This weekend we have an excerpt from James Browning’s The Fracking King. When the tap water at the Hale Boarding School for Boys bursts into flames, people blame fracking. Life at Hale has always been fraught—the swim test consists of being thrown into the pool with wrists and ankles tied, and a boy can be expelled if he and a girl keep fewer than “three feet on the floor.” But the sight of combustible drinking water and the possibility that fracking is making Hale kids sick turn one student into an unlikely hero in the fight to stop the controversial drilling practice.
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My father taught five sections of U.S. History at Hannah Penn, 160 kids in all, and refused to give pop quizzes, meaning he had 160 “thought papers” to grade each weekend. Besides history, my father loved the Phillies and shooting pool and once told me that “the only way to make a shot is, first, to miss it in every way possible.” A tragic philosophy that I thought explained his life. Before getting his Master’s Degree in U.S. History, he actually spent several years trying to get a Ph.D. in So Fo Po, or Soviet Foreign Policy, only to have the Soviet Union suddenly go belly up. He switched to U.S. History and was doing fine until the Internet came along. He had always loved to be the first person to cut the pages in a book, or put on cotton gloves to handle certain books as if they were bones or fossils that might crumble at his touch. A pile of red, rotten blocks that had been sitting in a corner of our basement for as long as I could remember had turned out to be the New Soviet Encyclopedia—a gluey monstrosity that my father got in Leningrad in 1985 in exchange for the Walkman off his ears and the Nikes off his feet. He loved books but now you could know anything about anyone in history with the click of a mouse or a tap of your finger. Or so my father feared. My mother tried to tell him that these two things—the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Internet—were not mistakes but just bad luck, and that books, newspapers, magazines, and the printed word were not going to disappear. But he did not believe her.
I was luckier than my father as the great love of my life seemed to be indestructible. I played Scrabble with tiles as a kid and now played online against people from all around the world. Although players outside the U.S. and the U.K. use a much bigger dictionary—so big that the whole thing starts to seem ridiculous. Kids at Hannah Penn and even kids at Clovis Friends made fun of me for playing words like “zebrass,” a sterile cross between a zebra and an ass, as if my lousy social life had driven me to study other strange creatures who could never reproduce. But even I drew the line at “zo,” a cross between a Tibetan yak and a Tibetan cow, in part because “zo” makes it too easy to get rid of the Z.
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The drive from Philadelphia seemed to be uphill all the way—up the Schuylkill Valley and up into the foothills of the Endless Mountains in northeastern Pennsylvania. Hale was founded in 1890, right after the Johnstown Flood. You could even say Hale was founded because of the flood. I had known this ever since Hale offered me a scholarship and my father told me to “look before you leap.” As a freshman, I leapt into Hannah Penn before reading about her marriage to the much older William Penn and did not understand when a senior put her arm around me and asked if I wanted to “pull a Penn” on her. The girl had a tattoo of an octopus on her wrist, and I worried that I was now supposed to draw on her. Only later did I learn that she was asking me on a date and that “pull a Penn” meant to honor Hannah Penn by dating someone much older.
I made a bigger mistake when I leapt at the chance to get the hell out of Hannah Penn and go to Clovis Friends. My father told me that Clovis was for gifted kids and that they would appreciate my unique abilities. But what he didn’t say was that Clovis Smith was the only man known to have been elected to Congress without knowing how to read. Smith could recite whole books of the Bible from memory and give entire speeches without a stumble or an um. But the words in books “swam before his eyes” and gave Smith vertigo. Like William Penn, Smith married a much younger Quaker and the two of them founded a school for boys who were in some way “afflicted,” most of them physically, though some shared Smith’s curse of words that swam before his eyes. Old photographs of Clovis graduates show many of them in wheelchairs or wearing braces to help them cope with polio. More recent photos show boys and girls staring into space or staring fixedly at something on their phones.
I would not get fooled again. Hale’s brochure said the school was founded as a “kinder, gentler” alternative to other Pennsylvania boarding schools, a place where boys would be taught to think for themselves and be given a measure of freedom because “freedom teaches responsibility.” Kinder, gentler wasn’t hard, at first, as many schools in the nineteenth century were little more than farms or factories where, after a long day of plowing the fields or trying to pick cotton out of the jennies without getting their fingers smashed, boys were taught to read and write. Instead of manual labor Hale had its students go to class on Saturdays—a kinder, gentler approach to education that had endured beyond the passage of child labor laws and the rise of the “weekend,” so that Hale and a few military academies were now crueler, harder as the only schools in Pennsylvania to have classes on Saturdays. I read online that a Hale student had killed himself a few years ago and that many students and teachers blamed Hale’s schedule—classes in the morning, afternoon, and night, classes on Saturdays, some optional classes for students who could not afford to travel home for the holidays. But instead of cutting back on work, the school responded to this tragedy by lifting its 117-year-old ban on boys having girls in their rooms. Now a boy could have a girl in his room between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. if he got his housemaster’s permission, if the door was kept open, and if boy and girl kept a total of “three feet on the floor.” My chances of finding a girlfriend at a school for boys seemed about as good as drawing “Qu”—a tile that only appears in Spanish versions of Scrabble, and which only wound up in my bag once by mistake—but this new rule thrilled me.
Elijah Hale would say that he founded Hale to advance the idea that “children have souls.” But it is also true that helping children was Plan B, and that he bought the land around Hale so he could build a dam and create a “lake in the sky” and have “sailboats in the mountains” just like they did at Lake Connemaugh—the lake above Johnstown where Hale and many other wealthy, Pennsylvania families had summer cottages. Hale had dammed the Skulking River and was laying railroad tracks when he got the news that Connemaugh’s dam had burst and that more than two thousand people had been killed in the resulting flood, fires, and mayhem. A plateau in the foothills of the Endless Mountains was not a great place for a boarding school, either, but that’s what became of the lodge, the cottages, and the few houses that Hale had already built; and with its small endowment and the gradual collapse of most industries in northeastern Pennsylvania—steel, lumber, coal, and the railroads on which these things had been shipped—the school had struggled for most of its history.
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5
Fitler Hall was the darkest, most Dickensian dorm at Hale. I could tell this just by looking at a photograph, but I didn’t know why it was so dark until we drove through Hale’s gates and parked in the shadow of the Dreissegacker Natatorium, a building so big it had a dark side like a moon. The dark side of Dreissegacker was ten to fifteen degrees colder than the rest of Hale and could not support certain forms of life. Instead of fruit, a blueberry bush in front of Fitler grew little, wooden knobs. The grass near Fitler grew either spiky, short, and brown, or spiky, short, and a garish shade of green that was actually paint—the same shade of green as the grass that grew around the natural gas wells I’d seen driving up from Philadelphia. The things in the pots in my housemaster’s windows were lumpy, stunted and looked more like rocks than plants. Dr. Goltz was a geologist and I would learn later that he kept rocks in pots; at the time I worried that I, too, would wither in Dreissegacker’s shadow.
Rich’s and my room was on the second floor and a quick glance at Dreissegacker to the south, then a longer look at the Endless Mountains to the east and west, made me wonder if our room got direct sunlight. One of my father’s students had gone to Yale and later told a wild story about a man who gave Yale a girls’ dorm but stipulated that all of his descendants who went to Yale be given the penthouse suite—even if they were male. A dark dorm surrounded by grass that had been painted green made me think that Fitler was a trustee or one of Hale’s founders and that his family would not let Hale knock Fitler down.
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Excerpted from The Fracking King by James Browning. ©2014 by James Browning. Published by Little A/New Harvest April 2014. All Rights Reserved.