A tale of two spoons

A man once asked God to shed some light on the mystery of heaven and hell. God said, “Why not? First I’ll show you hell.”

The man suddenly found himself in an elegant, well-lit dining room. Many people were seated around a table set with a mouthwatering feast. The man thought God had made a mistake. He must have meant to say this was heaven, not hell. Where was the fire and the tortured cries of the condemned? Surely hell would not resemble a five star restaurant. Then he noticed that, in spite of the abundance of food, everyone in attendance suffered from desperate hunger. Their pale skin hung on protruding bones like wet tissue paper. Eyes receded into their sockets, clouded with the faraway look of prolonged agony. The man turned to God with a confused expression on his face.

“Keep looking,” was all the Creator said.

Each person held a spoon with a handle long enough to reach any of the fabulous dishes spread out before them. However, since the handle was longer than their arms, they were unable to reach their mouths with any of the food. Now the man understood: People in hell were doomed to starve in the tormenting presence of enough food to last forever. Like the chain that Jacob Marley dragged into Ebenezer Scrooge’s bedroom in Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”, these people must have forged for themselves—by their deeds in life—the horrible and useless spoons that would torture them in death.

“Now I’ll show you heaven,” God said.

Upon arriving there, the man was more confused than ever, for he stood in a dining room that was identical to the one he’d just left behind in hell. The table was spread with the same food, fine crystal, and silver—and everyone held the same long-handled spoons. Yet, one detail was strikingly different: Here, each person was well-fed. Their faces were radiant with health and happiness. Whereas hell had been draped with an atmosphere of despair, heaven was full of lively laughter and conversation.

“I don’t understand,” the man said to God. “How can heaven and hell be the same and yet so different?”

“Simple,” God said. “It isn’t the length of the spoon that matters, but how one chooses to use it. Here, each guest feeds someone else, not himself.”

Christmas has always been a good time to acknowledge the cold and darkness of the Winter Solstice—but to remind ourselves of the far, far more powerful nature of light and love. You needn’t be a Christian to be touched by the story of hope in the form of a humble baby born to poor parents in troubled times. The message—Peace on Earth!—transcends every pretentious limit we would place on it. For our part, Christmastime is when we traditionally think about what is on someone else’s plate, or under someone else’s tree, not just our own.

That point of view has rarely—if ever—been more necessary than it is now. In modern times, you’d have to go all the way back to 1941 to find a Christmas season as darkened by world events as this one. That year, the shock of Pearl Harbor was barely two weeks old. It was truly a liminal moment in the lives of millions around the world, a threshold of sweeping upheaval, change, and death. The fact that all-out war was imminent and unavoidable was obvious to all but the most accomplished optimists.

Sixty-nine years later, Christmas once again arrives in the choppy wake of events that are at least equal in magnitude to the attack on Pearl Harbor. (Actually, it’s a simple matter to argue that today’s challenges exceed those of the “Greatest Generation” by a large margin.) These days it is self-evident to the informed that there are bombs ticking in every direction, but two of them in particular finally exploded in recent weeks.

First, the International Energy Agency released the World Energy Outlook 2010, an annual report that analyzes energy trends in the coming years. In a stunning (and unapologetic) reversal of itself, the agency not only affirmed the existence of peak oil, it stated flatly that the peak of conventional oil production has already happened—four years ago, in 2006. That means that, from now on, the supply of oil that is easy to find, extract, and move to market will steadily decline—while prices inevitably rise. It is impossible to overstate the gravity of this assessment from an organization that has consistently placed peak oil—if it existed at all—decades into the future. For a more detailed analysis see this and this.

Second, the Federal Reserve finally bowed to pressure from the courts, and from Congress, and released a limited accounting of how much taxpayer money has gone into bailing out the world’s banking system—and who got what portion of the pie. Never mind that it shouldn’t have been necessary to force the data out of them, and what it means about the state of the republic that it was necessary, here is the number they grudgingly provided: $12.6 trillion in direct hand-outs and “other arrangements.” Twelve. Point. Six. Trillion—12.6 x 10¹² dollars. That is eighteen times the amount  that Congress debated and authorized ($700 billion). Much of this Noah’s flood of your money went to foreign banks. All of it is irretrievably gone.

