Cold Comfort for a Long, Hard Winter

Winter has always had a way of sneaking up on many Americans. Perhaps they work too hard, move too fast, or spend too much time indoors to see the earlier sunsets every evening or notice that the air has begun to acquire an edge, like a jug of apple cider left over from early fall. Suddenly they wake up one morning to find sunlight sparkling off the hoarfrost and a silvery net of ice crystals on the puddles in the driveway. It can be a cold shock.

This year it is not merely another winter that has begun to creep in unnoticed. It is a whole new kind of season, fraught with inconvenience, deprivation and uncertainty. The chilling prospect of an energy crisis has been in the air all autumn, but Americans are just beginning to realize that the winter of their sourest discontent is at hand. As December arrived last week, power cuts were beginning in the Northeast, energy experts in Washington were saying that gasoline rationing is all but inevitable, and filling stations across the country began a presidentially ordered routine of Sunday closings. Fewer lights, or none, glittered on outdoor Christmas trees, the first layoffs attributable to the energy crisis--of airline pilots, auto and construction workers--began, and pharmaceutical executives were actually warning of a shortage of lifesaving drugs that are manufactured by a process that uses petrochemicals.

Against that bleak landscape, the mood of the nation emerged as a mixture of hopeful disbelief and gathering anxiety. Two conflicting notions are battling it out in people's heads: the Great American Dream of owning a home full of appliances and a garage full of cars, and the dawning irony of not being able to use them at will. An Atlanta housewife expressed the new ambivalence: "I just can't believe it's going to be that bad. But I've never seen more depressed people. It's finally beginning to sink in that we may be in real trouble."

Quiet Panic. In some places, people already were in trouble. More than 50 truckers were stranded at the Davis Arco truck stop in San Jose, Calif., without diesel fuel to continue their trips. For lack of gasoline, some 25 New Hampshire towns were without police and fire protection, garbage pickups, road repair or school transportation. Fishing fleets were idled along the Gulf of Mexico, and newly harvested potatoes sat undelivered in Maine. Even among Americans who were not yet suffering, a quiet panic was beginning to germinate. Concluded Chuck Littlefield, a Los Angeles construction worker who has a daily 72-mile round-trip drive between his home and his job: "Gas rationing would put me on welfare."

While politicians and bureaucrats in Washington tried to agree on the best ways to cope with the crisis (see following story), local officials and private citizens were taking matters into their own hands. Sometimes their energy-saving measures were more cosmetic than effective, but they were almost always imaginative. In Milwaukee, the public safety committee of the city's common council last week began meeting by candlelight. The Geauga Times Leader of Chardon, Ohio, was offering free advertising space for commuters organizing car pools. In Rensselaer, Ind., Mayor Emmett W. Eger turned off all of the city's 425 street lights -- until after four burglaries, citizens demanded that the lights come on again. "People thought I was a son of a b. for dousing the lights, but what do I care?" he said. "If everyone in the country would make this kind of effort, we could tell the Arabs to go to hell."

B.B. Criswell, an industrial-design instructor at Georgia Tech, put head lights, taillights, turn signals and a horn on his electric golf cart, passed the state safety inspection and now drives the vehicle to his local rapid-transit station every day. When Massachusetts' Berkshire Community College lowered class room temperatures to 63DEG, Jurgen A. Thomas began lecturing his drama class in a very collegiate (1920s) raccoon coat. And Paul Indianer, an insurance executive in Miami, has replaced his telephone-equipped Chrysler Imperial with a bicycle. "It's great exercise, and I'm amused at the stares I get," he says. The stares are not for Indianer but for his portable telephone, now installed on the handlebars.

The energy shortage is unearthing a vein of community-enforced morality that many Americans thought ran out with stockades and witch burning. Motorists on some Connecticut and Wisconsin highways have begun honking angrily at drivers who exceed the new lower speed limits. On Interstate 75 near Atlanta last week, one car displayed a sign on its left-side door for every car passing him to see: "You too, 50 m.p.h." Jim Hunt, a filling-station operator in suburban Atlanta, has developed his own righteous way of rationing. He gives drivers of sub-compact cars all the gasoline they want, but limits larger autos to a dollar's worth. Says Hunt: "I give them just enough to get them off the road. Those big gas gulpers are the ones doing the damage."

