ozone and too much carbon dioxide and too much methane and too much too much, trapping more and more and more heat. They have no idea who they’re dealing with, do they? While you roam free on work-release from the underworld.
The job trailer up on the drilling platform sports three enormous flags: the U.S. stars and stripes, Pennsylvania’s boring coat of arms on dark blue, and the United Energy Holdings’ logo—green topped with concentric blue circles. It’s either a stylized gas flame or ripples in water. The entire perimeter of the second platform is strung with yellow, red, and blue plastic pennants like the grand opening of a used car lot. What is it with guys and their flags?
She scouted this site before the drilling began. The men catcalled her from the platform. Hey, honey, come see what I got for you, and Show us your tits. When she flipped them off, they hooted louder. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. She’s no snitch; she handles her own problems. She could yell her standard response: You kiss your mother with that mouth? but this crew needed tougher.
On her next visit, she climbed to the platform and photographed each one of them with her SLR camera. This direct approach confused and subdued them. A few hammed it up for the camera. After the last guy, she told them that if even one of them catcalls her again, she will send all the photos to their local union rep. One called her a bitch, but they never bothered her again.
Today, even with the headset, the weight of sound nearly crushes her. The drill could be penetrating her own body. Crouching under the platform doesn’t do her ankle any favors either. By the time she’s finished, the ache has climbed from a manageable four to a distracting seven. The throb has traveled from ankle to knee to hip.
Next stop is the job trailer to tell the foreman Scott about the liner tear and retrieve her data off the server. She should dose up on painkillers, but she forgot them at home. She should ice and elevate the foot, but instead she’s here, crawling around on a dusty drill site.
A sleek silver sports car passes inches from her, trailing a thick cloud of dust. Brake lights glow pink in the haze. She takes a hit on her inhaler.
People expect Grace to drive a Prius, but her 1999 Camry is all she can afford. A former boyfriend gave it to her when he won the lottery and bought himself a red Ferrari. Such a cliché. It was a fun car, though. Convertible, black and gray leather interior. He never let her drive it. Even when he was high. Which was more and more often. When he graduated from weed to pills, Grace exited with the Camry. That car was home for eight months until her next grant came through.
The car backs up and stops beside her. The driver’s window slides down. A man about her age—thirtyish, blond hair, mirror sunglasses, careful two-day stubble—is shouting something. She has to lean in with one ear and pull her headset away to hear his voice over the drilling.
He says Office and some other garbled words. Gestures toward the trailer.
She doesn’t take orders from strangers. Her neutral expression shatters into a wince when the ankle spasms in resistance.
“Now,” his lips form as the window slides up. He drives off in a fresh cloud of dust.
Grace doubles over coughing. Her eyes stream. Her airways tighten. Unable to draw a full breath, she takes two hits of albuterol. The guy parks and climbs into the trailer.
The Camry boyfriend had left his parents’ BUSH-CHENEY 2000 bumper sticker on it as a joke. Grace decided it was the automotive equivalent of wearing dark glasses with a fake nose and moustache. She likes the irony. Cheney was instrumental in passing the Energy Policy Act of 2005, written with industry insiders to flout existing clean air and water legislation and make all this fracking possible.
By the time Grace lurches to the office trailer, she needs another hit of albuterol. It hits her like four espressos, leaving her lightheaded and seasick. She’s been too busy to see a doctor and what would they say anyway? Stop going to those hellish well sites?
Inside the trailer, the foreman Scott is picking his cuticles and nodding. Silver Car’s back is turned. Custom suit and time to work out. Muscles swell beneath the light charcoal fabric stretched across his upper back, shoulders, biceps. The hair, though. A sandy mop of dishevelment. Not in a self-conscious metrosexual way, but in a dangerous don’t-give-a-shit way. Guys like this cannot be reasoned with.
“Grace,” Scott says. “What’d you do to your foot?” She would be glad to see him, if not for this other guy.
“It’s nothing,” she says.
When Silver Car turns, his controlled smile is a sociopath’s mask. Grace shivers in the close heat of the tin-can trailer, aware of the grime on her. Heavy boot caked with weeks-old mud. Dirty sock toes exposed in the Bledsoe. Dust coating clothes, skin, hair, face. A Dorothea Lange photo of a coal miner blinking in the sun. Her airways pinch.
He extends a manicured hand that benches one-eighty and curls sixty easy. She is reluctant to take it, but he gives a Meeting as Equals handshake, which redeems him a fraction.
“I’m James Cowan,” he says. The suit is double-breasted silk, shirt pale salmon, tie hot pink paisley. It’s all ridiculous here. That it seems intentional throws Grace off her game.
When she dares to meet his eyes, she’s jarred off balance by their warmth, a sun-kissed Florida Gulf coast blue. The corners crinkle when he grins, a thaw so entire she has to tug on his hand to keep from stumbling. He reaches the other to steady her shoulder. It’s all over in an instant. Scott doesn’t notice. But the guy does. And here comes the cool-lipped smile to drop a shadow over his eyes. Grace disengages to lean away and cough. A wave of nausea burns a sour burp in the back of her throat. She’d kill for water.
