[By Andy Arthur, originally published here. Reprinted by permission.]
What the future of the Capital City may be like after peak oil. May 5, 2008.
Albany in recent years has been undergoing quite a renaissance thanks to a change in the economy that made urban real estate much more desirable. The lower part of Arbor Hill is once again tree lined, and owned by mid-level bureaucrats who decades ago purchased up former apartment houses and turned them into quality housing.
Many structures in Albany during that period where either demolished or significantly renovated as new wealth floated into the city. The wealthiest bureaucrats and the whos who of the Albany elite all purchased homes in Center Square, while nearby neighborhoods came dominated by mid-level legislative and executive branch bureaucrats who make New York State government function. Indeed, several former state office buildings have been turned into condominiums and rental housing for the many state employees who continue to work downtown.
A lot of people no longer come downtown to work as their work has been digitized and provided on computers in people's homes. Regional offices for state agencies still buzz with a limited number of top level staff administering their functions, while rank and file work at home. Fiber-optics and widespread digitization means formerly paper forms move in and out of offices quickly. While technology has lead to a moderate decrease in the state workforce, most still are employed, a bit working from all corners of our state.
Today, with gas prices exceeding $25 dollars a gallon in most parts of our state, regular commuting is out of the reach of most New Yorkers. Modern cars are quite fuel efficient getting around 40 miles per gallon of gasoline, and can drive the first 50 miles all on electricity, but even that is expensive in New York State, with going rates exceeding $2 a Kw/h. Driving indeed is a luxury for most New Yorkers - something people do on the weekend for pleasure.
Due to the high cost of energy, houses and commercial structures are vastly more efficient then those of 50 years ago. Insulation is thick, and green roofs are the norm. The average structure consumes half as much energy as years ago, but remains comfortable in the summer and winter alike. Most houses don't heat above 55 degrees Fahrenheit, but without drafts they remain comfortable. Modern clothes, using advanced materials keeps people warm at this temperature, but is not bulky like sweaters of the past. In the summertime, a combination of highly-efficient fans and vent shafts. Incandescent lighting disappeared nearly 40 years ago from the market, and many houses use advanced lumeneres that use T-5 and T-8 florescent to provide lighting at actual rates exceeding 100 lumen for watt. Houses are designed to let in as much light as possible, and it rare that lighting is used at all in the day time. To turn lights on in the daytime, requires the resident to press a special override button that overrides the automatic switch that ensures lights are not on during the day time.
Many houses and apartment structures generate a significant portion of their energy needs. With such high electricity rates, it is quite profitable to sell as much electricity as possible back to the grid. Many houses with solar cells on their roofs can make their occupants as much as $30-$50 a day in energy, much of which won't be consumed immediately and will be sold be back to the grid to provide energy to major industries in our cities.
In the past 30 years the suburbs around our city have seen a collapse and failure. Many former suburban structures have long been abandoned. Many shopping malls have been torn down and the soils under them reclaimed for agricultural purposes, providing reasonably priced food to the cities nearby. Other suburban developments have been purchased by the state after most of the former owners have abandoned their property for the cities or towns where there is more community. Large tracts of suburbia are now wild forests, reverting back to their natural structure after a series of demolitions and controlled burns by the state.
Walk around what used to be Colonie and you will occasionally find foundations from old suburban housing. Dig in the soil you might find abandoned sewer lines. But what you mostly see is grown up woods, and a variety of farms producing virtually every kind of food product one could grow in our region to provide low cost food to the city. You can still see the remnants of the clover leafs of the south bound carriage road of the Adirondack Northway, although those three lanes have been converted over to electrified railroad tracks, and provide light rail service from Saratoga to Albany. The former northbound carriage way on the Adirondack Northway provides sufficient capacity for a two-lane highway that carries the remaining automobile traffic on the road.
Nobody would have guessed that suburbia would be a reversible condition that within 50 years would start to collapse, while cities saw gentrification and new life as never before seen. With such high fuel costs people find it cheaper to live in the city, where they can reach out with a diverse group of people. At the same time, small towns in are growing as they provide low-cost living and easy access to products and culture, and access to work through high-speed Internet.
