What Will Be, Will Be--A Long and Gassy Rant

During the weekend that we went to pick up Dante, my mother yet again brought up the stupid gas contract she's been begging me to sign (for a refresher on that can of crap, click here.) Recently she's been barraging me with discussion of it, to the exclusion of everything else. Now, I know from experience that the best way to insure your kid won't do the thing you want him to is to make sure you nag him about it at every possible opportunity. What has thrown Mom into high Land Rapist gear is the fact that a new company is out there drilling all over our neighbors' properties. We are, I found out, literally ringed in by gas wells around our property. "They could be siphoning off our gas!" She shrilled at me. I don't care. But I did make one mistake this weekend. I tried to use logic, which for Mom is like throwing eggs at a brick wall hoping they'll knock it down. Posing a logical question gave my mother an opportunity to go into conman mode, something she's been resorting to as she gets older. She saw a door being opened; so if she can just demonstrate that she can meet that need I'm showing, I'll sign over.

I had originally asked her why she was so adamant that we sign now. After all, we get contacted every few years by people who want to drill (or log or mine or whatever). We've always said "No." Why say yes now? She had two reasons: 1) They were there. And 2) they could be siphoning off our gas. Everyone else had a well--so should we. (This is the same woman that gave me unholy hell over peer pressure. As a JW, you aren't even really supposed to have "worldly" friends, hence everything that isn't strict doctrine is subject to peer pressure.) I told her I didn't find either of those reasons compelling; they both seemed like a version of "If your friends were jumping off a bridge, would you do it, too??"

I changed tactics then, which turned out to be a mistake, her way to try to con me into signing. I thought that if I just tried to force her to lay things out in the open, she would be shamed into leaving things alone. So I asked her: Do you need extra money for some reason? Are you in financial trouble?

The way her eyes lit up immediately, I knew I'd asked the wrong thing. I happen to know for a fact that she's not in financial trouble. But everything after that question became an uncomfortable rebuttal of her "needs."

She said she'd like to retire. I asked her if she was going to have difficulty making ends meet when she retired. She started to say yes, but then realized she'd have to come clean with just how much she was short by--she's not short by anything. Because of my father's death, she also gets his social security and his retirement pension from work when she chooses to retire. She gets two retirement incomes. She's fine. She won't be able to retire in Hawaii, but she's perfectly capable of retiring in Kentucky, and she had no plans of doing otherwise anyway.

Turns out what that really means is she wants to retire two years earlier.

This pissed me off. It doesn't piss me off that she wants to retire early. It pisses me off that she'd sell out the land through the lifetime of my son and his children so that she can get two fucking extra years.

Her two other reasons were health insurance and a new car. There will be a gap for her when she retires (early) where she'll have to pay for her entire insurance bill. That's legitimate. She also wants a new car, and even though her old one is still drivable now, it is a foreseeable need. I asked her how much she anticipated those things to cost. She had no idea. I told her I would help her pay for all of those things, that's what children are there for (not that she's been such a fantastic mother). "You can't meet my needs," she announced quickly. I asked for a dollar figure on her needs, which she couldn't supply.

I tried to explain two things to her, neither really successfully. First, I told her, if she wanted to make a needs based argument, she was going to have to know what her needs actually were. She just knows she needs "money." Don't we all. If we can meet her needs collectively as a family, there is no need to lock up the land for 80-100 years (more on how I know that figure later). Second, there is no guarantee that the gas well will meet any portion of her "needs." They can't guarantee that she'll make anything off of the well, much less to the size that she thinks she's going to get. If it were a stock, I wouldn't buy it. It's too risky. It's especially too risky to bet your "retirement" on it.

In the day and a half I was there, besides talking my head off about it every time we were around each other in daylight, I got a phone thrust at me with the new gas company owner on the other end of it. I happened to be watching both my son and his friend in the backyard, and while they're good, they're wild as bats, so I wasn't very keen on talking to him and taking my eye off of them. "He insists!" Mom declared. I told her that neither she nor he were going to get what they wanted by forcing it upon people. So, in a particularly brusque business mood, I talked to this man for probably 25 minutes (which she eavesdropped on, and then later denied; when I confronted her with the fact that I was sitting outside and heard the boys rumbling through the house through the phone, she owned up to it). He's not a bad man. He's just not selling something I want to buy. From him, I found out that because he's drilling down to the shale, he's near guaranteed to hit gas, because gas is a byproduct of the pressure the shale is under at that depth. He also said that the average life of a shale gas well is 80-100 years, and that he would not be able to change the terms of the duration of the contract to mean anything besides "the life of the well." We're nearly guaranteed to be locked in for 80 years. And, during that time, he can come in and drill another one, and the contract would then extend to the life of that well.

Later that night, my mother and I really got into it over the principle of the thing, mainly because she just wouldn't leave it the hell alone. I told her I thought it was wrong of her to try and ram this down our throats, which she would've done, had that other deed not popped up at the last minute. I told her that I felt like I had an obligation to future generations, and that I just couldn't make a decision that my son (or any other kids I may have) and likely his children would have no choice but to accept, or what's more likely, would have to clean up legally and literally behind me long after I was gone. I declared that I wasn't signing, period. My "conscience" wouldn't let me. (The look alone on that one was worth it; apparently, JWs have the lock down on possessing a "conscience.")

Then she shocked me with, "You know, I don't have to get your signature on Grandma's part of the property. She only did the mineral rights deed for the place you grew up in. I can't imagine, though, why she did that." Gee, I wonder. The reason she did that is so that all family members involved would have to come to a consensus about something of that magnitude happening to the land. Her people have always filed deeds like that. It's their little way of being democratic, I guess.

I told Mom that if she wanted to sign that part over, that was her choice. But she was doing it knowing that her children were dead set against it. If her "conscience" (again, the beauty of that rhetoric!) allowed her to do that, then there wasn't anything I could do to stand in the way of it. But I wouldn't participate in it, help her legally with it, or take any of the profits (provided there were any) from it. I responded with that right away. But I grieved over it longer quietly.

It just seems so incredibly selfish to me. Just for two years earlier for your retirement, you do this thing that everyone else is so much against.

The next day, before we left to come back to West Virginia, she told me "I've just grieved me heart out over this gas contract. I've tried to think about what it means to be reasonable or unreasonable, and I just...I'm just so upset over it." I explained that grieving was for people, not for business ventures. And that reason existed apart from her own ability to identify it. Reason isn't subjective, and it doesn't require her to validate a thing as reasonable. I told her I couldn't understand why she didn't see how she was tying our future generations' hands. Then it occurred to me. She doesn't believe there will be any future generations, because the "New System" is coming right around the corner. It doesn't matter if the gas company tears the land to hell, Jehovah will be coming, probably next week, and he'll make it all better. So she gets her money and her land, if only in her own mythology. I can't believe I never thought of that before. She told me to think about it some more. I replied that I'm done with thinking about it, that I had thought about it, laid out my reasons for being against it, and that was that. No free clear conscience passes from me.

On the long seven hour drive home, I tried to be zen about the whole thing. I can't control others, only my reactions to them. I was calm the whole time I wanted to rage about the house. I no longer have the desire to burn things to the ground (well, maybe just a little bit, but it's under control). If I get a check in the mail, I'm going to return it with a snarky little note about how since she needs this so *desperately* for her early retirement, my conscience (again, lovely!) won't let me cash it. If she gets in legal crap, I'm not helping with it. She comes to me every time she needs something salvaged. I've made a shaky peace with the fact that this is now out of my control. Whatever happens, happens; but at least I feel like I did my level best.

-- Virgil