James Kunstler: World Made by Hand

The electricity stayed off, without even a few more spasms. We got used to it. George Murdlow’s candlemaking operation had to go further afield for supplies of beeswax, which was far superior to the abundant tallow in our neighborhood of Washington County. I got in four cords of stovewood working a no-title woodlot on the back side of Pumpkin Hill with the help of Tom Allison and his team of Haflingers.

A weird corn fungus appeared in mid-August, something nobody had seen before. We held an emergency meeting of the town trustees and passed an ordinance to send a team of inspectors around to every farm and compel the burning of all infected fields. It did not sweep the county, but it made us nervous since we had little to fall back on but buckwheat, Bullock’s limited experiments with spelt, and whatever came up the river from Albany.

The fate of our nation remained shrouded in mystery. Without the occasional radio broadcast, we existed beyond the hypothetical doings of President Harvey Albright and his people in Minneapolis (or wherever), and their people, and their people’s people. Printed broadsides out of Newburgh, Kingston, Poughkeepsie, and other towns down the Hudson Valley came to us via Bullock’s trade boats. They were full of religious hysteria with nuggets of news here and there. The hurricane that battered New England in June generated ocean surges that left parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and low-lying New Jersey uninhabitable. The immense overburden of skyscrapers in Manhattan had proven unusable without electric service. Long Island, a geographic dead end, had suffered terribly from the hurricane and a dengue fever epidemic, and now had a population equivalent to what it had been in the year 1800-with an immense surplus of free parking. Of the world beyond the Atlantic Ocean, we heard nothing at all. We were content to be undisturbed in our little backwater, Union Grove, Washington County, in a place once called the Empire State, where the Battenkill runs into the Hudson River.

Britney was right. I now had a family to look after. It made all the difference. She was tough and tender both and brought me home to myself after a long sojourn in a dark region of my heart. I still thought about Sandy, and mourned her and Genna, and often woke before dawn wondering if my Daniel was out there somewhere, still alive. But I had new responsibilities and new affections, and by the end of August, I had a little girl who was able to play “Old Joe Clark” on the fiddle. I resumed my regular labors, starting with the cupola of Larry Prager’s barn, and enjoyed the benefit of using the donkey we had rescued in Albany. And that is the end of the story of that particular summer when we had so much trouble and so much good fortune in the world we were making by hand.

Maggie Darling

Thunder Island

The Halloween Ball

The Hunt

Blood Solstice

An Embarrassment of Riches

The Life of Byron Jaynes

A Clown in the Moonlight

The Wampanaki Tales

The Long Emergency

The City in Mind

Home from Nowhere

The Geography of Nowhere

Atlantic Monthly Press

New York

Copyright© 2008 by James Howard Kunstler

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Published simultaneously in Canada

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FIRST EDITION

ISBN-10: 0-87113-978-2

ISBN-13: 978-0-87113-978-8

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