Despite the increasing cost to travel across the state and the nation, people are well aware of what is happening in the world. The Internet brings in customized information from all kinds of people, from blogs to professional news organizations. Thanks to low-cost wireless internet technology, everybody from anywhere can quickly send information over the internet.
While we still rely on a variety of advanced technological devices, due to their cost of creation and importation to our country with high energy prices, we consume a lot less of them. Many people have computers that are over a decade old, but they still work reliably, as today's computers are much better built, and are too expensive to replace. Technological advancement happens slower now, but has reached maturity so most people are happy with their computers for a long time.
Cities and small towns in our country are flourishing. They are filled with inspired people who now have the time and resources to invest in their communities. Local community organizations are growing, as people have the time and money to invest in their communities. Pollution levels in our country have dropped to lowest levels since the beginning of the industrial revolutions, swimming and fishing are popular pass times in our rivers, which are largely lined with lush parks, particularly near urban areas. Without so much petroleum and other fossil fuels polluting our city skylines, cancer rates have dropped.
Resignation, replacement, election, coup, chaos. Or was it coup, replacement, chaos, election? 7th grade is hard, and the first part of the 21st century made the Age of Homespun seem easy to follow.
Lemuel sighed. He'd need to come up with some kind of song for that, or maybe a rhyme. Hmmm... RRECC. Like 'wreck' or maybe 'rec'. 'Wreck' sounded best, and wrecks end with chaos, mostly... And you have to resign before you're replaced, unless there's a coup, but coup was in the second half.
That should work okay for a paragraph, he decided, or a time-sequence question. The rest of the story he pretty much knew. The chaos following the coup, and the election machine disaster of the 2010 elections combining to shut down the state government. That part he'd seen a few movies about, and he even knew about why the first resignation happened, though his mother wouldn't be happy he knew that. Those pictures had made Social Studies interesting for the first time.
Out of all that chaos, Federal control, and then Federal imposition of a federal solution, whatever that meant. Western New York, Hudson, New York City, and Long Island going their separate ways, mini-states within a state. Still two Senators, but regional control inside the state, a statewide court that only decided on matters of court procedure and portionment, whatever that was, separate constitutions, separate taxes, and separate National Guards.
That first puzzle he'd had as a baby showed it. Big pieces, with a tiny court on the outside edge, looking like it was floating in the blue Lake Ontario. Every puzzle piece with its picture of the new regional capitol buildings, at Rochester, Albany, New York, and Melville. His parents were weird to have given him that, but he still had it somewhere.
His mother still rejoiced about the lower taxes, though his father always thought it was a scam. Property taxes down, sales taxes way up, but hidden into prices. They argued about the strangest things. Well, they had argued when his father was here, anyway. Lately it was just his mother praising the Regional Governor and their Legislator. His father kept asking about the Legislator when he went over for a visit. Why do parents care about politics so much?
And why did the Syl put such stupid questions on tests? All these names to learn before he could go to bed. Stories would help, but interesting stories, with real battles. Maybe these politicians needed horses to ride and lances to joust with. Or at least a video game where they could fight it out, far away from test questions. Something.
[by Thomas Shelley]
Ithaca, New York, late July, 2039
The thermometer just inside the shed read 104 degrees. Streams of sweat were rolling off Riley's forehead. He found himself in disbelief that he was working in this heat. The Old Guy was even more unbelievable to Riley. The Old Guy was standing in the yard near the retort, his large homemade straw hat his only shelter against the blazing late July sun. As if the heat from the sun wasn't bad enough, the retort was now burning full-force and Riley was only able to get about five feet from it without feeling like he was going to burst into flames himself.
They had been lining up since early morning. The Old Guy and the folks in the old Cederstrom place had even let a handful of the Wanderers camp out overnight near the retort. They came from nearby neighborhoods, the big box stores and the parking garages. Some local farmers even rode their horses into town just for today's firing. Each came with an armload of sticks or a few pieces of firewood. Some brought a bike-drawn cart or backpack full of logs or firewood. Each in turn helped the Old Guy load the retort. The retort held five cords of wood so it took from 100 to 120 small contributors to mostly fill the retort.
