Burning Oil
by John Janovy
~ M. R. Raupach, G. Marland, P. Ciais, C. LeQuere, J. G. Canadell, J. G. Klepper, and C.B. Field. (2007, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 104:10288-10293.)
My father-in-law Glenn Oneth didn’t like to be in debt, so he paid cash for his house at 321 West Wade. He also had rental properties — one behind his house, the others in El Reno, Oklahoma, the old Rock Island railroad town. After I’m gone, Glenn used to say, those rental houses will take care of Mama. Genevieve Oneth, “Mama,” his wife, worked as a teacher; it wasn’t entirely certain that she needed “taking care of.” Nor was it entirely certain where Glenn had gotten the cash to buy a house. His employment consisted of promoting addiction, of making sure Americans remained hooked on that essential — some would say ultimately deadly — element of post WWII life: the automobile. If my own father, John Janovy, an Oklahoma petroleum geologist, was committed to finding oil, Glenn was committed to helping burn it up. In between the lines pointing to oil on John’s geological maps and the twist of the key to fire up an automobile’s engine lay a nation’s dream, its identity, and its disease.
“Cars’ll be the death of this country,” says Glenn, as he pops open the distributor cap on my green and white 1955 Ford. He pulls a small screw driver out of his shirt pocket, loosens the ignition points, then takes a matchbook out of the same shirt pocket, opens it, and uses its cover as a spacer gauge to set the gap. He tightens the screws holding the points in place, snaps the cover and clips back on, returns his tools to their hiding places in his shirt pocket, and bites on his pipe, the one with the metal ventilated stem. Then he nods. I turn the key. The vehicle purrs. He slams the hood. It’s just as simple as that. He will be long dead before this kind of work gets done by a computer. Whatever information he needs to make a few adjustments will be sent into a black box that anyone can attach some wires to then read something about performance on a screen instead of being sent into his brain by an invisible, indeed indescribable, mystic sense derived from experience, the lessons of time and practice, of what makes an internal combustion engine work.
While art may have once been considered an essential component of our answer to the leading question of our time — What is a human being? — the automobile has since become an essential component of our answer, although it could be argued that molecular biology, computers, and shoulder-fired weapons are close rivals. But humans travel, period. There is plenty of evidence that this tendency is of genetic origin, perhaps part of our species’ character. Before we domesticated horses, we walked. Once we domesticated horses, we rode. Once we invented trains, we built tracks and rode long distances relatively quickly. Once we invented the internal combustion engine and the automobile, we bought these machines and made them a part of our personal identity.
If the malignant disease promoted by John Janovy and Glenn Oneth continues to run its natural course, then history might come full circle when oil reserves read “E” and there is nothing left to burn. We might have to get out of our cars and back on the train — if not a horse or our own two feet.
If “What is a human being?” is the leading question of our time, then “What will a human being be a thousand years from now?” is perhaps one of the most intriguing. We know that in a thousand years the planet’s fossil fuel will be exhausted. We know that in a thousand years, there will be no need for petroleum geologists, and probably none for auto mechanics, either. In the meantime, driving — that quintessential American addiction — is inextricably linked to everything: work, romance, and individual and collective identity. There is hardly a better place to contemplate the wonders of an automobile than out on the open road, and if there is an ideal open road, deep in the heart of America, indeed deep into both the geographic and metaphorical center of our nation, then it must be State Highway 15 across Kansas.
What does a person think about during a drive across Kansas? It depends on when you take the drive, and on your definition of “when.” When you don’t want to, but have to because your sister just called to tell you that your father has gotten so weak from his cancer that he can’t take his addictive painkillers so is having withdrawals? When you don’t have to but want to because you’re sick and tired of the Nebraska winter and wish to see the forsythia blooming and leaves starting to push out of their sheaths? When you feel an obligation to visit relatives, just to keep in touch, personally, just to make sure they know you’ll drive across Kansas to see them? When your mother-in-law Genevieve has finally died? When your only surviving paternal relative is having her 90th birthday? Yes, on all these occasions, something has to be thought about during the drive across Kansas, something that will take your mind off the fact that you’ve packed yourself and your family into America’s major public health hazard and are now zinging it across the prairie at up to 70 miles per hour.
