The Twelfth Hour

One of the things I’ve noted repeatedly since The Archdruid Report first began attracting a significant number of comments is the way that certain stories maintain a deathgrip on our collective imagination of the future. I’ve written at length in previous posts here about two of those stories, the story of progress and the story of survivalism. Look through the last decade or so of discussion about Peak Oil, or for that matter any other manifestation of the predicament of industrial civilization, and you’ll find the climactic scenes of both stories – the basement entrepreneur laboring away at the technological fix that will save us all, on the one hand, and the plucky band of survivors blasting away with assault rifles at savage, starving, mindless mobs, on the other – circling like broken records.

I’ve come to think that much of the mutual incomprehension that strangles communication among different sides of the Peak Oil scene, and has played an important part in keeping it fragmented and marginalized, comes from the way that so many people in that scene have their ears so full of one or another of these stories that they can’t hear anything else. Still, these two aren’t the only stories that have had this kind of effect on the debate, and I’d like to talk a little bit about one of the others in this week’s post. The story in question is at least as old as the other two, and it has, if anything, even more pervasive a presence in the rhetoric that shapes our collective thinking about the future. Call it the story of the eleventh hour.

You know that story inside and out already. It’s the one in which the world is on the brink of disaster, for some simple and readily defined reason that could be solved if people were only willing to do what was necessary. Things get worse, and worse, and worse, until at the last possible moment before disaster strikes – at the eleventh hour, to use the constantly repeated phrase – people leap up from their sofas and do whatever it is that they have to do to save the world. A few cautionary words about being more proactive next time rounds off the story, and then they all live happily ever after.

It’s a whacking good yarn, of course, which accounts for much of its popularity – everyone likes a taut suspenseful tale – and, like the other narratives we use these days to make sense of the future, it can be applied to almost any situation you care to name. It’s also a very politically useful story, which accounts for the other half of its popularity. If you can convince people that the world really is on the brink of disaster, it’s a good deal easier to stampede them into action, and if you can present them with a plan of action you claim will save the world, people may not look at the details too closely before they embrace it as their one hope of salvation. This can be exceedingly useful, particularly if you have an agenda your audience might not support if they know they have another choice.

The last three hundred years or so of North American cultural politics are full of individuals and movements who discovered these advantages in the story of the eleventh hour. One of the most relevant is also one of the earliest. I don’t know if any of my readers were introduced in college literature classes, as I was, to Jonathan Edwards’ harrowing 1741 sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Like so many preachers before and since, Edwards faced the not inconsiderable challenge of convincing human beings to live like angels, and made the often repeated discovery that one of the best ways to do it was to scare the stuffing out of them. The result is one of the most spectacular invocations of the eleventh hour in all of literature. Edwards bent all his talents to the task of convincing his listeners that as they sat their in their pews, right then and there, the ground might suddenly open up beneath them and drop them screaming and flailing into the jaws of eternal damnation.

It was a great success at the time. Like so many preachers before and since, though, Edwards discovered the homely moral of the story of the boy who cried wolf: you can only scare the stuffing out of people in the same way so many times before the impact wears off, and your listeners become irritated or, worse yet, bored. Few things in popular culture have less cachet than last year’s imminent disasters.

This is problematic for the Jonathan Edwardses of the world, who tend to be one-trick ponies, with careers founded on a single catastrophe and a solution to match. It can be even more problematic for the rest of us, though, because it does sometimes happen that one or more of the Jonathan Edwardses of an age proclaim a disaster that actually is in the offing – even a broken clock is right twice a day – and the story of the boy who cried wolf has two additional morals not often remembered: first, the wolves were real; second, they ended up eating the sheep.

That’s the hidden downside of the story of the eleventh hour. When you’ve told the same story often enough, people become used to the fact that you’ll be back again shortly with another catastrophe du jour, and another one after that, and so on. They stop being scared and become irritated or, worse yet, bored. At that point it doesn’t matter how many more changes you ring on the story or how colorfully you describe this year’s imminent disaster, because they’ve learned to recognize the narrative as narrative – and, not uncommonly, they’ve learned to glimpse whatever agenda lies behind the story and motivates the people who tell it.

The awkward conversation about Peak Oil in today’s industrial societies, I’m convinced, cannot be understood at all unless the spreading effect of these paired recognitions is taken into account. For decades now our collective discourse has been filled to overflowing with competing renditions of the story of the eleventh hour, from every imaginable point on the political and cultural spectrum. Whether it’s the missile gap or the ozone layer, fiat currencies or emerging viruses, immigration policy or trade deficits or the antics of whatever set of clowns is piling into or out of the executive branch this season, somebody or other is presenting it as a source of imminent disaster from which, at the eleventh hour, their proposals can save us.

