A History of the Future

by Kunstler, James Howard

  “Please go on,” Jane Ann said.

  Daniel’s Story: Adrift on the Inland Sea

  It was a beautiful peaceful morning and the next week and a half was the most beautiful time . . . ever. We woke up on the boat. Evan didn’t feel very good. He had a nasty-looking scab on his lip where he split it the night before falling into the boat. We were both awfully hungry. One of the things I’d forgotten to buy in my haste to gather up supplies before leaving Buffalo was cooking utensils. I had alcohol for the little galley stove but nothing to cook any of our food in, and I wasn’t too keen for raw bacon and potatoes. The bucket I’d bought was a plastic one from the old times. Couldn’t cook in that. The only thing that might serve for cookery was the steel toilet pan. So I scooped some sand and gravel off the lake bottom and scrubbed that toilet pan and ended up frying our bacon and potatoes and onions in it, and it was the best meal we ever ate. After that, Evan felt better. I showed him around the boat and explained how things worked and he began to see what a good boat she was and how we would have a career carrying cargoes about the lake for the summer, or until we got sick of it, or found a better situation somewhere. But the big thing was that we were free and out of danger and on our own, and when we hoisted the anchor and raised the sails our spirits flew.

  Evan took the wheel and I studied the charts Fourier sold me. We had a compass built into the pilot station and it was easy to understand where we were as long as we weren’t out of sight of land. There were no natural harbors along the lakeshore for many miles and few signs of life. We coasted off it all morning in a fair breeze coming in from the southwest. Evan knew some things that I didn’t about sailing a boat—how you could move forward even sailing partly into the wind because of the way the air flowed over the sail and the air pressure on each side. It was physics, he said. I wasn’t any good at math and physics but Evan was a whiz. He mastered the operation of the boat that first day and taught me things I didn’t know.

  The weather was perfect. It was even getting hot, being June. We stopped wherever we liked that first day. The Kerry McKinney had a very shallow draft. We could raise the leeboards and bring her in close to shore, drop the anchor, and wade onto the land carrying our boots. We could swim or lie about, or read our books, or sleep. When we felt like it, we moved on. We passed little towns that seemed uninhabited, an old state park with pavilions overgrown with Virginia creeper, crumbling factories, abandoned rail yards. There were occasional orchards and farms along the shore, some raggedy, some better-looking. We stopped at one late that first afternoon. It was a big, handsome old house in the Greek temple style of the long ago times of early America, like the machine age never happened. There were people working about the place, well clothed and healthy-looking, good fenced pastures with horses and oxen, fields planted far to the horizon, workshops and outbuildings, a smith banging away in one of them.

  We went to the kitchen door of the big house and asked to trade for a fry pan and a pot and some spoons and forks and a flipper and like that. The cook must have been making supper. It was quite hot in there. She had pots simmering on a big stove. She was a good-looking old girl, forty or so, substantial in the right places, with a gypsy-looking head rag on, and she was a little flirty with us. She had two helpers, both younger, both homely, one with a pushed-together face and kinky red hair and the other quite fat. She said she doubted we had anything worthwhile to trade. I said we had silver and could pay in hard money. That perked her up. We bargained and got what we needed, plus a loaf of real wheat bread, a sack of cornmeal, two dozen eggs, more onions, and some oat cookies. She asked who we were and how we came into a pocket full of silver. Evan said that we were pirates. It was one of his jokes, but I could see it didn’t sit so well with the girls. The cook said that was a dangerous career and perhaps we might not want to keep at it. She said that her farmer boss was looking for strong young men and was a good provider. Evan said, no thank you, we liked being pirates out on the Great Lakes. She said we would probably get ourself hanged inside a year. I asked if the people out on the property worked on the indenture and she said no, she didn’t even know what it meant, and all were free to come and go, but there was no better situation in western New York than Miller’s farm, which was famous in the region. I took it that Miller was a grandee like our Mr. Bullock. She had never had a better life, she said. In the old times, she worked for a company that had a thousand restaurants all over the country, all the same, and all they did was heat up food that was made far far away and came frozen in trucks. She said the new times was the best thing that ever happened to her and Miller’s farm the best place, and if we got tired of being pirates we should come back there and sign on for honest work. She was a jolly spirit. I suspect she had a free hand with the cider in that kitchen too. She said we could both kiss her before we left because she had never been kissed by pirates before.

