The Unwinding

by George Packer

  That Thanksgiving, Dean and his sisters and mother brought a plate of food to his father where he worked, in a guard’s booth at the entrance to the parking lot outside Unifi Manufacturing in Mayodan. His father had been divorced by the wife in Burlington, and at age sixty-five he was living alone in a rental apartment in Mayodan, in a little yellow house next to a shuttered mill. Unifi, a windowless concrete building hundreds of yards long, was the last mill in the area still doing any volume. His father was lucky to hold on to a job there. He was slobbering, barely coherent, and had to wear Depends because the painkillers had worn away his stomach lining.

  Dean opened the Back Yard Burgers in Danville on December 13. Three days later, his father shot himself in the heart with a .357 in his bed. His last words were left behind on paper in chicken scratch handwriting: “I can’t take it any more.”

  Pete Price was buried on the Price tobacco farm, in the grave next to his father Norfleet’s, under a stone cross inscribed with the words “Just a sinner saved by grace.” Years later, Dean stood over the grave and said, “That was his whole mind-set. That was what was wrong with it. He thought he was a sinner. When he was really a child of God—could have done anything, and had powers he didn’t even know.”

  A few months before the suicide, Dean and his father and Dean’s boys had gone on a family vacation to Walt Disney World in Orlando. One day, Dean and his father were sitting under the Tree of Life, and they began talking about religion and the Bible. One thing that always struck Dean was where the Bible said, “And the word became flesh and dwelt among us.” At Disney World he told his father, “And what that means is that your thoughts and your words become your reality, and you need to protect your thoughts and guard your words, and never say anything you don’t want to see come to fruition in your life. You stay positive.” And perhaps because Dean seemed like a big success, with a lot of cash on hand from the sale of the Stokesdale store, and perhaps because his father’s way of believing had led him downward to this point, they sat there under the Tree of Life and his father listened—for the first and last time in their lives together, he listened.

  * * *

  Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on Monday, August 29, 2005. That morning, seven hundred fifty miles away, Dean watched on TV. By Friday, with oil refineries shut down all along the Gulf Coast, the price of diesel had spiked from $2.25 to $3.50 a gallon, and Dean was running out of fuel at his truck stops in Martinsville and Bassett. Commerce on Route 220 pretty much came to a halt, and the North Carolina public schools nearly closed for lack of fuel in school buses. Dean struggled to keep fuel in the ground any way he could, selling off-road diesel from his on-road diesel tanks. Independents like him were accused of price gouging, but they were only protecting what little fuel they had—if they kept the price low they’d run out in a matter of hours. It took two months for the region to emerge from the crisis.

  Dean called Katrina “my come-to-Jesus moment.”

  He had long known that independent truck stop owners like him were hog-tied. Margins were so low that a small-scale distributor made less than a dime on the gallon. “From day one I’ve struggled with the business, always undercapitalized, always trying to leverage everything I had. Between the credit card companies, the big oil companies, the taxes, the employees stealing, with twenty-something percent unemployment around here, I just never had a chance.” But Katrina almost put Dean out of business, and it drove him to realize that he had to do something different to survive. He had to make his truck stops energy independent—that would be his competitive advantage over all the other truck stops up and down 220. He was startled to learn how dependent America was on foreign oil, imported from countries that didn’t like the United States, countries that sent terrorists to kill Americans, countries where Americans were now fighting and dying. “And it pissed me off that our government, George W. Bush and all the rest of ’em, would let this country get into a position where it is actually threatening our very existence. And all because of greed, and the almighty dollar, and putting our faith in these multinational corporations that clothe us, feed us, and fuel us.”

