Today, I’m writing to share a poem by George Bilgere that describes the world’s greatest slingshot expert. But first, the poem brings to mind the protagonist from The Last American Man, a creative non-fiction book by Elizabeth Gilbert:
“By the time Eustace Conway was seven years old he could throw a knife accurately enough to nail a chipmunk to a tree.”
Such abilities like marksmanship were held to be admirable qualities in the rugged pioneer days when being handy with a slingshot or a knife meant you could nail a rabbit for supper. Now who eats rabbit for supper? With supermarkets, computers, guns, malls, factories, and industrial jobs, who needs to? This poem mourns how wonderful qualities like being a good shot with a knife or slingshot are now, at best, quirks and, at worst, useless in our technologically advanced society.
To listen to the complete poem read by Garrison Keillor, you can here. I’ve excerpted it below.
You Asked For It
by George Bilgere (b.1951)
…
“He was a grown man, as I recall,
and he lived in an ordinary place like New Jersey.
At a distance of ten or twenty paces
he could pulverize one marble with another.
…
He was the kind
of father I wanted to have,
an expert shot, never missing.
…
And I think of him now, perhaps long dead,
or frail and gray, his gift forgotten.
Just another old guy on a park bench
in Fort Lauderdale, fretting about Medicare,
grateful for the sun on his back, his slingshot
useless in this new world.”
“You Asked For It” by George Bilgere. © George Bilgere. (George Bilgere’s books.)
I can’t help but wonder: if the slingshot expert had continued to hone his abilities, how might he have used them? How can our society meet slingshot experts, and honor their gifts? Perhaps our society could ask the man to become an arborist, placing difficult lines in trees where the cherry picker couldn’t reach. Perhaps he could take that visual acuity and do landscape architecture. Or with that motor control, pick up a guitar for fretting with instead. Somehow, these solutions seem pat or condescending though. There’s no true replacement for being a slingshot expert except being a slingshot expert.
What is Eustace Conway up to these days? It sounds like he’s still out there as a student of nature, helping connect other people with nature, as an educator and a role model. On his website, it says:
“Studying modern America, he has found his most interesting subjects: people in cultural and environmental crises, his own people. Eustace started teaching about environmental ethics long before it became an “in thing.” He said, “Americans have separated themselves from the natural world. During the past eighty years we have been ‘advancing’ so fast that we are as infants trying to run. We would be wise to slow down and learn more about primitive (first) values. Today more than ever we need to understand and live by harmony and balance with nature, for truly, man separate from nature is a fantasy.”
All you slingshot experts out there, don’t lose hope. American kids still need real people — people who know how to throw a knife or make their own shoes — to look up to. We might just need a slingshot expert. Not someday, but now. We need people who can model what it’s like to embrace the wind and the cold. People who embrace our natural limitations.
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”
Like every great quote, this one can be misinterpreted. Conway is talking about cleaning our plates instead of throwing half into the garbage. Of things being functional. He’s definitely not talking about over-exploiting our Earth. I can imagine someone advocating for space travel and resource exploitation on Earth and other planets misinterpreting this quote. I wonder what Eustace Conway would make of the film, The Martian. I’m certainly not opposed to space travel. I loved the film, with Matt Damon as Mark Watney. He decides that he’s not going to give up fighting for survival. To fight to return home to Earth despite the odds:
“I’m going to have to science the shit out of this.”
What I am opposed to is the egregious waste of our shared resources, making not only survival more difficult for future generations of human beings, but especially that wonderfully immersive skin-to-ocean or skin-to-river experience of thriving on Earth, eating unfiltered fruit, fish, and plants from our gardens.
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
Let’s return to what Eustace Conway said about slowing down:
“During the past eighty years we have been ‘advancing’ so fast that we are as infants trying to run. We would be wise to slow down and learn more about primitive (first) values.”
For more along this vein of thought, see Thich Nhat Hahn’s book How to Walk, in which he talks about how slowing down can help us live happier lives.
Thich Nhat Hahn talks about how amazing walking is for astronauts returning to Earth. He muses about how long that amazing feeling lasts — 10 days? A couple weeks? — and encourages us to really feel and love the Earth as we walk, for we walk,
“not only on matter, but on spirit.”
He says it’s possible to “arrive” in the present moment with each step, even without ever having visited the moon, or Mars.
For more great writing and ideas, see Maria Popova’s wonderful blog, Brain Pickings. I signed up for Maria Popova’s weekly articles months ago, and a few days ago finally donated to her website because it’s just that good.
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Website Transparency and Credit
Note: This post is modeled somewhat on Maria Popova’s formatting: the way I included more quotations, figured out how to get an Amazon commission if you purchase a book through this website, and also how I’m recommending other things to check out at the end of the post.
At first, I felt weird about going for the Amazon commission. Is it a huge shipping force that’s putting local bookstores out of business? Maybe yes, maybe not. It’s certainly making local businesses adapt. Personally, I purchase books both at my local independent bookstores, and through Amazon. (For example, I purchased How to Walk from my local independent bookstore, but Teach Like A Champion from Amazon.)
If you figure out how to get book descriptions and book graphics while simultaneously linking to a reader’s independent bookstores, please let me know using my contact page!
Thanks to Harry Haines for introducing me to the Bilgere poem.