Schenectady

After resting a bit and cleaning up we headed out yesterday evening for dinner at a Japanese place with outdoor seating we had seen on the way in. I was driving along the road, maybe a little slow in an unfamiliar city, trying to figure out if I was in a 25 or a 35 zone. All of a sudden this guy pulls out and passes me on the left. In town. Double yellow lines. A couple of blocks down I learned that we were right by the town's big hospital.

Dinner was perfectly fine, if unexceptional. We were hungry. Somewhere in the middle a Black guy and a white woman came out, fully masked. He was wearing slides with white socks. She had on crocks with white socks. Made me feel right at home, though I rarely am so bold as to venture out in public wearing that combo. They got into a mustard-colored late model Camaro and drove off. America at its finest.

On the way back to the hotel we came through this nice older neighborhood we had seen on the way there. It was dark as hell, in town mind you. Only the sparest of streetlights to be had, at very low wattage. It was hard not to wonder whether municipal budgetary concerns weren't a factor.

Schenectady, it seems, was once the headquarters of GE, some many years ago. Its population peaked somewhere around 1930 and is now about a third lower than it was then. It has stabilized and clawed back a little in the last couple of decades, but is visibly not what it once was.

In the Charles Kuralt book I read earlier this summer, NC's favorite wayfaring journalist notes how, already in the 50s, he had begun to chronicle the disappearance of family farms throughout the heartland. The emptying of America's great hinterlands is not a new phenomenon. It has been going on for many decades. On the one hand, the myth of a golden era of plenitude is just that. On the other, it is a powerful one, and no one can be blind to the persistence and fertility of the soil from whence sprang Trump.