“THE BARBARIANS ARE AT THE DOOR” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 21

the highway, a sign of ering i nancial planning to people with new gas
wealth remained.
h is time was dif erent. Hopes and fears were both higher. h e target
was the Utica shale, a layer of deep underground rock formed some
hundred million years before the Marcellus. By now Athens residents
had already seen the intense bat les break out across the border to their
east. Many Pennsylvanians embraced the drillers as their economic sal-
vation in a tough time. Others cursed them for tearing apart communi-
ties and, they said, for bringing environmental ruin.
Dix was all for let ing the drillers in. Many opponents, he had con-
cluded, were hypocrites, happy to proi t when their pension funds
invested in ExxonMobil and Chesapeake but unwilling to accept gas
development in their own backyard. But it wasn't just what he saw as
a double standard from those worried about the local environment that
rankled; it was what he thought natural gas could do for the community.
“h ey're worried about the Athens way of life, when the barbarians are
at the door,” he excitedly warned with a hint of a smile on his face. “h e
rural men aren't workin. h e kids don't have fathers. h ere's heroin. h e
barbarians are at the fuckin' gate. And you're worryin' about havin' to
see fuckin' oil rigs when you're takin' your fuckin' Sunday night drive?”
h e rhythm in his voice was almost hypnotic. “Excuse me,” he added.
Half an hour earlier, I'd been talking to Warren Taylor, a sixty-one-
year-old man with more energy than most people half his age, when
Dix drove up and joined the conversation. Taylor, wire-thin with close-
cropped hair, sported a long-sleeved white t-shirt; he would have i t
right in in Northern California, where he had lived a good part of his
life. Today he was the proprietor of Snowville Creamery, a four-year-old
operation that promised “milk the way it used to be” and was one of the
more vocal area opponents of natural gas development. Dix, who had
lived around Athens his whole life, rented Snowville its property and
sold the creamery its milk. h e two friends, who shared a stretch of land
not far from the West Virginia border, were clearly used to sparring.
h eir disagreement didn't i t into neat lines. “I'm a far let ist, is where
I'm coming from,” explained Dix, whose views on everything from capi-
talism to Karl Marx coni rmed that. h en he launched into a spirited
defense of private property rights, particularly his right to lease his land