On Josephine Young Case’s ‘After Midnight,’ in which an overall city endures soon after reduce off from the rest of the entire world.
I’ll give the coronavirus this: it bought me out of likely to Buffalo to see the touring enterprise of Howdy, Dolly.
Effectively, dim days contact for silver linings, don’t they?
So when Governor Andrew Cuomo, obviously relishing the in the vicinity of-dictatorial powers he has assumed with nary a peep of protest, requested the closing of bars, places to eat, theaters, and fitness centers, and proscribed gatherings of greater than 50 people—or was it 10? I have issues retaining up with the edicts—I revisited 1 of the stranger literary artifacts of our haunted area: the book-size blank-verse poem At Midnight on the 31st of March by Josephine Youthful Situation.
Posted in 1938, for the duration of what inevitably could be referred to as the First Great Depression, the ebook is about a very little Upstate New York village, Saugersville, which at the stroke of midnight on the final working day of March is suddenly, mysteriously, and seemingly irrevocably reduce off from the rest of the globe. Its two dozen properties, two church buildings, school, garage, mill, general keep, and grange go darkish. (Josephine’s father, Owen Young, was president of Basic Electrical, and she can take fantastic delight in turning out the lights in what I believe was a winking nod dadwards.) 
Electric powered electrical power is long gone. The telephones are lifeless. The roads major out of city have disappeared. Research events venturing beyond the settlement locate only “the endless woods, the silent hills…and nowhere any house or any indicator of guy, there now or at any time.”
There is “only Saugersville in all the environment.” It is an autarkist’s aspiration.
Recovering from the preliminary shock, the great folks of Saugersville take inventory. They adapt. They relearn the outdated methods. Dairymen milk the cows by kerosene light as an alternative of Alec-Tricity. Horses substitute farm equipment. Thirsty for beer, they mature hops. Even scoffers head to church.
All is not sunshine and homey bliss. By the next wintertime influenza cuts through the village missing medical practitioners and obtain to present day drugs, a few citizens die prior to “the plague diminished.”
There is a Spoon River Anthology high quality to the poem, with its sensitively incised portraits of Saugersvillians reacting to their village’s isolation. Some find fulfillment in communal self-sufficiency, a couple rue staying stranded in hicksville, and the common ton just make do.
It’s glance homeward or die, physically and spiritually. “Here is all,” resolves the resourceful younger May perhaps Warder. There is no other location, no improved place. I am reminded of a scene in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter in which steelworkers Nick (Christopher Walken) and Mike (Robert DeNiro) drunkenly exchange confidences soon after their friend’s wedding on the weekend prior to they are to be transported to Vietnam. Mike asks Nick if he thinks they will ever return. Nick states, “You know a thing? The full detail. It is right in this article. I appreciate this f—ing location.”
Perhaps I should not advert to a Hollywood movie, even just one as excellent as The Deer Hunter, in talking about Case’s e book, for amongst the blessings of the tiny village’s severance from the outdoors is that mass-created tradition is no longer imported. A thing is dropped, yet one thing is received. A character remembers “When Saugersville established fashions for alone/I mean to say we had our individual methods in this article/That weren’t the methods of Centerfield or Steck/A lot fewer the strategies of any metropolis put/Where by most of us experienced under no circumstances been at all.”
Rum and Coke and Clark Gable no longer exist, yet the community consensus is that “life is more challenging than it utilized to be/But troubles are more real….We’re all of us additional true, and a lot more alive/And Saugersville is genuine, much more like a town/And not a gasoline-pump on a concrete highway.”
Admittedly, our situation now is disanalogous to that in Case’s poem. Televised agitprop from Crew Blue and Workforce Pink continue to pollutes our properties. But the reaction of standard folks to disaster is equivalent.
Although many years of submit-nuclear war and zombie videos have conditioned us to anticipate all hell to crack unfastened except if we are firmly guided by stern rulers, adult men and females in demanding situations usually exhibit cooperative, even neighborly actions.
The bathroom paper hoarders and elbow-throwing buyers so beloved by Tv reporters are atypical. “Despite Hollywood’s clichés to the contrary,” writes Rationale’s superb Jesse Walker, “it is pretty scarce for people today to panic for the duration of an unexpected emergency. And the regular purely natural or technological disaster is adopted not by a Mad Max war of all in opposition to all but by mutual aid in the rubble. Criminal offense declines. Bottom-up cooperation bouquets. Looting is uncommon, and when it does happen it typically amounts to scavenging, not theft.”
In Saugersville, 11 months into the isolation, a younger guy of mastering and ambition who chafes below the new dispensation has an epiphany as he skis the sloping fields outside the house the village:
“I am alive and this is where I reside.”
The realization fills him with pleasure and gratitude. May well we in these bizarre days working experience our have revelations.
Monthly bill Kauffman is the writer of 11 guides, among the them Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette and Ain’t My America.