  When we got back to the boat I had to lecture Evan about shooting his mouth off like that and he said I had no sense of humor. I said no, he just had no sense, period, as in common sense, telling people we were pirates. For all I knew there were pirates out in the lakes just like there were pickers all over the land, and I hoped we didn’t encounter any because they would have no reason not to leave us for dead after stealing our money. But apart from that little upset, the period that followed was a dreamtime. We had fine weather, day after day of bright sun and cool, still nights. We turned brown basking through the long days as we followed the shore and stopped and swam and ate. Evan suggested that we try crossing Lake Erie to the Canadian side, to see how things had gone in that country, but I wasn’t ready to sail out of sight of land yet. Those lakes are like little oceans. It was a good forty miles across to Canada where we were and you couldn’t see across. A few times, a wind came up and the water got rough, quickly, and forced you to be respectful of it. I didn’t want to be caught out there at night, unable to get to dry land if necessary.

  We broke out the fishing lines and easily found bait ashore under rotten logs and down in the leaf litter and brought it back and fished off the boat at evening time when the lake grew still. At first we hooked the common bass and perch that we knew from the ponds back home. But for really great eating we discovered another fish I was not acquainted with. It wasn’t any kind of a trout or a salmon but looked like a stretched-out bass, yellowish brown colored, with a dorsal fin like a sail. I later learned it was a walleye. We called it the golden snapper. It was superior to the others, which we threw back. We weren’t out deep enough to get lake trout, if they were in there at all. We’d roll the fillets in cornmeal and fry them in bacon fat. Often, we made supper on shore over a wood fire if there was a pretty little beach. We had pancakes and jam for dessert and took turns reading out loud from Moby-Dick until it was too dark to see the page, and then we’d wade back to our bunks aboard the Kerry McKinney and sleep to the gentle rocking of the little waves. It was a glorious time. Nobody bothered us. After a while we stopped worrying about being followed over what happened way back in Lockport. We also developed a plan to sail clear up through the lakes, past Detroit, up into Huron and around the Mackinac Straits. From the charts, it looked like you had to go through a set of locks to get into Lake Superior. But I didn’t think we’d go that far in one summer, or know what we would do when winter came on, or whether we’d keep on sailing the lakes more than one season. Evan had some idea about sailing as far as Chicago and going west from there to the Pacific Ocean, where Lewis and Clark went—he knew all about them, and I didn’t, except that they were famous Americans of long ago—only now if you went all the way to the Pacific Ocean, Evan said, there would be Americans there, whereas Lewis and Clark met up only with Indians. Well, I wasn’t confident that things were going so great out on the West Coast since the bombing of Los Angeles, but it gave us a lot to talk about, making plans and all by the campfire.

  After five days, we were running low on supplies again and we came upon a town with
an excellent harbor. It turned out to be Erie, Pennsylvania—we’d made it out of New York State! It had a great big hook of a sand spit with woods on it that sheltered a bay a good mile across. We sailed in and found the public dock. A harbor master was on duty to keep order there, which was reassuring. Like other cities we visited, Erie was well reduced from its former glory of the machine age, with many blocks of abandoned buildings and houses and old factories and a population pared down by sickness and hardship. But down around the harbor they had built new buildings for warehouses and dealers in goods and they had a lively trade going on. We bought new clothes there, and straw hats, and more bacon and a nice ham and some Ashtabula whiskey, a deck of cards, a pound of taffy, and two fishing rods made in the old times, with good line, and they had a bathhouse on Short Street where we got cleaned and shaved, and then we went out for supper at the Star Hotel overlooking the harbor and had beefsteaks with spring greens and good crusty wheat bread and learned the news of the day, which was the first we heard of the Foxfire Republic.

