History, Rurality, and Masculinity

(Don't worry if that sounds like a dissertation title from the cultural geography program at the University of Surrey.  It's just my normal habit of putting together things that don't usually go together.)

Part 1.  Two posts ago, Nora outlined some of the cultural events that were swirling around America at the time that our home was built.  This house has been on its site for over 170 years.  I always thought that one of my criteria, if I ever hired an architect to design for me, would be that my house would be in the National Register of Historic Places in 300 years—and this house has the bones to do that.

But it's not the Great Pyramid of Giza, where you just put it up and then leave it alone for a few millenia.  It needs some attention now and then.  And that gets me a little worried.

Part 2.  James Howard Kuntzler wrote an influential book 25 years ago called The Geography of Nowhere, in which he makes the argument that a combination of personal mobility, economic centralization, and auto-based urban planning has reduced the ability for the human landscape of any part of America to look fundamentally different than any other part.  And a drive through Vermont Route 7 in Rutland proves his point.  Shopping centers, auto dealerships, gas stations, McDonalds and Panera and Dunkin Donuts — there's a three-mile strip there that exactly replicates three-mile strips of North Carolina and Michigan and Massachusetts.  It's an easy and incontrovertable argument to make, which is why Kuntzler's book is so useful; you smack your forehead and say "I've seen that a million times, and now he's told me why!"

But there's a smaller argument in there that has stuck with me for the twenty years since I first read the book.  Kuntzler argues that Home Depot and its ilk have supplanted not just the local hardware store but something larger, some sense that hardware has dignity and places some burden of talent and experience on those who employ it.  Do-it-yourself home repair, he says plays into two "contemporary myths: (1) the idea that shopping is a substitute for design, and (2) the idea that it’s possible to get something for nothing, in this case skillful work without skill.”  The results of our acceptance of those myths has become a residential landscape which is shoddy and poorly conceived.

Part 3.  We romanticize farms and rustic cabins.  The groomed plants, the red barns and white houses, the open porch that allows the call to the farmhands for lunch.  But farms aren't really like that, and rarely have ever been.

Farms are expedient places.  Everyone has too much work to do, and so everything is done "good enough for now."  Tools are cheap and time is expensive, and most farms, even small family farms, look like muddy graveyards of industrial equipment.

As a result, one of the defining characteristics of men in small communities is that they fix things.  Keeping a thirty-year-old Deere skid loader running by virtue of chewing gum, baling wire and ingenuity is a mark of honor.

1 + 2 + 3.  This whole line of thought has come about because I'm attempting to design a pool cue rack for what will eventually become my secular temple after we move in.  My pool room will be a place of calmness and craft, a place where the ability to do things with care is the real reason for its existence and pool is the medium through which care can be expressed.  (This is utterly unlike being a college administrator, which is why I need it so badly.  Colleges have much in common with farms: if you get behind the catalog photos of Georgian buildings and attractive students reading on the lawn, you see beleaguered people building expedient outcomes, good enough for now.)

Something as simple as a cue rack takes on importance in a place like this.  The cues themselves are gorgeous and elegant, and the rack should be so as well.  I have some ideas for a very "simple" design, something that can fall to the background and not be noticed until you happen to notice it, and then it captures your attention as a small gift of its own.

I'm not sure that I have the manual skill to pull it off.  I could build an approximation, but it would be just that; an attempt, a mock-up, good enough.  But I know what I want.

The house has been attended to, for the past twelve years, by a remarkably talented craft builder in our community, one of a large fraternity of Middletown builders.  It is filled with small moments like those I'm describing, details that don't call attention to themselves but which reward your eyes and mind when you happen to catch one.

The house has stood for 170 years, and bears its own history of expedient decisions, of construction that's good enough (and has proven to be good enough for a long time).  But the past few years of the house seem to have been related more to the 1890s than the 1990s; there's an expression of hand labor and manual decision making that has skipped the Home Depotization of America, bears little relationship to its rural neighbors, and yet isn't fussy.  It's a house that deserves responsibility.

It's funny how something as inconsequential as a pool cue rack can lead in so many directions.  I could get one at Sears in thirty minutes for thirty dollars, and no one would ever look at it and say that it was a bad idea.  But it isn't a good idea.  And I feel a strong need for good rather than good enough.