I think we've made a trip to Home Depot every single day the past few weeks. Our happy little trailer wouldn't be so
happy without that gigantic warehouse of building supplies. What did we ever do before Home Depot? What did we do
before hardware stores in general?
Tyler and I were talking about this recently, how it used to be that you built your home entirely of the raw
materials around you and whatever ingenuity your brain could muster. A man's mind and his acreage were the earliest
Home Depot. We also discussed how people emigrating from England to the New World used to burn down their homes
before leaving in order to salvage the nails. Nails were that important, that hard to come by. Now it's an entirely
different story. When laying down our hardwood floors, I bent more nails than I successfully employed. The trailer
was littered with an alphabet soup of bent metal spikes: Ses, Ls, Cs, Js, and the occasional M from an incredibly
botched attempt to drive the damned nail home.
Though we're doing all this with our own hands ? building desks and shelves, laying flooring, installing a stove,
constructing a homemade folding bed frame ? we're still indebted to the hardware store for the raw materials...and
the occasional bit of advice. In contemplating this, I realize how much knowledge our society has lost in just the
past century. There once was a sort of kinesthetic or manual intellect that has now subsided to make room for the
more prestigious intellectual pursuits and trades. We encourage our kids to study law or medicine or computers, and
now it seems that high school shop and home economics classes are on the wane. We rely on people in faraway places to
manufacture our wares and grow our food so that we can focus on our computer-based virtual lives. How many of us now
have the know-how to create a nail, a hinge or a woodstove? How many of us ? beyond those who work construction as a
trade ? know how to frame a wall, slap down a roof or create a solid foundation that supports it all? We largely
don't know how to mill wood or forge steel. And even the things that happen inside the home ? canning and drying
food, sewing and mending clothes, or building furniture ? are arts that are slipping away from us. My grandparent's
generation still had a tenuous connection to some of these things. I don't. I can't even sew on a button, let alone
make a whole shirt.
So where does the loss of this kind of knowledge leave us? Do we even require it anymore? Can we always count on Home
Depot or Wal-Mart to provide for us? These days, is there something more than sheer satisfaction that a DIY lifestyle
provides? Is such an awareness of the mechanics of life and living still relevant?
I don't anticipate I'll be learning how to make nails any time soon, but I would like to cultivate a kind of
knowledge that resides in my hands and muscles. I want my body to become more familiar with the rhythms of life that
we all once felt ? rhythms and rituals that are now paved over by strip malls and parking lots. I appreciate the
convenience of buying all I need at the store, but I would feel better knowing that all I needed resided within
me.
Desert Reflections
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Tuesday, November 17, 2009
at 11:24:40 AM
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Ken says:
A-yep. Check out "The Last American Man," by Elizabeth Gilbert. A nice piece of nonfiction writing, with much fodder for thought. And right on target with your own muusings.