Pre-Election, Post Apocalypse Diary (138 Days to go.)
The town where I live has already been through the apocalypse. I realized that a little while ago while observing a few of the chat groups on Facebook.
It happened a long time before my arrival, in 1985, with the closure of the last industrial complex in town, the Sprague Electric Company, but the damage echoes through the town even now. Time, like the trees in the valley surrounding the town, continues to move forward and as it does, much of what made North Adams a viable small town, moves with it. The last bit of industry abandoned the town a few years ago when the Crane paper company closed its doors and disappeared.
Forty thousand people used to live here. Now there are 12,000. My husband works in film and spent most of his career as a photo journalist in Manhattan. He moved here on September 12, 2001.
So we live with the residue of abandonment. We live in a converted textile mill. We have a small house on the other side of town. From my desk in that house, you can see the forest slowly swallowing the town. The largest contemporary art museum in America is here so we will likely never completely disappear, but the town is not what is was. Work here is not what it was and in all probability, it never will be again.
