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Oh what a mighty spewage of vinyl weighs heavy on this land!
A
dark mood spread through the body politic like a septic infection last week
in response to bad numbers in employment, housing, and commerce, not to
mention unease about the now complete takeover of the stock market by robot
traders. But I left it all behind to trip across New England from the Vermont
border to Maine and back, and many a strange thing did I see....
New Hampshire's got their state motto on the license plate wrong: Live Free
or Die. It ought to read Live Free and Die. Just north of Concord on
I-89 there's a highway rest stop. The primary retail outlet there is... the
state liquor store! Yes, for some reason the New Hampshire government
controls the sale of liquor. Puritan guilt? Creeping socialism?
Who knows. Apparently some brilliant state
wonk got the idea that they could maximize revenue by selling liquor to
motorists. Now, granted, not everybody motoring up I-89 is an alcoholic, but
surely some of them are. Maybe it's a scheme to kill off the Boston Irish --
but at some risk to the citizens of The Granite State. Note: there was no
coffee shop on the premises. I kid you not.
Meanwhile, New Hampshire's little wedge of seacoast has been completely
coated in vinyl, as if some angry god decoupaged
the darn thing after eating a bad clam roll. The world has never before seen
an array of seaside cottages so uniquely hideous as the ones we passed from
Seabrook to Portsmouth. The owners had managed to try every proportioning
system and every color scheme known to man -- except the right ones. They
made your eyeballs wobble in their sockets just motoring by them on US Route
1-A -- and we were not unaware, of course, that our presence on the road,
along with ten thousand other pleasure-seeking tourists, only made these
houses seem worse by dint of the highway's toxic proximity.
We
stopped for lunch in a clam bar, naturally. The dining room was populated by
a new race of humanoid behemoths, great lumbering brutes the size (and shape)
of giant sloths, only dressed in the raiment of clowns, downing heaps of
battered fried things, purportedly of-the-sea -- except I honestly don't see
how there can be anything alive left to catch out there with the
industrial-strength trawlers scraping the ocean floor as if they were Zamboni machines grooming the rink at the Boston Garden.
I would like to tell you that we ordered cucumber sandwiches but it would be
a lie. We got the clam strips -- that is, clam rolls minus the rolls. For all
I know, someone in the kitchen is shredding old Michelin inner tubes for the
Fry-o-later, but it's all about the cocktail sauce anyway.
There were more giant sloths wading curiously in the surf (still hungry perhaps?)
as we crossed the border into Maine, where you really want to weep for your
nation. Is there any way to fuck up a landscape that has not been tried
there, short of all-out war (which might actually have the benefit of`clearing a lot of muck away)? Maine is where the oil
fields of Texas crawled off to die, and left their remains in a thousand
miniature golf courses, giant plastic signs shaped like lighthouses,
lobsters, schooners, whales, fisher-folk and other ghost-like entities no
longer of this world, and enough asphaltic free parking to accommodate the
automobile club of the hosts of hell.
The awful cavalcade prompted me to remember that it's all over for this stuff
and the pattern of culture it represents. What you are seeing is the residue
of an economy that no longer exists. I doubt we will build any more of it.
You're just left wondering what becomes of it all now that we slouch toward
oil depletion, climate change hijinks, the
vanishing of capital, penury, and possibly starvation. In the years ahead
there will be fewer and fewer vehicle miles recorded on these inevitably
disintegrating highways -- with the sharp sea air gnawing away at every
I-beam and truss in the overpasses and bridges, and the government too broke
to do anything about them -- and the American middle class with their quaint
touristic habits will join the codfish, sperm whales, and great auk in the
Atlantic Ocean's extinction Hall of Fame. The Long Emergency can't come soon
enough.
The long agony of motoring up the coast brought us eventually to Mt. Desert
Isle where Mr. John D Rockefeller, Jr. had the foresight to capture most of
the acreage and hand it over to the National Park Service before it could be
turned into another clam roll empire. The majesty of Acadia National Park is
a rebuke to all the tragic hucksterism that destroyed the coastline
everywhere else in New England through the miserable 20th century. We hiked
the rocky scree trails around the summit of
Cadillac Mountain and the path along Otter Cliff, which smelled like
Christmas and chowder, and didn't see too many people away from the motor
roads. Here and there the bell of a lonely buoy sounded
distantly through the creeping fog making the frantic absurdity of daily life
in America seem like a mere bad memory. Then we had to leave.
We
took a different route home, more northerly, across a rural Maine region
largely un-molested by the toils of tourism, but stunningly poor. Some of it
looked like Arkansas -- not the part where WalMart
lives, either. At long intervals we passed through mill towns where the mills
are now silent and the only visible business was the tattoo trade. Even there
in the New England backwaters, the toxic superhero-thug culture of Hollywood
rules and the idle grandsons of mill-workers glowered in death-metal regalia
at passing strangers as if they were auditioning for parts in the next Road
Warrior movie. Not a few of them seemed to have lopsided heads. Does
crystal meth do that?
Everywhere along the route, shovel-ready highway improvement projects from
the late stimulus crusade were now underway, and you wondered exactly what
kind of future they were intended to serve -- or was it all a kind of weird
national potlatch ceremony in which we were literally throwing away our
wealth to memorialize what seemed normal the day before yesterday and never
will be again.
Compared to the ominous vastness of Maine, northern New Hampshire was a blur.
Somewhere in the White Mountains, punch-drunk with motoring fatigue, we
stopped at the only available venue for coffee in one little burg, a
McDonalds as chance would have it, apparently staffed by client-workers
supplied by the ARC -- and I'm not trying to be funny mentioning that. You
wondered how much such an agency was creaming off their minimum wage
salaries. This is what it's come to now in the Home of the Brave: corporate
wickedness knows no bottom.
The last weird display we encountered was the mystery of highway cones in
Vermont. The orange rubber cones were deployed along the center line of I-91
for scores of miles, with absolutely no sign that any project -- shovel-ready
or otherwise -- was underway, leading us to suspect that the project of cone
deployment for its own sake was a kind of rogue stimulus program. Just cones,
cones, and more cones, as baffling as crop circles. No heavy equipment, no
men in hard hats. Just mile after mile of cones. Whatever it signified, it
was at least equally unproductive as high frequency trading -- the other half
of what's left of the US economy.
Home again
and suddenly fall is in the air. Or is it the distant sound of falling
knives?
James Howard Kunstler
www.kunstler.com/
James Howard Kunstler’s
new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is
available at all booksellers.
James Kunstler has worked as
a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a
staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write
books on a full-time basis.
His latest nonfiction book, "The Long
Emergency," describes the changes that American society faces in the
21st century. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic
crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive
dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the
American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over oil, military invasions of
the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides, Americans will live in smaller
places and eat locally grown food.
You can purchase your own copy here
: The Long
Emergency .
You can get more from James Howard Kunstler -
including his artwork, information about his other novels, and his blog - at
his Web site : http://www.kunstler.com/
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