The retort was a funny looking thing, but well known to the local populace. The thousand-gallon tank, held up by railroad ties braced together, was positioned above what looked like an overgrown brick outhouse--an outhouse on fire. The tank was once part of a fuel oil depot on 5th Street. Several years ago a work crew organized by the Old Guy had moved it to its new location. It was quite an effort all in all, especially cleaning out the inside of the tank, most of which was done before it was moved. The ties came from an abandoned nearby spur of the old railroad line. Bricks for the retort came from the chimneys and foundations of the many collapsed or burned out houses in the area. The Old Guy, who was the son of a brick mason, and who had learned the trade from his father, always said there would probably never be a shortage of used brick. This was a good thing for the participants since the Old Guy had to rebuild the retort after every few firings. The old red bricks were fairly soft and didn't last long under the heat of the retort. The Old Guy kept looking for firebrick, but they were really hard to find. Fortunately he had a good source of lime for the mortar he used to build the retort. Two or three times each year he would trade a firing of charcoal for a cart of lime from the Lime Man in Enfield. The arrangement worked really well for all concerned. The owners of the local iron forge and the several blacksmiths in the area were good customers as well and had participated in the original construction of the retort many years ago.
But most of the participants were local folks and the Wanderers who showed up with their armloads of sticks and logs. Many of them didn't care much about the charcoal but some of the local women were eager to have some of the charcoal for cooking. The artists in the line would eventually pick out the hardest, darkest sticks of charcoal for drawing on their handmade paper or for grinding with local walnut oil to make carbon black pigment for painting and decoration. But most of the line was there for a shower. Each participant received ten gallons of hot water, so one hundred or so folks, some in pairs got a really nice shower. There was no other source of hot water for most of the locals, yet alone the Wanderers. A few homes still had solar hot water installations from the teens and the twenty's that still worked. Some of the locals had devised all sorts of ad hoc solar and wood heated water heating systems since then, but most of the local population, especially those living in the parking garages and the former big box stores, not to mention the Wanderers, had little access to running water let alone hot water. All of their water was carried in from the creeks or collected in homemade cisterns of sorts. A hot shower was a real treat.
The children who operated the bellows received a shower as well. Usually it took two or three of them, especially on a really hot day like today. They took turns and it was more play than work, especially since the Old Guy would be joking with them along the way as he supervised the whole operation, making the long afternoon go by a little quicker. The bellows, made of leather and canvas salvaged from old houses, supplied air for the downdraft air supply of the kiln. The forced air system devised by the Old Guy allowed the retort to develop a high enough temperature to gasify the volatile components of the wood, leaving the charcoal behind. The "wood gas" produced was then burned in the upper stage of the retort to heat the water in the thousand gallon tank. It took several hours to heat the full tank, but no one much cared. The hot shower in the late afternoon was worth the wait. Most of the afternoon was like a carnival anyway--the air was filled with music and dancing; women told stories to small clusters of children covered by tarps pitched to shade them from the afternoon Sun. The Old Guy's wife sat in her special place, in the shade of the shed, teaching a small circle of children to read. Some of the women helped Sylvia work in the garden. Riley and a couple of the Wanderers carried on a brisk trade with the crowd in tools and other small useful items. The Old Guy supervised the cooking of a deer and local beans and rice in an oven constructed in one side of the kiln. This was then shared by all of those assembled at the end of the shower.
The shower was the high point of the afternoon. By late afternoon the water was hot. The retort would be sealed for the cool down and the fun would begin. The line of 100 or so participants would take their shower one by one or in pairs at times. The Old Guy furnished his homemade soap which everyone enjoyed using. The crowd would clap and cheer for each participant as they finished their shower. This had become sort of a ritual of the shower. Some of the women used some of their hot water to make teas or infusions with herbs they brought from their gardens. The Old Guy was always the last one to shower. He would toss his straw hat to a row of boys and girls waiting nearby and the one who caught the hat would replace one of the bellows operators for the next shower. Everyone applauded and cheered the loudest when he was finished. The party would continue into the early evening with all assembled making short work of the venison and other food provided. The music and the crowd would slowly drift away, leaving the retort and its precious product to cool.
