The closer to a city’s many opportunities you get, the easier it is to let other people maintain you.
It’s tempting to live on take-out food when your kitchen is a glorified hotplate. Without a washer-dryer, it’s easy to send out your laundry. As a renter, you call your super rather than tackle repairs yourself.
Here on our hillside, we’re busy splitting wood for the winter, and putting up our harvest. To some friends, our way of life seems a little over the top.
When we first moved back to VT, my husband put chains on the tractor using bungee cords. Embarrassed by his virtual cat’s cradle, he wondered to a visiting tractor expert if it would do. The man scratched his head, and pronounced the experiment a success. “It works, don’t it?” It did... and still does.
Of course, driving distances dictate a lot of what I do. It’s easier to make a decent baguette than to drive the hour and a half round trip to buy it. The same goes for pancetta and naan.
What’s more, the things that are done for me out here, I am hugely grateful for. When the town plow comes by in a storm, its driver gets baked goods from yours truly.
Historically, it was the DIY spirit that drove the industrial revolution, at least in New England. And it was mostly driven by bright young farm boys, in the 1800’s, coming to areas like Worcester and Boston.
In fact, right after the Civil War, Worcester County, Massachusetts had more patent holders per capita than any other county in the then United States. This was because Worcester had power for rent, able machinists and easy transportation to major cities, so bright farm kids from up country could come down and put their ideas into practice.
Worcester was the model business incubator. Electric looms, the sewing machine, the monkey wrench, barbed wire and even the rickshaw were invented in Worcester County.
So I find it troubling that so many schools have cut shop, home ec and art classes, all places where kids are allowed to tinker a bit, try out machines or techniques they don’t have access to at home.
And to problem solve.
Still, at the finals of the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont’s Engineering program a few years back, I saw teens come up with a turbine that generated electricity using the grey water from clothes and dishwashers.
Our DIY legacy may be alive and well, after all.
