Over the past two and a half years of the conflict, Gerhart has been arrested three times and jailed twice, mostly for violating the court order and going onto the easement to block heavy machinery. Recently, she attempted to create an intolerable stink for the workers by pouring a mixture of rancid milk, rotten eggs, and Tabasco sauce (to discourage animals from eating it) over a pile of logs along the pipeline, and by hanging empty cat-food cans from the trees. She was cited for bear baiting, a charge that is still pending. As we walked a half mile through her woods, which were littered with remnants from the battle—including a mess tent and a green banner announcing solidarity with the Rojava revolution in Kurdish Syria—she pointed out the places where she’d poured her noxious brew. “No one said I had to make their jobs comfortable,” she told me.

When we arrived at the bright-orange fence that marked the beginning of the easement, we caught the attention of five bearded pipeline workers in yellow vests and white hard hats. They’d already succeeded in placing the pipeline in the ground, and were currently working with three earthmovers and a bulldozer to remediate the land. The workers eyed her warily; one walked closer, carrying a camera and snapping pictures of us, and then picked up a phone, as if to call for backup. Gerhart noted somewhat gleefully that there was nothing he could do. We were standing on her property, and she was still allowed in this stretch of the woods. The company had employed a security firm that kept guards stationed by the Gerharts’ house, and someone had followed Elise to work, posted pictures of her online, and called her an eco-terrorist on a shadowy Facebook page called PA Progress. (The Gerharts currently have a suit in federal court against the page’s alleged creator, as well as against Energy Transfer Partners and others for violating their right to protest.) The family received death threats from people living nearby. Only the day before, Gerhart told me, workers had removed the two surveillance towers surrounding her home, but a series of blue and black signs warning visitors that they were being filmed and recorded still ran along the orange fence.

Late that afternoon, as the sun dropped behind the pine ridge, I sat with Gerhart and Elise around a kitchen table that was handmade by Gerhart’s eighty-seven-year-old husband, Steve, and carved with their names. I wondered if the Gerharts considered their battle a victory. After all, the pipeline was in the ground, and would soon be flowing with explosive liquids. Elise had hoped that they might be able to halt the company entirely, but her mother was more pragmatic. “We never intended to stop them,” she said. “We wanted to slow them down. They thought they’d be through here in three months and it took three years.” In the region, which locals call Pennsyltucky, there had been little chance of blocking the pipeline through politics. Seventy-three per cent of the county’s votes had gone to Trump—though, because of high poverty rates and low education rates, only a small proportion of the population actually voted. “People around here, for the most part, don’t get involved with politics,” Elise said. “A lot of people don’t vote because they don’t see value in it, because they haven’t been valued by those people who have been in those positions of power.” The protest was really a strategy to call attention to what the company was doing, which allowed people farther east along the pipeline, in wealthier and more densely populated places like Chester County, the time to organize. They’d taken their stand to draw the attention of people like Danielle Friel Otten, who had more means to fight than climbing trees.

The next morning, I visited Ralph Blume, a seventy-eight-year-old gun-shop owner who was sporting a thick gray beard and a blue button-down that was labelled “U.S. NAVY.” His land sits sixty miles east of Huntingdon along the pipeline, midway between the Gerharts’ camp and Friel Otten’s suburban neighborhood. As I drove there, I passed villages with names like Burnt Cabins, which were full of old brick homes set close to the roadside. The entrance to Blume’s Gunshop, in his old garage, was marked by a sign covered in pink hearts that read, “DEFEND WHAT YOU LOVE, RESIST MARINER EAST.” The walls and shelves were lined with shotguns, pink plastic stun guns designed for a woman’s purse, and water bottles filled with thick orange sediment from Blume’s tap. “I fought for this country,” Blume told me. “Then I came home and they’re taking my land.”

Blume is a Navy veteran, and lives with his wife, Doris. Three years ago, Energy Transfer Partners started digging on their land against Blume’s opposition, and Blume claims that the company ruined their well. Blume drove me on his yellow and green John Deere gator from his garage to the trailer where he lives, and opened the tap to show me the foul-smelling sediment that flows out. Blume and his wife were also furious that the workers had dug up their hayfield to install the pipe. Although the workers were gone, it was easy to see where the pipe lay: a yellow band of weeds, called foxtail, ran through the green hay where the earth had been replaced. “I won’t be able to grow anything here for a decade,” he said. Doris couldn’t walk, owing to age and infirmity, and relied on the gator to navigate the farm. If there was a leak in the pipe, she wouldn’t be able to trek half a mile upwind to escape the blast zone.

Blume lived in a less remote region than the Gerharts, and was slightly more hopeful about the prospect of opposing the pipeline through electoral politics. A local candidate running for state legislature named Emily Best had visited him. “She’s more of a farm girl than a politician,” he told me. Best had served in the Peace Corps in West Africa, and had a passion for agriculture. She was also the first Democrat to run in their conservative county in twelve years, and it was highly unlikely that she’d win. When I reached Best, she told me that she was running, in part, to give people a political choice for the first time in more than a decade. “We need to reinvigorate democracy in this area,” she said. “Even here, in this very conservative district, people realize that the economy is rigged against them.”

Blume doesn’t think of himself as a Democrat. “I think I'm registered as a Republican,” he said. But he’d voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential election—among only thirty-eight per cent of voters in his county to do so. Blume didn’t like Clinton’s policies, but he voted for her as a marketing strategy. “She would want to take guns,” he told me. “And as soon as you say, ‘You can’t have it,’ everybody wants one.” His best sales booms had occurred under the Clinton and Obama Administrations, amid fears that they would ban firearms. Blume didn’t think that a Democratic upset was likely, but he liked Best, and he wanted to see her party win, both to help him sell guns and to block the pipeline.