  Some enterprising person had put out a newspaper there, of the style from the far-back old times where all the stories and advertising were crammed on two sides of what was called a broadsheet. I guess paper was in short supply, like so many other things. But I was most taken by it and thought wherever fate led me I might someday like to run a broadsheet newspaper like that if I got sick of sailing around on a boat.

  The Foxfire Republic was a new nation broken away from the USA composed of Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia, North and South Carolina, Arkansas and Missouri and the southern part of Illinois. It was led by a woman president who was a famous roustabout for Jesus on TV and, before that, a star of country music recordings before she turned politician. This Foxfire Republic was engaged in hostilities with another new nation of former states that called itself New Africa, or Uhuruwardi, which was Swahili for land of freedom, the paper said. That country was made of Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana and the two new nations had sorted themselves out just like it sounds, between the white and black races, which is how come we encountered so few people of color anywhere we’d been since leaving home. Texas had apparently gone its own way for a while, with Oklahoma for a sidekick, but was now fighting off a takeover by Mexico. Then there was the country still called the United States, which I concluded was made up of whatever else might be left over, with the government most recently located in St. Paul, Minnesota, because of what happened in Washington, and rumors of yet another move of the capital elsewhere. We talked to various men in the barroom before supper about these new developments and they didn’t know much else about the fate of the nations besides what was in the paper, or what was going on in the Pacific coast states, or the Rocky Mountains, for that matter. People were not journeying far between the regions unconnected by rivers or the Great Lakes because there were no cars, railroads, or airplanes anymore.

  The story in the newspaper was titled “Rumors of Atrocities Down South.” A battle had taken place around Marietta, Georgia, in a failed attempt by the Foxfire army to take back the city of Atlanta. Both sides were executing prisoners in horrific ways and the roads were festooned with soldiers hanging from trees, or crucified, or decapitated, with the heads displayed on poles, very brutal stuff. The paper said there were unconfirmed incidents of cannibalism on both sides. The USA was trying to stay out of it but there were rumors, too, of an imminent Foxfire incursion to take over Cincinnati and to therefore control the traffic along the Ohio River. An advertisement across the bottom of the sheet called for volunteers for the U.S. Army, mustering in Cleveland on the Fourth of July, with the promise to pay in hard money. The men in the barroom laughed at the idea of joining up, saying they would be damned to fight in a new civil war, and that they couldn’t depend on the government of Erie County, let alone the state of Pennsylvania, which was bankrupt and useless, and that the U.S. government was just a ghost of a government, haunting the land—and thank God for it because that was the end of the taxes that almost crushed everybody in the “last days of the empire,” they called it. I told them we hadn’t heard anything from the U.S. government back home for quite a while, which at once I regretted bringing up, in case anybody came around inquiring about two young men from New York State. Anyway, Evan and I had no desire or intention to travel south of the Mason–Dixon line, or go off fighting when we were free as a couple of birds on the lakes.

  I tried to talk Evan out of seeking some romantic adventure that evening in one of the parlor shops, as the men in the barroom called places where love could be bought, and he was all grumpy when we returned to the public dock, especially when I said we would shove off that night, and we argued about that because I think he intended to sneak back into town once I was asleep and find a girl, and I said I would feel like a sitting duck sleeping tied up to the town dock if anyone came looking for us, and he says, “We must be fifty miles away from Buffalo now.”

  I go, “That’s not far away enough for my comfort.”

  “We’re not even in New York State anymore,” he says.

  “I doubt that any pack of regulators would care about state lines.”

  He’s like, “Who appointed you captain, anyway?”

  I go, “I’m the senior member of the crew.”

  He’s like, “And half of what you know about sailing this tub I had to teach you.”

  “Well, I bought the boat,” I say.

  “Partly with my money,” he goes.

  “Shut up and get on the goddamn boat,” I say.

  “Can’t make me,” he says.