Two or three days later, once the retort had fully cooled, the Old Guy and his helpers from his household would dismantle the brick "doors" of the retort and remove and sort the charcoal into piles. Repairs were made to the retort as needed and it was readied for the next firing and shower. Over the next couple of days the providers of the wood interested in the charcoal would come by to pick up their portion. There was always lots left over for Riley, Sylvia and the Old Guy for cooking and trading. There was always someone coming by to trade surplus charcoal for vegetables, grain, or whatever items they had to trade. But the lasting memories of the locals and the Wanderers alike were of the hot shower they had on that July afternoon.
Cortlandville, June 4, 2051 - The first two-vehicle accident in five years took place on Route 13 yesterday near the Community Mall, former home of Walmart and Price Chopper, when a delivery van from the Food Cooperative broadsided a van from TrueValue Hardware. Dispatched to the scene, Mounted Police Officer Ray Cruz remarked, "Once the PPO [Post-Peak-Oil] Regs came out, the state reduced biweekly trips for individuals to bimonthly. All we see on the roads now are local delivery vans, horses like Trigger here, and transporters taking commuters to the mag-rail depots. So yes, accidents like this used to be pretty common, but we don't see them much anymore."
The TrueValue driver was taken by wagon to Cortland Health Cooperative. Harlan Becker, the Food Cooperative driver, was unhurt, although his van was damaged. "A lot of families are counting on me," he told this reporter. "I'll have to switch to the wagon to get these deliveries made." He warned that local families on a Tuesday delivery schedule might need to make do until Wednesday, and so on until the van was repaired.
[by Thomas Shelley]
Ithaca, New York, late June, 2053
Riley and Sylvia sat in the antique folding chairs on the little flagstone pad outside the Old Guy's Shed sipping lemon flavored tea. The stars were brilliant. This was unusual as it was towards the end of the rainy season and it was usually cloudy. Even though it was well after sunset, on this rare dry day the humidity was down and the usual fog and mist weren't obscuring their view of the heavens. The Big Dipper floated overhead. Fireflies danced over Sylvia's garden. Pungent, aromatic smoke from the smudge pot kept the mosquitoes at bay.
Riley and Sylvia were now living in the Old Guy's Shed all year round. Even though there was no heat in the shed Riley had winterized a portion of the shed so that even on those rare days when the winter temperatures dipped below freezing they were warm enough to function. They could always go to the old Cederstrom place where their friends lived to warm up for awhile if they wanted to, but they were enjoying living on their own. Besides, too much time with the eight assorted characters there was taxing, even if by necessity they all got along fairly well. And since Mike Cederstrom had passed away unexpectedly two years back, the place didn't seem the same. Mike was only 72 at the time when the giant mosquitoes zapped him with one of those tropical fevers. The Regional Central Council had been pretty good about distributing the anit-malaria drugs, but they weren't at all effective against some of the newer strains.
Nobody hassled Riley and Sylvia about living in the Old Guy's Shed. The shed was once a car barn for the house in front of the lot. The "red house", as it was known, burned to the ground about 10 years ago, just when Riley was getting to know the Old Guy. It had been boarded up for many years. Its former owners had died during one of the Food Riots in the late '30s when the Heights and much of the Northeast was sacked and burned. Besides, the Courthouse itself burned to the ground a few years back and all of the records were lost, so who owned what was now only colloquial information, as if anyone cared anyway, except maybe some of the Regional Central Council folks. After the Great Collapse the fire department converted its surviving engines to wood burners. But it took a while to get one going and get the engine hot enough to run well enough to leave the firehouse. Besides, since all of the water had to come from one of the creeks, chances for the survival of a burning structure were really slim.