At the same time, hostility is welling up in many citizens against whomever they consider most responsible for the crisis. When the temperature hit a balmy --and energy-saving--68DEG in Manhattan one day last week, a woman walking her dog explained smugly that "God is punishing the Arabs." But usually the culprits are perceived to be closer to home. Said New Yorker Writer Hendrik Hertzberg: "I think it's disgusting that Nixon puts limits on the private citizen and not the oil companies. What sacrifices are they making?" A Rhode Island official noted that a large number of drivers caught exceeding the state's new 50-m.p.h. speed limit cite their peripatetic President as a greater offender. As Mrs. Doris A. Korot of Panorama City, Calif., put it: "I would willingly agree to turn my thermostat down to 68DEG if the President would give up his helicopter and jet flights and stay at home in the White --House during the energy crisis. After all, let's all 68 it together.''

Not that the average American is -- so austerely public-spirited himself. Across the country, a kind of siege mentality is beginning to take hold. At hardware and discount stores, gasoline jerry cans are becoming as scarce as Arab hitchhikers in Amsterdam on a Sunday. The gasoline hoarders who have bought out the cans are unknowingly risking their lives; firemen in Manhattan last week demonstrated that a car with a gasoline can in the trunk, hit from the rear, can turn into a fire bomb.

Last Trip. Sweaters and flannel shirts are big sellers in the Northwest and Midwest, and thermal underwear is becoming so fashionable that Utah Governor Calvin Rampton interrupted a press conference last week and pulled up a trouser leg to show off his new long Johns. Despite spot shortages of gas and snailish speed limits, highways were jammed over the weekend as motorists tried to get in at least one more long trip before rationing begins. Mammoth Mountain, a ski resort in northern California that stands to suffer mightily from the fuel shortage, reported its biggest single day in 17 years of operation as some 11,000 skiers crowded the slopes.

Such self-indulgence is innocent enough now, but things could get uglier when the shortage gets worse. Siphoning threatens to join mugging as a feared street crime. Auto supply houses across the country already report a run on locking gas caps--and siphons. A 16,000-gal. gasoline tank truck was hijacked from a Gulf Oil Co. pipeline terminal in Detroit; it was found two days later, empty. TIME learned last week that the Carlo Gambino family of the Mafia has begun making regular deliveries of black-market gasoline to New York City filling stations. The gas, believed to be stolen from several bulk plants in the area and offered to the dealers for 70 per gal. more than legitimate distributors charge, is known among filling-station men in some parts of Brooklyn as "Gambinoil."

Money Talks. Aside from any strain on honesty, the energy crisis promises to produce dramatic and lasting changes in American habits of thinking and acting. Columbia Sociologist Amitai Etzioni believes that a prolonged shortage will produce a decline in egalitarianism and the reassertion of privilege in America. "Money will make the difference in the future," he says. "Only people with money will be able to travel and buy Cadillacs. The poor part of society will end up paying a disproportionate share." Boston University Sociologist S.M. Miller asserts that the rationing of commodities like gas and oil will bring a rationing of opportunities as well. "Americans are going to have to lead a more planned existence," he says. "We are already suffering a loss of discretionary income because of inflation. As our mobility decreases, we will also face a loss of discretionary time and space. These changes will drain society of much of its spontaneity and excitement. And they will dampen the American belief that everything is possible at all times. But the shortage may also lead to the rediscovery of friends. People will have to share cars, share activities, maybe even share houses from time to time, if the fuel shortage gets bad enough. In a sense, maybe people will rediscover themselves and their families because it will be harder to run away."

Even among Americans who fully expect the worst from the fuel crisis, a stubbornly incandescent optimism has begun to shine through the gloom. People who lament the expected death of a comfortably affluent, energy-intensive way of life look forward to a rebirth of some old values. "We have become literally and figuratively fat," says William C. Westmoreland, the general who commanded U.S. forces in Viet Nam and now directs economic development for South Carolina. "Perhaps the crisis will bring us back to some of the virtues that made this country great, like thrift and the belief that waste is sinful." Says Sylvia Lavietes, a Manhattan social worker: "At first I was really depressed about the energy crisis, but now I think it's a riot. It's a real challenge. As a child I sometimes wondered what it would have been like to live in the 1850s. That was a time when people were much more in control of their lives. Our society has suffered from mental and physical atrophy. This crisis could really be a good thing." Other Americans would do well to adopt that spirit of adventure. It may be all that they have to get them through a literally dark Christmas and what could be a long, hard winter.

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