I struck a blow for self-reliance this past weekend when I heroically repaired my refrigerator. Henry David Thoreau, the king of self-reliance at Walden Pond (and the owner of the ugliest mutton chops in Concord, Massachusetts), would have approved.
While going back for a second dish of Blue Bunny Moose Track ice cream, I noticed that water was seeping out from the bottom of my refrigerator and soaking into my hardwood floor.
I tried to pull the fridge out to see what was happening, but it was tightly wedged against the cabinets on either side of it. All this while, more water was puddling on the floor. I called a few refrigerator repair outfits but couldn’t get anyone to answer their phone. I finally got hold of Sears, but they couldn’t come out until May 16th. I couldn’t wait that long.
So I went back to yanking and yanking at the damned fridge. Finally, I saw it move an inch or so. I called Marie, and after much grunting and a small curse or two, Marie and I pulled the fridge straight out, inch by inch.
As soon as we got it out, I peered in back of it and discovered that the plastic tubing that fed water to the fridge had sprung a leak. I needed to shut off the water flow. I was just barely able to squeeze my body through an opening behind the fridge. Once I was there, I had to lie on my back in a puddle of water, flashlight in hand, in order to turn off a small lever on a connecting joint where the water supply came out of the wall.
Now that I had the water turned off, I cut off the last six inches of the tube, a section that included the split in the tubing. Then I loosened a couple of nuts and pulled the six inches of bad tubing out of a nipple joint, pushed the fresh-cut tubing into the nipple joint, and tightened two nuts. It worked. No more leaks. I don’t need no fancy repairmen. I’m self-reliant!
(And you thought that retired English professors were total dorks around tools and household repairs!)
You may remember that Thoreau, in his own quest for self-reliance, lived for a couple of years in a small cabin on Walden Pond. It’s true, quibblers, that Thoreau ate at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house occasionally and Thoreau’s momma washed his clothes (Thoreau was a lifelong bachelor), but for those two years at Walden Pond, Thoreau pretty much relied on himself.
For shelter, he built a 10’x15′ cabin with a brick fireplace. For his fuel, he filled his woodshed with the wood he had felled and split. That’s not too shabby for a Harvard graduate.
For food, Thoreau grew beans, potatoes, corn, peas, and turnips on his two-acre garden; he ate the wild apples that grew everywhere around the town of Concord; and he caught fish that swam in Walden Pond. (Thoreau was a “polite vegetarian.” That is, if he were eating at someone’s house, he would politely eat the meat that was offered up. Otherwise, he was a vegetarian, though, like some vegetarians, he didn’t count fish. Thoreau was just putting into practice what his friend Emerson had written in Self Reliance: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
Thoreau earned enough just enough money surveying and carpentering to buy sugar, lard, salt, and an occasional piece of clothing.
In and around his cabin, he read, wrote, and took long walks in the hills and woods around Walden Pond. (He had a scientists’ knowledge of flowers, plants, and trees.) Occasionally he would walk into Concord. One time he was accosted by the constable/tax collector, who asked Thoreau to pay his poll tax. Like his mother and father, Thoreau was an abolitionist, so he refused the constable’s request. He didn’t want his money going to a government that countenanced slavery. (His family home was a “safe” house, which sheltered a number of fugitive slaves.). So Thoreau spent the night in jail and was released the next morning. A private benefactor paid Thoreau’s way out of jail. Thoreau wanted to stay in jail, but the constable insisted he leave.
According to legend, his friend Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, “Why are you here?” Thoreau answered, “Why are you not here?”
Out of his experiences of being arrested and jailed, Thoreau wrote Civil Disobedience, which influenced both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. The essay has a line that should warm every conservative’s heart: “That government is best which governs least.”
I visited Walden Pond a few years back. It was fun to stand on the shore and see almost the exact same scene that Thoreau saw over 150 years ago.
It’s hard to be self-reliant these days. Who knows how to repair all the complex machinery and electronic paraphernalia that keep us fed, warm, and entertained? We are at the mercy of the air conditioning repairman, the air conditioning repairman is at the mercy of the gas stove repairman, and so on. That is, unless your skillset is as advanced as mine. Then appliances like refrigerators bend to your will. (“OK, Kent, we get it: You fixed your damned refrigerator.”)
“Our life is frittered away by detail,” Thoreau wrote in Walden Pond, “Simplify, simplify.” Every now and then, I think that it might be fun to get away, Thoreau-style, and experience simple living. I once had a dream of walking the Pacific Crest Trail, from Mexico to Canada. camping out along the way. (My son and I once hiked the portion of the PCT that runs through Yosemite.) It would take me months and months. I would think deeply about things and write clever little observations about nature along the way. It would be swell.
Nowadays, however, even the small uphills on my morning walk with Marie and Bob leave me huffing and puffing. I think that my dream will have to wait until my next incarnation.
Postscript: Thoreau is one of the major New England transcendentalists, the term that literary historians give to nature-loving American romantics who emphasized freedom of thought and intuitive thinking over empirical knowledge.
Out on our morning walk this morning, I started thinking that Bob the dog is a transcendentalist in the style of Thoreau. Like Thoreau, Bob sometimes forages for his food (he scored a discarded third of a pizza yesterday), he loves to be in nature and knows by scent all of nature’s flora and fauna, he poops in the woods, and he hates being leashed. For a time, Thoreau owned only a rowboat, his books, and the clothes on his back. Bob does Thoreau one better: Bob doesn’t even own a pair of trousers. Like the transcendentalists, simple and intuitive living has always been the way that Bob rolls. Bob is a transcendentalist!
I’ve been trying for months to catch Bob running while my iPhone’s camera was set to slow motion. You wouldn’t believe how fast that little mutt can go. Yesterday I finally got the shot I wanted. See that little thing below. Press it and you’ll see Bob in action on our walk this morning. I’ve watched it, oh, maybe 15 times and I can’t get enough of it. The clink you hear is his dog tags bouncing around.
Hey scofflaw, there was an implied obligation for you to read my post before you came down here for the Bob video. Now go back and start from the beginning. You know you won’t feel good about yourself if you watch the Bob video first. There is order baked into the universe and the affairs of men, and you’re not following it. One doesn’t eat dessert before the entree.
Published in GeneralThanks for reading Quote of the Day: Thoreau and Self-Reliance - Ricochet.com. Please share...!
0 Comment for "Quote of the Day: Thoreau and Self-Reliance - Ricochet.com"