[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."
[Written by Ellen Edgerton.]
Do you remember the money near the end of the Ivy Wars (as we called them here)? I think that was the worst of a very low point in our history. It was ironic that Orangebacks were the first college-printed currency in New York, considering how people in Ithaca were printing their own money decades earlier. If you were caught with Cornell money -- or God forbid, outside money -- you would be in big trouble. I suppose "trouble" depended on your station. If you were a townie or staff you'd be fined (and of course, the outside money would be "confiscated as evidence" - how convenient!); but if you were a student or faculty or administrator, you'd be publicly denounced in the University Senate -- and at the very worst points, a couple students were expelled as examples. Calling it "Cornell money" was even a bit of a thoughtcrime. Now Syracuse money was good old "orangebacks," but Cornell's was derisively called "Scarlet Scrip" or "Cornell Scrip" or "Carnies."
Of course, it was ALL company scrip. You couldn't use it anywhere else but on Campus (but who ever left Campus in those days?) and you couldn't buy computers or non-GMO food from any other places but Bookstore outlets that would only take scrip. Although parking permits -- those had to be paid in cash or whatever else was valuable off-Campus. Of course, they don't call them parking permits any more -- wisely, the Trustees finally figured out that was too demeaning and obsolete. Now they are called taxes, a serviceable old word. Better to call them taxes than what our movement wanted to call them.
It took townies 27 years to make the journey from organizing the first (sadly ineffective) protests for parking permit waivers, to fomenting the Free Tuition Movement. I always thought it was a bad name for the movement - it wasn't "free tuition" we wanted, it was the right to join the student-class. It was a complete paradigm shift, utterly threatening to the status quo, that our parking permit money could be called something else ("tuition") and that we would receive fair credit for our life experience. What was the difference between a fee and tuition? Nothing. What was the difference between life experience and a degree program? Nothing. To just... admit the truth, waive the credits. Or rather, change their whole meaning. Audacious. Can you imagine?
It was too radical in the end, and in the end they shut it down. In the end, the threats to the old order were just too powerful. Don't be mistaken -- the student-class weren't against us. That is a big misconception - but then again, faculty write the history books, don't they? The students were maybe not for us, but not against us either. But even the Trustees figured out that it wouldn't do to have townies figuring out ways to break through the university-networks and talking to each other. Too much was at stake. Finally, the olive branches were secretly extended, the satellite state-schools were horse-traded between the Big Four, and plans were devised for the gleaming joint centers that would be built on top of the most troublesome neighborhoods in Ithaca and Syracuse.
You remember it as Peace in Our Time... the exalted marriage of Red and Orange... "the inevitable upward progress of human intellectual growth, a triumph of soulfulness and knowledge, a new era of academic excellence." You don't want to go back to the bad old days when there were too many townies who weren't even staff-class. But I'm just telling you what the price was for that, who paid it, and what that was really all about.
I was pleasantly surprised to be invited to give Schuyler Livingston's eulogy - and even more surprised to learn that it was at his request. We last spoke ten years ago, a painful parting at the end of a struggle in which he was forced out of MorganChaseCiti. Since then, New York City and State have suffered terribly from the problems he thought he had defeated when he was Governor.
Given Schuyler's reputation for hounding his bosses and most of a Legislature out of their jobs, it may be a surprise that Schuyler didn't have a mean streak. He just said what he meant compulsively, which regularly lost him friends among people who preferred to keep the truth at a safe distance.
I've known Schuyler since our first day at Groton, though he only stayed there for a year - his father filed, quite dramatically, for bankruptcy, and Schuyler finished his schooling at Bronx Science. We both went to Columbia, where he originally planned to be a doctor, but somehow we both wound up at Cornell Law School. Fortunately, his brilliance made all of these schools want him as a student.
His early years on Wall Street were remarkable, a rise fueled by his warnings that various kinds of transactions carried consequences the firm wouldn't want to face later. He was repeatedly sidelined and then brought back and promoted, as warning after warning came true. He reached the boardroom after his predecessor was hauled away in handcuffs for a complex scheme that boiled down to bribing an accounting firm's partners to okay a series of transactions. His father's bankruptcy had left him incapable of tolerating corruption, especially financial corruption.
That lack of tolerance for corruption also left him deeply concerned about New York State. Perhaps hoping to distract him, his peers on Wall Street helped him to a seat on the 2024 State Financial Investigative Commission. After a few meetings, he rapidly changed course, and by 2029 had decided to run for Governor. He won the 2030 election by a tiny margin against an incumbent who had disgraced himself repeatedly.
His first few years were rocky, to say the least. The Legislature considered him sanctimonious, to put it mildly, and refused to cooperate with his strivings toward a balanced budget. They called him the Pope, mocking him for both his religious beliefs and his politics. His first term was pretty much a fiery trainwreck - I believe I'm allowed to say that, since I was his chief of staff.
I suspect you're all hoping that I'll have something to say about Saratoga, perhaps even something new. Schuyler had warned me not to share anything more about it until he was gone, but now I can safely tell you that it was the most carefully planned scandal in history, combining his fondness for practical jokes with his need to create a public sense of scandal about a system that had been broken for centuries without anyone much caring.
