Love Affairs!

This is the first of periodic pieces on love affairs in my life. I hasten to add, these affairs encompassed many things, persons, and ideas.

I am not sure if any future love affairs can compare with this very first one. (My wife Kate falls completely outside of these declarations as she appeared long after.) My very first affair was with the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE). I have a distinct memory of living on 181st in the Bronx and finding a garage around the corner from the tenement where my family lived. My mother was still alive back then, so that puts my age around five or six and around 1922 or 23.

I would spend hours in the garage watching the mechanics working on cars. At the time there were still plenty horses pulling all kinds of wagons. I saw the last troika of horses pulling fire engines that belched smoke from steam engines that ran the pumps. The horses thundered through the streets looking and sounding like hell and damnation had been turned loose.

Here was the thing about the ICE. It was easy for me to understand a big Belgium truck horse pulling a wagon. What got me crazy was trying to figure out how one could put a liquid called gasoline into a tank that would make the wheels push the car. And so began my search for the Rosette Stone that would teach me how the ICE ran a car.

I came to understand that gasoline was highly combustible. The fuel pump moved the gas to the carburetor. It was then made into a mist and injected into cylinders where it was compressed and then exploded by the spark plug. Riding up and down in the cylinder was a piston connecting-rod that attached to a crankshaft. That changed the reciprocating motion into a circular one. The energy from that turning shaft was transferred to the wheels via the transmission and drive-shaft. God, what on earth could be more beautiful than that! And I was in love with it. Little did I know that I was not alone in this affair.

The basic ICE was made both bigger and smaller until it was as ubiquitous as horse-shit was in the days of the wagon. ICE gave us automobiles, tractors that revolutionized farming, motorcycles, lawn mowers, chain saws, weed whackers, boat engines, outboard motors, and on and on. And man it was cheap. I could fill up my 1929 Packard eight-cylinder engine for two bucks. Who ever thought we might someday run out of that magical liquid?

Okay, here comes the “alas.” I was not at all alone in this great love fest that burgeoned into a universal party. It has spread throughout the world and continues at ever increasing rapidity. China, India, Mexico, everywhere that there is an opportunity, people want a car to take them to somewheres. Now, this has become one of our most serious present day economic and environmental problems. How so you ask?

In our century long party with ICE we lost sight of the fact that the oil from which we make gasoline is finite. This means there is just so much of it and once we burn the oil, it’s gone forever. It shows up in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, a major factor in global warming. Now that we are in the $4 a gallon range going to $5 and $6 we are face to face with a crisis far more serious than the housing bubble. Since I was focused on my love affair with ICE, I did not mention all the other things that oil is used for, including heating most homes in the US, plastics, fertilizer, medicines, cloth, rope, and on and on. With the exception of Al Gore, who is not running for office, there is not a leader who is willing to tackle this eight-hundred pound Gorilla that is about to become an economic catastrophe of repercussions of which we have never seen the like. (I encourage you to read Hugh Jone’s fact filled story and predictions of Peak Oil included in the December 13, 2007 blog.)

Precisely because there is no simple solution to the problem, leaders choose to largely ignore the reality of oil’s decline, perhaps because to act on it could be political suicide. If we don’t talk about it, maybe it won’t happen. That just makes things worse because we become anesthetized. When the steady decrease of oil does hit us, we have what is known as a rude awakening, but no solution. Like people hit by a tsunami or an earthquake, we never believed it was coming. Hopefully we can wake up our folks in Washington and start acting on some things we might begin doing NOW, not in 2020. [I do feel sorry for whoever becomes our President in 2009. He or she will certainly have some mess “when the shit hits the fan” (a World War II joke).]

The automobile in the 1920’s often broke down. Passers-by would shout, “get a horse.” That might now be “get an electric.”

Thank you Kate. N.H.W.Y.