We’ve certainly spilled a lot of ink on the natural gas drilling issue in the last few months, but it wasn’t until last week that the situation became tangible to me.

It’s fairly easy to sit back and read all the stories and letters we’ve printed on the issue as they come past my desk, but sometimes I really need to descend from the Ivory Tower for reality to sink in.

That’s just what happened last week when an intrepid colleague and I took a little field trip into the hinterlands of Chenango County to take an up close (or as close as we could get) look at the gas drilling issue – the apparatus itself.

I’d been wanting to send a reporter out to get me some good pictures of a real, live Chenango County gas rig for quite some time. We had one set that we’ve used to exhaustion over the past couple years, and there’s only so many stock photos you can pull from the Internet (like the time I mistakenly used an oil well as an illustration) before entering cheesy territory.

So there I was, on a bucolic August day standing on Beaver Meadow Road out in East Jesus when, suddenly, the natural gas saga became less ink on paper and more metal on earth. If you’ve never seen one of these big rigs (and I’m using layman’s terms here, I know – even though I’ve become surprisingly well-versed in hydro-fracking recently) in person, I’d highly recommend doing so.