“Mr. Cowan is the boss of our New Energy Division,” Scott says. Meaningless words. Is he quality control? Personnel? Same last name as her PR guy Hank. In a giant corporation with tens of thousands of employees, the bosses are related. Bad sign.
Grace nods. “Dr. Grace Evans, from—”
“Yes, I’m aware.” The guy gestures with a stack of papers. “I came to meet you. Please, sit. We have things to discuss.”
Scott sets two bottles of water on the table. He won’t meet her eyes. “I got two new floormen out there and the cement trucks coming,” he says. “I’ll leave you to it.” The tinny trailer shudders when he shuts the door.
Now she’s alone with this arrogant stranger who acts like he’s in charge. Who is in charge. Her skin crawls a warning, which she dismisses. She’s dealt with his type many times.
“Mr. Cowan—”
He holds up a hand. “James, please.” He runs his index finger around the front of his collar and tugs.
“Okay, James. You may call me Dr. Evans.”
Closed-lip smile. Amusement or disdain. “Fair enough.” He straightens the stack of papers by tapping first the short side then the long side on the table.
She muscles the plastic cap off her bottle of water. It crinkles in her grip while she drains half of it. The water flashes down her throat, leaving her parched.
“I need to sync my data here and hit the road,” she says. A jolt of panic warns, He knows about the missing datasets. She dismisses it as absurd. Impossible. “What’s this about? An audit? I send monthly reports to—”
Crisp nod. “Oh, I’m aware. I see it all.” He twists the papers with two fingers. “Hank has let this get away from him. The Board is concerned. I’m concerned.” He’s barely audible over the din from outside. He meets her eyes and pushes a single sheet across the table.
It’s a map of dozens of seismic testing sites. She’s seen it before.
“Do you know how many active wells we’re drilling in this county alone?” he asks. “How many land leases we’ve signed this quarter?”
Of course she does. If he thinks this is a test, he should be embarrassed. He has no idea who he’s dealing with.
“How many monitors do you need, per well?” he asks. “Per site? And how much do they cost?”
Ah, that’s it. He reminds her exactly of a guy in her PhD program who had it out for her from jump. Kept stealing her grad students and badmouthing her research to faculty. Sleeping with him only made it worse. She should’ve shut that asshole down on day one. Lesson learned.
“Y’know what? Fuck you. You think this is amateur hour?” Grace pushes her chair back. In her distraction, she stands on her left foot. The ankle screams. She crumples back into the chair.
“Yes. Yes, it is amateur hour. Without the funding to do it right.” He exudes smugness.
“Oh, I’ll get the funding. I’ve got five proposals in right now.” Or she will have by day after tomorrow.
“For how much? And what are your odds?”
So ignorant. “It’s not about odds. It’s the quality of the proposal. The broader impacts.” This man is insufferable. “Why don’t you go on back to New York and do whatever it is you do there? Leave the real work here to us.”
He smiles like a corporate Cheshire cat. “I looked you up.”
Her surge of anger congeals to a cold mass in her chest. The university discloses grants in their braggy newsletters; it’s all public domain. She feels violated by his voyeurism. Objectified.
“There’s no way with that budget you can do the critical research we need,” he says.
“What do you know about research? Or—” She sweeps her arms wide. “—any of this?”
His laugh startles her out of righteous rage. “I’m gonna level with you, Dr. Grace Evans. You are failing us. Your funding is piddly-squat and you’ve been withholding data from us. I assume because—” He pushes two other pieces of paper toward her. “Either your sad little instruments don’t work thus you can’t produce reliable data streams. Or you’re a hack who will do anything to get ahead.” He leans back, laces his fingers behind his disheveled head, and cat-smiles. “I came here today to see for myself. Which is it?”
Next chapter ➡️
One of the best things about reading serial fiction on Substack is the community that gathers around. This is slow reading at its best. Twice a month, everyone experiences a new chapter and gets to weigh in on what’s happening in real time. When I’ve read stories this way, whether short fiction or whole novels, the interactions with both readers and authors is one of the most enjoyable aspects.
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A partial list of known substances used in fracking natural gas compiled by activists, though fracking companies are legally shielded from disclosing “proprietary information:” benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene, tetrachloroethylene, ethylene glycol, propylene glycol, ethanol, butanol, propanol, chloroform, barium, sodium strontium, cadmium, thallium, chloromethane, bromodichloromethane, trichlorofluoromethane, cobalt, mercury, lead, arsenic
Oh man, Grace is up against some real winners. I love hearing about her past loves (the astrophysicist who only made love in the dark. Haha!) and these more personal forays sit alongside her more profession relations with perfect overlap and tension.
We were joking about your research, but the more I read of this, the more I’m in awe of how much depth you bring to it.