James Kunstler: World Made by Hand

“We met him on the road coming back from fishing.”

“Oh?”

“He was driving a rig with two fine horses.”

“What was he like?”

“Pushy. Seemed full of himself. Loren will tell you about him. Why did you come here tonight? It isn’t Thursday until tomorrow.”

“Oh? I lose track.”

“Feeling sad?”

“Yes. A bit more than usual, I guess.”

“Loren’s an upright man,” I said.

“It’s true. But I’m still sad.”

“He’s got two nice trout waiting for you.”

She finished lacing her slippers and turned around to face me. “How do you keep from going crazy, Robert?”

I had to think about it. “I’m not sure. Disposition maybe.”

“Sometimes I wish you were as sad as me.”

“Why would you suppose I’m not?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“We’re not the first society who fell into hardship,” I said.

“I can’t find much consolation in that.”

“Maybe I am crazy. I live with hope.”

“What for?”

“That we’ll recover some. Maybe not back to before, but some. I live in hope that my Daniel will walk into this house again some fine morning, and your boy with him.”

Jane Ann sighed.

“It’s not all bad now,” I said.

“We’ve lost our world.”

“Only the part that the machines lived in.”

Jane Ann patted my thigh, but said no more and got up to leave.

“Thanks very much for the bread,” I called after her.

She was careful not to let the screen door slap on her way out.

In a recurrent dream, I was sitting in a comfortable padded chair gliding swiftly over the landscape in a way that felt supernatural yet oddly familiar. I did not feel any wind in my face, despite the speed, which was much faster than anything I was accustomed to. I was deeply at ease in my wonderful traveling chair and thrilled by the motion. Familiar sights whizzed by: the Larmon farm on the Battenville Road, Holyrood’s cider mill, the old railroad overpass outside the village of Shushan, pastures and cornfields, hills, hollows, and houses I had known for years. In the dream, I came to realize that I was moving inside some kind of protective envelope, not just sitting in a wonderful chair. Then, a dashboard resolved before me with its round glowing gauges, and then the steering wheel. Of course, I remembered, with the bottom falling out of my stomach, I am driving a car! It had been so many years since I had done that! It was a dream-memory of something that now seemed hardly different from the magic carpets of my childhood storybooks. But then the speed picked up alarmingly and I was no longer at ease. I careened around curves in the road just missing gigantic trees. I couldn’t remember what to do with my feet. I had lost control…

I woke up gasping to a great commotion of preaching on the radio. Even after I caught my breath, I could not overcome the sinking sensation in my gut. I recalled Jane Ann visiting me the night before and wondered what we thought we were doing together. The purity of my despair astonished me. The uproar on the radio finally wrenched me out of it. Roosters crowed off in the distance behind the din. I never turned off the old FM receiver in the living room anymore so as to be aware when the electricity kicked back on. It hadn’t been on in weeks. I wasn’t even sure who or what was putting juice through the wires when it did come on.

Sunlight was already filtering through the curtains, so I supposed it was around six. We lived more by the sun than by the clock, but I did own a clock. It was an eight-day windup console clock which I kept on the mantel in the living room, and it was the only timepiece in the house that worked anymore. It was made by my friend Andrew Pendergast, the town librarian, a man of broad talents: portrait painter, sometime theater director, leader of our church music circle, and a wonderful piano player. He repaired instruments and made strings out of sheep intestine for those of us who played instruments that required them-in my case, fiddle.

Living by the clock was an old habit that died hard. Not much that we did required punctuality, but people still wanted to know what time it was. Andrew had old almanacs that told the sunrise and sunset for a given date so he always had the correct time. If you asked him, Andrew would stop by your house and check your clock against his pocket watch, which was accurate. It was not so hard to keep track of the date, probably because holidays were important to us in ways that might be inconceivable to people whose sole conception of Christmas had been based on frantic excursions to gigantic chain stores. We lived by the seasons now. Our survival depended on it. And we marked the seasons by frequent holiday celebrations, fetes, levees, balls, and solemn days of remembrance.

The racket was coming over what used to be our public radio station, WAMC out of Albany, but the familiar reassuring voices of normality were long gone. Some febrile evangelist was railing from the Book of Revelation:

“I know thy works and where thou dwellest, even where Satan’s seat is; and thou holdest fast my name, and hast not denied my faith, even in those days wherein Antipas was my faithful martyr, who was slain among you, where Satan dwelleth…”

I switched on the television on the outside chance that something might come through. Nothing had been on for years. The local network affiliates withered away after the national network of cable channels went out, until there was nothing. But when the electricity did come on, I automatically turned on the TV and roamed around the stations to see if anything had changed. It hadn’t.

I searched the FM band but there was nothing besides other pious pleaders, and they didn’t come in too well. The AM band offered about the same thing, only with worse reception, nothing remotely describable as news, and no music because commercial entertainment as we knew it was no more, and its handmaiden, advertising, had gone with it. No shortwave bands were on my old receiver, so I returned the signal to the ranter on 90.3 FM just to hear another voice while I addressed myself to the project of breakfast. Even if the world had gone crazy, I preferred to know what was on its addled mind. Among us survivors were many who were confused and despondent.

“I have a few things against thee, because thou bast there them that hold the doctrine ofBalaam, who taught Balac to cast a stumblingblock before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed unto idols, and to commit fornication.”

What used to be the rear patio of my house was rigged up to be a summer kitchen. You didn’t want to run a wood-burning stove indoors when it was ninety degrees, and it was that hot much of the time, May through October. I had a sheet-metal wood-burning cookstove out there under a roof with open side walls, a sturdy eight-foot pine table I’d made, and a cupboard with pierced tin panels to keep my salt and cornmeal and honey safe from little animals while it let air in. A smoker sat a way back from there, an old refrigerator on blocks, over by the fence. It was hard to imagine that we used to cultivate lawns. My yard was now a raised bed garden. It was geometrical, a cruciform pattern, the beds transected on the diagonal as well, with brick paths carefully laid. With our many material privations, it was not possible to live without beauty anymore. I spent a lot of time in my garden, and the feel of being in it was as important to me as the vegetables I grew. At the center, I built a birdbath out of stacked granite blocks with a concave piece of slate on top that caught the rain. The birds seemed satisfied with it and it was pleasant to look at. I would have preferred a statue of the goddess Diana in the manner of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, but I hadn’t managed to scrounge one up. The smoker, much as I needed it, was an insult to the garden. It galled me to see the damned thing: a scarred old Kelvinator that mocked our failed industrial dreams. I intended to replace it someday with a proper brick smokehouse.