AFTER THE UNITED STATES COLLAPSED, it split predictably into smaller entities like the Mountain Union and the Gulf States. There was also the New England Confederation, its capital at Boston, based on the ideas of the 1814 Hartford Convention. New York, the Empire State, decided to go it alone, and anyone traveling from the New England Confederation to Long Island had to go through a customs check shortly after crossing the Rhode Island border in Connecticut and before boarding the passenger ship at New London bound for Orient.
Being a native-born Long Islander and passport-carrying, “birth right New Yorker,” I tried to get ahead in line there, but it was no use. The line at the official New England Confederation-New York State border went up and down metal staircases. To my surprise, everyone who waited in this line was wearing bathing suits and sandals, and it soon occurred to me that border control resembled a sort of water park, or maybe they had decided to monetize it in that fashion, which would not be at all unusual. There I waited and I didn’t even have a towel.
At the thronged counters, I gave one of the officers a piece of my mind, but she waved me away with Yankee distaste. She was dark haired and might have been a Pequot or Narragansett, at least in part. “How downright typical of a pushy New Yorker to expect preferential treatment,” the woman at border control told me. Then she gave me a rubber bracelet, the kind that anyone might wear in a water park, and pointed me toward the ship.
north! 