My ten Cadillacs - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 12: Hot Air
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Peter Meredith
AS WE DROVE ON, I EYED THE LITTLE CADILLAC LOGOS dotted around the inside of the car. With their shield, crown and laurel wreath symbols, they denoted, I supposed, privilege, regality and success. It struck me, not for the first time that day, how apt it was that, at the pinnacle of his career, my father should be parading around in a car he once considered the acme of motoring prestige.
I always remembered the ten Cadillacs I'd won in 1954, but I had no idea what had happened to all but one of them. My father insisted I'd lost them in bets over the years since then, but I couldn't believe I'd been that stupid so many times. I knew he was pulling a fast one, just as I knew he was deliberately stalling on handing over the one he still owed me. This had been going on for four years.
Over a dinner later during that Venezuelan holiday, I asked him, "When do you think the oil will run out?"
"What oil?"
"All the oil, Venezuela's, the world's."
"It'll never run out."
"Whoa, Dad, I can't believe you just said that! You're an oil man. You should know all about it. It's made from the bodies of tiny sea creatures that are crushed and pressure-cooked until they're chemically transformed into petroleum. The process takes millions of years and we're pumping it out as fast as we can. Of course it'll run out."
My father didn't seem moved by my outburst. He went on chewing.
"Tell you what," I said. "I'll bet you it's going to run out sooner rather than later. I'll bet you the last Cadillac. If I win, I'll take cash in lieu. If you win, you owe me nothing. How's that?"
After a moment's thought he said, "Righto."
When he flew into London for a lightning business visit some weeks later, he said to me over a meal at the RAF club, "About that oil bet. I'll give you cash."
I asked him what had prompted the change of tune, but he was vague. I suspected there hadn't been a change at all. I suspected that my father, ever the petro-optimist, was just humouring me. Whatever the case, though, I got some money from him. It wasn't enough for a Cadillac but it would buy me something second-hand in reasonable nick. I was happy with that.
After my father retired from Shell at the age of fifty-five in 1977, having surfed the postwar oil wave, he settled with Joan in cosy south-east England and died twenty years later. Shell continued its transglobal march without him, growing more successful than ever, despite its record of pollution, destruction, deception and neglect in some places. Today, operating in 143 countries, it earns millions of dollars every hour. In terms of turnover, it's the fourth largest private corporation in the world; in terms of gross profits it's the second most profitable private business after ExxonMobil.
Nevertheless, just over the horizon stalks the spectre of the dwindling of the resource that made it rich. Logic dictates that oil will run out one day, whatever the optimists say, and long before then, things will get difficult for societies addicted to it. So, like most if its rivals, Shell is dipping its toe into the waters of sustainability and renewables.
IN A WHEAT FIELD NEAR AMARILLO, TEXAS, TEN GRAFFITIED CADILLACS stand in a line planted nose-first in the ground, their tail fins pointing into the sky at the same angle. I sometimes fantasise that they were the ten cars I won off my father, magically translated through time and space to that spot. But the truth is that they were put there by a bunch of artists in 1974. Since then, these classic Cadillacs have become one of America's most famous public art works. Chip Lord, one of its creators, says the work can be seen as a symbol of the decline of the American empire. I see it more as portent of the end of the oil age. ♦