Movie directors like to employ a camera trick that would come in handy right now to underscore this news. It is used to portray the wobbly-kneed vertigo a character feels when he or she suddenly realizes the jig is up, and the threat they face is orders of magnitude greater than previously feared. (Picture the demolitions expert called to defuse what he thinks is a homemade pipe bomb only to open the shoebox and find an encrypted ten-megaton warhead ticking down to zero.) On screen this is when the foreground races forward while the background recedes, and the world stretches sickeningly like spandex that is four sizes too small.

Unfortunately, in real life there is no director telling you by visual cues that you’ve reached a turning point in the drama. You have to figure it out for yourself, and few people have bothered to keep up with events well enough to do so. If America still functioned as advertised, the ink would have hit the fan by now, as journalists took off like greyhounds after the mechanical bunny at the race track.

Alas. That is not the world as it is. The main stream media have stridently ignored both of these detonations. So it is up to us to connect the dots. Here goes: a) Oil—the essential ingredient in all modern economic activity (including getting the family car to the grocery store and back)—is about to get much more expensive and difficult to come by; and b) any national treasure we might have spent to ease ourselves into these uncertain energy waters has been stolen in the night. Furthermore, the thieves have destroyed the dollar on their way out the door, making traditional recovery and replenishment on par with believing in pixie dust and perpetual bliss in Neverland.

Happy Holidays.

On Christmas Day, 1941, our grandparents couldn’t wish the Japanese bombs back into the air. A new reality presented itself that they had to face and act upon. Now it’s our turn. Like it or not, life, as we have grown accustomed to living it, is coming to a rapid end. Some things about our immediate future may be brutally hard no matter what we do. But, the truth is, the difference between full-blown hell ahead and shared hardship and mutual support will always be a matter of choice. As present day social arrangements collapse around us, we will be left with an economic infrastructure that functions about as well as an oversized spoon. Many who’ve recently lost jobs and homes, have already discovered this fact: This way of living doesn’t work. We can no longer feed (only) ourselves as we were taught to do.

When I am asked what steps I recommend to be ready for what lies ahead, I always begin with the obvious: food, water, shelter, etc. It does no good to neglect personal preparedness while you pursue high-minded global change. In other words, if you can’t heat your own house in the winter of a crisis, the fact that you lobbied your utility company to buy some of its power from “green” sources doesn’t mean very much. That’s blunt, I know, but true. Make a list of the things you personally depend on, then under each one write the question: “What would I do if…” Don’t stop until you have answers for each one.

Yet, sadly, many people mistakenly believe that this sort of nitty-gritty preparation is the whole journey, when it is, in fact, just the first step. Securing your own basic necessities is the very least you can do—must do—to prepare yourself for the coming Long Emergency.

No, there is much more to preparedness than that. Next, you must set about making sure you have something vital to offer your community—not the one presently defined by political boundaries or tax districts, but the much smaller circle of actual people you live with or near. As John F. Kennedy once suggested, don’t think in terms of what your community can do for you. Imagine having to justify your inclusion in a clan of people when the burning political question of the day is how to fairly divide up the hardship of scarcity. Why should you get a share? What do you bring to the table that the community values and needs? Here’s a hint: It had better be something with a direct and measurable positive impact on collective survival, under conditions more challenging than anything you’ve ever seen.

The key word here, of course, is “collective”—a badly discredited word after years of capitalist triumphalism. Nevertheless, by helping to feed (or clothe, or heal, or shelter) the people you live with, you will gain access to all that they can do for you as well, each of you leading the other away from hell, if not into heaven. Contrary to the fear mongering propaganda plastered all over the TV, most people want to contribute and belong to something larger than themselves , and would if shown a viable vision of how it can work.

Yes, there is serious trouble at our doorstep. Yes, society is undergoing dramatic convulsions of contraction and change—right now. But we will make things much worse on ourselves if we fail to factor into our calculations the welfare of others, not just our own. We are only as safe as the least secure of our neighbors--period. Some people respond to that idea by building deeper bunkers. What would happen if we reached out instead? Genuine community may not spring up overnight, but a single act of one-on-one kindness and inclusion can begin to undo years of isolation and fear. One gesture of hope and trust can inspire people to lower their weapons and tear down long-held defenses. From there we might discover that we’re all starving to death anyway, attempting to feed ourselves alone. What would it cost us to give cooperation a shot for a change?

