and to the Lackawanna, which drops off the same plateau at Stillwater to cut a course through the ridge and valley system of the Susquehanna rivershed. Even when I lived furthest from the farm, for four years in College Park, Maryland, near the Chesapeake, Mount Pleasant Township showers found the sea through the bay. So these waters have stayed with me.
Colliding continents folded and refolded the earth’s crust here, rolling up layers of dead Devonian trees, plants, and marine life. As mountains rose, their weight compressed the dead, pressing from them almost all but carbon. The folded layers hardened, over millennia, into anthracite, or hard coal. In the trough of one fold rides our house, and beneath us stretch seams of carbon. A slight correction: one bed, the Clark, lay there until the 1930s, when it was hacked out and shipped off to disappear into heat and light. Only the shell of what was remains.
I visited the void in July 2010. The Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour, a Scranton tourist attraction, brought me under in a car that descended at a 25° pitch. The circle of light at the mine entrance receded, smaller and smaller, the deeper we went; as we rounded a bend, natural light winked out, leaving only lamps to show the way. With a jolt, the car stopped, and we clambered out beside a shack 250 feet below the surface, in the ten-by-fifteen Clark vein. Rail thin, a retired miner, the only one of us wearing a hard hat, collected us before a chart of the region’s coal beds: Rock Bed, Big Bed, New County Bed, Clark Bed, Dunmore #1, Dunmore #2, and Dunmore #3. Under them all lay the Pottsville Conglomerate, bedrock. Explaining how the beds ran, our guide talked fast, and didn’t ask for questions.
“C’mon,” he said.
Striding along the gangway, going deeper into the mine, he sang out, “When the pillars start talking, miners start walking.”
After uneasy glances at the walls, we followed, quickly.
Geological faults, our miner-guide told us, were a big problem; big coal producers, but risky to mine. We stopped beside a cathedral-like room. Inside, a hand pushed through the debris of a cave-in; when our miner pressed a button, the hand waved. Amused, a few people laughed, but the wounded mannequin guarding the room looked on, impassive. The space was too much, our guide pointed out: the folding earth had shoved a vein twenty-three feet straight up, raising a column of anthracite but also creating a dangerous mine prop problem.
How do you take so much and not get buried?
Gawking at such spaces is no recent phenomenon; curiosity seekers have strolled through coal mines near here since at least the 1840s. The final report of the First Geological Survey of Pennsylvania (1858) includes two full-color lithographs of mines near Wilkes-Barre, considered by at least one observer to be “outstanding examples demonstrating geology and artistry.”19 In volume 2’s frontispiece, “The Baltimore Comp. Mines, Wilkes-Barre,” rock strata dwarf three tourists who have come to wonder at the Mammoth vein, the largest coal seam in the northern field, in some places forty or more feet thick. The lithograph depicts no markers of industry or technology, other than a fence and three tunnels, which might pass for natural caves. The tunnels on the lithograph’s left side mirror gaps in the rock columns on the closer right side; all the gaps open into mines. Cliffs of coal and rock, topped with evergreens, overwhelm the ghostlike and easy-to-miss people who stand at mine entrances. The immensity of the Mammoth vein made the Baltimore mine, which first shipped coal in 1814, a popular tourist trap three decades later.20 But why? Were people awed by the coal or by its disappearance?
Maybe by its disappearance. An emphasis on the vast interior space rendered in the other lithograph, “Interior of Baltimore Co. Old Mine, Wilkes-Barre,” suggests that the absence of coal is the site’s main attraction.21 Inside the mine, the viewer looks across a gigantic room, through two more rooms, toward the mine entrance, a distant sphere of light colored with green trees and blue mountains, a summer scene. A well-dressed man stands just inside the opening, chatting with two brightly dressed women: one in a red shawl, the other in a blue dress. Making the colors stand out, the rest of the scene wraps them in black and gray. Dwarfed by the interior space, the only other figure, an indistinct miner on a small shelf inside the largest room, blends with his surroundings. The scene offers no trace of mining equipment. It’s as if the space has been hollowed without effort. As if by magic.
Three years ago, I discovered that coal may not be the only fossil fuel beneath my house. I happen to live above the Marcellus, a swath of shale under much of Pennsylvania that holds what may soon become one of the largest natural gas fields in the world. Thickest in eastern parts of the state—Susquehanna County is a current center of attention—Marcellus shale formed during the Devonian period, just over 360 million years ago, a time that saw a major mass extinction, mainly of marine life. As layers of organic material accumulated and deteriorated, they hardened to shale, and produced natural gas, which eventually created enough pressures of its own to fracture the surrounding rock. Not long after, just over 300 million years ago, Iapetus, the shallow sea separating the ancient continents of Laurentia and Gondwana, rapidly closed. As the continents came crashing together, a “promontory in the vicinity of New York City locked Gondwana and Laurentia at a pivot point,” which swung Gondwana clockwise, slamming it into Laurentia and thrusting up the central and southern Appalachians, which buried the shale and rolled beds of anthracite. The collision, which lasted about 15 million years, determined not only the pitch of coal seams but also the direction of Marcellus shale fractures.22 In other words, what played out over millions of years millions of years ago has led major corporations to think about whether they want to drill—read, mine—under my house. Again.
Long after the drilling ends, oil and gas people may well remember alongside I. C. White the geologists Terry Engelder (Penn State) and Gary Lash (SUNY Fredonia), who started the recent corporate stampede to northeastern Pennsylvania. In early January 2008, the scientists pointed out that “the Marcellus would become one of the world’s top super giant gas fields.” They soon spurred on the resulting rush to sink unconventional wells when they claimed that “Marcellus Shale weighs in with more than 500 trillion cubic feet of gas in-place spread over a four state area.”23 Engelder calculated that there’s enough gas in Marcellus shale to satisfy all U.S. energy needs for at least twenty years, at current levels of consumption.24 Although Marcellus gas may reduce the nation’s carbon emissions and could cut U.S. dependence on foreign oil, one thing is certain: tapping it puts in play billions, if not trillions, of dollars.
To strike it rich, rig operators must drop their drills six to seven thousand feet, turn them at right angles, bore in a NNW or SSE direction several thousand feet more, and inject at high pressure sand and water to fracture further the rock.25 Gas then squeezes through the resulting fissures toward the pipe, which carries it to the surface...
Working Away
To help me understand what’s happening at home, I wrote Here and There as narrative scholarship.
The description of the 2011 Modern Language Association Convention theme, “Narrating Lives,” omitted how narrative informs scholarship in the study of language and literature. Although MLA president Sidonie Smith acknowledged in the description that the association “assembles membership stories of the professional lives of language and literature scholars in changing times,” she left no room for how the interweaving of personal stories and traditional scholarship “exposes the work of the humanities in the world.”26 This interweaving, however, has become a major practice of ecocriticism, a fairly recent and expanding subfield in the discipline.
In a paper delivered at the 1994 Western Literature Association Conference (WLA), Scott Slovic, a founder of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, used the term “narrative scholarship” in urging “ecocritics to ‘encounter the world and literature together, then report about the conjunctions.’ ” Slovic’s term caught on. At the following year’s WLA, nineteen ecocritics offered position papers about narrative scholarship. Since then, several prominent writers have published important examples of it.27
Although ecocriticism is not alone, of course, in introducing the personal into scholarly work,