In 2001 he and Quinn organized a fundraiser for Biden, who had just become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was up for his sixth Senate term in 2002. The event raised almost seventy-five thousand dollars for his former boss. Two years later, he hosted another event. On both occasions, Biden failed to thank him. It was too much, and he complained to a close friend who had been working for Biden since before the speech in Tuscaloosa in 1979 and who’d taken Connaughton to lunch as a thank-you for the second fundraiser. Two weeks later, Biden sent him a note. “Jeff, you’ve always been there for me,” it read. “I hope you know I will always be there for you.”
Connaughton never really sold himself as someone who could get to Biden—in twelve years he only once asked Biden to meet with a client—but he made a cold calculation that it was worth maintaining the illusion of closeness, which meant enduring the slights. No one except Biden still thought Biden was going to be president—that part of the myth had become something of a joke—but chairman of Foreign Relations was a powerful position, and during the 2004 campaign, Biden was on John Kerry’s short list for secretary of state, and anyway, it wouldn’t have been worth very much to be known around Washington as an “ex–Biden guy.” Being a Biden guy gave him stature with corporations trying to navigate the capital. So, publicly at least, he remained one.
In late 2003, Quinn Gillespie was bought by WPP, a London firm that was the world’s largest advertising and public affairs company. The partners’ share of the sale would be paid out in three installments over the next four years, and the eventual price would depend on Quinn Gillespie’s profitability. Every dollar of profit would be multiplied in the price. Connaughton began to work harder than ever, and at night, in bars and restaurants, he would figure out his expected millions on the back of a napkin, constantly recalculating as the firm’s income statements changed. From 2005 to 2007 Quinn Gillespie made almost twenty million a year, and toward the end of the earn-out period, maximizing revenues and minimizing expenses became such an obsession that Quinn would say they were digging for change in the sofas. When Connaughton finally cashed in, he was rich.
PART II
DEAN PRICE
A two-lane asphalt road ran past the woods—white oak, shagbark hickory, Carolina ash—and in the shadows of the trees a tobacco barn was year by year collapsing on itself, the metal roof sloping inward, pieces of bare siding hanging loose from nails. Nearby, a white clapboard house with empty windows squatted at the roadside half smothered in tree branches and vines, while a fire-scorched handwritten sign on the outside wall still advertised CRUSH. Farther along, the road took a turn and a tidy brick ranch house with a big satellite dish mounted on top stood in the golden sunlight of a red-brown field. Another bend, a gentle hill, deep woods again, then an abandoned metal warehouse alone in a clearing. The road straightened and flattened and came to a stoplight where a pair of strip malls faced each other, parking lots full, a Walgreen’s across from a McDonald’s, Shell opposing BP. Another light, a shuttered car dealership, a vast scrap yard with a mountain of twisted metal and stacked timbers next door to a spinning mill that was being methodically gutted like a great whale and sold off one part at a time. Then downtown, the lonely little main street, a tae kwon do studio, a government benefits office, a closed restaurant, a nameless corner store for rent, two pedestrians in four blocks, a Dollar General that marked the far end of town. On the other side the country opened up at once, the road passing fields, corn planted on one, nothing on the next—weeds and clods of dirt—then a residential development with two-story look-alike houses in neat rows laid out across someone’s former tobacco farm. And beyond the subdivision, isolated on acres of grass behind a split-rail fence and a man-made lake, the supersized faux château of a celebrity NASCAR driver.
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, usef
ul 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 outsourc
ed 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.
One thing Dean never mentioned was global warming. There were too many doubters in his part of the country—as soon as they heard the words, they’d stop listening and start arguing. Dean himself wasn’t at all sure it was true. He was much more convinced about peak oil, since there was an example right here in America. He didn’t need global warming to make the sale.
The Unwinding Page 20
