Learning from the Past

        "Against a rising tide of automation and increasing digital complexity, we are becoming further divorced from the very thing that defines us: we are makers, crafters of things."

        So says Alexander Langlands in his excellent book Cræft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts. To reconnect with ourselves as makers, Langlands, who is an archeologist, walks back into time. He swings a mattock to break new ground for a garden. He learns to thatch a roof. He grows hedges to replace wire fences. He makes and uses limestone as a building material instead of concrete. Everywhere, he extols the ancient craft over its more modern replacement: baskets over plastic bags, thatched roofs over tin, horse-drawn plows over tractors. Even the bicycle, in Langlands's eyes, "removes us from a natural state." To walk, he says, is more "crafty" (craft being the Old English word for craft but connoting, along with the skill of making, which is what we mean by the word today, power, knowledge, wisdom, and resourcefulness).

        Alexander Langlands would have understood my forty years of life on the mountain without electricity. Just as he felt that his learning to use a scythe for making hay was a valuable contribution to the general psyche of modern living, so did I feel that my life on the mountain, so intimately connected with nature, was psychically important to our world. Someone has to understand what we lost with modernization.

        When I first moved onto the mountain, I was doing everything by cræft. I built my house with a hammer and bow saw, cutting from my own woods the poles for walls. I spent hours with a drawknife, peeling bark from logs. But I was making concessions from the beginning: it was a chain saw, run by a friend, not my bow saw that cut down the larger poles for the framing.

       Langlands would have approved of my living without a car, though I think he would have preferred me to have a horse and buggy instead of hitchhiking, as I did after walking the half mile to the road when I needed to go to town. When my wheelbarrow broke, I hitchhiked to town to buy a new one. Langlands certainly would have approved of the time I borrowed a burro from a neighbor to haul garden soil up the hill. I loved the burro, but it wasn't really a very suitable way to carry burdens to my house, after all.

        For a very short while I was walking a half mile down the road to do my laundry in the creek. I may have been learning the cræft of beating dirty clothes against a rock, but mainly what I learned was that it was well worth the time, trouble, and lack of cræft to take my clothes to the laundromat.

       One thing I learned from all those years is that life is easier with electricity. But I also learned what Langlands learned by pursuing so many ancient crafts: that with every advance, something is always lost.

        When we accepted electricity, for instance, we lost silence. We hardly know how much noise is in our lives because we shut so much of it out of our hearing. With all the noise of electrical equipment and appliances eliminated in my little house on the mountain, I flowed into a more peaceful life. I lived always with the sounds of nature, especially in my poorly insulated house with its single-pane windows. When I moved into my new house nine years ago (on the same land, still on the mountain), I gained a warmer, easier-to-heat, easier-to-keep-cool house, but my double-pane windows muffle, without entirely shutting out, the whir of crickets, songs of birds, calls of owls, barks of foxes, the wind roaring down the ridge, and the thump of snow falling from trees. Mostly my well insulated house has put me at one remove from the huge and beautiful silence of snowfall in the night.

        At my old house I also knew the darkness of that night. Kerosene lamplight is a soft light that seeps gently into the dark, letting dark curl into corners of the house and letting the stars keep their power. The electric lights in my new house are a hundred times better than the kerosene – cleaner, easier, healthier, brighter – but they jut viciously into the dark, thrusting it outside. It is dark in the house; then suddenly all there is is light. Everything that is is indoors. The outdoors is alien, blacked out. If I want to see outside, I have to turn the light off, let my eyes adjust, gentle my vision, and be one with the night. 

        In the same sort of way, Langlands prefers a scythe, while acknowledging the tractor's superiority in certain ways. He still thinks we should use a scythe, but I don't advocate going back to kerosene light, which is dirty, smelly, and troublesome. I wouldn't want to. But I do know what we lost when we took up electricity instead. And I think it's a good thing to recognize what we lose when we take up something different.

        Langlands would agree.