America Wakes: Part Ten- Platte River
Chapters
After spending so much time contemplating cities, wars, politics and economics, I realized that I had lost sight of some of the more enduring aspects of the North American continent. The natural beauty, for example. The truth is, this land of variety and abundance is both blessed and cursed by that very variety and abundance. All of its problems in the aforementioned subjects of contemplation can be traced back to how people have approached America's bounty. After searching for a particular check-in station in a vast tract of under-serviced land in the Federation of Free States for half a day, the crew and I decided to break our routine and set up a camp. We chose a spot along the Platte River, a place that looked like it hadn't been disturbed by people in years. This would prove to be a peaceful respite in between very troubled periods in our making of this film.
It's strange to think that there still exist such wild places in a land that has been industrialized for so long. In fact, nature has been in the process of reclaiming certain portions of the former United States ever since the Transition. People should never underestimate the resources necessary to maintain roads, especially a system of highways and local routes as extensive as the ones found on this continent. It takes a vast amount of money, access to a wide variety of industrial materials, and an almost unthinkable amount of manpower and logistical coordination to ensure America's roads are safe and functional. This is why many of them simply aren't. Of the vast network of roads constructed by the United States government, now only a few major trade paths are maintained by the countries concerned with them. The rest have fallen into disrepair and disuse following a wave of mass transit and increased regionalization. It's far simpler to make one rail system function properly than it is to keep up with thousands of arterial roadways.
The deteriorating highways become especially apparent in the FFS. I used to think it was merely dismissive intellectualism to call the amorphous collection of polities that make up the Federation "city-states", but now I see that it is a strikingly appropriate designation. Cities like Denver, Indianapolis, Chicago and Salt Lake do little more than buy agricultural products from the countless provincial towns that surround them. Most of the satellites even have to generate their own electricity and purify their own water. There is no larger transport agency that repairs potholes and updates road signs. In a more abstract sense, there is no unity here. Absent the care of a central government with too much history to not be obligated, large swathes of the North American countryside have no masters or even permanent residents. It is so quiet in this place that the local stray dogs, conditioned by centuries of breeding, stood watch at the edge of our camp and barked at the scant few cars that passed on the nearby highway.
