World Without Oil: Alternative Reality News, Week Eight
In the eighth week of the global energy crisis, we here in Conquest have not seen the kind of major upheavals of larger communities. Lacking our own incorporated village, people are going to the diner over in Cato for news. Recently, however, people seem not to be ordering the full meals they used to get. A cup of coffee is as far as it goes.
The market in Cato is shutting down temporarily, citing the increased cost of shipping in supplies. So, people are going over to the Big M in Wolcott or to Ed and Jean’s down route 38 instead, making fewer trips and coming back with more supplies each time.
It’s too late in the year for local farms to change what they’re planting for this year, but there has been a shift in focus to where the food is going. Roadside vegetable stands have grown significantly. Next year, farmers are planning to switch to more of an emphasis on food production for local consumption, with a wider variety of fruits and vegetables, in the hopes of economic revitalization, given the expected drop in competition from producers overseas and in California. Farmers are talking with Wegmans about setting up a new local distribution network, but the truth is that no one really knows what will happen.
Some people are talking about the national news, like the apparent American military foray into Alberta. Most people are focused on more local impacts, however. The Syracuse Post-Standard has stopped delivery out past Baldwinsville, citing shipping expense, and the drop in readership after the price a a weekday paper was increased to one dollar and fifty cents per issue.
Most dramatic is the sharp decrease in traffic on route 370. With people from Wayne County making fewer trips into Syracuse, fewer shipments being made by truck, and fewer people travelling by car for pleasure much at all, it’s rare to see a vehicle going down the highway. That’s a good thing, given that highway repairs have been tabled for the year, and some of last winter’s potholes have been left unfilled. Drivers have reported having to stop while children clear games of a popular new sport, road hockey, from the pavement.
“This article is a part of the project World Without Oil. It describes fictional events in an alternative reality imagined collectively by project participants. In this alternative reality, the world faces an unexpected oil shortage. These events are not actually taking place. They are part of a collective fiction experiment.”
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