Dean read about all this, and it blew his mind, and he stood up at the green-jobs fair and said, “My name is Dean Price but I want you to call me Green Dean. In my opinion one of the greatest men ever to live was Martin Luther King.” If his father could have heard that! When Congress was debating whether to make King’s birthday a national holiday, his father had said, “If they killed four more you could give ’em a whole week.” Dean had always thought that King was a black leader at best, not a leader of all men, but his views had changed in recent years, and now, before this mainly black crowd, who couldn’t often have heard a white man with a southern country accent say such things, he went on, “Martin Luther King once said, ‘We all came here on different ships but we’re in the same boat now,’” and he heard a gasp from the crowd. “There’s another man who came to Warren County forty years ago by the name of Floyd McKissick.” Another gasp, from the older people in the crowd. “Floyd McKissick had a dream, too, and that was to build a city for all men—white, yellow, black, brown, green—so they could work together with equal opportunity for all. And I’m here to tell you that dream is still alive! Floyd McKissick was a visionary. He was swimming upstream, but the tide has turned and we’re swimming with the stream because cheap energy is leaving here. Cheap energy allowed globalization to take place, and what will allow the reverse of globalization will be high energy costs, and it goes back to Gandhi. Gandhi said it was a sin to buy from your farthest neighbor at the neglect of your nearest neighbor.” And he told them how they could make their own energy right here in one of the poorest counties in North Carolina.
They ate it up with a spoon. Afterward, people called out to him, “Green Dean! Green Dean!” An old black man with blue eyes told him, “If I had a million dollars I’d put it in your idea.” Acres of diamonds in Warren County. But the board of commissioners didn’t have the right sense of urgency, they spent months kicking the tires without making the sale, and nothing came of Dean’s speech.
He talked to Kathy Proctor, a fifty-five-year-old white single mother of two down near High Point, who had lost her job at the furniture factory during the bank bailouts. With her unemployment benefits she had gone back to study biotechnology at the community college in Winston-Salem—not just to find a new career, but to set an example for her daughters. One day, President Obama visited the college to talk up retraining and manufacturing, and when he came through Kathy’s lab and asked if anyone had a story, Kathy told him hers. The next thing Kathy knew, she was Michelle Obama’s guest at the 2011 State of the Union address (and she hadn’t even voted for Mrs. Obama’s husband in 2008, though she might well the next time around). When the president mentioned Kathy Proctor’s name in his speech, she was so surprised that the cameras caught a stout woman with lank dark hair turning to the people seated beside her in the First Lady’s box and saying, “That’s me.”
By the time Dean went down to see Kathy Proctor, and they sat together in the cramped living room, which was furnished with dark-stained pieces made in the defunct local factories where she had worked all her life, Kathy had been hired to do quality control at an online twenty-four-hour vitamin distribution center. She was making thirty thousand a year—less than at the furniture factory, not the lab job she’d hoped for with her associate’s degree, but it was better than minimum wage, better than living on the streets, it paid her bills.
Dean described how he had met Obama, too, and then he told her about his project.
“I didn’t know about this biofuels,” Kathy, a lively and curious woman, said.
“Let’s start a new industry,” Dean laughed.
“We might. I’m interested in this. It’s fixin’ to take off. How long you been working on this, Dean?”
“Since 2005—and it has been a struggle.”
The White House had invited Kathy to hear Obama speak at a community college in Greensboro the next day. “If I get a chance to talk to the president tomorrow,” she told Dean, “I’ll mention it to him.”
Dean and Kathy exchanged a high five. But he no longer expected much from the president. Up at Red Birch, he had thought that change would come from Obama getting elected, or Tom Perriello helping make it happen. As polarized as the country was, Obama had his best chance with a majority in Congress, but he couldn’t muster the support to pass cap and trade. Obama had failed, and Perriello was gone—working for a Washington think tank. Change wasn’t going to come from new laws. It wasn’t going to come from Washington, or Raleigh. It might come from Stokesdale. The country was stuck and no politician could fix that. It was going to take an entrepreneur. “It’s like a dam that develops a crack, and the water starts seeping through, and it’s not long before the whole dam comes down, and I think it’s that way with this economy. And that crack is the relationship between the rendering company and the restaurant owner.”
