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Divorced twice, with three children, a single mother with no legal background, she won the largest civil compensation case ever in the United States — not a cool drama, but a real event.
The film "Never Compromise", adapted from this, starred Julia Roberts, a former "pretty woman of the wind and moon", and she won the Academy Award, golden globe award and British Academy Film Award for best actress with this role.
The real events behind the film take place in the countryside of the Rust Belt region of the United States.
The low-income families living here, shortly after signing the "Devil's Treaty" with the gas company, found that the air was filled with an unknown chemical odor, the water flowing from the tap was black, the livestock and pets died mysteriously, and mysterious diseases began to torment children...
In a long and desperate predicament, they are not seen, behind America's prosperity.
Until it was written into a book by the top New Yorker contributors, "The Bottom of Fracking.". Once published, it won the Pulitzer Prize, the highest honor that any journalist wants.
Not only that, the book was also selected as GQ's 50 Best Literary Journalism Books of the 21st Century, and was warmly recommended by more than 20 media outlets such as The New York Times, The Times, Washington Post, Pittsburgh Post, Los Angeles Book Review, National Book Review, and Book List, and quickly became a "classic in the field of non-fiction".
In line with the film, the protagonist of author Eliza Griswold, Stacey Hennie, is also a single mother.
Stacy raised two children alone, Harry, 14, and Page, 11. She used to believe that if she worked hard, she could live the life of her dreams. But now she no longer believes that hard work will bring her anything, except exhaustion.
In a sense, this is a dilemma that each of us ordinary people may encounter – the combined power of capital and power. When that moment comes, how can we rebuild our lives in the rubble?
"The Bottom of Fracking" is a real shot
▍ In Harmony Town, it is not necessary to have a man to live
Growing up in Harmony means growing up in poverty, Stacey said. When her father's steel mill went out of business, Stacey was in third grade. She and Shelly's childhood was spent during the economic downturn.
They grow their own vegetables, pickle vegetables, cut their own firewood to make a fire, and fetch their own water. Although southwestern Pennsylvania is located on the overcast side of the Allegheny Mountains, where the river network is long and rainy, it is one of the most abundant regions in the world, but many residents in this area do not have access to municipal water, that is, running water.
When Stacy was in high school, she learned about going to college, and she told her mother that she wanted to go to college. However, Stacy remembers Linda telling her that children in poor places like Harmony Town don't go to college, and she had better forget about it.
It happened occasionally between mother and daughter: Linda thought it was for her own good to tell Stacey the truth so that she wouldn't be disappointed in the future; but Stacey was deeply frustrated.
So she left home to go to beauty school and lived with her then-boyfriend (who later became her husband and divorced), Larry Henny.
Stacey just said goodbye. When she came back to get her things, Dad told her that Larry liked his own truck more than he liked her. Stacy was furious, but now that I think about it, Daddy was right.
Source American drama "East Side Nightmare"
For Stacey, owning her own house is a step towards the middle class.
Larry works as a warehouse manager at a nearby plastics factory, and Stacy works as a nurse at the hospital, which gives them enough money to buy a house with good water. When Stacey found this farm near McAdams Road, the biggest highlight of this farm is that it has a high-quality water source.
Stacey cherishes the well here, and it is also the source of water for Stacey's parents and sister and the Presbyterian Church in the Lower Ten Mile. The $82,000 house needed a complete renovation: a new roof and vinyl siding, as well as reinforced foundations. While trying to salvage the old house as much as they could — which Stacey says is "preserving history" — they added new kitchens, bathrooms and porches.
Stacey fills the house with a collection of old objects, such as an antique sewing machine and her grandmother's rocking chair, and plans to live here for the rest of her life.
When Larry left in 2007, Stacy was happy to see him gone. Although Stacey thought in her heart that his departure was due to his loss of interest in the children, it was his fault, but she herself had lost interest in marriage.
She works hard to convince the children that they can live better without their father, and Larry feels like a bad guy they kicked out of the house.
In 2009, Stacey met Chris Rush at the Kettle Tavern. At that time, she temporarily went to a banquet to help in order to earn extra money, and after it was finished, she rarely came to the kettle tavern to prepare for a drink. He saw Stacey come in, so he went up and talked to her. He knew Stacy and had fallen in love with her.
Compared to Larry, Chris is closer to Stacey's ideal partner.
Chris, 34, is still single, appearing restrained and careful in front of strangers, and after drinking more than half a dozen Budweiser light beers, he relaxed and became funny and lively, noisy like a boy. He sings fluent rap songs from Lear Wayne and Snoopy Dog, but looks like a burly Hapi. They liked each other's strong rustic traits, including an old-fashioned sense of distance between the two. Stacey was proud of her self-reliance and didn't have to call Chris every time the tires exploded.
"The difference between the women of Harmony Town and most women is that," she said, "we don't have to have men to live." "Stacey is happy to be able to chop the firewood for the whole winter herself with the help of her family, or at least without complaint."
In her opinion, this is what real border women should do.
▍ One day in March, everything changed
One day in March 2010, Ron Jaeger saw a slurry worker standing next to the sludge oozing from the mountain, pumping the oozing sludge back into the waste pit and asked him what he was doing.
In the same month, Harry of the Stacy Yamashita family fell ill.
For most of his seventh grade, he woke up in the morning feeling nauseous and then diarrhea. Due to stomach pain and prolonged mouth ulcers, Harry was reluctant to eat. To coax him, Stacey made his favorite chicken shell pasta and grilled cheese. But he only ate a few bites.