This is the environment into which the Peak Oil movement emerged when it left its larval stage on a handful of internet mailing lists and started to try to warn the world that the age of cheap abundant energy is about to come to an end. In the language of theater, they found themselves playing to a very unsympathetic house. Mind you, it didn’t help that a significant number of people in the Peak Oil community proceeded to pack their message into the familiar framework of the story of the eleventh hour, complete in many cases with unstated political agendas that are not unfamiliar to those of us who have watched the last thirty years’ worth of imminent disasters come and go.

The irony here, and it’s as rich as it is bitter, is that this is one of the cases where the crisis is real. Depending on how you measure it – with or without natural gas liquids, oil-sands products, and other marginal sources of quasipetroleum fuel – world oil production peaked in 2005 or 2006 and, despite record prices and massive drilling programs in the Middle East and elsewhere, has been slipping down the far side of Hubbert’s peak ever since. Dozens of countries in the nonindustrial world are already struggling with desperate shortages of petroleum products, while the industrial world’s attempts to stave off trouble by pouring its food supply into its gas tanks via ethanol and biodiesel have succeeded mostly in launching food prices on a stratospheric trajectory from which they show no signs of returning any time soon.

Does this mean that we’re finally, for real, at the eleventh hour? That’s the richest and most bitter irony of all. As Robert Hirsch and his colleagues pointed out not long ago in a crucial study, the only way to respond effectively to Peak Oil on a national scale, and stave off massive economic and social disruptions, is to start preparations twenty years before the arrival of peak petroleum production. The eleventh hour, in other words, came and went in 1986, and no amount of pressure, protest, or wishful thinking can make up for the opportunity that was missed then. Listen carefully today and you can hear the sound of the clock tolling twelve, reminding us that the eleventh hour is gone for good.

The problem with this realization, of course, is that the story of the twelfth hour doesn’t make good melodrama. When you’re standing in the train station watching the train you meant to catch rattling out of sight around a distant curve miles down the track, it’s hard to capture the excitement of the desperate pelting run through the station that gets you onto the train just as it starts rolling toward the destination you hoped to reach. Equally, the story of the twelfth hour isn’t all that useful as a tool of political manipulation, since the silence of an empty train station makes it rather too easy to stop and think about whether the destination you hoped to reach was actually someplace you wanted to go.

While it may not make good melodrama or effective politics, though, I’ve come to think that one of the things we most need just now, in the Peak Oil scene and in modern industrial civilization as a whole, is that time of reflection in the silence that follows when the eleventh hour has come and gone, and the last hope of avoiding the consequences of our actions has vanished down the track into the land of might-have-beens. It’s been pointed out more than once that the process of coming to terms with Peak Oil has more than a little in common with the five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – that Elizabeth Kubler-Ross injected into our cultural dialogue and Ben Vereen made famous in Bob Fosse’s extraordinary movie All That Jazz. It’s been noticed much less often that the final stage of the process has a gift to offer, and the name of the gift is wisdom – something the world arguably needs a good deal more than it needs another round of comforting melodrama, or another set of political agendas disguising themselves as solutions to yet another catastrophe du jour.

Adam's Story: Uncharted Waters

This narrative is the final part of an exploration of the five themes from my Archdruid Report post “Glimpsing the Deindustrial Future” using the toolkit of narrative fiction. As with the rest of “Adam’s Story,” the setting is the coastal Pacific Northwest sometime during the second half of this century, after the political disintegration of the United States and the end of the global industrial system.

*********************

They’d been at Tillicum River most of a month before Adam and Haruko knew for certain that their future lay there, though Adam began to guess the shape of it after the first week or so. Growing up as the last child left in a dying town, he’d studied almost from infancy the art of listening to the words behind the words people spoke, all the things adults didn’t want a child to know about that the child needed to know. Through the long days he spent working in Earl Tigard’s garden, patching his roof, and doing a hundred other neglected chores, he watched the townsfolk watch him, listened to their voices as wariness gave way to familiarity in their greetings and small talk, felt the label “outsider” gradually dropping off him as though the sweat that rolled down his face and back as he put in onions or dug up dandelion roots for coffee made it come unstuck. Even so, when certainty arrived it caught him by surprise.

