When I drove up to the two-room offices of Paxton Water Supply, in a strip mall next to a car wash about a mile from a bridge that crosses the Sabine River into Louisiana, I was expecting to meet the head of the small public utility and a local rancher. But there were more than forty other people waiting in the parking lot to have a word with the Texas Monthly reporter from Austin.The small town of Joaquin sits on the outskirts of the Haynesville Shale, a subterranean rock formation that contains an enormous reserve of natural gas that gets richer as you move northeast into Louisiana. Drilling and operating wells to access that energy source generates waste—including contaminated soil and used drilling fluid—that has…