For me that “something” is my life as remembered — memories that are presumably “true” but in fact have been strongly shaped by parents, who assembled the environment in which those memories were formed. From a father who searched for oil, I learned that automobiles were more than mere transportation. Thus we never just went somewhere; we had to also be doing something by going there, if that something were only — and I used the word “only” advisedly here — studying local landscape and distant clouds. From a mother who sought comfort in books, good books, interesting books, I either learned or inherited the need to also be thinking about something along the way. And what is there to think about on a drive across Kansas? Many things: Coronado’s early explorations in search of Quivira, what the prairies must have looked like to Native Americans before Spaniards brought horses again to the New World, and the post-modern devolution of American science education symbolized by the cultural clashes over, of all things, evolution. But in all those decades of driving across Kansas, studying and thinking, what occupied my thoughts most of the time was the evolution of cars.
Because of changes in automotive technology during the time since my parents, Bernice and John, bought their first automobile, the historical narrative that follows is one no sixteen year old, just having passed his or her first driving test, will ever be able to write fifty years from now. Fifty years is just a blink, even in a human life. It has been longer than that since a strange man grabbed my arm in the downtown Oklahoma City Library on May 17, 1954, and shouted “They gonna make you go to school with the niggers! Whataya think uh that!?” It has been more than fifty years since the launching of Sputnik I, the event that ushered in the age of truly meaningful space exploration. It has been more than fifty years since President Harry Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur of his command in Korea and the general then uttered those memorable words “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” It has been more than fifty years since the Joseph McCarthy House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, since the last undisputed American Civil War veteran died, since the last Jew was gassed in Auschwitz II, and since an atomic weapon was last used in war. Fifty years ago, a carburetor was one of the most mysterious of all automotive devices; fifty years from now the word “carburetor” will have vanished from the average American’s lexicon and migrated over into the realm of antique automobile collector and Museum of Science and Industry staff argot, if it has not done so already.
Thus driving across Kansas for most of the last half of the 20th Century is actually a lifetime of research on the United States’ addiction to fossil fuels and the devices we developed after WWII to help maintain that addiction. Any person who has lived through post-war American cultural, economic and political evolution, and has spent most of that time outside one of our inner cities, has enough experience to write their own tale about their family automobiles, and they should, for family history from 1945 to 2007 is also national history, and national history makes up military history, and all this history has been written because of global forces humans can’t control, namely, the burial of Mesozoic algae and the drifting of continents — forces that delivered the American way of life into Middle Eastern hands.
Of the major components that make up the American identity — fuel, service, and car — I was born into one, married into another, and bought the third, making for an interesting tale to add to all of this history.
The automobile was a central player when my wife Karen and I had our first date in the fall of 1958. A friend offered to drive some girls to Dallas if they would buy the gas; I went with them and she was one of the girls. She was also the daughter of Glenn, the service manager at the Ford agency in El Reno, Oklahoma, and the man who would later fix my 1955 Ford with a screwdriver and matchbook.
Obviously, after I met Karen, I drove Fords, although my family had owned two Chevrolets — a 1948 two-door Fleetline and a 1953 four-door, blue and white Model 150. In 1949, we drove the Fleetline from Oklahoma to California to visit my aunt and grandmother, and when the temperature reached 120 degrees as we drove through the Arizona desert, we bought a canvas water bag that we had seen hanging on the grills of all the cars coming out of the desert. The water bag seemed more like a fashion statement than an essential emergency item to me, and fortunately we didn’t need it. For years afterwards the water bag hung in our Oklahoma City garage, a reminder of the California vacation taken when my mother Bernice was young and beautiful and healthy. I also learned to drive in the Fleetline, although in a clear violation of company policy, my father taught me the rudiments of clutch work in his company car, a 1952 4-door Ford. I loved the Ford, tolerated the Chevy; both were, of course, standard shift. Standard shift is no longer a necessity in a personal or family vehicle; if they fulfill any useful role for typical Americans today, standard transmissions are life style statements. My dad eventually traded that 1948 Chevrolet for the 1953 model, which later gave way to a 1955 Ford. None of these cars came with seat belts.
The 1953 blue and white Chevy felt solid and I liked the way it shifted, but the first time I drove it to El Reno to visit Karen, her whole family teased me unmercifully about driving a “Chiv-uh-lay.” So I never drove that car to El Reno again.
