Coda Katrina Vandenberg
NAILS
I
haven’t told you yet how haunted
I felt when I saw the Harkin store. It
stands alone, its wide porch over-
looking the Minnesota River, on a deserted
stretch of county highway thick with
cottonwoods.
In mid-nineteenth-century Minnesota,
Harkin’s general store and post o;ce was
a Super Wal-Mart, a destination for people
who lived several days in any direction
from the bustling town of West Newton.
The last stop for steamboat tra;c on
its way upriver, West Newton boasted
saloons and blacksmith shops, a hotel,
livery stable, sawmill, and wagon works.
It was the ideal place for an enterprising
farmer like Alexander Harkin to build a
store in 1869. But the town died when
the railroad was built through New Ulm,
eight miles southeast. People stopped
traveling by riverboat. Harkin shut his
doors. The townspeople burned down
all the other buildings for the nails. West
Newton vanished. And when Harkin’s
grandchildren finally unlocked his store
again sixty years later, they found his
entire stock waiting on the shelves,
unopened mail in the slots.
Today, if you give two dollars to a guide
dressed up as Harkin, you can enter the
store and handle those goods yourself. On
shelves and in barrels, staples like sugar,
hairpins, bolts of cloth, and a handful of
medicines like laudanum and bitters
display the comparative modesty of what
we could make and a=ord before we
infused oil’s energy—one barrel contains
up to twenty-five thousand hours of human
work, a concentration found in nothing
else—into our lives. Ask to try on a pair of
shoes, and you’ll learn there’s no di=erence
between the left and the right; place a pair
of eyeglasses on the bridge of your nose,
and squint—you would have had to settle
on the prescription that came closest.
Black tea, all the way from Asia, was the
flashiest item you could buy. Getting those
goods to Harkin’s store was expensive. You
too might burn down a building for the
nails, because they cost a lot: nails are
dense, thus heavy and costly to ship.
And so, although the railroad doomed
West Newton, it was a boon to New Ulm’s
brewer, August Schell, who had been
delivering beer (also heavy, costly to ship)
by horse-drawn wagon. The farthest he
could deliver was a day’s journey, twenty-five miles. The day I saw the Harkin store,
I drove over one hundred miles in my compact car. I traveled the last eight between
New Ulm and the store on a whim.
I wonder whether I would have
connected the Harkin store to peak oil if
my retired father had not called the day
before to tell me that General Motors had
cut his health insurance. My father had
been the general foreman of an engine
plant, and I grew up near Detroit, a town
not unlike West Newton. In Detroit, too,
we thought our comfortable way of life
would last forever; when fortunes turned,
our townspeople, too, burned buildings
and left.
We say that those who don’t know
history are doomed to repeat it. But we
do know history, and still we can’t imagine
structuring our lives any other way.
We know, for example, that a whole
indigenous way of life was destroyed when
white settlers hunted the bu=alo into near-extinction. Now, just as Native Americans
staked their lives on the bu=alo, we stake
ours on monoculture and oil. We su=er
from a collective failure of imagination.
Because metaphor has the power to
shape what we believe, we need to make
new metaphors to live inside. I have to
hope for my parents that Detroit is not
West Newton, and for the children in my
life that our culture at peak oil is not the
Harkin store. What if our lives don’t end
with us shutting the door on piles of
useless, unsold goods? What if the train
whistling in the distance is not a frightening omen, but an opportunity? What if we
take the nails—dense and dear, the small
things most worth saving—but don’t leave?
What if we build something better? a
