The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (67 page)

That was Dean’s belief, his faith. Forty-eight years old, with no job, no partner,
hardly any money, driving from county to county and talking to hundreds of people,
some nibbles but no solid bites—these months were the strongest test of his faith.
Maybe he didn’t know how to talk to county bureaucrats. They were even more cautious
than farmers, knowing they needed help but afraid to take the first step into something
they couldn’t see—which was the actual definition of faith. Sometimes, while Dean
was describing his vision, he would get too far out ahead of himself and start to
lose them. One of his brochures said, “Our hard earned tax dollars go to support terrorists
and jihadists, the very people we are at war with. Enriching their lives, while we
struggle to maintain our basic infrastructure,” and that freaked out a few school
administrators.

Once, when he was driving in Franklin County, his son Ryan called him from school.
A sheriff ’s deputy was looking for Dean—while trying to serve a civil summons, he’d
found the house door ajar and was concerned about a break-in. The summons was from
a food company that hadn’t gotten the word about Red Birch of Martinsville’s bankruptcy.
Dean’s mother couldn’t hide her worry. Wasn’t this a little crazy? When was he going
to make some money? Was it time to give up and get a secular job?

And all around him was brokenness.

One day in October, Dean was driving through Forsyth County and he stopped in a little
place called Rural Hall, where they still held tobacco auctions at the Old Belt Farmers
Co-Op—some of the last anywhere in the state, if not the country. It was the end of
the season, and the cavernous warehouse with the sharp strong smell of tobacco hanging
in the air was almost empty, and six or eight men in golf shirts were walking up and
down rows of four-foot-high tobacco bales. As they moved from bale to bale the buyers
grabbed fistfuls of golden brown leaves and the auctioneer called out a price per
pound, “Dollar fifteen dollar ten ten dollar ten ten ten dollar ten ten dollar five
five dollar five,” and one of the buyers, a man from Bailey’s Cigarettes in Virginia,
said “Eighty,” and the auctioneer said, “Eighty. Bailey,” and the clerk wrote it down
on a scrap of paper and slapped it on top of the bale. The other buyer was from Kentucky.
“’Bacca pays bills,” he was saying. “I was told that when I was a little boy and the
rest is bull.” A few of the men had just come to watch, like Dean, retired farmers
and warehousemen who couldn’t get it out of their system.

The young farmer who was selling the tobacco leaned on a bale at a distance and watched
the older men in golf shirts. They were auctioning the part of his crop that the big
company in Danville where he had a contract, Japan Tobacco International, wouldn’t
take. The farmer’s name was Anthony Pyrtle, and he said that with the price of diesel
this year he would be lucky to make a profit. His childhood buddy Kent Smith had come
along to help unload the bales. Smith worked in a copper factory making $14.50 an
hour. “I used to think how lucky he was he didn’t have to work in the factory,” Smith
said. “Now I think I’m better off than he is.”

Pyrtle had heard about Dean and Red Birch. Dean told him, “This country should pay
you six dollars a gallon for biodiesel, instead of sending three dollars to Saudi
Arabia.”

“I’d change in a minute,” Pyrtle said, “and raise corn or whatever fuel crop I could
find.”

Dean walked out of the Old Belt Farmers Co-Op and got into his Honda. When he was
a boy, the auctions had been a regional celebration—the excitement, the cash in hand,
the Christmas shopping. The tobacco warehouses hummed with people who came to socialize
and talk politics. But the auction today was something quick and dirty, done in private
with a few onlookers, and Anthony Pyrtle was just hoping to break even.

Maybe to suit his mood, Dean drove home through the back roads of Stokes County. The
county manager had told him that 30 percent of the people in Stokes couldn’t afford
to put food on the table, and the suicide rate was twice the national average. Dean’s
accountant lived in Stokes, and his stepson had lost eight friends since high school,
three from suicide. Dean drove through the town of Walnut Cove and parked at the East
Stokes Outreach Ministry. There was a food pantry in front, with canned goods and
bags of pet food on plywood shelves, and in the fridge there was ground deer meat
donated by local hunters. The lady who ran the place told him that a police officer
who was shot in the line of duty and was getting workmen’s compensation, but didn’t
want to go on disability, had come in a week ago asking for food. So had a court stenographer
with a broken hand. A sign in the office said “Due to lack of funds there will be
NO fuel or kerosene assistance this year. We are doing all we can to keep our pantry
full. Please make other arrangements for heating assistance ASAP.” An obese woman
with oxygen tubes in her nostrils and a clothing voucher in her hand was waiting for
a double-large shirt. She said, “We’re a family of nine and we’re doing fine.” The
lady in charge told Dean, “You realize that we live in the economy where one flat
tire or one month without a paycheck could alter most anybody’s world.”

