Author: Erik Lokensgard

The Rugged Days of Old

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.”

What a horrible fate if human beings were headed for the post-apocalyptic setting described in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, in which so much of the biodiversity of life was lost.

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. 

—

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.

Book Recommendation for 2015

The best book I’ve read this year is Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, written as a letter to his son for when he’s older.

Coates recognizes the dignity of each person, each “one-of-one.”

Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dress-making and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved… Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains — whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

Also, despite our nation’s wealth being built out of slavery and systematic abuses of power to safeguard the American Dream, Coates sees the beauty in the world. He sees the stark reality of how easily bodies can be broken by human and natural causes, and how to be insulated from that reality is to not only be ignorant, but also to be farther from grasping the meaning of life itself: life’s transience, our mortality, the richness of our differences, and the way we depend on one another.

I am sorry that I cannot save you — but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real — when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities — they are shocked in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be. And I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.

There is so much I would like to talk about with this book, and I realize I’ve just slapped down some large quotes with very little discussion. But first, without delay, I recommend it to you so that I have you to talk about it with.

After that, I’d like to discuss how Coates talks about how racism perpetuates itself, how it’s not about race but about a people. How Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus. And so much more. But first, read the book.