  A month before Katrina hit, Wal-Mart had opened its first Supercenter in Rockingham County. Two more were coming within six months, including one that would occupy 158,000 square feet in a mall on the highway between the center of Mayodan and Route 220. Three Wal-Marts for a poor rural county of just ninety thousand people: that would wipe out just about every remaining grocery store, clothing store, and pharmacy in the area, and because Wal-Mart also sold discount fuel, eventually it would kill the truck stop owners. Two thousand five hundred people applied for the 307 “associates” positions at the Mayodan store, which paid an average of $9.85 an hour, or $16,108 a year. On January 31, 2006, the mayor of Mayodan and Miss Rockingham County were on hand to roll out the red carpet for the grand opening on Highway 135.

  Dean began reading around on the Web and found that when a big-box retailer came into your community, eighty-six cents of every dollar spent there went somewhere else. Very little money stayed home to benefit the people who lived, worked, and shopped there—just like with the local truck stops that kept only a dime on every gallon sold. Even before Wal-Mart showed up, the main streets of Madison and Mayodan were emptying out, the center of economic life moving to the highways where Lowe’s and CVS had already arrived. “And if you think about it,” Dean said, “the people that ran the hardware store, the shoe store, the little restaurant that was here, they were the fabric of the community. They were the leaders. They were the Little League baseball coaches, they were the town council members, they were the people everybody looked up to. We lost that.” The rest of the country was supposed to be booming—Wall Street and Silicon Valley had more money than ever—but Rockingham County and the Piedmont were sinking into something like a depression. Anyway, how many investment bankers and software designers were there around the country? Then think of how many farmers.

  A lot changed in Dean’s mind very quickly. He had always voted Republican, except in 1992 when he went for Ross Perot, but after Katrina he realized that Bush was teamed up with the multinationals and the oil companies in the worst way. Even Reagan, his idol, had made a big mistake when he cut deals with the oil countries—wasn’t Iran-contra about that?—and kept America on fossil fuels for thirty more years. History would judge Reagan harshly for that.

  One day, Dean was sitting on a bar stool at his kitchen table, surfing a website called “Whiskey and Gunpowder: The Independent Investor’s Daily Guide to Gold, Commodities, Profits and Freedom” on the lousy dial-up connection that was all you could get in Stokesdale, when he read the words “peak oil.” It meant the point when petroleum extraction would reach its maximum rate and begin to fall off. A geologist with Gulf Oil named M. King Hubbert came up with the theory in 1956. Hubbert predicted that the United States, the world’s largest oil producer, would hit its high point in domestic production around 1970—which was what happened, and which explained why oil prices became so volatile throughout the seventies. Hubbert’s theory was that the rest of the world would reach peak oil right around 2005.

  Dean stood up at the table, went weak in his knees, and stumbled backward. He had a vision of what peak oil would mean where he lived (Katrina had already given a glimpse): long-haul trucks coming to a standstill, food stranded on the highways, local people unable to eat or get to work or heat their homes. Riots, revolution. At least, things getting very chaotic very fast. People around here had guns, they had the Scotch-Irish mentality to fight. Then something like martial law, maybe a coup d’état. This was what America was facing. He knew that this moment would stay with him, just like discovering Napoleon Hill. Napoleon wrote about the power of concentration—that if you concentrated your mind on one subject for an extended period of time, things would start popping into your head and what you needed to know would be illuminated to you. Dean could feel that happening to him now. He immediately called his mentor, Rocky Carter�
�the contractor who had built the truck stop by the Martinsville Speedway and turned Dean on to Napoleon Hill—and told him about this discovery.

  In the spring of 2006, around the time Dean found out about peak oil, his friend Howard saw a story on CNN about a man in Tennessee who was making ethanol that he sold for fifty cents a gallon. Howard was twelve years older than Dean and had grown up in a house that his family rented for twenty-five dollars a month on the Price tobacco farm. He was stocky and irascible, with a thick white mustache and powerful forearms, and he had spent most of his adult life stringing television cable, drinking, fighting, and riding motorcycles. He lost several front teeth in a bar fight in High Point after he ran out of pool balls to throw at the bikers coming after him. Then, at age fifty-three, he married a tough little slip of a woman—“harder than a raw bone on a ladder knot,” Howard said. She had been his first love in his teens but she’d married someone else, so Howard had to wait most of his life to settle down. They lived in a trailer in Madison with his wife’s daughter, who was obese and drew a disability check.