That was Dean’s belief, his faith. Forty-eight years old, with no job, no partner, hardly any money, driving from county to county and talking to hundreds of people, some nibbles but no solid bites—these months were the strongest test of his faith. Maybe he didn’t know how to talk to county bureaucrats. They were even more cautious than farmers, knowing they needed help but afraid to take the first step into something they couldn’t see—which was the actual definition of faith. Sometimes, while Dean was describing his vision, he would get too far out ahead of himself and start to lose them. One of his brochures said, “Our hard earned tax dollars go to support terrorists and jihadists, the very people we are at war with. Enriching their lives, while we struggle to maintain our basic infrastructure,” and that freaked out a few school administrators.
Once, when he was driving in Franklin County, his son Ryan called him from school. A sheriff ’s deputy was looking for Dean—while trying to serve a civil summons, he’d found the house door ajar and was concerned about a break-in. The summons was from a food company that hadn’t gotten the word about Red Birch of Martinsville’s bankruptcy. Dean’s mother couldn’t hide her worry. Wasn’t this a little crazy? When was he going to make some money? Was it time to give up and get a secular job?
And all around him was brokenness.
One day in October, Dean was driving through Forsyth County and he stopped in a little place called Rural Hall, where they still held tobacco auctions at the Old Belt Farmers Co-Op—some of the last anywhere in the state, if not the country. It was the end of the season, and the cavernous warehouse with the sharp strong smell of tobacco hanging in the air was almost empty, and six or eight men in golf shirts were walking up and down rows of four-foot-high tobacco bales. As they moved from bale to bale the buyers grabbed fistfuls of golden brown leaves and the auctioneer called out a price per pound, “Dollar fifteen dollar ten ten dollar ten ten ten dollar ten ten dollar five five dollar five,” and one of the buyers, a man from Bailey’s Cigarettes in Virginia, said “Eighty,” and the auctioneer said, “Eighty. Bailey,” and the clerk wrote it down on a scrap of paper and slapped it on top of the bale. The other buyer was from Kentucky. “’Bacca pays bills,” he was saying. “I was told that when I was a little boy and the rest is bull.” A few of the men had just come to watch, like Dean, retired farmers and warehousemen who couldn’t get it out of their system.
The young farmer who was selling the tobacco leaned on a bale at a distance and watched the older men in golf shirts. They were auctioning the part of his crop that the big company in Danville where he had a contract, Japan Tobacco International, wouldn’t take. The farmer’s name was Anthony Pyrtle, and he said that with the price of diesel this year he would be lucky to make a profit. His childhood buddy Kent Smith had come along to help unload the bales. Smith worked in a copper factory making $14.50 an hour. “I used to think how lucky he was he didn’t have to work in the factory,” Smith said. “Now I think I’m better off than he is.”
Pyrtle had heard about Dean and Red Birch. Dean told him, “This country should pay you six dollars a gallon for biodiesel, instead of sending three d
ollars to Saudi Arabia.”
“I’d change in a minute,” Pyrtle said, “and raise corn or whatever fuel crop I could find.”
Dean walked out of the Old Belt Farmers Co-Op and got into his Honda. When he was a boy, the auctions had been a regional celebration—the excitement, the cash in hand, the Christmas shopping. The tobacco warehouses hummed with people who came to socialize and talk politics. But the auction today was something quick and dirty, done in private with a few onlookers, and Anthony Pyrtle was just hoping to break even.
