The Miracle of Petroleum

We leave next Friday for our summer vacation, and it is going to be the last long one for a while. We’re going to take the city bus down to the Railrunner depot to head down to Albuquerque. We’ll walk down to the Flying Star for breakfast, (I love their Southwest Bennie), and then knock around Albuquerque until it’s time for us to board Amtrak’s Southwest Chief.

Then it’s up to Chicago in coach, where we catch the Capitol Limited for Washington DC. We do have a family bedroom on the second half of each trip, so we get to hang out in the first class waiting room in Chicago.

We’ll be visiting friends and family in the DC area, then renting a car to drive down to visit my mother in South Carolina. Then, we’ll travel up the coast from Myrtle Beach, hang out with my wife’s family in DC a little while longer and hop the Amtrak back to New Mexico. If there’s anyone along our route who wants to pay me a handsome sum to give a lecture on living carfree, you’re welcome to contact me.

The idea of that train travel and the car rental has brought home to me what a miracle we have in petroleum. Apart from its destructive aspects, it is amazing that you can pump a very inexpensive — even now — amount of the stuff in your tank and travel independently wherever the network of roads takes you at an incredible speed. Having primarily bicycled for the past seven years lifts my perception of automobiles out of the realm of the ordinary into the realm of miraculous. That we, as a society, treat the automobile as such an everyday thing, and that we’re basically pissing away the top of the Peak Oil bell curve on trips of three miles or less is a true shame.

When I see people driving their children a few blocks to school, and then driving themselves a couple of miles further to work, I want to say to them, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves? Aren’t you embarrassed?” But of course they’re not. Like stuffing ourselves beyond reason on a batch of cookies when they’re lying around our house, we seem to be programmed to piss away natural resources when they seem to be available to us. Most people probably don’t even think about it. Many who do, feel that they have no choice. They don’t feel safe bicycling. The bus systems also feel dangerous to them, and also *gasp* inconvenient.

I see a tragedy in the making. I’m not sure if it will be Jim Kunstler’s Long Emergency, or if there will be a series of adjustments to our lifestyles that will stave off starvation and die-offs and so on. Population overshoot and die-off seems to be the order of natural systems, only in the case of humanity, we’re not coyotes growing fat on an overpopulation of rabbits, but humans doing the same thing on an over-sufficient input of fossil fuels. It would be nice if we stopped most of the superfluous use and reserved them for the things which have become essential in our modern age. We simply don’t seem, as a species, to possess that sort of wisdom.

I’m not particularly worried. Life always muddles on, and in thinking about writing this post, I thought about one of the earliest poems I remember studying in grade school, the one that begins “About suffering, they were never wrong, the old masters. . .” Which, through the miracle of Google, I will now look up:

Musée des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Lifted from the Poetry X website.

We have all become like Icarus, only our wax wings are the miraculous things we can do with petroleum. Rather than use this resource with temperance and moderation, we’re going as far and as fast as we can.

And once it is gone, those who are left are going to walk away and continue.

It will make a glorious and tragic story.

As for myself, I’ll be a little embarrassed and a little ashamed as I drive around on vacation in our rental car, but I’m using it for an exceptional journey, and I understand the miraculous nature of what we are about to do.

I may or may not update the blog while I’m away. Probably not. I’m also taking a little bit of a digital vacation. I’m off Facebook and avoiding Twitter. I want to do some thinking and writing without being connected to the global electronic mind. I have my Olivetti typewriter out of the closet, my pencils are all sharpened, and I’m making heavy use of the library.

In July, I will be back.