  The ethanol man lived outside Lynchburg, Tennessee, home of Jack Daniel’s. One day, Howard and Dean drove eight hours and found him by a creek at the bottom of a crooked, foggy road—a short, beady-eyed man with a big gut, making moonshine and adding gasoline. The man sold them a still—a long copper tube, like an oversized bassoon, with several valves—for $2,100. Dean and Howard weren’t his only customers. What with Katrina, the gas price spike, and the CNN clip, the ethanol man sold ten or eleven stills that day.

  Dean and Howard drove back to North Carolina, bought some corn from local farmers, and started fooling around with sugar and yeast. They soon found out that making ethanol was too costly, in terms of the energy needed to separate the water and alcohol and also the number of government permits required. But Dean had also been reading about another alternative fuel: biodiesel. Before Katrina, he’d never heard the word, had no idea how it was even spelled, but biodiesel was appealing for a number of reasons. Transesterification—that’s what the production process was called—took much less energy than making ethanol: for every unit of energy you put in, you created almost five units of fuel. Biodiesel was made from fat compounds called triglycerides, and the oil could come from various feedstocks, like soybeans or crushed canola seeds or animal fat, or even the waste cooking oil that restaurants got rid of. It could be manufactured on a small scale for relatively little money. Blended with regular number 2 diesel at a concentration of up to 20 percent biodiesel, it could go straight into an engine that needed no conversion. With slight modifications, a diesel engine could run on 100 percent biofuel. Politicians worried about the price of gas because that’s what went into the voters’ cars, but diesel ran the economy, got the food to market.

  Dean and Howard drove back to Tennessee. The ethanol man had hooked up with two Germans who were making what they called “bee-o-diesel.” Dean bought one of their portable reactors mounted on skids for twenty thousand dollars, having secured an investment from Rocky Carter. The reactor could produce a thousand gallons a day. Dean and Howard drove it back home and traded the ethanol still to a farmer in Harrisburg, Virginia, for two crops of canola harvested on fifty acres. Canola—it stood for Canadian Oil, Low Acid—was a winter cover crop derived from rapeseed. Forty-four percent of the crushed seed became oil, the rest meal for feeding livestock. Dean read that canola oil had 93 percent of the BTU value of number 2 diesel and took less energy to convert to fuel than other feedstock, because the fatty acid chains melted down at lower temperatures. Canola was a mustard seed. There was a parable about the mustard seed in the Bible—Jesus compared it to the kingdom of heaven: “Though it is less than all the seeds that are on the earth, yet when it is sown, grows up, and becomes greater than all the herbs, and puts out great branches, so that the birds of the sky can lodge under its shadow.”

  Dean harvested some canola seeds, tiny black balls like peppercorns. He ran the seeds through a small crushing machine twice, caught the stream of oil, filtered it, poured the oil into the reactor, and turned up the heat. He began making biodiesel. Unlike the Germans, he gave the first syllable a full, high, open-mouthed lift, as if it were the opening phrase of an old Baptist hymn. This was the stuff that was going to set him free.

  “All I’ve ever wanted to do all my life,” Dean said, “is farm and be left alone.”

  TAMMY THOMAS

  In the late nineties, Tammy’s high school sweetheart, Barry, reappeared. She had run into him a few times over the years and would never talk to him, once even fled with her kids when she saw him approaching at a festival. Then, at her godmother’s son’s wedding reception, Barry’s aunt was the caterer and Barry was working with her. He pursued Tammy and cornered her and asked for five minutes to explain that he had never stopped caring for her, always loved her, regretted marrying the pregnant girl Tammy had seen him with the summer after their daughter was born. “If I could just give him five minutes,” she said, “and it cost me seven years.”