This Christmas it is no longer good enough to mouth a few empty words about “goodwill toward men”. It is time to start living it on purpose and out loud, learning to love and care for each other like our lives depend on it—because they very well may. After all, that’s what the baby from Bethlehem grew up to say.

Up Water Tower Hill

The climb to the top of Water Tower Hill, near my house, begins at the bottom of Elmwood Street in the neighborhood loosely known as Sherrelwood Estates. Though, to tell the truth, the words “climb” and “hill” overdo things a bit in this context. It is really just a walk up a steep street, followed by a few more steps on a path that is a little steeper. I like walking there as much as arriving, because I pass by a tangled Fangorn Forest of juniper bushes that conceal a whole village of amber and black foxes. They wander the streets at night, but always look out of place against a backdrop of trash cans and parked cars. Here, in a tiny pocket of accidental wildness, it is possible to convince myself that I am on their turf, not the other way round. If the time of day is right (early morning or late evening), I frequently catch glimpses of them catching glimpses of me.

When I’ve ascended the hill as far as I can, the path levels out on the “summit” and traces the shape of a doughnut around a large, tan, cylindrical water tank. A barbed wire-topped chain link fence (with motion sensors inside) bravely guards the sides of the tank from local graffiti artists, who have to settle for decorating neighborhood traffic signs and privacy fences instead. There is one small tree beside the path on top. It recently put on new growth again after a prolonged illness of unknown origin; loneliness, perhaps.

The huge tank more closely resembles an oil storage facility than the quaint Mayberry image of a proper tower on legs, with the name of the town painted on the side, along with the high school football team mascot, and “Class of (whoever is next in line to graduate)”. That tower belongs in a real community. This one is a foreign object. I’m pretty sure it actually stores water, though there are no visible pipes above ground to offer clues, so that’s just an assumption. It’s one of many assumptions I routinely make about things in my environment—complicated power relays; strange-looking antennas; cameras on top of traffic signal poles; random little non-descript buildings with gray metal doors and no windows. Who knows how these things work, or even what they really do, for that matter? (For all I know—really know—the water tank is actually a UFO exit ramp on a subterranean highway leading all the way to Area 51 in Nevada.)  Apart from a handful of technicians and people who store up esoteric facts for entertainment, very few of us could explain how our highly complex way of life works, much less fix it if it started to fail. It makes me wonder if techno-specialization really is a step up on the evolutionary scale, as most futurists insist, or a dizzy, death-defying experiment in collective tight rope walking without a net. I suspect society is poised to find out which. Shortly.

So, if this isn’t a climb, and it isn’t a hill, and it doesn’t really look like a water tower, what’s the point of naming this essay as I did? Because within the circle I drew on my map at home (with a radius of ten miles; enclosing 314 square miles) this is the closest thing we’ve got to a hill worth climbing—that I know of so far, anyway. Besides, Water Tower Hill has no other name that I can find, so I exercised my first-in-line right to make one up. It will do as well as any other. The knob probably had a better name for much of its brief contact with human beings, back when the Cheyenne were the party in power in these parts. Maybe it was something mystical suggested by the spirits who used to live here, and who might consider returning if we made them the right offer. Or maybe it was simply called, “Where-My-Horse-Went-Lame-That-Time Hill”. Who knows?

Nobody who lives here now, that’s for sure. Now it is just an unremarkable, unnoticed high spot among a bunch of mostly unremarkable, brick houses built when Eisenhower was president. Now it’s where teenagers go to smoke Camels, drink Pabst Blue Ribbon, talk trash about their parents, and make out. It’s a place to throw out a blanket on the Fourth of July and watch the fireworks displays over the city. The hill’s flank does make for some wicked fast sledding in winter. Oh, and it’s a pretty good place for wanderers like me to come and walk in circles around the tank and think about things.

Which is why I’ve climbed it today. That, and to take in the view—a 3-D panoramic picture window onto my world. There are the Fruited Plains to the east, Purple Mountain Majesty in the west, and the bar graph outline of downtown Denver to the south. Sixty miles farther south is legendary Pikes Peak (visible on clear days). North, well, the topography rises gently a few miles out obscuring what would otherwise be a clear shot to Wyoming and then all the way to the North Pole via Canada.

