Getting a Charge Down the River and Back

By ART CULLEN

I’m bleary and road-weary after a pioneering trek in an electric pickup truck to the Gulf of Mexico and back recently.

We made it, no small feat.

We being Tom Lentz of St. Paul, Mike “Oscar” Ostrowski of Milwaukee and me, old college buds from our days so long ago inside the all-male fortress at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul. We were joined for an evening by the fourth member of our band, Pat Duffy of Chicago, along the shores of the Mississippi at Hannibal, Mo.

It’s remarkable that our friendship has endured this long and survived the week, which was trying in a country not quite ready for the EV Ford 150 Lightning.

Everything took three times longer than we anticipated. Chargers are too far apart. The battery range is too short at about 175 miles on a fast-charge, driving 65-70 mph. We reached our New Orleans hotel with 8 miles left, and barely made it to the charger.

Talk about range anxiety! It is real. Fortunately, Dr. Oscar, a psychologist, was aboard reassuring us that everything would be okay. It was, by a whisker. When I was about to cry, Oscar would lay hands on a dysfunctional charging station and it somehow worked.

The stations are too far apart down South. They are hidden behind dumpsters or near the used pickups at auto dealers. One Sunday the charger works at the Dubuque casino. The following Sunday it doesn’t. The one at the Burlington casino, the only fast charger in town, hasn’t worked in two years.

The Ford navigation system is clunky. It does a brilliant job finding fast-charge stations, but it doesn’t know Fort Dodge, Iowa. Sometimes it makes the charger go, other times it won’t. So you have do download two or three more apps and toggle between them and Apple Maps to get where you want to go. It was nerve-wracking.

All the fretting achieved the purpose of the trip: to get my mind off another prostate invasion this Friday by the able hands at the Dakota Dunes, S.D., surgical center.

The immediate idea of being stuck in Grenada, Miss., wipes out the more abstract notion of mortality. It can be affirming. When we could not make the charger work in Grenada, the service manager at Kirk Chevrolet jumped in the driver seat and took command. She talked like a sailor and scared the charger into submission. Then she sat with us to hide from an especially demanding and stupid customer until he drove off. There is a God, and she sends angels in all manner.

Other goals of the journey included interviewing Dr. Nancy Rabalais of Louisiana State University, who with her husband has researched the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico for decades; and to see son Joe, a street musician in New Orleans. We checked those boxes. Strolled Beale Street in Memphis, birthplace of B.B. King, where they hand beers to pedestrians out windows amid all sorts of funk and blues acts. I have never seen the like. We hit the French Quarter. The gumbo down there is to die for.

On the road, we reviewed past exploits, detailed our ailments, chronicled loss and separation, and worried aloud about what was around the next turn as Oscar gently guided us. Pretty good therapy for the cost of a room at the Comfort Inn.

It was good to see Joe getting established in the Big Easy music scene. He has hooked up with a Cajun band about to go on tour. It was frustrating to hear from Dr. Rabalais how little we have accomplished in lessening the phosphorous and nitrate loads on the Gulf from growing corn, cotton and rice in the river’s watershed.

Corn’s days as a feedstock for fuel may be numbered. The electric future is here. The Lightning runs like a dreamboat on the freeway. There are just enough chargers. The software is improving as Google is including fast chargers in its maps now. It is coming on. The farther south you drive into oil country, the more resistance to chargers. Storm Lake has more non-Tesla fast chargers within 12 miles than New Orleans does.

“We just don’t have the infrastructure down here,” said the GM at the BMW dealership in Jackson, Miss. It’s not the price that prevents sales, it’s the range anxiety.

Not everyone has a clinical psychologist to keep them calm in 96-degree Southern swamp. That’s why prices on the Lightning plunged to the point where it made sense for us to buy one for hauling papers to area post offices. It’s perfect, with a range just over 200 miles fully charged in decent weather. It would rock for a trip to Des Moines. It’s the most comfortable vehicle I have driven. GM is about to roll out a new Equinox with more than 300 miles of range at a net cost of less than $30,000. That’s a game-changer as more chargers sprout all the time. (MidAmerican Energy has the best ones I used.)

I have not tallied fuel costs, but it figures to be 30% to 50% less than gasoline (except in New Orleans, where electricity is way more expensive than petrol). It’s a lot cheaper in Iowa because of wind turbines.

My excuse for the trip was to see how electric runs on the road. Well enough. Time is better spent searching for a charge than running down a prostate rabbit hole on the Internet. Oscar said everything would be okay. I think he is right.

Art Cullen is publisher and editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 and is author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” Email times@stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2024

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