The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (27 page)

The landscape Dean had returned to, where he planned to live out his life, was very
old and also new, as particular as anything in America and also as generic, as beautiful
and as ugly. In his imagination it had become a nightmare, so profoundly wrong that
he called it sinful, and he hated the sin more than any casual visitor or distant
critic possibly could, yet he also saw here a dream of redemption so unlikely and
glorious that it could only fill the mind’s eye of a visionary native son.

Once, driving through Cleveland County, Dean happened to pass the hard-shell Baptist
church that his father had once tried to get but failed, the failure that had broken
his father’s will. Dean had gone down with him to Cleveland County and heard the sermon
that his father had given for his audition, back around 1975, so that decades later
he recognized the church—and he also noticed that there was now a fucking Bojangles’
right next door. For Dean, Bojangles’ had come to represent everything that was wrong
with the way Americans lived: how they raised their food and transported it across
the country, how they grew the crops to feed the animals they ate, the way they employed
the people who worked in the restaurants, the way the money left the community—everything
about it was wrong. Dean’s own business, gas and fast food, had become hateful to
him, and he saw the error of his ways as his father never had, and the conjunction
of his father’s legacy and his own struck him with bitter irony as he drove past.

He was seeing beyond the surfaces of the land to its hidden truths. Some nights he
sat up late on his front porch with a glass of Jack and listened to the trucks heading
south on 220, carrying crates of live chickens to the slaughterhouses—always under
cover of darkness, like a vast and shameful trafficking—chickens pumped full of hormones
that left them too big to walk—and he thought how these same chickens might return
from their destination as pieces of meat to the floodlit Bojangles’ up the hill from
his house, and that meat would be drowned in the bubbling fryers by employees whose
hatred of the job would leak into the cooked food, and that food would be served up
and eaten by customers who would grow obese and end up in the hospital in Greensboro
with diabetes or heart failure, a burden to the public, and later Dean would see them
riding around the Mayodan Wal-Mart in electric carts because they were too heavy to
walk the aisles of a Supercenter, just like hormone-fed chickens.

The traffic on 220, the lifeblood of his chain, made him think about all those engines
burning all those millions of gallons of gas that came from America’s enemies overseas,
and the millions of dollars leaking out of the local economy to the oil companies
and big-box retailers. He would pull his truck into a Marathon gas station to fill
up and notice the logo above the pump, with the words
ALL ROADS LEAD TO LIBERTY
written across a flag in the shape of the U.S. map, and it would make him a little
crazy to think of people around here buying into such hypocritical bullshit. They’d
grown dependent on the corporations and lost their independent spirit. They were supposed
to be Americans, not Americain’ts, but democracy was in one of those stages of decline.
It would take something big to rouse people in the Piedmont and make them act. Something
as big as peak oil, which, in Dean’s opinion, was the biggest thing in the twenty-first
century. The age of cheap energy had begun when Colonel Edwin Drake drilled the first
oil well in 1859 in Titusville, Pennsylvania, and it had created the greatest industrial
power the world had ever known, and now it was coming to an end.

In the last lines of
Think and Grow Rich
, Napoleon Hill quoted Emerson: “If we are related, we shall meet.” Dean, in his awakened
state, met a writer named James Howard Kunstler, through his books and his weekly
blog, Clusterfuck Nation. Kunstler, who lived in upstate New York, predicted the coming
of what he called “the long emergency,” drawing an apocalyptic picture of America
in an age of oil scarcity, with the collapse of the suburban, automobile-based way
of life, breakdowns in public order, scattered guerrilla uprisings, devolution of
the country into semiautonomous regions and localities, and immense hardships forced
on a people who had been living for half a century in “the greatest fiesta of luxury,
comfort, and leisure that the world has ever known.” Those best equipped to survive
would be Americans living on the land or in small towns, with local attachments, useful
vocations, practical skills, and a grown-up sense of civic responsibility. The losers
would be the exurbanites who chased the American dream in four thousand square feet
of house forty miles away from an office park, drove everywhere, shopped at Target
and Home Depot, and had long since lost the know-how to make their own fuel and food.
For reasons of geography, history, and culture, southerners would fare badly in the
long emergency, which would bring particularly high levels of delusional thinking
and violence to the South. It was a future that the author, who stood in the old native
line of puritan prophets, seemed to welcome, even desire.