Riley was one of the few people who knew the Old Guy's real name. He even referred to himself as the Old Guy as he was one of the few really elderly folks in the neighborhood. He was 102 when he died suddenly in the summer of '48. Sylvia found him lying in the garden, just outside the compost bins. His wife had lived to be 97, having died nearly 10 years earlier. They were the sages of the neighborhood in their time and were known for their hospitality towards the great influx of younger people like Riley and Sylvia who had made it to Upstate New York to escape the ravages of the drowned Coastal Plain. Most didn't survive the initial alternating monster hurricanes and droughts, but the lucky few that made it to the mountains and hills of the interior North East and managed to survive the Food Riots after the Great Collapse now had a relatively peaceful if marginal existence. The Old Guy and his wife had taught Sylvia how to read and write along with many other young people that had stayed at their house on the corner.
No one knew the street names any longer, not that it mattered anyway. All of the street signs had been stolen for their scrap value a long time ago. They just knew the large badly faded clapboard house on the corner as the Old Guy's house. Except for hand-made artists' pigments, industrial paint was only a memory of some of the older folks in town. Milk paint and white wash could be traded for if you knew the local producers and had something to trade, but there was hardly a house in town that had had any work of any kind done on it since the Great Collapse. The ten or so younger people living there, mostly in their late 20s or early 30s, took care of the Old Guy's house as well as they could after he died. It was about the only house around with glass in all of the windows!
Riley and Sylvia were trying to save up materials to trade for white wash made by a guy in Enfield. If they could carry it off they were going to white wash both the Old Guy's Shed and the old couple's former house on the corner.
Riley and Sylvia had escaped from "the drowning", as they referred to it, when they were in their early teens. They had somehow made it to Ithaca after a few years of desperate drifting in the mountains to the East. Riley met the Old Guy while he and Sylvia were camped in the former park across the street, taking handouts of food from the Regional Central Council. They were waiting for a space in the old parking garage nearby, now a camp for hundreds of refugees from "the drowning". The Old Guy had invited them to be part of his household along with several other young people. This was just a year before the Old Guy's wife died in her sleep one night. Sylvia was just learning how to read and write at the time. The Old Guy took his wife's loss really hard and the household of young folks and the people down the block who had been befriended by the Old Guy and his wife mourned for weeks.
The Old Guy's Shed was at the heart of Riley's existence. It was chocked full of every type of hardware and widget and bits and pieces of junk that one could imagine. The Old Guy had been a compulsive pack rat and filled up the shed with so much stuff that you could barely walk through it. Early on the Old Guy had taken Riley on a tour of the shed and introduced him to its marvelous contents, much of it from the late nineteen hundreds. The Old Guy said that he could build or repair almost anything from the parts and pieces stacked on shelves, in parts bins and in sets of drawers. Riley certainly believed he could. Riley and Sylvia became closer friends with the Old Guy after his wife died. The Old Guy continued with Sylvia's home schooling, taught Riley how to use tools. make repairs on all kinds of equipment, and he taught Sylvia how to garden, compost and collect seeds. They acquired all sorts of life skills that enabled them to be less dependent on the Regional Central Council's largess and to become leaders in the neighborhood. In his Will the Old Guy gave the shed and its contents to Riley.
Riley had become the local repairman and trader. Since there had been no stores anywhere since the Great Collapse, local farmers would walk or ride their horses miles to trade a basket of fresh produce or a loaf of bread for a couple of bolts to repair their thrasher or their hand-powered grain grinder. Riley had a brisk trade in all sorts of hand tools as a going concern. He was constantly busy repairing all sorts of gadgets. He had also learned how to convert furnaces to wood or biomass burning from the Old Guy. Much of the local housing stock had deteriorated to the point of being boarded up and ransacked for fire wood because it had been unheated for so long after the Great Collapse that the structures had warped, cracked and collapsed to the point where they were no longer habitable. The Old Guy's house was in comparatively good condition because he had installed a wood-burning furnace early in this century, so he could keep the house heated all winter. Knowing how to convert old fossil fuel furnaces to wood burning units in trade for food and goods made Riley even more valuable to the local community, even though the warmer climactic regime over the past many years made heating less of a necessity than it had been in the "old days". And Sylvia was teaching gardening, food preserving techniques and other survival skills to dozens of young people living in the parking structures and camping out in the former big box stores. She was receiving sewing and other services in return.
