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I occasionally find myself wondering how it is my younger self did not spend more of his time and brain power wishing for things my older self has found it impossible, or at least uncomfortable, to live without.
I started life on the west side of Manhattan, New York City, where I attended PS-173 through Third Grade. We lived on the fifth floor, Apartment D. Each morning, I walked down the five flights of stairs, out the front door, cut through the alley to 173Street and then another block to the school. I think I didn’t know such conveyances as school buses existed.
We moved to Maine, and the two-room school where I started Fourth Grade. I don’t know why Mr. Webber, who drove our morning bus, didn’t bring my brother and I home in the afternoon, at least to the driveway. I also didn’t care. It was a fun walk — except for some days in the depth of winter.
I learned to operate a heavy electric drill the year my folks finally paid the cost of Central Maine Power running wires along that half-mile driveway from the paved road to our house. The fuse box had two glass screw-in fuses that carried enough electricity to run a few lights and the Stromberg-Carlson radio and record player console. On the other hand, we did not even imagine computers for home use and microwave ovens.
I don’t ever remember wondering why we did not have those things, though I recall being a little unhappy that I had to cut firewood with a buck saw and split the resulting 24-inch logs with a maul and wedges. I never dreamt of any particular easier way.
I turned 12 the year we built the “big house” and Mom brought a new baby sister to a home with an indoor flush toilet and hot running water in the kitchen and bathroom sinks and bathtub. There was a doo-dad on the living room wall to dial in how warm we wanted to keep the house. We burned oil to heat water that was circulated throughout the home to attain the desired temperature. I didn’t mind losing the wood chopping chore.
Eventually, some bright soul invented transistors. It would be years until I knew what they were, exactly, but they made possible a fantastic gift from my uncle, an ivory-colored Sony radio about the size of a pack of Dad’s cigarettes, with a gold-plated speaker. I put it under my pillow at night and listened to “77 WABC” out of New York, with Cousin Brucie playing rock’n’roll and reporting on the submarine races I guessed were on the Hudson River. (When I lived in New York, Mom had taken us boys to the roof of our apartment house to watch the newly launched Nautilus submarine — our country’s first nuclear sub — strut up the Hudson, surrounded by tugboats and fire boats, all shooting fountains of Hudson River water in grand celebration.)
I graduated from high school and joined the U.S. Navy and was there when computers came along for general use. My work involved a “hard drive” sporting a stack of a half-dozen disks, each about the size of an LP record. When we wanted to use a different set of data, we pulled out the hard drive and inserted the one we needed..
Shortly after that, I was proud as heck to replace my typewriter with a suitcase-sized portable computer equipped with a pair of 400k “floppy” drives, which soon gave way in the company’s lineup to a model boasting a 10 megabyte drive.
I had not thought such a huge capacity was possible and anyway, an upstart computer programmer named Bill Gates told us we would never need a drive bigger than 10 megabytes, and it likely would take years to fill one even that big.
When I was in high school, I had a pen pal named Prudence Hender. She lived in Lewes, Sussex, England, and we wrote letters back and forth for several years. After I retired from the Navy, I thought it pure magic to sit at home, dial via telephone into the college computer system, and chat, keyboard to keyboard in almost real time, with a pair of students in Taiwan.
Now I sit each week and join with a dozen or so fellow environmentalists I can see and hear on my computer screen as we talk about the book we are reading and the environmentally friendly ways of our nation’s First Settlers.
We humans seem eminently capable of not complaining of not having tools we have not yet remembered how to create. It has become apparent those First Settlers were great conservationists — probably because they didn’t have John Deere to help them with the plowing and harvesting.
All rights reserved. Text & images ©2024 John Messeder. John is an award-winning environmental storyteller, nemophilist and social anthropologist, and lives in Gettysburg, PA. He may be contacted at john@johnmesseder.com