  For a while it was a for-real fairy tale, as if God had wanted them back together. Her older daughter was told that the Time Warner Cable serviceman her mother was going to marry on July 3, 1999, was her father. She graduated the next year and left to study theater at Ohio State, so it didn’t matter so much that she didn’t like her mother’s new husband. But Tammy’s other two kids didn’t have a great relationship with their stepfather, either. And within a few years, Tammy and Barry began to quarrel, and the marriage fell apart.

  Tammy stopped going to the church on the south side where Barry’s family was prominent. For a while she didn’t want to be seen around the city. “Youngstown is very, very small,” she said. “A lot of people were surprised that we were together anyway, so it was even harder being separated.” So many things from her life that she’d repressed came back to hurt her. God and her cousin led Tammy to an interracial megachurch in Akron, the House of the Lord, where a sign in the sanctuary said RELATIONSHIPS ARE EVERYTHING. She decided that this was where she needed to heal, and she began attending services several times a week, and for two or three years church was her life.

  She had lived in four different places on the south side, and it was now worse than the east side. She never felt safe getting into her car in the middle of the night when she worked the midnight shift, or leaving her younger daughter home alone after dark. She let Barry have the house, since there was already enough turmoil (he lost it to foreclosure a couple of years later). She could have moved to the west side, which was the last part of the city where homes were holding their value, but that was where white people from the east and south sides had fled. It would have felt wrong for her to join them there. In July 2005, she and Barry decided to divorce, and in August Tammy bought a modest house for seventy-one thousand dollars, with an attached garage, on a safe street in a township on the northern edge of Youngstown called Liberty. For the first time she had an easy drive to work.

  In October she moved in. That same month, Packard Electric, going under a new name, declared bankruptcy.

  * * *

  For the two decades that Tammy worked there, Packard steadily chipped away at the labor force in Warren, going from more than thirteen thousand employees in the early seventies to seven thousand in the early nineties to three thousand by 2005. During the same years, the foreign workforce expanded to more than a hundred thousand, and Packard’s auto parts factories became the largest employers in the maquiladora belt of Mexico. At some plants, like Plant 14, Tammy came to see that nothing was locked down, and over time all the machinery was moved south of the border, and with it the jobs on those lines. It was like a repetition of the steelworkers’ agony, but in slow time, by attrition.

  Tammy watched the union get weaker and weaker. The company’s 1993 contract with Local 717 established a new third tier of workers who would never receive full wages and benefits. Tammy noticed how management treated the 93s differently, with stricter work rules, wouldn�
��t let them talk to Tammy’s line at Thomas Road, stood behind them and watched them work in a way that would make anyone nervous. The contract also gave incentives to do twelve-hour shifts, which was impossible for someone with a family, like Tammy, or for someone with health problems. It seemed like a way to get the more senior employees to retire, and then hire more workers as 93s.

  In 1999, having consolidated its parts divisions, including Packard, into one entity called Delphi Automotive Systems, General Motors spun off Delphi into an independent corporation, with a public stock offering and a prospectus for investors that promised to “improve operating performance” with “a ‘fix/sell/close’ plant-by-plant analysis through which we seek to improve our cost competitiveness, and various other sourcing, labor, and cost reduction initiatives.” Wall Street had been pushing GM to spin off Delphi for at least a year, thinking there would be more shareholder value in a smaller automaker and a separate parts company than in one vertically integrated GM.

  Tammy found the whole spin-off suspicious. “At the time, Packard Electric was profitable. As soon as we came under Delphi, we were no longer profitable,” she said. “I had a feeling then that something was not right about this. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I think the writing was on the wall. There was a plan to get rid of some of the long-term workers, so you spin these people off, you put them under an umbrella, and then you don’t have to deal with them, because now they are not going to be GM employees.”