In November of 1959, when I gave her her engagement ring, I was in the army at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, driving the 4-door 1955 Ford, my favorite of all cars because, with $800 of my own money, I bought it from my father. I was determined that Karen would be my wife, and I had money in my pocket — namely, my second lieutenant’s uniform allowance — so spent it in Lawton, Oklahoma, on an engagement ring and matching wedding band. The rings had an unusual emerald-cut design that I thought she’d like. When I drove from Ft. Sill to Norman it was in a Ford; one did not deliver an engagement ring to Glenn Oneth’s daughter in a Chiv-uh-lay. And despite my driving a Ford, Glenn still seemed genuinely disappointed when Karen and I became engaged. He immediately started talking about his hopes for Karen to finish school. “School” in this case meant college. Karen would be the first of Glenn’s children to get a college degree, but she was two years away from graduation, so that engagement ring must have looked like a memory of what marriage can do to one’s educational plans.
The seat belts in this particular 1955 Ford were ones that I’d installed myself, and of course they only belted around the waist, not over the shoulder, too. I consider it enormous good fortune to have never needed them. The seat covers were vinyl and torn in a place or two. I bought my first set of tires for that particular car, with my own money, and my driving habits changed within minutes of writing the check. My own father showed me how to replace the points and plugs and how to adjust the valves. I learned from experience how to replace fan belts, heater and radiator hoses, brake shoes, a fuel pump, and a water pump.
A few days after my officers’ training course at Ft. Sill was completed, now at home at my parents’ house in Oklahoma City, I got into the 1955 Ford for a trip to Columbus, Georgia, and Ft. Benning, where I was to start parachute training. But the car was not running very well, so I messed around a little bit with the carburetor. In the process, I discovered that the housing was cracked. However, if I pushed the whole carburetor-air cleaner apparatus to the left, the car would run much more smoothly. So I found a coat hanger, attached it to the carburetor, wired it tightly to something on the left side of the engine compartment, and started off toward Memphis.
Basil Cronin, an Army buddy who’d be my friend for years to come, rode with me to Ft. Benning. Among the items packed for my trip was a terra cotta sculpture of a reclining female nude that Karen had made in one of her art classes. Because it was about the only place left for this terra cotta lady, I put her up in the back seat window ledge. If I’d hit anything, that little statue would have flown forward and decapitated one of us, but I kept watch on her during the trip, thinking of my fiancé, and worrying not at all about my 1955 green and white 4-door Ford whose carburetor had been fixed with a coat hanger for a cross-country trip. Somewhere along the way, the nude lady’s foot got broken off, but she still had that relatively seductive look, especially in the rear view mirror, that a 22-year old Second Lieutenant, separated from his bride-to-be, would appreciate.
The terra cotta reclining nude remained a part of my away-from-home life for the next 35 years. She stayed with me through research on bird malaria and mosquitoes, commuting regularly across half of Kansas, through another cross-country move to New Brunswick, New Jersey, and halfway back across America to Lincoln, Nebraska. She rode along in several subsequent Fords, watching over my shoulder, a silent back seat non-driver. When we settled into Nebraska she became a part of my office decorations and remained in this role through most of my academic career. She watched me struggle through those first research projects as an untenured professor, those first grant proposals, first graduate students, first committee assignments, and first 300-student biology classes. As my office plants grew, she acquired the aura of a jungle goddess, nestling among the philodendron leaves on top of my file cabinets, watching the parade of young people through my office. Periodically I’d glance over at her, thinking about Karen’s fingers as they’d pressed the clay in 1958, shaping the bits into the shapes that would become her arms and legs.
Finally one day I took the clay lady home and put her away high up on a shelf. Why? Times had changed. My nation had evolved. It was no longer politically correct to have a terra cotta nude in a university science professor’s office (a state owned building, constructed with tax money). After all, John Ashcroft, the United States Attorney General, had the bronze breasts of a statue covered so that he would not have to appear on national television with a piece of hackneyed sculpture typical of any art museum in the world, and if he was embarrassed by a that, there’s no telling what kind of a reaction my students would have to a naked lady hiding beneath the philodendron on my file cabinet.
