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On a hot Saturday
in mid-July in my corner of the country, when everyone else is cavorting on
Million Dollar Beach at Lake George, or plying the aisles of the home Depot,
or riding their motorcycles in faux-outlaw hordes, I like to slip away to the
neglected places where nobody goes. I seek out the places of industrial
ruin - there are many around here in the upper Hudson Valley, and they are
mostly right along the river itself, because there are many spots where the
water tumbles and falls in a way that human beings could capture that power
and direct it to useful work.
I always bring my French easel, a wooden contraption ingeniously
designed to fold up into a box, to which I have bolted on backpack straps. To
me, these ruins of America's industrial past are as compelling as the ruins
of ancient Rome were to Thomas Cole and his painter-contemporaries, who took
refuge in history at the exact moment that their own new nation began racing
into its industrial future.
I've been haunting this particular site in Hudson Falls, New York, all
summer so far. Originally called Bakers Falls, it evolved over a hundred-odd
years into an extremely complex set of dams, spillways, intakes, revetments,
channels, gangways, and hydroelectric bric-a-brac all worked into the crumbly
shale that forms the original cliff. From a vantage on the west side of the
river, you can clearly read the layered history of industry as though it was
a section of sedimentary rock from the Mesozoic.
One thing above all amazes me about these American industrial ruins: they're
not really very old. My grandfather was already reading law and drinking beer
when some of this stuff was brand-new (or not even here yet!). Unlike Rome's
long, dawdling descent from greatness, America's industrial fall seems to
have happened in the space of a handclap. I suppose it was in the nature of
the fossil fuel fiesta that these activities could only last as long as the
basic energy resource was so cheap you hardly needed to figure it into the
cost of doing business. Which is not to say that the human element didn't
change, too, since obviously it did - as America went from a cheap labor
nation of immigrants eager to join in the security of factory regimentation,
to adversarial relations between unionized workers and business owners, and
finally to game over, as off-shoring and out-sourcing savaged American
manufacturing.
These factories at what was first called Bakers Falls began in 1858 as an
iron machine works, intended to produce the frames for water wheels. Soon
they quit that in favor of making replacement parts for the growing
paper-making industry that made use of the pulpwood from the Adirondack
Mountains. Activities related to this went on clear through the 1960s, about
a century in all, until things fell apart in the upper Hudson Valley and
business mysteriously went elsewhere.
I'm sure it was a mystery to many of the people around here who got a living
from these factories, who felt strong, willing, and able to trade their labor
for a decent paycheck. How could the world not need them anymore?
American political leadership explained it rather poorly to them. This
was a new economy, they said. From now on making a living in America would be
all about being clever at cooking up "innovations" that the rest of
the people in the world could use in order to churn things out for us at
twenty cents an hour. America's young people, they said, should go to
college, even if it meant taking on a lifetime of loan obligations. Or enroll
at the local community college to learn "computer technology," the
coming thing.
What really happened to places like Hudson Falls is now painfully visible
on-the-ground, in the streets, and in the shopfront windows, which are either
vacant or occupied by the most marginal businesses - martial arts studios
(training for what? Gang war? Insurrection? Afghanistan?), second-hand shops,
and the ubiquitous pizza joints for a cheese-hungry populace. The once
dignified business blocks at the small center of town - itself perched on a
bluff with a panoramic view west - are vacant and falling into gross
disrepair. The owner class of citizen, still inveighed against in progressive
radio circles, are so gone that their ghosts seem to have packed up and left,
too. But then so is every other class of people above the nether-class - that
is, people engaged in something other than subsidized idleness and crime,
people who's only obligation in life is waking up in the morning. (No wonder
the nation is obsessed with zombies these days.) I passed a wedding late in
the afternoon on my way out of town. The bride had a tattoo the size of
bumper-sticker on her décolletage. The groomsmen were dressed in black
baby shorts and backwards hats. You want to weep for their offspring.
I only saw them on the way out. All the rest of the long day, I
was blessedly alone under a fierce sun on the far side of the river, in close
observation of the visual details of history and the quality of the day.
It is hard to imagine the determination and ingenuity (not to mention
strength and sweat) it took to pile up all these buildings right next to this
raging river, or to fling a concrete dam across it. I don't see how we could
do that now, since we seem collectively incapable of accomplishing anything
anymore - except some phony new political disposition of foot-dragging,
evasion of responsibility, or refusal to confront reality.
The reality I spend these days rambling the river with is the reality of a
nation riding a great wave of entropy into the unknown. Only at this stage of
the ride can we indulge in our Goth fantasies of the charming vampire
nether-life. Believe me, when things really get dark we will all be wishing
desperately for something more like lambs-in-the-meadow and the kindly touch
of a loving hand and the dim memory of what it was like to care about
anything or anyone.
Where we are now, to me, is the real dark time, the proverbial moment
before the dawn. The depravity of our culture, Disney merchandise, cool ranch
Doritos, and all, is something that people of the future will marvel at for
centuries to come. The purity of our surrender will fascinate them. They will
conclude that we looked into the abyss... and decided that we liked what we
saw in there.
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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