Life was good in 2053 in the remnants of Downtown Ithaca.
For the past century, we in Raleigh have profited from a steady stream of refugees from the north. "Send us your cold, your overtaxed, your frustrated by unions," we said.
We benefited from a steady influx of newcomers we hadn't had to pay to educate, who bought our property, grew our economy, and adjusted to our culture. They even wrote home to tell everyone how great it was here, helping us drain many states north of us of their valuable youth.
This huge influx helped us to adjust to the loss of tobacco and industrial jobs. It guaranteed us stability and growth during a period when much of the country faced mounting bills and fewer opportunities.
Unfortunately, this has reversed in the last ten years. After investing millions in expanding the state university system, we've seen our own massive brain drain, as our educated youth move north to places like Burlington, New York City, and - who'd have imagined it? - Upstate New York.
This paper has warned our politicians for decades that they were losing their edge on taxes. We have warned that the counties spent far too much on roads and schools for developments that never quite happened the way they were supposed to. We have warned that the state put far too much effort into environmental protection while neglecting the need to generate cheap power. We have warned that the creeping bureaucracy threated North Carolina's competitiveness, and that supporting it with taxes was killing business.
Still, it seems that the cause of this exodus may be a problem this paper has no way of fighting: it's just plain warmer here. We may have the finest air conditioning on earth, but running it nine months a year is expensive, and we don't want to use it on fields of parched crops.
Perhaps the best we can say is that Upstate New York stole our weather, and is now stealing our people.
[By Angelika St.Laurent]
"We could just as well have walked, sir," objected Grace. "It's only an hour from the station, anyway."
"I want us to look official," answered Kim, steering the car up the wide road. To their left, the blue sky reflected in magnificent Cayuga Lake. Sheer cliffs loomed to the right, where the rock had been blasted away to make room for the gently curved road.
"Sometimes I wonder, whether you joined the police just so you could drive a car, Sergeant Chen," went Grace on.
Kim didn't answer, but he couldn't suppress a smile. There was a reason why he had picked the young corporal to come along. As so often, Grace was right on: there had been other motives, too, to be sure. But if he was honest, he had joined the police because he loved cars. What other profession offered so many opportunities to drive?
"I need you to keep your eyes open, today," he said.
"What are we looking for, sir?" she asked.
"I don't know," he shrugged, turning the car to the entrance of the big auction hall. "Anything, whatever it is, as long as we can show it is criminal. This whole business disgusts me."
"There must be a lot of money in it," she observed, pointing at one of the busses parked in front of the hall. "If they bothered to drive a bus all the way down from Detroit."
"There sure is," growled Kim. The fools were a fine deal for anybody who needed cheap labor, and an even better one for those who acted as their agents: Fools too stupid to ask for proper security, who'd take a bottle of cheap cider just as happily for a salary as hard $100 coins, were just handy, if there was a new railroad track to be shoveled, a channel to be built, or an old electricity damn to be replaced. And the worst of it, nobody was likely to ask for them, if an accident happened.
The cities were happy to see them leave - radiation-damaged young men crowding the streets did nothing to improve the image of new prosperity and rebuilding. And the mothers, well, they had been too poor and unimportant for anybody to bother to evacuate them when the bombs fell. They were no more likely to be able to protect their sons now, than they had been able to protect their unborn babies nineteen years ago.
"The mayor wouldn't be happy about it," Grace mused, scrambling out of the car.
"No," said Kim, slamming the car door, "But sure as hell, they'll stop the business here in Ithaca, if we'd find anything. I heard the word 'slavery' more than once down on the Commons."
