I have finished raking the driveway, clearing willow leaves and red pine needles off the gravel. For the moment, it’s reminiscent of a Japanese garden, except it lacks boulders sticking up here and there, and maybe a bonsai or two. You don’t want those in a driveway anyway.
Still, it looks good. I’ve cleaned up a small part of the world. There is order where yesterday there was only the random melted-out debris of spring.
We’ll head for the post office later this afternoon, putting tire-tracks over my rake-marks. No matter. I’ve still got the whole back yard to rake. Yardwork, if you imagine that the grass you’re raking contains the bug scene in the opening moments of Blue Velvet, can be a pretty intense experience.
I have gopher holes to fill before I can flood irrigate. I have a couple of fence posts to replace, and a rail.
The pump for the sprinkler system needs to be packed out of the garage, installed on its perch next to the sump in the back yard, and hooked up to its intake and to the underground pipes that supply the sprinklers. When I start it up, I’ll find out if I successfully blew all the water out of the pipes last fall with the compressor. If I didn’t, there will be a length of shattered PVC pipe that will create an artesian spring somewhere in the lawn. I’ll have to dig down and replace a section. I’ve got the materials to do that, and the time.
Then I’ll climb the ladder up to the roof and tighten the roof screws that have loosened since last May. While I’m up there I’ll sweep the chimney. I’ll replace a plank in the deck, broken when the ice dam slid off the roof during the February warm spell.
I’ve already found a much bigger plank in the just-thawed pile of wood I’ve rescued from construction dumpsters over the last ten years. It’s on the deck in the sunlight. As soon as it dries, I’ll cut it to fit. Once cut, I’ll drop it in its place and screw it to the deck joists. Take that, Entropy, I’ll say. Be Afraid, Arrow of Time.
I’m rationing these tasks. I’m adding to them when I can.
Julie helps. Last week she was vacuuming the carpet when the vacuum quit. We got out the household tools, took the vacuum apart, carefully looked its bits and pieces over, found a broken wire and spliced it.
Julie took our other vacuum—the shop vacuum—and sucked all of the dog hair out of the house vacuum’s nooks and crannies while it was apart, and then we put it back together. We turned it on. It worked better than it had in years. We had a shared moment of triumph that dwarfed any pleasure we might have gotten out of lifting a new Dyson Animal from its Amazon packaging.
Even if we could have afforded a new Dyson Animal in the first place.
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Fixing broken appliances has been a rarely acquired taste in our culture, but it’s about to become a survival skill. Supply chains are broken. Jobs and paychecks have disappeared, a good many of them forever. For the country’s one-time middle class, money is no longer something to earn and spend. Instead, it’s something you repay, and it won’t always be there when you need to repay it.
Julie and I aren’t going to notice as much change as some people. We’ve been fixing things for 25 years. The last time either one of us bought something on credit was before we met each other.
We’ve traveled on tight budgets. We’ve avoided expensive restaurants like the plague. We’ve repaired cars rather than trading them in. Our clothes are out of style, and already were when we bought them at Sierra Trading Post. Our skiing hasn’t required tickets for years. We’ve said that if most Americans had our spending habits, the economy would collapse in a month.
Not funny. Not anymore. Austerity is no longer a lifestyle choice for us and we’re aware that it never was for some people. Now, even when it’s not life-or-death necessity, austerity is wisdom in a world where cause-and-effect has left the building. It will be a shock for those people who spent money as if the future would see a never-ending string of paychecks.
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But household appliances and off-warranty cars are among the least important items on The List of Broken Things. They’ve been superseded by schools and colleges, medical systems, federal and state administrations, the hopes and dreams of recent college graduates, and a social contract that promised the Baby Boomers a secure old age. These things haven’t been working for some time. Nothing in anybody’s household toolbox has been able to fix them.
The pandemic has brought them out into the open, where everyone can see them. Their failures are generating consequences, and not just for the people they most immediately fail.
Broken systems have produced broken people. Paying interest on college loans has resulted in unbought houses, unapplied-for jobs, marriages that didn’t happen, brilliant children who refused to even apply to college.
Uninsured falls off bicycles have resulted in trips to the emergency room and subsequent bankruptcies. Social security checks don’t even dent food bills or rent, or even buy birthday presents for grandchildren. The human cost of these things never shows up on balance sheets. It gets written off, along with the people it represents.
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The shutdown has highlighted breakpoints in the global economy. Stopping a just-in-time supply chain is easier than starting it back up again. Creating agoraphobics is easier than curing them. Videoconferencing is easier and cheaper than getting on a plane and showing up at a conference hall. A Caribbean cruise isn’t an excuse to relax and forget you ever had a care in the world, because you’ve seen that getting on a boat can be easier than getting off one.
Depressing metaphors proliferate. Economies are compared to hearts that have quit beating for longer than ten minutes, or motorcycles that have fallen over at a stoplight and are too heavy to lift back on their wheels. Civilization is compared to a game of Jenga: the tower you’ve built is four feet high, and tottering, and somebody’s just pulled out the wrong block.
A friend who teaches says her students are asking if our time contains deprivations they’ll tell their grandchildren about. I hope so, I say. I hope they won’t be telling their grandchildren about the lost wonders of electricity, and gasoline.
When people talk about getting back to normal as soon as a vaccine is distributed and administered, they’re assuming that a workable vaccine will be developed. They’re assuming people will line up for injections, and not be scared away by rumors that it’s part of a UN–Bill Gates mind-control conspiracy. They’re assuming that habits of consumption and spending will return to what they were in the days before the pandemic, and that Julie and I will buy that Dyson Animal after all, even if we have to borrow money to pay for it.
They’re assuming that employment levels will rebound, and that we’ll have a V-shaped recovery rather than an L-shaped one. They’re assuming that the normal is a thing, and that recreating it is simply a matter of behaving like you remember behaving—which is true, as long as billions of people remember to behave along with you. It’s likely some of them aren’t going to know what you’re talking about. It’s likely some of them aren’t going to want to behave at all.
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By the way, the deck is fixed. I discovered the plank I had rescued from the construction dumpster was clear redwood. It cut easily and fit perfectly. It was a small job, I told Julie, but a slow one.
Six long deck screws are holding the new plank to the deck joists. It’s not going anywhere.
I wish it were as easy to find the materials for a complete social and economic remodel, but we’re a long way from being able to pluck an FDR or an Eisenhower from the citizen salvage pile. I’m not sure who will be leading this country through the next few years of the pandemic, but it’s a sure bet that he won’t be the kind of carpenter that can do the job quickly, or well.