Maybe to suit his mood, Dean drove home through the back roads of Stokes County. The county manager had told him that 30 percent of the people in Stokes couldn’t afford to put food on the table, and the suicide rate was twice the national average. Dean’s accountant lived in Stokes, and his stepson had lost eight friends since high school, three from suicide. Dean drove through the town of Walnut Cove and parked at the East Stokes Outreach Ministry. There was a food pantry in front, with canned goods and bags of pet food on plywood shelves, and in the fridge there was ground deer meat donated by local hunters. The lady who ran the place told him that a police officer who was shot in the line of duty and was getting workmen’s compensation, but didn’t want to go on disability, had come in a week ago asking for food. So had a court stenographer with a broken hand. A sign in the office said “Due to lack of funds there will be NO fuel or kerosene assistance this year. We are doing all we can to keep our pantry full. Please make other arrangements for heating assistance ASAP.” An obese woman with oxygen tubes in her nostrils and a clothing voucher in her hand was waiting for a double-large shirt. She said, “We’re a family of nine and we’re doing fine.” The lady in charge told Dean, “You realize that we live in the economy where one flat tire or one month without a paycheck could alter most anybody’s world.”
On his way out Dean felt a shudder. There but for the grace of God. Once it happened to you, it was almost impossible to get out. And to think how many times he believed he’d been about to break through, only to have it pulled back at the last minute and find he was farther away than ever. On the drive home an old church hymn got stuck in his head.
How tedious and tasteless the hours
When Jesus no longer I see!
Sweet prospects, sweet birds and sweet flowers
Have all lost their sweetness to me.
Tedious and tasteless. He went cold and started to cry. Then a voice like the voice in his dream about the old wagon road spoke to him and said, “This is the only way it will work.”
And then the breakthrough came.
* * *
One night in October, Dean was reading The Prosperity Bible when he came across a sentence by Ralph Waldo Trine, a nineteenth-century author. It said, “Never go to the second thing first.”
It suddenly hit him why he was having so much trouble with the schools. He was going to the second thing first—telling them they could make their own fuel for the buses if the county built a four-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar reactor. But the counties didn’t have the money, and anyway the project was too risky and too complicated for them to understand, especially when he started into the next phase with canola crops and food-grade oil. He’d had to explain it to Eva Clayton three times, and even then he wasn’t sure she got it. He had everything ass-backwards. The first thing was to get the dadgum oil! Otherwise, how would you know how big a refinery a county should build? He ought to just tell the schools that he would collect restaurant cooking oil in their name, sell it to an existing biodiesel company, and give them half the profits. The money could be used to keep teachers in classrooms, or anything else they wanted. Just a simple cash donation, a school fundraiser—that was a metaphor they could understand. And the local restaurant owners would understand, too, which was why they’d sell their oil to Dean. Building a refinery, making the fuel, getting farmers to grow canola—all that could come later.
Around the time he had this revelation, Dean met a man named Stephan Caldwell. Stephan was thirty-two years old, from a small town in Ohio, the son of an oral surgeon and gentleman apple farmer. He had started a career in advertising in Raleigh, but the industry had been battered by the financial crisis, so he decided to get out of advertising and into what he had always loved—machinery and farming. His interest led him to biodiesel, and he set up a little waste oil recycling company called Green Circle, renting a shop from a retired welder named Barefoot a mile from a hog slaughterhouse on lonely farmland in Johnston County. When Dean went out to see Green Circle, he thought Stephan’s plant looked like Red Birch, just in a new place—smelled like it, too.
Everyone doing biodiesel in the Piedmont knew about Red Birch. The word that had reached Stephan’s ears wasn’t good—Red Birch didn’t pay farmers, and it sold bad fuel. But he liked Dean Price’s passion and didn’t want to blame Dean for what he took to be the sins of others. Quiet and hardworking, Stephan was barely surviving on contracts with just a handful of restaurants around Raleigh, and the long hours pumping waste oil were putting a strain on his marriage.
Dean came with an idea that promised much more than Stephan could hope to make on his own. And Stephan came with the infrastructure—plant, equipment, truck—that Dean lacked. He also had a degree in graphic design, and when Dean told him about his revelation, Stephan spent the weekend drawing up a vivid brochure in green and yellow, called “Biodiesel 4 Schools,” that explained the new concept with simplicity and clarity, so that any fool of a bureaucrat could see this was the right thing to do.