That day he and Earl helped finish the new fence around the goat pasture the Tigards shared with their five closest neighbors: hard work even by Adam’s standards, and it didn’t help that the goats did their level best all day to extract themselves from the barn and get underfoot, and succeeded more than once. The dinner bell was even more welcome than usual, and afterwards Earl broke out bottled beer from the cellar – local, of course, but the Tillicum River brewery had more than a local market in the days before things started falling apart, and there was talk of selling it to the trading ships that were starting to poke their way up and down the coast again.

Halfway through the first glass, someone knocked at the door. When Earl went to answer it, it turned out to be four people, one familiar face among them: the portly policeman Adam remembered from the town gate. “You’ve met Chuck Babcock,” Earl said, making introductions, “our police chief. This is Cathy Weiss, our mayor.” A woman with iron-colored hair in a bun and the angular face and quick motions of a bird shook Adam’s hand, then Haruko’s. “Juliet Rasmussen, city clerk, and Fred Baird from the city council.” Juliet was plump and smiling, Fred lean and reserved. They found chairs around the living room, took beers from Earl.

“Well,” said the mayor. “You probably know that we’ve had trouble now and then with people from outside, but you probably also know that about half the people who live here came from somewhere else. Earl and Anne have spoken well of both of you.”

“They’re not the only ones,” said Chuck. “You two work hard, you stay out of trouble, and – ” A nod to Haruko. “ – the folks at the Buddhist church ain’t exactly unhappy to have somebody show up and start helping out, just like that.” Haruko ducked her head, embarrassed but pleased.

“So what we’d like to know,” the mayor went on, “is whether you’d considered the possibility of settling down here.”

Haruko’s hand went to her mouth. Adam blinked, and then grinned. “Tell you the truth,” he said, “we’d been wondering what was the best way to ask somebody about that. So yes, please, and thank you.”

“You’ll want a place of your own,” Juliet said, “and there are plenty of those; choose one that nobody lives in and register it with me at city hall, and it’s yours. Some of the things you’ll need you’ll have to buy or work for, but some you can get free – this town used to have upwards of seven thousand people, and a lot of their stuff is still around. The city warehouse is one of the things I manage, so check with me.”

There was more talk, about votes and town meetings and what to do if emergencies happened, but most of it slid out of Adam’s mind just as fast as it entered, pushed aside by the sheer bright awareness that the long trek from Learyville was actually over, and not the way he’d thought it might end, bleached bones along the road somewhere or the long slow fall into one of the big inland cities where so many people from Learyville went and so few survived long. Still, one memory stuck; as everyone shook hands and the visitors got ready to go, the police chief stopped, grinned, and said, “Got something of yours to give back, too,” and handed him his father’s pistol. “You might want to get that cleaned and serviced; we got a gunsmith here, you know, and if we get raiders again you’ll need it.”

The next few days were a blur: choosing a house from among the empty ones on the edge of the inhabited part of town, with a yard big enough for chickens and gardens and no leaks in the roof; going to the city warehouse and finding out just how much tableware and cooking pots, storm windows and furniture seven thousand people had left behind; meeting new neighbors and ending up at the center of a housewarming party where people from a block in every direction brought food and hand-me-downs to help tide things over until the household got going; giving two of Marge Dotson’s asparagus crowns to Earl and Anne as a thank-you gift and planting the others in the best spot of the new garden; holding Haruko as she wept out of sheer relief that her own journey, so much longer and more bitter than his, had ended so well.

Yet it didn’t feel like an ending, not to Adam. One of his new neighbors was a stocky black man named Stan, who spent his days at the docks fitting out a sailboat, a big one, with two masts and enough room belowdecks to carry cargo. Other port towns up and down the coast already had the beginnings of trading fleets, Stan told him one evening. “We ain’t never gonna see air freight again, or container ships, or any of that, but folks still gonna want things they can’t grow where they at,” he said, gesturing expansively. “I don’t know about you, but man, I’d just about kill to get my hands on real coffee, and I ain’t the only one. Head down south and you get to where they grow coffee, chocolate, chili peppers with some real heat to ‘em, all kinds of good stuff. What I don’t know yet is what they want that we got, but that won’t take but one trip to find out. Next spring the Alice May’s gonna be ready, and we gonna give it a try.”

