And the Beat Goes On

A little something I wrote back in 2019.

Talking ‘bout cars and dreaming ‘bout women

Never had a plan just livin’ for the minute.

Alan Jackson calls it On the Chattahoochee when he sings it. It could have been my hometown of Halfway, Oregon, On the Breaks of the Snake when the high school class of 1955 lived it. With a buck’s worth of gas at 29 cents a gallon, we could do a lot of talking and dreaming while we cruised up and down Main Street in my parents’ ’48 Chevy. When the gas ran low, we’d pool our money and get another dollar’s worth at the Richfield station. Their pumps never ran dry back then. Twenty years passed before that happened.

It came as a shock when the Middle East shut down oil exports to the United States in the 1970s. Lines formed at the pumps and tempers flared as gas prices doubled. New terms like “oil crisis” and “energy shortage” entered our conversations. Politicians offered bromides like “turn off your motor instead of letting it idle” and “turn down your thermostat and wear a sweater.” President Nixon tried domestic oil price controls, and President Carter removed them. Toward the end of his administration, Carter called the oil crisis “the moral equivalent of war.” Moral values notwithstanding, the Middle East still controlled what we paid for gasoline.

Thirty years and four administrations passed, and little changed. Shortly after his election, President Obama told us that “After all, oil is a finite resource. We consume more than 20 percent of the world’s oil but have less than 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves.” He also said on numerous occasions that “We just can’t drill our way to lower gas prices” and that “There is no ‘silver bullet’ to bring gas prices down.” With gas prices in Europe approaching $10 a gallon, his energy secretary, Dr. Steven Chu, told us that “Somehow, we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” Small comfort to working Americans.

And then on September 14, 2019, images of billowing smoke filled our TV screens as missiles and drones came flying and crashed into Saudi Aramco’s Abqaiq oil processing facility and the Khurais oil field. In a matter of minutes, 50 percent of the world’s largest production facility and 5 percent of the world’s oil supply was knocked offline. Pundits predicted spiraling oil prices. Nervous motorists rushed to the pumps to fill their tanks. And then, nothing happened. A week later, the national average price of a gallon of gas had risen just 8.5 cents to $2.66 a gallon. So, what changed?

Geologists knew about oil-bearing shale underlying the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota and surrounding areas since the 1950s. They just did not know how to get it out of the ground. Then in the late 1990s, new techniques of horizontal drilling and high-pressure fracking were developed in Texas. That technology proved to be Mr. Obama’s ‘silver bullet’ when applied to the Bakken oil fields. Almost overnight, the U.S. became the world’s leading oil producer. That’s what changed.

The BNSF railroad’s main line cuts through North Idaho on its way to the coast. Mile-long tanker trains barrel over the tracks carrying oil from the Bakken fields to refineries and shipping points to feed a fuel-thirsty world. Controversies arise concerning everything from complaints about the sound of the train’s horns to oil’s contribution to global warming to worries about derailments to waiting lines at the crossings. Certainly, America’s newfound fossil fuel production doesn’t sit well with proponents of the Green New Deal. But until they can offer a realistic alternative, perhaps it would do well to be thankful for what we have.

As for me, I’ll take the waiting lines at railroad crossings of today over the waiting lines at gas stations of the 70s any day. Yeah, way down yonder on the Chattahoochee. Now, can we just get back to the gas prices of my high school days? Those were the days!

(Author’s note: 29 cents in 1955 equates to about $3.30 in 2026 buying power, so I guess not much has really changed!)