I grew up in "flyover country", as some call it. Roughly, just north of the fork of the Chemung and Susquehanna rivers, on the border of New York and Pennsylvania.
I went back for my 30 year high school reunion and it was like visiting an archaeological dig. Nothing had changed other than the frackers, and we know how that turned out: they have now flooded the market with natural gas so that its price has crashed, along with the water quality of various aquifers. Nothing to see here!
Speaking of flood, in the early 70's the area had been hit by a massive flood, and you could still see signs of the wreckage: broken bridges and empty buildings. Not a month after my visit, another flood raged through the area that reached nearly to the same watermark. They hadn't even cleaned up from the last one 40 years before...
The steel and sister coal industry left the Northeast a wreck, with nothing but the woods to wander, hunting, praying for the glory days of post WWII. I knew folks that made their fortunes selling scrap metal to Uncle Sam to make tanks and guns. The woods up there are scattered with stone fences left over from a previous era of wanderings. I lived on an old potato farm that had been farmed so hard the shale was showing through in places.
The truth hurts, don't it?