The Ministry for the Future

87

The town meeting included pretty much every single person left in the area; that meant about four hundred people. Looking around the old high school gym, where most of us had gone to school back in the day, we could see each other. Everyone we knew. We knew each other by name.

The deal had come down from some UN agency called the Ministry for the Future, by way of the Feds and the Montana state government. Everyone was offered a buy-out that pretty much covered the rest of your life; housing costs in expensive places, enrollment in the school of your choice, and options that if taken, might allow most of us to move to the same city. Probably Bozeman. Some argued for Minneapolis.

Everyone already knew the plan. The night before, the one movie theater still running had screened Local Hero, a Scottish film in which an international oil company based in Texas offers to buy a Scottish coastal village from the inhabitants, so they can rip it out and build a tanker port. The pay-out will make everyone rich, and the townspeople all cheerfully and unsentimentally vote in favor of it. They have a final ceilidh to say goodbye to the town and celebrate everyone becoming millionaires. Then the owner of the oil company arrives by helicopter and declares the town and its beach need to be saved for an astronomical observatory, astronomy being his personal hobby. Burt Lancaster. A funny sly movie. We watched it in silence. It was too close to home.

Our situation was not so different, although they weren’t going to knock the town down. It would be left to serve as some kind of emergency shelter, and headquarters for local animal stewards, who could be any of our kids, if they cared to do it, or even us, if the idea of coming back to the town empty appealed. And we could come back once a year to visit the place. The movie theater had screened Brigadoon a few nights before, probably to show how stupid that would be. No one had laughed at that one either. Obviously Jeff, the owner of the theater, who had kept the business going at a loss, didn’t want us to close the town. He was whipping on us a little. As we came in he was playing Simon and Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound” over the speakers, really piling it on. But the vote had been decisive.

The main thing was, it was going to happen anyway. Or it already had happened. Jeff could have screened a zombie movie to show that aspect of it. Because all the kids were gone. They graduated high school, having bused to the next town over for it, and went off to college or to find work, and they never came back. Not all of them of course. I myself came back for instance. But most of them didn’t, and the fewer that came back, the fewer came back. Positive feedback loop with a negative result; happens all the time, it’s the story of our time. The town’s population had peaked in 1911 at 12,235 people. Every decade after that it had gone down, and now it was officially at 831 people, but really it was less than that, especially if you didn’t count the poor meth addicts, who were zombies indeed. One store, one café, one movie theater, courtesy of Jeff; a post office, a gas station, a school for K through 8, a high school the next town over with not enough students and teachers. That was it.

And of course we weren’t the only one. I don’t know if that fact made it worse or better. It was happening all over the upper Midwest, all over the West, the South, New England, the Great Lakes. Everywhere on Earth, we were told. You could buy an entire Spanish village for a few thousand euros, we were told. Central Spain, central Poland, lots of eastern Europe, eastern Portugal, lots of Russia—on and on it went. Of course there were countries where villages were turning into cities right before their eyes, cardboard shacks melting in every rainstorm, but no. No one thought that was a good way, and anyway it wasn’t our way. We were in Montana, and our little town’s numbers had dipped below the level of function and habitability. Our town had died, and so here we were looking around at each other.

The buy-out was generous. And if enough of us agreed to move to the same city, we would still have each other. We would constitute a neighborhood, or part of a neighborhood. We would have enough to live on. We could come back here once a year and see the place, see the land. After a while, those of us who had actually lived here would die, and then there would be no reason to come. Then they would let the buildings fall down, presumably, or salvage them for building materials. The land would become part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, one of the greatest ecosystems on Earth. Buffalo, wolves, grizzly bears, elk, deer, wolverines, muskrats, beaver. Fish in the rivers, birds in the air. The animals would migrate, and maybe if the climate kept getting hotter they would move north, but in any case it would be their land, to live on as they liked. The people still here, or still visiting here, would be like park rangers or field scientists, or some kind of wildlife wrangler, or even I suppose buffalo cowboys. Buffaloboys. The authorities were vague on that. They admitted it was a work in progress.

They planned to pull out a lot of the roads in the region. A few railroads and the interstate would remain, with big animal over- or under-passes added every few miles. Some regional roads too, but not many. Most would be pulled up, their concrete and asphalt chewed to gravel and carried off to serve as construction materials elsewhere as needed. Making concrete was bad in carbon terms, so the price on new concrete was astronomical now, taxed to the point where anything else was cheaper, almost. Recycled concrete from decommissioned roads and old foundations of deconstructed buildings was a way to get rich, or at least do very well. We were given shares in the roads that came through town, also the town’s foundations and so on. A kind of trust fund going forward. Later, with the roads gone, the animals and plants would have it better than ever. Fish in the creeks, birds in the air. The Half Earth plan, right here in the USA.

So we talked it out. Some people broke down as they spoke. They told stories of their parents and grandparents, as far back up their family tree as they could climb, or at least back to the ancestors who had first come here. We all cried with them. It would come on you by surprise, some chance remark, or a face remembered, or a good thing someone did for someone. This was our town.

All over the world this was happening, they kept saying. All these sad little towns, the backbone of rural civilization, tossed into the trash bin of history. What a sad moment for humanity to come to. City life—come on. All the fine talk about it—only people who never lived in a small town could say those things. Well, maybe it only suited some of us. And not the majority, obviously. People voted with their feet. The kids were leaving and not coming back, plain as that. So we would move too. Seemed like about half wanted Bozeman, half Minneapolis. That would be like us. Maybe all little towns had that kind of either-or going on, a nearly fifty-fifty split on everything; the mayor, the high school principal, the quarterback, the best gas station, best café, whatever. Always that either-or. So we would split up and go on. Become city folk. Well, it wouldn’t last forever. This was degrowth growth, as the facilitator pointed out. The facilitator was really good, I have to say. She encouraged us to tell our stories. She said in towns like ours it’s always the same. She had done this for a lot of them. It was her work. Like a hospice preacher, she said, looking troubled at that. Everybody cries. At least in towns like this. She said that when they do this same thing in suburbs, no one cares. People don’t even come to the meetings, except to find out what the compensation will be. Sometimes, she said, people are told their suburb is going to be torn down and replaced by habitat, and they cheer. We laughed at that, although it was painful to think of people that alienated. But that was the suburbs. For us—we had a town.

But it was happening everywhere, she said. All over the world. And after that, in the years and centuries that followed, there would come a time when the world’s population drifted back down to a sane level, and then people would move back out of the cities into the countryside, and the villages would come back. Villages used to be just part of the animals’ habitat, she said. Animals would walk right down the streets. They do here already! someone shouted. Yes, and it will happen again, she replied. People who like knowing their teachers, their repair people, their store clerks and so on. The mayor. Everyone in your town. All that is too basic to go away forever. This is just one stage in a larger story. People lived like this for a long time. But now it’s some kind of emergency.

And we would still have each other. And we would be rich, or at least well off—secure—with an annuity for life, and a trust fund for the kids. We would still have something to do on a Saturday night. So it would be all right.

But after a while your eyes began to hurt. People broke down and couldn’t finish what they were saying. Their friends helped them off the stage. This was our town. This was who we were.

Finally there was nothing left to say. It was midnight and we closed up the town like in a fairy tale. Nothing left to do but go home, feeling hollow, stumbling a little. Go in your house and look around at it. Pack your bags.