A Warm, Fuzzy Day with Cabot

(The Cabot Community Picnic, Montrose Area High School, August 14, 10 a.m.-2 p.m.)

Corporate Big Brother loves you. Or just has really bad taste. But in a gesture right out of George Orwell’s 1984, Cabot invites us all to a community picnic. Can this be Cabot, the company behind the environmental screw-ups poisoning PA daily? The very same. Cabot? Community? The two words blink across the page at each other in disbelief.

See, a friend of mine with years of Hazmat safety experience—even gigs with the good ol’ gas boys of Oklahoma and Texas (the same types swarming here)—told a curious yarn about Cabot. Currently unemployed, he drove hours to drop his resume at a local Cabot office. On entering, he said he’d picked up a serious vibe of “We don’t like yer kind ’round here, boy.” He just wasn’t sure if they meant Yankees, local guys—or safety men.

Talk of good ol’ boys suggests another tale. After the War Between the States, we Yanks blew off Honest Abe’s plan to “bind up wounds,” and what goes around comes around. But mark my word, Scarlett, these nomads—these “reverse carpetbaggers”—aren’t flowers of Southern chivalry. No, Gone with the Wind is the wrong movie here; we’re talking Deliverance. Certain crew members have flashed guns at complaining landowners—not owners under contract, but neighbors griping of trespass. A pickup with Texas plates swerved to nearly hit me as I expressed (with my middle finger, for a keepsake photo) my free citizen's views on a fracking tower. A small hotel owner’s lovely Victorian rooms were drunkenly smashed when she refused to slash her price. All besides the usual DUIs, fistfights, meth abuse,and rape.

To be fair, these aren’t all Cabot people (the pickup guy was Chief), just the vagrant "roughnecks" gas drillers hire. Probably it’s not a Southern thing, but an “invading army” thing; people with no stake in a community aren’t prone to behave well when faced with long hours of boredom and discomfort laced with moments of sheer terror. Hiring local people might help. But naw, they’d never think of that—except for ex-cons and dropouts. Probably to serve as role models.

Cabot, like other drillers, is deaf to gripes about these problems. Once you’ve bought state houses and lawyers out the wazoo, PR mustn’t matter much. Or perhaps to fix things in Texas, y'all just throw a big barbecue.