To Move or Not to Move

If you lived where we live, with all this fracking stuff happening all around you, what would you do?  Preemptive strike and get out before anything happens?  Stick it out until something does happen?  It's a crap shoot.  I guess it depends on how much you like the area and how much you have invested in it.  It is entirely possible that nothing will go wrong and that, aside from the obnoxiousness of all the trucks, ground shaking when the frack happens (even the drillers say the ground shakes.  And why wouldn't it?  They are BREAKING the rock below our feet!), noise from fans and influx of potentially very transient people, life will continue on in our quiet little hamlet without incident.  But, with all those pitfalls just listed, plenty could go wrong and greatly affect our everyday lives, and THEN we would have to move.  To what end?  Will we be sick?  God forbid (and I hate even putting it in writing, much less thinking it) something happen to the kids.

Crime will go up.  My husband says: "But Beth, you lived in and just outside DC, in Virginia Beach, and IN Detroit.  The potential crime that will come here will never rival what you've lived with, and yet you want to move BACK to Norther Virginia, where you KNOW the crime rate is higher".  Yes, because that's where family is and I expect a certain amount of crime - a learning curve, if you will.  But here, because of where it is and the type of community it is, there's an expectation of safety.  The expectation that your neighbor is keeping an extra eye out for you.  Does that mean that crime doesn't happen here?  No (this whole fracking without unequivocal proof that nothing will happen thing is a crime, if you ask me).  That we shouldn't continue to be as vigilant here as in Norther Virginia or Virginia Beach?  No.  Is there a false sense of security?  Maybe.  It's ingrained in me to be vigilant, especially of the kids.  But, it is nice to know that there hasn't been (again, I hesitate to write this and jinx things) any gang related murders in the recent past.  I don't even know if there's a crime log for this town.  Where we just moved from, there was a website you could go on and find out the latest crime stats for a given street!

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I will gladly eat my words when the fracking goes on and nothing bad happens.  Do I want to be here if/when something happens?  Not really, but where ever we would go, there will be problems of some sort there too, hopefully nothing as life threatening or altering; no place is perfect.  As of this moment, we're staying here.  God help us.