As I put my hand around my little lady’s waist and retrieved her disconnected foot, I could not help but think about the truly fundamental contrasts between art, basic biology, and politics. Clay figurines — female nudes with exaggerated breasts and hips — have been collected from Cro-Magnon sites. At least four billion people must see an unclothed member of the opposite sex every day, sometimes several times a day, and surely more often than they see the purring engines of their vehicles, which are often given a female name if not simply referred to as “she” or called “baby.” Certainly the amount of damage done to society by an artistic rendition of a nude must be relatively immeasurable, especially compared to the damage done by men fighting with real weapons in the countries that have a great supply of the black milk we need for the “baby” we are not embarrassed to see naked. But with information-age technology, like the computer-generated special effects used to produce realistic and violent movies and television shows, global cultural forces had come home to Middle America, and like greenhouse gas emissions, changed things in a way few people noticed, at which point I took my terra cotta jungle goddess home and put her on a shelf in my basement office. The United States’ attorney general at the time would have been proud. Who knows when a coed might accidentally see that thing on a Friday when she and her boyfriend were headed to the downtown movie megaplex later that evening to take in Bruce Willis and Die Hard 4.
If the nation’s Attorney General was embarrassed by some bronze breasts, I was even more embarrassed by his inability to talk about Hellenistic sculpture in a casual way that might be of minor educational value to a national audience if asked about his sculpture companion, but I was determined to not be reprimanded because of a small piece of art with enormous personal significance. There was only a miniscule chance this reprimand would happen, of course, but the cultural evolution indicator is the fact that I was concerned enough to actively avoid the possibility. I even envisioned Bill O’Reilly using the terra cotta sculpture as exhibit number one in a piece about obscenity in tax-supported professor offices. I imagined myself bemoaning the fact that her ankle was broken instead of responding to questions about her posture and non-existent clothing.
The mental journey from a 10,000 year old Cro-Magnon fertility idol to an imagined propriety violation in Nebraska may seem greater than one from the Big Bang to SuperBowl, but it’s no further, in my mind, than either the changes in automotive technology since WWII — a measure of our determination to burn oil in order to move — or the cultural distance between populations presently occupying various geographical regions of Earth — populations in possession of oil that other populations seem hell-bent on burning. At the same time as culture warrior John Ashcroft stood demanding that a bronze nude be clothed, there were places on Earth where, by virtue of religious tradition turned into national law, girls were not allowed to go to school, work outside the home, or drive a car. These two places might represent the extreme points of a fossil fuel compass — the major consumers and the major suppliers — but were she still alive, my mother would lay down her book of English literature and pass immediate, scathing judgment on both cultures. Among her toxic proscriptions would be a volume of Shakespeare; she’d probably pick it up and turn to a page, reading out loud some passage about the arrogance of power and the ability of men to demonize not only women, but also one another.
It doesn’t take an avant guard artist to take information from the last few paragraphs and produce a picture made of oil, religion, and sex, categorized respectively as birthright, law, and evil. Nor does it take much effort to ask interesting questions about our current global socio-economic interactions, questions such as “What would the world be like today if the internal combustion engine had never been invented?” or “Was the invention of such an engine inevitable, given the development of metallurgy and the discovery that petroleum would actually burn?” And finally we could ask: “What would the land of Oklahoma be like had engines and oil not been a part of the human experience?” Would Oklahoma have been, in historian Angie Debo’s words, a place where “…all the American traits have been intensified.”? Would Debo ask if “The one who can interpret Oklahoma can grasp the meaning of America in the modern world”? I believe the answer to these last two questions is “no.” Oklahoma, like America, has been influenced by global forces humans can’t control, but Oklahoma is only one part of the whole story of how the American way of life has ended up in Middle Eastern hands. Family history is national history, national history is military history.
Since that weekend when we drove to El Reno with an engagement ring on Karen’s finger, we have had a long relationship with Ford Motor Company, and our family ties have been maintained as much as anything by driving across Kansas for three and a half decades in various Ford and Mercury vehicles. The automobile controlled our lives yet it also gave us unparallel freedom, which seems to be a universal narrative for the families of our evolving nation and in this short epoch of human history. And if the scientists are correct, children born in Nebraska in 2011 will live to see the end of petroleum as a factor in human lives, although just prior to that end, these same scientists might predict that petroleum would be the factor shaping the human experience.