Stacey tried to use her 23 years of experience as a nurse to find out what was going on.
They went to Pittsburgh's Children's Hospital and also to the emergency room of the Washington Hospital where she worked. Harry had appendicitis, Crohn's disease, irritable bowel syndrome, cat scratch fever (Henney had three cats, and a cat named Shane had scratched his lips), Rocky Mountain macule fever, mononucleosis, and swine flu, all of which were negative.
One night in March, Harry suddenly woke up and called out to his mother.
Stacey struggled to open her eyes and groped for crutches by the bedside. She had scratched the soles of her feet and had just undergone a minor surgery (she accidentally cut her Achilles tendon by a glass jar while jumping out of the upper bunk bed where Harry slept). She limped to the bathroom and found Harry curled up on the floor. His chestnut hair had long since turned black from sweat, and in the glimmer of dawn his pupils were wide open, and his eyes looked all black.
Stacey crouched down, tried to comfort him, and then called Chris to help. She didn't need to explain it to him—the same thing had happened many times. Less than 20 minutes later, Chris arrived, and he picked harry up and put him in the back seat of the Pontiac. Stacy climbed into the driver's seat and made a bumpy ride toward Washington Hospital, still in her pajamas. While waiting outside the emergency room, Harry's head never lifted from her arms.
Harry was admitted to the hospital for severe irritable bowel syndrome, accompanied by symptoms of insanity, disorientation, and abnormal lymph node enlargement.
He spent six days in the hospital, and because of the seriousness of the situation, his father also made a rare appearance. Larry looked worriedly at his son's pale, haggard face. He lives in Washington County, not far from here. But he and Stacy were in a Cold War state, so they left right away. Harry was so ill that he didn't notice it.
Doctors found that Harry's liver enzymes were elevated and his kidneys were failing, but ultrasounds showed that his liver was not inflamed. May be celiac disease. So Stacey started buying gluten-free food.
At the same time, her feet were not always good. Nurses work require constant movement, so she stays at home and sits on the couch all day. She was second only to Harry in depression, and she felt that she was suffering from Harry's illness (whatever he had), but with milder symptoms. She gave up her daily struggle with the dust brought in by passing trucks. Even when the windows are closed in winter, dust can burrow in. Sometimes she even felt sand in her mouth.
Fracturing mining sites
One afternoon in August, Stacey was standing by the goat's small pool when she suddenly smelled a foul smell wafting down the mountain. She immediately began to shed tears, and at the same time felt a fiery pain in her nose. The smell came and went in a hurry, but it made Stacey shudder.
Later they heard that an employee of the mountain called it "rotten beef jerky flavor." Stacy came into the house and called Beth and asked if she smelled the smell too.
Beth smelled it too, and she knew what it was. Beth has been calling the state Department of Environmental Protection for months complaining about pollution at the Jaeger well site. In August, she finally received a letter from the Ministry of Environmental Protection's water quality supervisor, Vince M. Thompson. Call back from Yantko.
He explained that the large pool of waste on the top of the hill, now filled with fractured sludge, had decayed like an infected wound. The bacterial explosion released the colorless gas hydrogen sulfide. Open waste ponds have become a growing concern for landowners, responsible drilling companies and the Ministry of Environmental Protection. This is a conundrum.
Waste pool
Beth and Stacey didn't know that many drilling companies try not to use this simple waste pool or the potential health effects of hydrogen sulfide. According to Beth, the EPA only told her that hydrogen sulfide was naturally occurring. But "naturally occurring" doesn't mean harmless, and she and Stacey will soon understand that.
Small exposure to hydrogen sulfide can cause inflammation and depression in the eyes, while exposure to large amounts can lead to death, especially in small children. She and Beth were not the only ones complaining about the bad smell.
Later, a neighbor who lived across the valley on Headley Road called to say her young son had been vomiting since he was 1 year old.
The lower family of Appalachia
Stacey came out and continued to trim Butts' hair in preparation for the upcoming bazaar. Soon, she and Beth will learn that they are not only inhaling hydrogen sulfide.
At the top of the hill, workers in chemical protective suits and gas masks are pouring 819 pounds of liquid carcinogens and fungicides into the sludge to control the bacterial outbreak. Just a few hundred feet away, women work outdoors wearing only T-shirts.
This fungicide, called acrolein, is highly concentrated and can be used to make chemical weapons.
The above is an excerpt from "The Bottom layer of fracking".
"It's a morally complex and well-written story... It's about families, it's about the resources that we all use. It tries to tell us what binds a community to a country and then divides it. The author's dedication and keen compassion shine on every page. ”
—George Parker, author of The Age of Sinking
"If J. D. Vance's "Lamentations of the Countrymen" brilliantly depicts the Rust Belt spirit of the Appalachian migration to southern Ohio, while "The Bottom of Fracking" tells the outlines of everyday life in Washington and Green Counties in vivid detail... "The Bottom of Fracking" is not only a glimpse of the environmental consequences of post-industrial small towns and fracking, but also a legal thriller comparable to John Grisham. ”
—Byron Borg, The Pittsburgh Post
"'The Bottom of Fracking' is essentially a david and goliath story that fits into a movie. Aside from the happy ending, it has it all: hides wealth and dangerous idyllic scenery; poor but proud locals who have experienced a cycle of resource extraction from boom to bust... Tough, reluctant victim heroes... And a juridical drama, a tenacious couple legal team against industry and the state... This is a valuable, disturbing book. ”
—Joan Wepidski, New York Times Book Review
Editing in this issue: dading_