All this resonated deeply with Dean. The sweeping statements, the all-or-nothing forecasts,
the sense of possessing a secret that most people couldn’t stand to hear, suited his
frame of mind. But a worldview was only the projection of psychological inclination
onto reality, and Dean was an optimist, a latter-day Horatio Alger. There was no Armageddon
without the Rapture. He fervently believed that out of this collapse would come a
new birth—a whole new way of life would emerge, right here in Rockingham County, and
around the country. In a decade or so, the whole landscape would be different. There
might be no more Wal-Marts. Exxon and Archer Daniels Midland would be moribund, brainless,
obsolete. With gas up to six or seven dollars a gallon, instead of centralization
and long-distance transportation and everything on a huge scale, the new economy would
be decentralized, local, and small-scale. Rural areas like the Piedmont were on the
cusp of revival, and everything they needed was right at hand, riches in the fallow
fields. In the age of riverboat travel there had been a gristmill every fifty miles
or so, where people produced flour using water power. In the coming years, small fuel
refineries and meat processors would spring up every fifty miles on Route 220. Instead
of mass production, it would be production by the masses. The future would take America
back into its past. In twenty years nothing would be recognizable. It would be a difficult
transformation, but on the other side lay an absolutely beautiful America.

“If this is a one-hundred-fifty-year anomaly,” Dean said, “where we took all the cheap,
affordable oil out of the ground, and used it to get us to where we are today—when
that starts to unwind, we will go back to where we were before, but yet we will have
learned so much in the process of all this new technology that we take with us.” And
the key, he believed, was biofuel. “This is the model that will go forward, this green
new economy. Unless they come up with something that will run these vehicles on air,
or something that is infinite in availability, this will rule for a thousand years.
It will be an agrarian economy, but locally. Who’s to say what the future holds, but
when these farmers can grow their own crops and power their own diesel tractors and
not be subjected to anybody and be their own boss, that’s a big change. And instead
of us thinking that we are going into the unwinding, to me this is the greatest economic
explosion that’s ever going to hit in our lifetimes, because all that money that’s
being concentrated at the top, with food, fuel, clothing—what else do they control?
banking—it might go back to little towns. I can see that happening.”

In the grip of this vision, Dean’s politics were taking a strange turn. He rejected
his own, his family’s, and his community’s conservative views. Now he believed that
the country’s problems had started with the Republicans. He lost his reverence for
Reagan, and he had never had any for Bush. But he wasn’t exactly a Democrat, either.
He was working things out on his own, using the Internet, without a political party
or trade association or labor union or newspaper, without any institution to guide
and support him. None of them had any credibility. He hated the banks and corporations
but he didn’t trust the government, which seemed to be in a conspiracy with big business.
If anything, his opinions were becoming more like those of the rural populists in
the late nineteenth century. “Sometimes I think I was born a hundred years too late,”
Dean said.

On the other side of Dean’s kitchen wall, his mother had Fox News on all day. When
Dean was a boy the family watched Walter Cronkite together, and back then his mother
had no strong political views to speak of, but now she was getting more and more conservative.
Her politics were based on “Bible principles,” which meant opposing abortion and homosexuality,
and since Fox and the Republican Party tied all their positions to religion, there
was nothing you could say to pry her away from them. So she and Dean avoided talking
about politics.