Truth is, this little hill is among the vanguard of the Continental Divide. This is where a blind person walking westward from Kansas would begin to get the idea that something different was about to happen. In many ways, I am that person and have stumbled blindly forward through my life to land here, forced at last to face the fact that something different—very different—is about to happen here. The plodding life we lived on the plains of prosperity all these years is coming to an end. All of us have arrived at a crossroads and a transition in human history of monumental magnitude—arguably the most significant we’ve ever faced. (Die hard “doomers” will object to such dainty descriptive words. They prefer “crash”, “collapse”, “the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it”. I can get there too, when I really start thinking about things. But, those words aren’t the ones evoked by the view from Water Tower Hill. Not just yet, anyway, so for now I’ll stick with less flammable ones.)

I’m in the right place, because this little spot on the planet is the very embodiment of transitions and crossroads. For instance, I am standing exactly between two world-class geographic features: the Great Plains, a vast continental ocean of flat farmland and prairie, and the Rocky Mountains, a range that stretches 3,000 miles from Canada to Mexico, with fifty-two peaks in excess of 14,000 feet in Colorado alone. This is where The American West truly begins, a topographic moment of truth where pioneers once smacked into the enormity of their decision to leave behind the well-behaved woods and farms of Colonial America in search of a new life. A new life awaited them, alright—if it didn’t kill them first.

Also, about three miles from here, I can see the crossroads of two great interstate highways: I-25 and I-70. The former lies south to north like an uncoiled rope, from Las Cruces, New Mexico (just a few miles north of Juarez, now the most dangerous city on earth, they say) past Albuquerque, and “chic” Santa Fe, over Raton Pass, along the western-most edge of the Great Plains through Colorado, all the way to bustling Buffalo, Wyoming, where it joins up with I-90 east of the Bighorn National Forest.  I-70 sprouts from the back streets of Baltimore on the Atlantic coast, ducks south of Pittsburgh, but then threads the needle of Columbus, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Denver, before petering out in the Utah desert without so much as a lemonade stand present to witness its confluence with I-15.

These highways are like giant concrete wormholes tunneling through space and time, hurling goods and people across vast distances at hyperspeed, with little or no friction (interaction) with the surrounding countryside. And they intersect right here, within the boundaries of my circular, walkable world! What an honor for all who live here, really—to bear witness every day to a surging river of plastic, glass, rubber, and metal, shaped into cars and trucks of every ilk; buses; motor homes; Harley Davidsons and other two-wheelers running in packs; and, above all, eighteen-wheel tractor trailers hauling an unfathomable inventory of stuff from anywhere stuff is made to anywhere stuff is sold. They haul massive and indecipherable machinery-stuff from here to yonder and back again (more things no one understands). The constant noise of these Anthropocene river rapids washes up the sides of my hill, like a tide that only comes in, never goes out again. I hate to even consider the not-so-good-for-you fumes riding in on those waves as well. Let’s just say they are visible in the air on days when Pikes Peak is not.

But, of course, that line of thought leads directly to the Founder of the whole dystopian feast, without which this spot would still be a grassy hill where pronghorn antelope graze, instead of an earthen table top for an ugly water tank; without which I’d be looking at a woven cord of cottonwood trees along the meandering South Platte River, and short grass prairie beyond, instead of a vista only a Captain of Industry could truly appreciate; without which the human world would be still “made by hand”—by (fewer) people who never stopped travelling by foot—theirs or ones belonging to a helpful animal.

In “The Story of Here Begins” I asked myself the question: Setting aside the issues of the wide world for a second, who and what are right here under my nose? Well, from the top of Water Tower Hill, one answer is abundantly clear: My little ten-mile world is filled with cars. Lots and lots and lots—a god king hell of a lot—of cars. A large slice of the blame for a century’s worth of wrong turns can be laid at the feet of this one invention. More than any other single toy in the playroom of technology, it has enabled us to go completely crazy—and to get there in air conditioned comfort and style!

