What I Did On Summer Vacation (James Howard Kunstler)

[Tace]

James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust

Aug. 23, 2010 -- Oh what a mighty spewage of vinyl weighs heavy on this land!

A dark mood spread through the body politic like a septic infection last week in response to bad numbers in employment, housing, and commerce, not to mention unease about the now complete takeover of the stock market by robot traders. But I left it all behind to trip across New England from the Vermont border to Maine and back, and many a strange thing did I see....

New Hampshire's got their state motto on the license plate wrong: Live Free or Die. It ought to read Live Free and Die. Just north of Concord on I-89 there's a highway rest stop. The primary retail outlet there is... the state liquor store! Yes, for some reason the New Hampshire government controls the sale of liquor. Puritan guilt? Creeping socialism? Who knows. Apparently some brilliant state wonk got the idea that they could maximize revenue by selling liquor to motorists. Now, granted, not everybody motoring up I-89 is an alcoholic, but surely some of them are. Maybe it's a scheme to kill off the Boston Irish -- but at some risk to the citizens of The Granite State. Note: there was no coffee shop on the premises. I kid you not.

Meanwhile, New Hampshire's little wedge of seacoast has been completely coated in vinyl, as if some angry god decoupaged the darn thing after eating a bad clam roll. The world has never before seen an array of seaside cottages so uniquely hideous as the ones we passed from Seabrook to Portsmouth. The owners had managed to try every proportioning system and every color scheme known to man -- except the right ones. They made your eyeballs wobble in their sockets just motoring by them on US Route 1-A -- and we were not unaware, of course, that our presence on the road, along with 10,000 other pleasure-seeking tourists, only made these houses seem worse by dint of the highway's toxic proximity.

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