The sky was blood red, the clouds long purple plumes stretching across the horizon. Something ominous and black was in the air. Drivers made frantic U turns across grassy medians on six-lane highways. Some abandoned their gas-guzzling chariots in drainage ditches, egrets and alligators peering quizzically on, and frantically waved at other drivers, who sped up at the sight of them. The blur of fast food restaurants now seemed obsolete. The colorful, eye-catching signs of gas stations were like a sick joke or a siren, luring you toward them ... only to learn the pumps were bone dry, and all those other cars on the highway were now ahead of you in your race to the next gas station.
The plot-line to a new Spielberg flick? No. Florida two weeks ago, during the aftermath of Katrina, which people seem not to have noticed also walloped Miami on her way to Cajun Country.
By dumb luck — or sheer accident — I was in southwestern Florida with my friend, Parke Puterbaugh. We were traveling from Marco Island to Pensacola Beach, fact-checking a new edition of our Florida Beaches . We've traveled together along America's coastlines for 21 years, and we've never seen anything quite like the madness in the wake of Katrina. The hurricane damaged the drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico and destroyed the ports where tankers from Saudi Arabia delivered the goods. It was as if a giant ax had severed the main artery into America's heart. These pitifully unprepared motorists in Florida were performing the St. Vitus Dance to a dying way of life.
Even the woman at the airport's car rental desk pleaded with us to pre-purchase a tank of their overpriced gas. Rental cars had been abandoned all over Florida due to lack of gas. When we walked to the lot to pick up our car, another sick joke winked at us, a giant yellow Hummer. It was parked, like all the other Hummers and SUVs — unrented and unrentable — in the space next to ours. As a sort of Freak Show Photo Op, we each posed for a snap behind the wheel of this Hummer, which ought to be sent to the Smithsonian and placed in a wing called "America's Hall of Shame."
It was 1974 all over again, back when we were in college, back when those woebegone students with cars brought back tales from the gas pumps of quarter-mile-long lines and fists flying along with curse words at the Goobers who worked at the station and the Saudi potentates who made this all possible.
We have had 30 years since that first shoe dropped to get our act together. And now, with Katrina and Iraq, the second shoe has dropped. What do we have to show for our three-decade headstart? "Less than zero," as Elvis Costello put it. We have less fuel-efficient vehicles, we've given trucks loopholes that make SUVs and Hummers "cars," we have run up personal and national debt we'll never pay off — and it will get far worse as people buy on credit the gas to keep obsolete vehicles sated. We've gutted our railroad system, ignored public transportation and continued to build and expand outward, as though the car were the wave of the future, not the broken paradigm is so clearly has become (see James Kunstler's Clusterfuck Nation blog; he's been hitting bullseyes since Katrina struck).
One of the things we learned as children was that when the Big Bad Wolf comes a-calling, you don't get a take-back. You build your house out of straw or sticks, the wolf's gonna blow it down. You build it out of bricks, there's a chance you can ride it out. We've built our economy on straw and sticks, staked our survival on a bunch of sleazebag oil execs and Saudi sheiks, and cut all funding to programs that might have prepared us for these dark days ahead.
As I wrote Parke once I got home, "I fear our most dire predictions over the years are coming to pass. These were not predictions I wanted to see unfold, merely cautionary warnings in hopes some mature adults in leadership positions would foment a long-range strategy. None did. New Orleans is just the start. The economy will tank, the situation in Iraq will worsen, Bush will circle the wagons, invade Venzuela or some other oil nation nearby and it's WWIII. The idea of travel guides will be obsolete. Who's going to travel? How will they get there with gas at $8/gallon?"
Katrina may have blown the fairy dust out of America's eyes but knowing this, and doing something about it, are two different things.
