James Kunstler: World Made by Hand

Sometime in the not-distant future…

Loren and I walked the railroad tracks along the river coming back from fishing the big pool under the old iron bridge, and I couldn’t remember a lovelier evening before or after our world changed. Down by the rushing stream, banks of wild yellow irises shimmered in the twilight, and up in the vaulted corridor that the tracks cut through the trees, the mild June air was filled with twinkling green fireflies. We’d both been drinking some of Jane Ann’s wine.

“It reminds me of Christmas at the mall,” he said.

“I don’t miss the mall,” I said. “I miss a lot of things, but not that.”

“Do you think I’m pathetic?”

“You’re obsessed with the old days.”

“Most of my life happened in the old days. Yours too, Robert.”

It made me sad, but I didn’t say so because the evening was so beautiful and that was something to be grateful for. Now and then, the fireflies pulsed in unison, mysteriously, as if they all agreed on something we humans didn’t know about.

“I wish I had a jar. I’d catch some,” Loren said. The fact that he was our minister and fifty-two years old had not diminished his boyish enthusiasm, which was one reason we were such close friends. He pulled out the bottle again, and polished off the dregs. Jane Ann, Loren’s wife, made good wine, considering what we had to work with around here. She flavored this batch with sweet woodruff to round off the foxy roughness. When the bottle was empty Loren pretended to try to catch fireflies with it, but he was obviously just clowning around. Finally, he stuck the bottle in the back flap of his fishing vest to take home and reuse. We resumed walking the tracks.

“I’ve been thinking lately,” he said.

“It’s not healthy to obsess about the past.”

“No, I’ve got an idea.”

“Oh? Let’s hear it.”

“We should start a laundry.”

“A laundry?”

“Yeah, a community laundry. A place where people bring their clothes and bedsheets and all, and they get washed there.”

“What about Mrs. Myles?” I said. Lucy Myles was my neighbor. She took in quite a bit of other people’s washing.

“She could work for us,” Loren said.

“Us?”

“Well, that’s why I’m telling you about this. We’d be partners.”

“I don’t know the first thing about running a laundry.”

“No, your job is to help me start it up. Fix the building. Figure out the water system. Get the tubs going. Keep things running. You know how to do all that stuff.”

“Where do you think you would do this?”

“We can use the old Wayland-Union Mill building. The title’s open,” he said, meaning that the owners were known to be dead with no heirs and assigns, a common condition in these times. “It would be useful for everybody. And we could make a little honest profit too.”

“What do you do with the dirty water?”

“Into the river,” he said.

“It’s got soap in it.”

“It’s just gray water. It’ll go downstream to the Hudson.”

“That’s not right.”

“It’s below where we fish. And mostly from town. It’s just soapy water.”

“That’s a hell of an attitude.”

“Don’t get all environmental with me,” he said.

“I wouldn’t dump soapy water in the river.”

“It wouldn’t affect anything.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure.”

“You’re being an asshole.”

“Nice talk, Reverend.”

“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.”

“Maybe you should think about it longer.”

“Condescending prick.”

“Vulgarian.”

“Nabob of negativism.”

I let him have the last word. It was always better that way with Loren. He could keep it up forever. We walked a ways more, enjoying the silence and the fireflies.

“Nabob of negativism?” I said. “Where’d you get that one?”

“Spiro T. Agnew.”

“Who was he?”

“Vice president under Nixon.”

“Oh? I don’t remember Nixon too well.”

“Agnew used to call news reporters ‘nattering nabobs of negativism.’”

“He wouldn’t be able to say that nowadays, would he?”

“No, he’d have to call them nabobs of nothingness,” Loren said and laughed at his own joke. I guess I didn’t think it was that funny, since we didn’t have news reporters anymore and you barely knew what was going on five miles away. “Hey, look,” he said. “Give this laundry idea a chance. It would be good for the community. Try not to be negative.”

“I’m not negative.”

“Contrary then.”

“I’m not contrary.”

“You should hear yourself.”

Eventually the train tracks crossed over Lovell Road, and we got off them there while the road took us across the river on a steel and concrete bridge that was falling to pieces now. It had been years since the state of New York repaired any of these things. There were big holes in the deck you could see clear through. Another couple of spring floods and it might be swept away altogether. On the far bank stood an old hydroelectric station, or the brick shell of one.. An inscription in the masonry lintel over the door said it was built in 1919. The big power company, Niagara Mohawk, closed down all these little generating plants in the 1960s because they were supposedly inefficient. Nothing was left but the walls and part of the roof. The turbines and metal parts had long since been sold for scrap and every other useful thing was scavenged out. We couldn’t replace them anymore. It was too bad because it might have lit up our whole town. Anyway, the little dam there had been breeched, and rebuilding that would have been more than our community could manage. I don’t know if anybody would even have known how to do it. It was chilling to reflect on how well the world used to work and how much we’d lost.

We stopped halfway across the bridge in the lovely pink light that remained of the long June day and peered down to the water. Scores of big trout finned in the current beside the crumbling bridge abutment. A nice hatch of cream-colored mayflies fluttered off the water and mingled with the fireflies. The swift little mud swallows that nested under the bridge did an aerial ballet through it, gorging themselves. Plenty of mayflies would still get away for their one ecstatic night of reproducing in the treetops. They would return to the river to die the next morning. It was called the “spinner fall.” They’d been doing it for millions of years before we showed up.

“Want to go down and try some?” I said.

“My creel is full,” Loren said.

“We could put back what we catch.”

“I’ve fished enough tonight, Robert.”

“Okay, let’s go home.”

It was about a three-mile walk home to Union Grove. In the old days, you’d drive it, of course, but now you walked. I didn’t mind. I enjoyed the peacefulness and easy pace of the walk. In a car, I remembered, you generally noticed only what was in your head or on the radio, while the landscape itself seemed dead, or at least irrelevant.