They walked into the auction hall. Most of it stood empty, but the corner where the contracts were signed was crowded. Kim walked over to the first desk. He quickly read over the contract lying on the table. The face of the young man signing it was tense with concentration. His name was probably the only word he had ever learned to write.
"I'm Sergeant Chen, from the local police," he said slowly to the young man, "Your contract tells you, that you will be paid a thousand dollars a day. If they don't give them to you, you come and speak with me."
The man nodded vacantly.
"You know how much a thousand dollars are?" Kim asked him.
The man's eyes glittered. He raised all his fingers. "Ten times a hundred," he said proudly. Kim wasn't sure, if he was proud of the promise of being paid minimum wage, or of his ability to count.
"Sergeant Chen, what a pleasant surprise!" boomed a voice from behind.
Kylan Greenboom, the contractor who had won the bid for rebuilding the Six Mile Creek dam, sped towards Kim.
"Sergeant, I assure you, there is no need to be worried at all. My men have everything under control," Mr. Greenboom declared loudly, "No need to trouble yourself. In fact, if you ask me, I find these poor young brain-damaged men much less violent than they are defamed to be. I always feel that they are grateful that we give them a chance of an independent life.... And not to worry, we'll keep them safely away from bars and public spaces. They won't cause any trouble in the city."
"I will need copies of all the contracts," Kim said stiffly, "Along with copies of their identification cards."
The contractor scowled. Copies were not cheap. "I'll bring them down to the station, tomorrow," he promised.
"Have you found anything?" asked Kim back in the car.
Grace shook her head. "No, but I bet there is enough money involved that we'll find something sooner or later."
"Dad, we have a big problem."
"Again?"
"They're on the edge of the field this time - mostly camped out in the forest."
"That's an improvement over last time."
"It's fifty, though."
"Fifty?"
"I think so. I tried to get close without them noticing, but I'm not sure."
"Fifty? Did you call the Sheriff?"
"Mom tried - the department's up in the northeast corner right now on something similar."
"All right. I guess we can't let these folks get too settled. Where are the shotguns?"
"They're still on the back of the tractor cab. What do we do?"
"We ride over and tell them to go away, just like the last three times. Get up here, and get the guns ready."
This is a rather different direction than the rest of Upstate 2050, but a friend sent me a link discussing an alternate version of New York State, explained here in more detail. The boundaries are very different, but make sense in their own way, and the development trajectory seems to have been very different.
The different boundaries and smaller country make me think that the "Upstate-Downstate" relationship there would be completely different.
I wonder what that might look like in 2050?
Albany, NY - In the New York Governor's race, voters narrowly supported Democrat Ricardo Wagner, who ran a nostalgic campaign promising the same kind of government that his great-great-grandfather Robert F. Wagner Jr. had given New York City in the 1950s. Wagner won 48% of the vote on the Democratic and Working Families lines, while Republican James Rivington fell short with 46%. Conservative Party candidate Charles Griffin received 6% of the vote.
The race had been seen as an Upstate-Downstate battle until late in the race, when Griffin ran a series of ads questioning whether Rivington was "really from Upstate? Really real?" and briefly catapulted himself to 25% in the polls. While Griffin fell back quickly as the election grew closer, Rivington spent much of the rest of the campaign explaining just how much time he had spent on the family farm outside of Palmyra and why he had chosen to go to college in New York City, staying there for a decade while he began his medical career.
Wagner began the race burdened by the scandals of his predecessor, Burton McKinsey, under whom he had served quietly as Lieutenant Governor. His refusal to condemn several long-time friends after their indictment had raised concerns that he would continue his predecessor's practices, though Wagner's insistence that accounting errors rather than misconduct were at issue may have soothed nervous voters.
Rivington, in an unusual move, made his concession speech under a projected portrait of Nathan Miller, Governor of New York from 1921 to 1922, and the last Governor from Upstate. While congratulating Wagner for his victory, he called on "Upstate voters to recognize the damage they have done to themselves time after time, failing to support their own candidates of either party and ruining their ability to participate in New York's political conversation."