On his way out Dean felt a shudder. There but for the grace of God. Once it happened
to you, it was almost impossible to get out. And to think how many times he believed
he’d been about to break through, only to have it pulled back at the last minute and
find he was farther away than ever. On the drive home an old church hymn got stuck
in his head.

How tedious and tasteless the hours

When Jesus no longer I see!

Sweet prospects, sweet birds and sweet flowers

Have all lost their sweetness to me.

Tedious and tasteless. He went cold and started to cry. Then a voice like the voice
in his dream about the old wagon road spoke to him and said, “This is the
only
way it will work.”

And then the breakthrough came.

*   *   *

One night in October, Dean was reading
The Prosperity Bible
when he came across a sentence by Ralph Waldo Trine, a nineteenth-century author.
It said, “Never go to the second thing first.”

It suddenly hit him why he was having so much trouble with the schools. He was going
to the second thing first—telling them they could make their own fuel for the buses
if the county built a four-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar reactor. But the counties
didn’t have the money, and anyway the project was too risky and too complicated for
them to understand, especially when he started into the next phase with canola crops
and food-grade oil. He’d had to explain it to Eva Clayton three times, and even then
he wasn’t sure she got it. He had everything ass-backwards. The first thing was to
get the dadgum oil! Otherwise, how would you know how big a refinery a county should
build? He ought to just tell the schools that he would collect restaurant cooking
oil in their name, sell it to an existing biodiesel company, and give them half the
profits. The money could be used to keep teachers in classrooms, or anything else
they wanted. Just a simple cash donation, a school fundraiser—that was a metaphor
they could understand. And the local restaurant owners would understand, too, which
was why they’d sell their oil to Dean. Building a refinery, making the fuel, getting
farmers to grow canola—all that could come later.

Around the time he had this revelation, Dean met a man named Stephan Caldwell. Stephan
was thirty-two years old, from a small town in Ohio, the son of an oral surgeon and
gentleman apple farmer. He had started a career in advertising in Raleigh, but the
industry had been battered by the financial crisis, so he decided to get out of advertising
and into what he had always loved—machinery and farming. His interest led him to biodiesel,
and he set up a little waste oil recycling company called Green Circle, renting a
shop from a retired welder named Barefoot a mile from a hog slaughterhouse on lonely
farmland in Johnston County. When Dean went out to see Green Circle, he thought Stephan’s
plant looked like Red Birch, just in a new place—smelled like it, too.

Everyone doing biodiesel in the Piedmont knew about Red Birch. The word that had reached
Stephan’s ears wasn’t good—Red Birch didn’t pay farmers, and it sold bad fuel. But
he liked Dean Price’s passion and didn’t want to blame Dean for what he took to be
the sins of others. Quiet and hardworking, Stephan was barely surviving on contracts
with just a handful of restaurants around Raleigh, and the long hours pumping waste
oil were putting a strain on his marriage.

Dean came with an idea that promised much more than Stephan could hope to make on
his own. And Stephan came with the infrastructure—plant, equipment, truck—that Dean
lacked. He also had a degree in graphic design, and when Dean told him about his revelation,
Stephan spent the weekend drawing up a vivid brochure in green and yellow, called
“Biodiesel 4 Schools,” that explained the new concept with simplicity and clarity,
so that any fool of a bureaucrat could see this was the right thing to do.