Paleontologists tell us that there have been easily recognizable human beings, probably doing things we would consider extremely common and, well, human, for at least 250,000 years, and surprisingly, human-like species have been around for several million years before that. We know that for at least 50,000 years humans have been producing spectacular art that stands the test of time, art that in itself is a litmus test for being human. But we’ve only had cars for about a hundred years, and if the pundits are correct, petroleum to allow this luxury may last for another hundred years at the most. So unless Detroit or Tokyo or some other fair industrial city learns how to produce cars that can run on seawater, the rather stunning mobility of modern humanity will come to a grinding halt. Instead of rolling blackouts, we’ll have rolling stay-at-homes. In another 50,000 years, paleontologists will be studying the plastic dashboards and door panels they’ve dug up from the rubble that used to be New York City and wondering what in the hell humans actually did with them. Thus, the record of this contemporary fraction of human history needs to be as rich as possible, because when it’s over, we’ll be back to horses and our own two feet.
There is one other reason why I’m telling this story, however, and that is because it documents one family’s interaction with an extraordinarily expensive, highly dangerous, pervasive, and rapidly evolving technology that has finally become institutionalized. By “institutionalized” I mean that today almost nobody works on his or her own cars. The vast majority of people who own and use automotive products daily have become extremely dependent not only on the vehicles themselves, but also on the service industry. We don’t do our own tune-ups now any more than we do our own appendectomies.
But this extreme dependence on a defining body of technology was not always the case. The pejorative term “shade tree mechanic” is a familiar one to older folks, but it’s now passing from our lexicon. For me, the hands-on part of this story of techno-human evolution ended in 1998. That’s when I bought a 1997 Dodge Dakota pickup truck, the first automotive product I’ve owned that I simply could not work on. Its immediate predecessor, a 1993 Dodge Dakota pickup, was my first rebellion against Ford Motor Company, and I worked on it. Before I bought that pickup in the small western Nebraska town of Ogallala, I called Karen’s brother Eddie, who builds cars from the frame up, and asked him for advice. He told me that police departments often bought Dodges and drove them 200,000 miles without much trouble.
When I stopped at a service station for $5 worth of gas before taking the 1993 Dakota out on the interstate for a requisite 100MPH test, the guy who took my money asked if I was actually thinking about buying it. When I answered “Yes, my brother-in-law says the cops drive them 200,000 miles,” he simply shook his head. I asked him why and he said “Because it’s a Dodge.” After my 1993 Dakota had 130,000 miles on it, I vowed to buy another one, and I did. Both of these pickups are, or were, in Karen’s words, “That damned Dodge.” Thus she preserves the essence of her father in our daily lives, using my truck, even as we both pass into the new automobile age together, she with her new white Mercury Sable and me with my damned Dodge, neither of which is amenable to self-repair or owner maintenance beyond replenishment of windshield washer fluid and the airing of tires.
Anyone who has lived through most of post-war American history, coming of age in the 1950s, and finding reasonable employment, could write a tale of gasoline prices, home and highway repair jobs, and fond memories. Among the same Americans, at least two million of us, since 1950, could also write stories of tragedy, incredible sadness, and loss, all stemming from our interactions with the automobile. I encourage all of you who may be reading this essay, and are over sixty, to fire up your laptop and start your own memoir in which the motor car is a central player. Then send your long letter off to your children, and donate copies to the archives department of your local library. A hundred years is not very long. Most of us senior citizens know people who are in their nineties. But a hundred years from now, the nation’s supply of narratives about our personal interactions with a vanishing technology will be extraordinarily valuable.
And if you were born into one industry, committed to the finding of petroleum, and married into another industry, this one committed to burning petroleum, then our collective stories of post-war, and sometimes pre-war, travel around the country in personal vehicles will comprise a database of stunning uniqueness. Unlike art, which springs from deep within a human soul or mind, and can be dabbed on a Spanish cave wall or splattered on a canvas on the floor, thus repeatedly generated as long as humans live, the oil will be used up, gone forever. The oil will be gone forever, at least as human measure “forever.”
And if you are lucky, your great grandchildren will not be living when it happens. But don’t bet the farm.
