25 January 2010 CRUNCH by Leslie Connor, HarperCollins/Katherine Tegen Books, Earth Day, 2010, 336p., ISBN: 978-0-06-169229-1
"Change it had to come
We knew it all along"
-- The Who, "Won't Get Fooled Again"
"The cost of making provision for rapid transit would, in 1955, be minimal in terms of the expressway's over-all cost: acquiring 240 feet of land instead of 200 feet and building heavier foundations would cost, for the whole eighty-five-mile length of the expressway, perhaps an extra $20,000,000. The expressway was going to cost $500,000,000 anyway. For $20,000,000 more -- for an increase in the cost of only 4 percent -- you could take the step that would insure that the expressway would one day be able to fulfill the function for which it was being built."
-- Robert A. Caro from his Pulitzer Prize winning THE POWER BROKER: ROBERT MOSES AND THE FALL OF NEW YORK (Knopf, 1974)
Caro was writing about the Long Island Expressway. I recall it being somewhere around 1960 when, on a Saturday afternoon, my father drove me up South Oyster Bay Road to take a look. We were living in nearby Plainview at the time, and work on the Expressway had just reached that point on its trek eastward. All of the giant machines were parked below on the yet-to-be-paved roadway for the weekend. It was quite an impressive sight, to the degree that I can well recall that experience so vividly a half-century later.
I was born the same year as the LIE, which came to be known as the World's Longest Parking Lot. Robert Moses had had his way: The land necessary for eventually providing rapid transit along the LIE was deliberately not acquired. In THE POWER BROKER, Caro notes how many communities in Brooklyn and Queens had developed in relationship to their proximity to subway stations. People could choose to live where they were able to walk to and from the subway on workdays, and real downtown areas developed. As Caro proposed, the development of suburban Long Island would have evolved entirely differently if rapid transit stations had been built along those eighty-five miles of the Long Island Expressway.
And we can only imagine, if rapid transit had been built into the LIE, how much petroleum would have been saved over these fifty-five years that me and the LIE have now been around.
"...Try telling a pair of five-year-olds that you don't know when their mommy and daddy are coming home.
"'I-I just really wanted them to come home now,' Angus said. He blinked back tears.
"'W-well, how many days?' Eva wanted to know. She was trying hard to suck it up too.
"Lil squatted down, arms wide. 'Okay, come here,' she said. She gathered them in. 'I know you miss them. But you have Vince and Dew and me. We're going to keep on taking good care of you. And when there is enough fuel again, Mom and Dad will come straight home to us. This is just some bad luck. Nobody could have known.'
"But part of me was thinking that we should have known. Or somebody should have."
In Leslie Connor's fun and provocative new book CRUNCH, there isn't a fuel shortage going on. There is no more fuel, period. The five Marriss kids are home alone. Dad is a trucker and Mom is with him because it is their annual work/pleasure on the road anniversary celebration. Now Mom and Dad are out of diesel and stuck up in Canada because gasoline and diesel fuel have run out. Everywhere.
It being summer, fourteen-year-old Dewey, from whose point of view the story is told, has already been busy at home, working with brother Vince at the family bicycle repair business -- the side business his dad had started -- while the parents are gone. To characterize the bicycle repair business as suddenly booming now -- now that there is no more fuel -- is an understatement. In fact, it is becoming Dewey's life and obsession.
The highway is free of motor vehicles. Walkers are over to the right using the slow lane and the fastest bicyclists are utilizing the left hand passing lane.
"No anchovies? You've got the wrong man. I spell my name..."
-- from The Further Adventures of Nick Danger
No fuel also means no trucking of food or other goods, which means that buying local is going to quickly become a way of life.
How bad and how quickly might this spiral out of control? Dewey goes shopping with big sister Lil while Vince guards the bicycles outside:
"She stood staring at the shelves, then at other people's carts. The look on her face was suddenly strange. 'I think we should skip the list and just get what we can get,' she said. 'And a lot of it.'
"'What do you mean?'
"'Let's just get to it,' she said. She leaned toward me and spoke quietly. 'Start picking things that we can store for a while. Like that cheddar. That was a good one, Dew.'
"Now I was kind of creeped out. This grocery run felt like a preemptive strike."
Imagine what all of this would be like in reality. Think about where you live and what it would be like if you could suddenly only travel by foot or bicycle.
Or imagine what it would be like if we have more warning than they have gotten in this rapidly intensifying story. Consider how you might utilize your motor vehicles differently if supply concerns were to cause gasoline to rise to $6 per gallon, $10 per gallon, $15 per gallon, or $20 per gallon.
Impossible, you say? Look at the rising price of gold, and think about how many more people would be involved in bidding up the price of gasoline than the price of gold. If you could lock in, say, a thousand gallons of gasoline at near today's prices, knowing that it would double in price over the next six months, wouldn't you go to some lengths to do so yourself? (Which, of course, creates a self-fulfilling prophesy.) What else might you do if you were faced with walking or bicycling from this point forward?
If you add in the cost of the fuel consumed at even $10 per gallon, how much will it really be costing you for that espresso or that pint of ice cream that you impulsively decide that you cannot do without and hop into the car for? How about the cost of driving to the City for the day because you cannot be bothered with the inconvenience of sitting on the bus for all those hours of stops and then having to transfer to city buses to get to you destinations?
Might it be a good idea for us to begin changing our behaviors now, rather than waiting for The Crunch to hit?
"Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
till it's gone."
It IS a pain in the neck to take the bus. I only do it some of the times that I go down to San Franciso or Oakland or San Jose. (It doesn't help that a decade ago Golden Gate Transit eliminated the commute route that passed within a mile of my farm.) But if the alternatives were walking or bicycling sixty or more miles...
Reading CRUNCH, as we head for the fortieth anniversary of the first Earth Day, I've feeling like a failure. My behavior, my modeling, and my advocacy have been so inconsistent. I knew in the Seventies what was coming. My good intentions have been there, but the follow-through hasn't been. At least not enough to match the urgency of the problem. I have never really treated it like the life and death situation that it will be for many.
It could all come to pass sooner rather than later. Doing a quick check online, I've just found a CNN article from 2003 discussing how some Swedish scientists were saying that petroleum producing nations have wildly inflated estimates of their reserves, that petroleum production will peak in 2010 (instead of 2050 as had once been predicted), and that prices will thereafter begin to rise astronomically.
But irregardless of the exact timing, the change it has to come. We've known it all along. And after the past forty years I also know that government is not going to magically make it happen. We need to do it ourselves. And so, I will begin my morning with one little step and one promise for the day: I'll make a list of everything else I need to get done in town (where I'm heading for a dental check-up this morning), and promise myself that I'll not go running back to town again until I have another full list of errands to accomplish.
One step at a time...
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