  I just stop for a long minute, drilling my eyes into him, and finally I’m like, “All right, you want to go your own way, then go. But I’m not sleeping here in the slips tonight, so I guess this is farewell. I won’t be here when you come back and neither will the Kerry McKinney.”

  He’s like, “You can’t do that!”

  “I can and I will,” I say. “We’re not out of danger in my judgment.”

  “And when will that be?” he goes.

  “It’ll be when I say so and not before,” I say. “You don’t have the sense of a box of rocks.”

  Evan walks around in little circles on the dock, kicking at the planks there in frustration, like he would like to kick me, but he can’t. I’m bigger.

  “Come on,” I say, “Get on the boat.”

  Finally, he goes, “You’re no fun at all,” and climbs aboard.

  We sailed in a light evening breeze until the sun went down and the moon came up, and we moored offshore, as usual, where there was no town and no people, just woods. We had bought candles back in town among the other things and we ate taffy as I read to him that night about Ishmael and Queequeg in their room at the Spouter tavern before they sailed off on Captain Ahab’s Pequod.

  Evan came around to himself the next morning and apologized for being pigheaded and made me read the charts and say when exactly we could start enjoying ourselves and I said maybe Sandusky, Ohio, because by then we would be well away from any pursuers, and it looked to be much the finest natural harbor on Lake Erie, and I said we might even begin asking around there about taking cargoes for hire and beginning our business and that satisfied him.

  It took us the better part of the rest of the week to beat a course west toward Sandusky. We decided to skip Cleveland altogether so as not to get dragooned or indentured into any military venture that might be marshaling there to fight at Cincinnati. We continued to live very easily and comfortably. Time seemed to stand still. It rained one day and we were glad to just laze around our bunks at anchor reading and napping, and then it was sunny again the next morning, which was our last on the Kerry McKinney.

  We were coasting off Ohio now. We picked up some cheese and sausage in a hard-up little town called Vermilion, maybe twenty miles from the mouth of Sandusky harbor. It was early afternoon when we g
ot back on board and under sail again. The sky had darkened and the wind was picking up but the boat handled nicely. We zigzagged in a close reach always following the shore, perhaps a quarter mile from land at most. I had a rough idea where we were from the charts and thought we could make it to our destination easily by late afternoon, and it was around the solstice, too, the longest day of the year, so we would have plenty of daylight in any case. We didn’t know what was coming our way, of course, which was a fierce and deadly blow. The rain started and pretty soon it was hitting us horizontally. It came down so hard that the shoreline disappeared. I tried to navigate by following the compass directly to the west, but that put us in the teeth of the wind and, from what I determined later, we blew off course, side-slipping toward a shoaly area around a set of islands and reefs to the north of Sandusky. I was beginning to despair of making it to the safe harbor there, and we were getting farther out into the vastness of the lake, exactly where I didn’t want to be in this kind of situation. Evan took down our forward sail and reefed the small one in the stern as the waves got higher. Soon, it was like being out in the ocean, the troughs were so big. They were huge rollers with whitecaps on top, probably thirty feet high. It happened so suddenly. The boat was like a toy on them. We’d get pitched up on the crest of a wave and then the bow would drop with a great crash on the other side so hard I thought the hull would shatter. The sky just grew darker and angrier, even though it was far from evening. Then, we came down off one particular wave and hit something that felt more like solid ground than water and the pilot wheel went slack. I realized that the steering cable had snapped. We were at the mercy of the wind. The boat spun around and we started taking the waves broadside and water was sweeping over the deck. It was a struggle not to get washed overboard. I cut the halyard of the stern sail into two pieces of about ten feet each and told Evan to tie himself to something on board. The storm and the crashing waves made a terrible din. Evan couldn’t hear what I was saying. I demonstrated by tying one end of the rope around my ankle and the other to a cleat on the starboard gunwale. Evan yelled that if the boat capsized, and we were tied to it, we’d drown. I yelled back that he’d drown if he got swept overboard and I think he was about to do as I had done when another wave caught us and swept over the cabin, and when I came through the wash Evan was gone, swept overboard.