Over Thanksgiving, Dean and Stephan decided to turn Green Circle into a partnership. Dean thought it should divide 70–30 in his favor, since Stephan’s business model was failing, but Stephan convinced him that at 55–45 they would be more like real partners. Armed with the brochure, Dean went back to some of the officials that he’d met with earlier in the year, in some cases eight or nine times. Right before Christmas, he called an agriculture expert on the board of education in Pitt County, whom he’d seen in April and then never heard a word. “I had it wrong,” Dean told him. “I went back and learned from my mistakes. Now I got it right. Let me come back and give my presentation.”
Pitt County was in eastern North Carolina. Unlike the Piedmont it was flat, and you knew the coast was nearby because of the bright silver light, but like the Piedmont it had seen tobacco fade away, and it had three things Dean considered vital for the success of his idea: fallow farmland, long driving distances, and a whole lot of restaurants in the county seat of Greenville. Between Christmas and New Year’s he was given a meeting with the chief financial officer of the Pitt County schools, who listened carefully before exclaiming, “It’s ingenious!”
Those words were balm to Dean’s heart. He still had to sell it to a dozen other officials, and they tried to poke any hole in it they could, wanting to be sure the schools weren’t signing on with some fly-by-night operator or uncontrollable maverick. But on March 5, 2012, the Pitt County school board voted unanimously to enter a deal with Green Circle, splitting the profits from the sale of the oil after the company covered its costs. It had taken Dean a full year to get his first win.
He was reading a biography of Steve Jobs that talked about the rarefied air you breathe when you have an idea that you know is going to change the world and nobody knows it yet. He believed that was where he was. Pitt County and North Carolina could be the Silicon Valley of the biofuels industry. Just sitting on an economic boom. Acres of diamonds in Greenville.
It was strange how small the idea had to get before anyone would give it a chance. A school fundraiser—as if Dean was a chocolate chip cookie dough salesman. But that’s what he had to become. The work could not have been less auspicious, less like the making of the Apple II. Dean went from restaurant to restaurant. He stood at the counter with the Denny’s manager and said, “We would pick it up for free and you get all the PR that goes with it, let all the parents know that Denny’s is supporting the schools.” In the kitchen of a Thai restaura
nt the owner asked, “Are you a teacher?” and Dean said, “With the schools, and we’re promoting this program and trying to save the schools money, and we’re also trying to start a new industry in Pitt County.” He spent two hours with the mother of the owner of Greenville’s biggest barbecue restaurant, getting nowhere. Chinese restaurants were the easiest to sign up because the owners were eager to be part of the community. By June 2012 he had ninety-three restaurants. By August, Green Circle was pumping two thousand gallons a week.
One night, the two partners drove around after dark in Stephan’s pickup. They pulled in to a mall and parked in the space in back of a barbecue joint. Stephan walked through the kitchen past the bubbling fryers to the little office of Freddy the manager, where a sign said I’M REDNECK PROUD, was given the keys, and went out again to unlock the cinder block shed where the restaurant kept its seven metal barrels full of waste oil. He and Dean ran a hose from the tank on the bed of the truck into the shed and stuck the sucking end into the first of the barrels and started up the pump. The oil was black-brown, flecked with bits of animal fat, the shine of grease at the top of the barrel swirling like galaxies in a night sky. On the other side of the shed were barrels full of pig parts—backbones, shoulders, feet—that would be hauled away by a big rendering company. The air had the burnt smell of good meat just starting to rot. Everything was sticky with dried oil—the barrels, the hose, the bed of the truck, their hands. The stickiness reminded Dean of the tar that came off on his hands when he was priming tobacco leaves as a boy. After so many months of thinking and talking, he was happy to be doing physical work.
An air leak in Stephan’s pump stretched out twenty minutes’ work to an hour and a half, but they drove away with 240 gallons of waste cooking oil, for which they paid the barbecue joint $108, and which would earn them $2.50 a gallon, six hundred dollars, from a biodiesel company. The plan was eventually to get to where they could manufacture the oil into fuel themselves.
The Unwinding Page 50