If he were to be a Pope, we decided, he should be a Renaissance Pope.
Since the Legislature had been behaving more and more scandalously for decades without consequence, Schuyler decided it was time to create a scandal on the Governor's side, one that would demand public attention but quickly reflect badly on the Legislature. Schuyler's squeaky-clean reputation would insure that there were plenty of shockwaves, and the timing had to fit perfectly with the 2034 election.
Saratoga was our opportunity - specifically the Speaker's Ball, at the close of the August 2034 racing season. Speaker Dalton sent out his usual invitations for 1200, including fifty invitations sent somewhat grudgingly to the Governor's office for distribution to the Executive Branch. Rather than giving them to department heads, of course, we contacted Marina Tariva, the proprietress of Albany Elite Escorts, and hired 47 of her finest escorts for the Ball. (She was apparently interested in retiring in any case.) They were only there to escort - it was a perfectly legal transaction.
About an hour into the Ball, I escorted his wife into the event, which brought over a few photographers wondering what was going on. Schuyler, as you doubtless know, came in a few minutes later. He was acting rather strangely, bringing 47 beautiful women to a dance attended by many of their regular clients. I'm sure that you've all seen the videotape of the resulting mayhem when the Governor presented them to the Speaker, calling "their graceful presence an appropriate gift to the Legislature for the quality and nature of the Legislature's work, a true reflection of how things get done in New York."
Bad taste, indeed. The media had no idea what to make of it, except to suggest that the Governor had gone mad. The Legislature went berserk, as we'd hoped, setting up impeachment proceedings that we encouraged with generously planted leaks. We had chosen the Governor's guests carefully - I'm still not sure what had enraged Ms. Tariva so severely and made her so interested in cooperating with us - and the scandal grew and grew. Their early rush to impeach the Governor for his insult proved a terrible idea, as the subsequent trial made the Legislature look terrible, in ways that made for attention-grabbing headlines.
That November proved that the electorate could understand a joke, throwing out the worst of the Old Guard, and we finally had a Legislature we could work with. We were happy to hear that there were unexpected rockslides on Bear Mountain on election night, a sign that the world was really changing.
We had to work quickly - New York was sinking fast. The crash in the dollar had weakened Wall Street's importance, and firms had been moving their operations away for decades. New York City's prestige as the center of media empires was withering rapidly, as the share of English in the worldwide market dwindled, and fashion just kept falling further and further behind. Poverty was up - the wealth needed to pay for social services was down. Schuyler's predecessors had already sold off - of course, I mean "outsourced" - many of the state's assets, from the former State University system to the Department of Motor Vehicles. There wasn't much left to work with, though no one had managed to sell off the Barge Canal successfully.
Schuyler poured money into education in ways the state had never seen. He couldn't recover the old SUNY system, but he built new tuition-free schools of finance in Lower Manhattan and Buffalo, schools of communications in Midtown Manhattan and Syracuse, a much larger fashion school in the old Garment District, and, to maintain some balance, schools of agriculture in Lockport and Poughkeepsie. Attendees could come from anywhere, if they met the admissions criteria - but they had to agree to work in New York State for the next five years, or tuition wouldn't be free.
The expensive gamble paid off - talent first poured into these schools as highly paid professors, and then students followed from all over the state, the country, and the world. The five-year rule ensured that companies would have a large pool of well-trained employees, and over time, more and more of these students chose to stay in a revitalized New York, all over the state.
He also got the Barge Canal operating again at a time when energy prices were climbing, though few people seem to realize how much that did to keep New York City going at a time when it was on the edge.
By the end of his second term, it was clear that his vision had made a difference, and by the end of his third term it looked like his eulogy might not even have to mention Saratoga. It was time for a new challenge, and Schuyler decided to head back to Wall Street, where he could focus more directly on a key industry for New York.
His return to Wall Street was rocky. Hailed as a conquering hero, he was quickly hired by the newly formed MorganChaseCiti as Chairman. The Board hoped that he could help create a cleaner image for a firm created out of necessity, as each member company had suffered major losses and scandals. For a while, it worked, and Schuyler was even able to expand their workforce in both New York City and Buffalo, taking advantage of the systems he'd set up.
Unfortunately, we all know what happened next. The National Bankruptcy led quickly to the Second Dollar Crash, and it was hard to take the United States seriously when 125 dollars suddenly bought a single Euro coin. New York State itself barely avoided bankruptcy, and the magic of the schools Schuyler had built dwindled as other places built competitors on similar lines, easily outspending us. New York City's collapse came more quickly than any of us anticipated, and the consequences Upstate were nearly as bleak. Businesses closed or left, leaving the remaining residents with shockingly little to do.
I'm not sure if Schuyler knew it was his last stand when he refused to move the company's headquarters to Shanghai, but it was clearly the end in any case. I stayed with the firm for a year wrapping up its departure before I left myself. Schuyler never forgave me for siding in the end with reality, however unfortunate, rather than with his visions.
He and Laura retreated here, to Tuxedo, and began work on this monastery. I fear that it may be Schuyler's final surviving monument, but it is a fitting conclusion to an extraordinary life, a heroic quest in the face of an imperfect world.