That night, somewhere in the dark hours, Adam blinked awake from a dream: he’d been with Stan on the Alice May, wind in her sails and uncharted waters ahead, while the coast that contained everything he’d ever known drew away into a dark line astern. He lay there for what seemed like half of forever, wondering why the image felt so familiar, until clarity came. He’d been sailing into uncharted waters all his life, since a world he’d never had time to get to know drifted off into memory, and he wasn’t alone on the voyage. As he sank back into sleep, thought blurred into dream, and he was on a boat again, except that the boat was the town of Tillicum River and the sails billowed above its much-patched roofs and makeshift wall; Haruko was with him, and so were Stan and all his other neighbors, the Buddhists chanting prayers amidships, Chuck in his police hat pacing along the gunwales and Cathy Weiss at the helm. The shore fading into distance was heaped with the ruins of skyscrapers, and faces from his past – his father, Sybil, many more – floated pale and silent in the gray waves astern.

When he woke from that, the sun’s first rays were already splashing through his bedroom window and distant voices and the clatter of handcart wheels announced the beginning of another workday. Still, he lay there for a moment before waking Haruko with a kiss and getting out of bed. Uncharted waters, he thought. Would there even be a shore on the other side?

But there was work to be done, plenty of it, and a place to find or make in a home he still only half knew. He started going to the Buddhist church now and again, more because Haruko went there than for any more spiritual reason; still, the town’s six churches played a big part in weaving the community together, and Adam knew that he couldn’t risk being on the outside. The same thinking got him and Haruko to join the Grange, one of the two old lodges in town. All the farmers and the really avid gardeners in town belonged to the Grange, just as the people who worked in the brewery, the other businesses in town, and the city government all belonged to the Elks Lodge. Once he and Haruko went through the elegant little ceremony that made them Grangers, a little more of their outsider status melted away, they were woven more tightly into the net of mutual help that made for survival now that the old and never more than half-kept promise of government help had been broken beyond repair.

The police chief was a Granger, the Worthy Master that year in fact; Adam hadn’t expected that, but then he hadn’t guessed that Chuck nurtured a wild passion for tomatoes, had more than two dozen varieties turning his back yard into a jungle where the local cats stalked like tigers. He also hadn’t expected to find so many questions about the town’s farming economy settled at Grange meetings. Those questions turned more and more on the weather, because the climate was changing: warmer and wetter with each passing year, or so he gathered from the talk.

“One more spring like last one and we’re going to have to let go of the river fields,” Fred Baird, the city councillor who’d come to invite them to stay, said in one such discussion. They were sitting at the long table in the Grange hall’s dining room after the meeting. “Between the rain and the river they’re basically mud until well into summer.” Glum nods circled the table.

“Excuse me,” said Haruko after a moment, startling Adam; she still rarely spoke much in public. “Perhaps you could grow rice?”

“Grain crops haven’t done well down there for years now,” Fred said with a quick shake of his head, but Chuck gave her a long sideways look. “You ain’t talking about field rice, though, are you?” the police chief asked. “You’re talking about paddy rice.” Haruko nodded.

“You know,” said Chuck, “this could get into questions you probably don’t want to answer, so I think we’re all gonna agree that you learned about rice in California or someplace, okay?” Haruko nodded again, a little more uneasily. “Do you know how to grow paddy rice?”

“Oh, yes,” she replied. “I worked in the rice fields for eleven years – in California.”

The word on everyone’s mind and no one’s lips was “nanmin,” Adam knew. Nobody in town ever talked about the refugees from crowded, starving Japan in his hearing: proof enough, if he needed any, that they’d figured out that Haruko came from the wrong side of the Pacific.

“And you can teach us how to do that?” Chuck asked.

“Oh, yes.”

Chuck put his chin in his hand. Adam felt Haruko tense beside him, draw herself up. In a very quiet voice, she said, “If you need help, there are others – from California – who know how.”

Growing up in a dying town, Adam thought, was a good way to learn about silences – big silences and small ones, still silences and loud ones. This one roared like thunder. After a long moment, Chuck nodded, said, “I was just thinking that.”

“Chuck, I don’t know,” said Fred, frowning.

“They ain’t gonna go back home,” Chuck said then, “and they ain’t gonna stop coming. I ain’t saying we ought to just throw open the door, but we’re gonna have to deal with ‘em sooner or later. Might as well be now.”

Another long silence and then, unwillingly, Fred nodded.

Uncharted waters, Adam thought. In the evening above him, he could imagine sails billowing in a wind none of them could feel, pushing the town like the boat in his dream away from the world they knew toward a destination they could only guess at.