Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [12]
As I took in the words, a strange feeling came over me. I soon recognized it as disappointment. I had been gearing up to be the Hercules of our homely days of yore, and Mr. Miller had just stolen my bravado. I felt cheated.
“But yes. You can have some manure.”
I stood open-mouthed. Finally I asked, “Can I pay you anything?”
He shook his head. “Come by any time.” He nodded and smiled cordially.
Given his tip, planting pumpkins became an easy matter indeed. The Millers had already plowed the half-acre field and sown a crop of corn that had never germinated. All that remained for me was to bike a quarter mile to the site, mark out a ten-foot grid with some rocks, and insert the seeds. Partway into the task, I felt a pair of eyes boring into my back. Mr. Miller’s seventeen-year-old son, Ellis, who had pointed the way to the field, was loitering nearby and watching.
“Am I doing anything wrong?” I asked.
“Well…this is just me. You may want to do things your own way. But if it was me, I’d be doin’ it a little differently.” He walked over and pointed to the bag of seeds I held in my palm. “Can I see that?” I handed it to him. “See this?” He pointed to the seed. “It’s sharp at one end. Ya’ wanna point that end down. The roots come out here.” Strange that no manual mentioned this. I did what he told me.
A day or so later, Mr. Miller’s two youngest sons, Amos and Caleb, helped me load up a wagon with manure from the barn. In about an hour we’d spread dollops of the stuff around every one of my pumpkin rings. And that was that. The thought was beginning to cross my mind that I might need to adjust my expectations about how difficult this experiment was going to be.
What I was beginning to learn was that life without modern technology need not consist of brawn alone; a deft use of human wits can often do as well as, or better than, scads of machinery or muscle.
Since my first stint mowing, I learned never to wait more than five days in the spring to cut grass, and never to attempt it when wet. I got the hang of fine-tuning the machine, using the little screws the manufacturer had placed on the cylinder just for that purpose. Mr. Miller’s second-oldest son showed me how. When you set the screws properly, the blades slice through the turf like butter.
Little tricks like these remove much of the onus from manual labor and add to the sense of physical effort a much finer satisfaction: the magisterial feeling that comes with wielding means precisely fitted to ends. Here, perhaps, is the first of all lessons in the use of power, whether technological or physiological: trimming back the means until only the essential remain; weeding out obstructions, man-made or not, to our goals.
Mr. Miller’s little tips, hints, and helpful implements continued to flow in our direction.
A day or two later he made another call, offering to sell us a foot treadle for Mary’s electric sewing machine. He converted the device right before our eyes. She got the hang of it in no time, and she found the beat of the treadle relaxing. The pumping motion kept up blood flow to the brain, and she felt more alert.
The two youngest Miller boys cultivated the garden with the one-horse cultivator. This spiderlike implement with several segmented legs clawed weeds loose from between the rows, then buried them. When we came over to watch, the boys looked at us and winked. Drawn by a live horse, the contraption performed the most onerous of the garden tasks in a few minutes while providing the user,