*   *   *

In 2007, Rocky Carter introduced Dean to a man named Gary Sink. Silver-haired, heavyset,
and conservative, Gary was retired from the printing and packaging business and serving
as president of the Piedmont Offshore Sport Fishing Club of Greensboro. But he saw
biodiesel as a smart investment in the future, and he saw Dean Price as a charismatic
entrepreneur, with an original vision, who knew how to talk and listen and figure
out how other people thought. In February 2007, Gary, Rocky, and Dean traveled out
to Oregon to look at a local farmer’s seed-crushing machines, and they ended up buying
three and having them shipped back to Virginia. The trip tied the three men closer
together and affirmed the venture they were about to undertake. In September, they
incorporated Red Birch Energy as equal partners, with Gary as president and Dean vice
president. The idea was for each of them to invest around thirty thousand dollars.
Rocky’s portion went into renovating a storage facility, which sat on a piece of undeveloped
property Dean owned next to his truck stop in Bassett, Virginia, into a biodiesel
refinery, housed in a structure of sheet metal and knotty pine boards, alongside a
grain tower. To design the refinery they hired an engineer from Winston-Salem named
Derrick Gortman, who had grown up on a two-hundred-acre tobacco farm. After the family’s
tobacco barn burned down, Derrick tried corn, then strawberries, but he could barely
break even, and the farm was now sitting fallow. Derrick joined Red Birch and installed
the reactor. On the walls Dean hung some of the old soda, ice cream, and bread signs
that he’d collected at antiques shops and flea markets. For 2009, its first year of
full production, Red Birch contracted to buy twelve hundred acres of winter canola
from twenty-five local farmers, paying nine dollars a bushel, more than twice the
price of corn. Dean also planted a small patch of canola right there between the refinery
and Route 220, to show local farmers that this unknown crop grew easily in the Piedmont’s
red clay soil. The fuel would be sold to Dean’s truck stop next door—a 20 percent
biodiesel blend would go straight into the trucks filling up at his pumps. Everything
would be in one place, a closed-loop system, from farm to pump, cutting out all the
middlemen and transportation costs, staying competitive with or underselling the price
of regular diesel.

Nothing like it existed anywhere in the country, and when the refinery was finished,
in the early summer of 2008—an auspicious moment, with fuel prices across the country
soaring to $4.50 a gallon, the roads around the Piedmont turning desolate, and the
presidential candidates trying to appease an angry public—the sign Dean and Gary put
up outside the plant proudly declared
RED BIRCH ENERGY: AMERICA’S 1ST BIODIESEL TRUCK STOP
.

They raised a giant American flag high above the grain tower. The canola patch by
the highway was a field of velvety yellow flowers blooming on waist-high stalks.

That summer, local newspapers began to notice that something interesting was happening
up on Route 220. They sent reporters to Bassett, where Dean Price had the quotes they
needed. “We grow it, we make it, we sell it,” he explained to the
Winston-Salem Journal
. “Everything is within house. We don’t have to go anywhere else to get the fuel.”
“Canola will take the place of tobacco as the cash crop of the future,” he told the
Greensboro
News & Record
. “The best thing that could happen to this country is eight-dollar gas, because that
would cause us to get off of it.” “A lot of truckers are farmers and a lot of farmers
are truckers,” he told the
Richmond Times-Dispatch
, “and they’ll patronize each other.” He gushed to the
Martinsville Bulletin
, “This industry is laden with high-paying green-collar jobs”—seventy-five or a hundred
jobs per truck stop, some of them paying twenty-five dollars an hour, jobs that couldn’t
be outsourced to China, jobs that would go to people in Henry County, Virginia, where
unemployment was over 20 percent, and to people all over the countryside if the Red
Birch model were franchised: jobs farming the crop, manufacturing the equipment, constructing
the refineries, making the fuel, regulating it in state and federal agencies, teaching
the technology at community colleges. “We are advocates of small-scale, farmer-owned
biorefineries,” he told the
Carolina-Virginia Farmer
. “For every dollar you spend on biofuel that is produced locally, ninety cents of
that dollar stays local. Now think about the economic impact that would have if you
circulate that through the economy, locally, five or six times. It could be huge—an
economic boom for this country.” It was good for the environment and improved the
fuel mileage of eighteen-wheelers. Dean quoted Jefferson on the cultivators of the
earth and talked about reviving the civic values of the country. He appealed to patriotism
and American independence. If Iran and Iraq started fighting over an oil field, or
America went to war with China, or a Muslim terrorist with a dirty bomb took out the
power grid on the East Coast, Red Birch would stay on line, and the trucks on Route
220 would keep rolling. “It’s win-win-win-win-win,” Dean said.