But as potent as this automotive crazy-maker is, it still isn’t the real spike in the punch. No, the enabler has an enabler of its own. I’m talking about Oil. Gasoline. Diesel. Cars have only managed to clog the arteries of my world because we’ve gorged ourselves on cheap, easy oil. We are greased up one side and slicked down the other. It is in everything we depend on for our really swell (non-negotiable) lifestyle. The list of products (including food) that owe their existence to a barrel of crude would go on for pages (and others have compiled it already). For now, let’s restrict our discussion to the oil devoted to moving people and stuff around. Most of what I can see from Water Tower Hill depends in one way or another on the energy stored in this magic carpet. If I could press a button and simultaneously combust all the liquid petroleum products stashed in all the gas tanks, gas stations, gas trucks, and gas cans presently within my sight, the force of the explosion might well alter the orbit of the earth around the sun. (Not really, all you physicists tempted to show me the error in my calculations. It’s hyperbole, to make a point.)

As if to underscore that point further, I look southeast, about four miles away, and have no trouble locating the Suncor Energy oil refinery. It’s a puny little thing compared to the sprawling monster refineries along the Gulf Coast, but, hey, it’s ours. Trains loaded with tanker cars deliver the crude at all hours. Alchemists turn the goo into gas, and then other locomotive drivers  pull in with other, empty, tanker cars and say “Fill ‘er up!” When I come here at night, I can easily spot the gas flares—towers that look like flame throwers pointed at heaven—disposing of unwanted methane by burning it. When the wind is just right (or wrong) I can smell the poisonous sulfur dioxide venting into the atmosphere. Today the sun glints off the incomprehensible tangle of tanks and conduits that looks to me like an unmelodious pipe organ built by extraterrestrials to remind them of home. All this—cars, pollution, noise, and eyesore refineries—so I can sit down, turn a key, and levitate (nearly for free!) to any destination I choose. Never have to walk again! Powerful magic, for sure.

But in this case it is literally black magic. Black gold. Texas Tea. It promised to free us, once and for all, from the straightjacket of physical limits to the good life. But science tells us that nothing is ever created out of thin air. E=mc²  means energy and matter simply rearrange themselves, changing from one to the other and back again, as needed. In other words, there is no such thing as a free magical lunch. You’ve got to pay for your adventures in Godhood. Every so-called advancement comes with a price tag pinned to its sleeve, payable in unintended consequences and hidden traps that grow tighter the higher you reach for more.

Today, I’m looking at one of those price tags—the bloated concrete and steel corpus of Hydrocarbon Man.

There is much more to see from Water Tower Hill, and I’ll be back again. I’m sure the ugliness is not the only thing I’ll find when I walk the land down there as humans were meant to do, one step at a time. Even mistakes as large as ours can be forgiven and put right when we make up our minds to back up and try again. I have the feeling there are people everywhere doing just that—creating sanity and beauty in the most unlikely places. But I’ve had enough for now. I head down the hill again (no sociable foxes today). Ten minutes later I arrive at the gate of New Leaf Gardens, the urban farm oasis belonging to my family.

I look across the half-acre of greenery and marvel at the sheer extravagance of it. There is more “green” contained in sunlight than any other color. And there is more unbridled, unconditional generosity in green things than any other creature on earth. Pick a green bean today, and tomorrow the plant will shower you with five more. Behead a broccoli? No hard feelings; try again in a few days. Eggplants balloon one after another, like deep purple soap bubbles. Tomatoes blush at the thought of loving hands, reaching, softly pressing, pulling them free, so ready to surrender their sweet, tangy flesh to you. (No wonder farmers can be such a lusty bunch!)

I can still hear the faint rush of traffic on nearby highways and streets; a distant police siren; a motorcycle in need of a muffler. I am comforted to think there are plentiful reasons to believe a quieter, less mobile season is upon us. And then the same thought makes me uneasy. How will we adjust? What new arrangements will we make for ourselves in a much smaller, walkable world? I don’t know. But I do know the answers are far more likely to be found in a garden—tucked under a cabbage leaf, or hiding among the cucumbers—than in places humans usually run to when faced with scary change: fear, conflict, crazed competition. For one thing, once peak oil has fully settled in and the hydrocarbon vault is functionally emptied (that is, what’s left is finally unaffordable or inaccessible), the plants—who live quite comfortably on a fixed solar income—can remind us how to stop writing bad checks, balance our energy budget, and live within our means again.

I can hear them now: “Have some dinner. Then we’ll talk.”