Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [15]
This indirect approach to companionship got us out of our shells and inexorably entwined our fates with those around us. Despite dissimilarities in social background and education, we found ourselves back at the Joneses’ again and again, enjoying each other’s company. The habit soon became a tradition. Manual labor was both the occasion of the parties and the substance that got us mixing and conversing. It was the nonalcoholic cocktail. I was so intoxicated socializing with the Joneses, alas, that I found it difficult at first to make the effort to remember and write down afterwards what actually was said. I was having so much fun that I forgot that one of my purposes in coming here was to do research.
Physical work, then, served more than one function. Besides putting bread on the table and vigor into the physique, it also provided a special social elixir. And this, at the same time, explained why you couldn’t appear too eager to see your neighbor. You had to keep up the pretext of labor or the whole arrangement would collapse. Friendship was something you could only sidle up to obliquely. Or maybe it would be better to say that you let it sidle up to you.
Given this principle, the problem of taking notes and recording thoughts soon became a serious one. Being of course a form of conscious capture, it was contrary to the whole undertaking. The difficulty extended even to such basic facts of daily life as the work itself. Yes, the labor…We were supposed to focus on this, but it was often easy to forget we were even doing it.
Well, there was hoeing, and there was harvesting, and there was canning, and there were field crops. There was just a little bit of everything, but it was getting interrupted all the time, and the demands were unpredictable. I tried to maintain a daily log of events, but naturally some items were missing. And often enough, just as I was sitting down to make a note, there’d be a knock at the door.
Mrs. Miller and her oldest daughter interrupted my train of thought one day, bringing us some extra peaches.
“You brought these for us? Thank you so much!” I cried.
“We were just going right by anyway!” Mrs. Miller responded. Peaches luckily were high-acid fruits, so we didn’t need to pressure-can them. We could dispose of them quickly in the large black kettle Mrs. Miller had loaned us, which sat in the backyard atop an old oil drum with a door cut in it. The drum served as a firebox. We would boil the peaches in quart jars, right in the kettle, for a few minutes and they would be done.
First, however, we had to prepare them—to wash, peel, trim, section, and pit them. The greater part of canning was like preparing a never-ending salad or fruit cup. Fortunately peaches were not nearly as difficult as beans, with all their little black spots, tips, and stems that had to be cut out. Corn was also rather involved, with the husking, silk removal, excision of wormy regions, and knifing of kernels. But far and away the greatest time-monger of the vegetables was the pea—the sweet, innocent, small, round pea. Every pea came from a pod, and every pod had to be cracked, and by the time you cracked a large bucketful of peapods, what remained was nothing by comparison—about enough for a mixing bowl. So it took mountains of peapods to get a reasonable hill of actual peas, each obtained by the muscular cracking of a leathery, sometimes stubborn green shell. Somehow the time-to-output ratio seemed wrong. Secretly I began to wonder whether peas were worth it. Was this the one job that was too much work? The Amish woman who let us pick peas from her garden