Jeff Kirkham - Black Autumn

In the previous months before the market crash, Union Pacific Railroad found itself in a precarious position, getting both lifted up and dragged down by energy markets, like a kite made out of hardwood.

Coal shipping was Union Pacific’s bread and butter, but coal was out of favor with the politicos in Washington, as well as every other state and municipality. Little by little, cleaner fuels were choking out the market for coal and Wall Street traders knew it. At the same time, the price of diesel—the fuel used by trains—had dropped so low it made Union Pacific’s profit-and-loss statement look almost rosy.

Most stock wasn’t traded by a bunch of old ladies tinkering with their retirement accounts. Most stock trades in the modern age were executed by razor-sharp experts. Most of the Union Pacific Railroad trades were being done by men who knew the exact strengths and weaknesses of UPR, diesel costs, and the coal markets.

When oil prices skyrocketed in the morning hours of trading due to uncertainty in the Middle East, the stock experts bailed out of Union Pacific like fleas off a drowning dog, knowing the railroad’s profit-and-loss statement would turn tits up.

Dante Morales knew nothing of stocks. He only knew that things had gone nuts in his coal yard. From his steel-cube office, he could see the yard was completely jam-packed with trucks full of coal, and they were lining up along the highway for a mile. The last time he lined up trucks on the highway, the Utah Highway Patrol and the state environmental protection douchebags had filed a formal complaint and he almost lost his job.

In a fit of exasperation, Dante called his counterpart at the SUFCO coal mine. “Turn those trucks around, Bill. We got no trains, and both our asses will be grass if we don’t get those trucks off the highway.”

“What do you mean, we got no trains?” Bill stammered. “You mean the train’s late?”

“No, Bill, I mean there are no damned trains. Not today. If they haven’t left Las Vegas by now, they’re not coming. You can leave a hundred trucks here in the yard, but all the rest need to go back right now.”

The guy at the mine couldn’t get his mind around what he was hearing. “That can’t be. Check again.”

“I already checked all goddamned morning, and there isn’t a single locomotive between here and Los Angeles. I don’t know what’s going on, but it has something to do with Union Pacific stock taking a dump and the West Coast diesel pricks screwing them on their contract.”

“I don’t think you understand,” Bill explained. “That coal gets burned by the power plant down in Delta and eight other power plants in Utah. It’s not like they keep a bunch of coal sitting around out in the weather. If we don’t get that coal up north, right fucking now, lights are going to start flickering in California and all around Utah. Then our asses will really be in a sling.”

“Of course I know what the coal is for, Bill. But I got no trains, so the power plants are just going to have to make do with what they got until the bean counters over at Union Pacific get their heads out of their asses. Please, pretty please, with sugar on top, get your goddamned trucks off the highway. Thank you!” Dante slammed the phone in its cradle and turned back to the window, praying the Utah Highway Patrol was tied up at a donut convention.

Dante had never placed a call to the Intermountain Power Plant in Delta, Utah before, but some industrious soul had written the phone number on a Post-it note and taped it to the side of his computer years ago. He had been looking at it, meaning to throw it away for as long as he could remember. It felt like destiny when he finally called the number.

“Hello.”

“Hello, is this the power plant in Delta?” Dante asked.

“Yes. Who’s this?” came the guarded reply.

“This is Dante Morales, director of the Levan rail yard for Union Pacific. Who am I talking to?”

“Ron Weber. What can I do you for?” Weber asked.

Dante didn’t quite know how to say it. “I just wanted to make sure you knew there wasn’t any coal coming today.”

“What are you talking about?” the man asked.

“Union Pacific isn’t running trains today. Some kind of headquarters SNAFU.”

“Bullshit,” Weber cursed, echoing Dante’s own thoughts.

“Well, have you seen any trains today? Have you?” Dante asked him.

“I’m not sure. Can you hold on, Mr. Morales?”

Dante waited almost ten minutes before another person picked up.

“Hello. This is Senior Operations Director Dale Price. Who are you?”

“This is Dante Morales, director of the Levan rail yard,” Dante repeated.

“Hello, Dante. Where’s our coal?” the senior operations director wasn’t in the mood for chit-chat.

“As I was telling your man, the coal is sitting here in trucks, but the trains aren’t running today.”

“That’s not possible. We have a contract with Union Pacific that guarantees daily delivery,” Price said firmly.

Dante knew he had pretty much reached the edge of his pay grade. “I let my license to practice law lapse some time back, so I’m not much help with your contract. I just thought you’d want to know that your coal is sitting right here outside my window instead of on its way to your plant.”

“I understand,” the senior engineer replied. “Thank you. I need to get off the phone and make some calls.”

“Okay. Have a good day.” Dante hung up. It occurred to him that “have a good day” was probably a stupid way to end that conversation.

California Governor’s Office

Sacramento, California

Within three hours, the mayor of the City of Los Angeles was on a conference call with three power company commissioners and the California governor. The governor asked the obvious question: “Why don’t the trucks just drive the coal to the power plant?”

The Intermountain Power Plant in Delta was actually owned by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and seventy-five percent of the power produced poured directly into southern California via the HVDC Intermountain transmission line that carried twenty-four hundred megawatts at a blistering five hundred kilovolts from middle-of-nowhere Utah to the city of Adelanto, California.

How California had convinced Utah to host their dirty coal power plant was one of the seven wonders of American political chicanery. In any case, when the senior operations director in Delta, Utah called his boss, he placed the call to the 213 area code: Los Angeles, California.

Since the Intermountain Power Plant supplied an enormous amount of power directly to the three-and-a-half million homes of Los Angeles, Anaheim, Riverside, Pasadena, Glendale and Burbank, the call was taken seriously.

Nobody on the conference call had an answer to the governor’s question, so he repeated himself. “Why don’t the trucks with the coal just drive to our power plant and drop it off?”

Sometimes the simplest answers can be the hardest to see, especially when hog-tied by bureaucracy and wrapped in decades of procedure. Sometimes the simplest answers can also lead straight down the road to hell.

IT WAS THE FIRST TIME in four months they had heard the music on the radio interrupted by an announcement. Both Filipino men, now very sick, looked up from their fishing lines and stared blankly at one another, trying to interpret the rapid-fire English of the radio announcer.

The little English they had been taught covered the basic conversation of a tourist in America: “Where is the bathroom?” “Nice to meet you.” “My name is Mickey Mouse.” In the tiny Muslim islands of the Philippines, nobody harbored any hope of going to America as a tourist but the teachers still taught the perfunctory phrases of all language teachers everywhere.