Over Thanksgiving, Dean and Stephan decided to turn Green Circle into a partnership.
Dean thought it should divide 70–30 in his favor, since Stephan’s business model was
failing, but Stephan convinced him that at 55–45 they would be more like real partners.
Armed with the brochure, Dean went back to some of the officials that he’d met with
earlier in the year, in some cases eight or nine times. Right before Christmas, he
called an agriculture expert on the board of education in Pitt County, whom he’d seen
in April and then never heard a word. “I had it wrong,” Dean told him. “I went back
and learned from my mistakes. Now I got it right. Let me come back and give my presentation.”

Pitt County was in eastern North Carolina. Unlike the Piedmont it was flat, and you
knew the coast was nearby because of the bright silver light, but like the Piedmont
it had seen tobacco fade away, and it had three things Dean considered vital for the
success of his idea: fallow farmland, long driving distances, and a whole lot of restaurants
in the county seat of Greenville. Between Christmas and New Year’s he was given a
meeting with the chief financial officer of the Pitt County schools, who listened
carefully before exclaiming, “It’s ingenious!”

Those words were balm to Dean’s heart. He still had to sell it to a dozen other officials,
and they tried to poke any hole in it they could, wanting to be sure the schools weren’t
signing on with some fly-by-night operator or uncontrollable maverick. But on March
5, 2012, the Pitt County school board voted unanimously to enter a deal with Green
Circle, splitting the profits from the sale of the oil after the company covered its
costs. It had taken Dean a full year to get his first win.

He was reading a biography of Steve Jobs that talked about the rarefied air you breathe
when you have an idea that you know is going to change the world and nobody knows
it yet. He believed that was where he was. Pitt County and North Carolina could be
the Silicon Valley of the biofuels industry. Just sitting on an economic boom. Acres
of diamonds in Greenville.

It was strange how small the idea had to get before anyone would give it a chance.
A school fundraiser—as if Dean was a chocolate chip cookie dough salesman. But that’s
what he had to become. The work could not have been less auspicious, less like the
making of the Apple II. Dean went from restaurant to restaurant. He stood at the counter
with the Denny’s manager and said, “We would pick it up for free and you get all the
PR that goes with it, let all the parents know that Denny’s is supporting the schools.”
In the kitchen of a Thai restaurant the owner asked, “Are you a teacher?” and Dean
said, “With the schools, and we’re promoting this program and trying to save the schools
money, and we’re also trying to start a new industry in Pitt County.” He spent two
hours with the mother of the owner of Greenville’s biggest barbecue restaurant, getting
nowhere. Chinese restaurants were the easiest to sign up because the owners were eager
to be part of the community. By June 2012 he had ninety-three restaurants. By August,
Green Circle was pumping two thousand gallons a week.

One night, the two partners drove around after dark in Stephan’s pickup. They pulled
in to a mall and parked in the space in back of a barbecue joint. Stephan walked through
the kitchen past the bubbling fryers to the little office of Freddy the manager, where
a sign said
I’M REDNECK PROUD
, was given the keys, and went out again to unlock the cinder block shed where the
restaurant kept its seven metal barrels full of waste oil. He and Dean ran a hose
from the tank on the bed of the truck into the shed and stuck the sucking end into
the first of the barrels and started up the pump. The oil was black-brown, flecked
with bits of animal fat, the shine of grease at the top of the barrel swirling like
galaxies in a night sky. On the other side of the shed were barrels full of pig parts—backbones,
shoulders, feet—that would be hauled away by a big rendering company. The air had
the burnt smell of good meat just starting to rot. Everything was sticky with dried
oil—the barrels, the hose, the bed of the truck, their hands. The stickiness reminded
Dean of the tar that came off on his hands when he was priming tobacco leaves as a
boy. After so many months of thinking and talking, he was happy to be doing physical
work.

An air leak in Stephan’s pump stretched out twenty minutes’ work to an hour and a
half, but they drove away with 240 gallons of waste cooking oil, for which they paid
the barbecue joint $108, and which would earn them $2.50 a gallon, six hundred dollars,
from a biodiesel company. The plan was eventually to get to where they could manufacture
the oil into fuel themselves.

They drove around with a tank full of waste cooking oil in back and Dean looked out
the passenger window at all the restaurants. There must have been three or four in
every strip mall. And if you thought about the hospital, the university, the football
stadium—Lord have mercy.