Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

 

“I have no more nails, but I’ll not keep on waiting till I can make a trip to Independence,” he said. “A man doesn’t need nails to build a house or make a door.” –Charles Ingalls, Little House on the Prairie

At age nineteen months, my son, late on this scrubbed-sky, chilly afternoon in the high desert, enjoyed his first Emergency Duct Tape demonstration. I’m surprised it took so long.

He held the wobbly axle of my second string wheelbarrow while I, post-duct tape-mummifying, tried to get our porous, ancient bicycle pump (which had been somewhat tragically stored, for months, at the bottom of the infrequently washed Ridiculously Oversized American Truck bed, which is nothing if not a compost pile) to work just one more time.

This, any Wal Mart shopper will recognize, being sort of the prayer uttered to all Asian slave-made crap in my life. In this case, because there was firewood to collect. (Yep, local, sustainable firewood.) And it was the time of day, in the desert in January, when even a nineteen-month-old knows the temperature is about to plummet. The weather changes so quickly during this chapter of Love in the Time of Climate Change that I have to pack for three seasons just to go on a simple afternoon hike. Could face hail, could confront the Saraha.

I was pumping away, trying to get the essentially detached elastic hose part of the mechanism (it’s one of those where you stand on flimsy metal fold-out foot rests) to fill a totally flat wheelbarrow tire.

“Hiss,” said the pump in the wrong place.

“Hee hee,” commented my son, pointed to the spot where new errant air was escaping from the severed pump.

Hence more duct tape. “Way to find the leak,” I complimented my offspring.

“Hiss,” sang the pump somewhere else when I completed my repair of the repair.

“Hee hee HEE,” observed my boy. Now he appeared to be pointing at me, evidently finding something amusing in my wheelbarrow-kicking motion.

Suddenly I knew how Hawkeye Pierce felt when a patient was simply lost.

The pump was done.

Margaret Houlihan should be here, leading me, struggling, away for a drink at The Swamp.

Both the wheelbarrow and the pump are examples of Globalization Age bottom-end junk remnants that linger here on the Funky Butte Ranch. (I’ve earlier Dispatched about this troubling phenomenon in the form of the Plastic Goat Water Bucket Dilemma.) At night, in front of the fire whose fuel a functional wheelbarrow is supposed to be carting to the Ranch house, we’ve been reading Little House On the Prairie out loud as a family here, and let me tell you, the fact that book patriarch Charles Ingalls could build a cabin in three days causes me some head-scratching. It takes me (and my toddler assistant) longer than that to inflate a Tru Value wheelbarrow tire. (Never mind that Ingalls settled his family and built said cabin in the middle of the existing culture’s Superhighway.)

We’re a two-wheelbarrow family here on the Funky Butte Ranch. It’s one of those transition-from-suburbia shocks to learn that you simply cannot function with fewer than this number if you live on more than, say, twenty or forty acres (and I’m starting to learn that it’s wise to have a third one on hand in the barn as back-up). In an era of standard automobile GPSes and Hubble telescopic images of something like three minutes after the Big Bang, it’s astonishing that I spend so much time working with anything, besides a family itself, that Charles Ingalls did in the 1870s.

Both of the Funky Butte Ranch wheelbarrows are always in use. They’re workhorses. Or substitutes for workhorses, I guess. One can often be found carting, say, the goat poop-n-hay mixture that I use as fertilizer to the garden while the other one collects firewood (ideally), or transports new wood shaving litter to the chicken coop, or maybe even is used for toddler-racing. Like Superman and Clark Kent, it’s unusual to see both of them together.

And today I found that one broken Chinese tire pump can bring the whole Ranch to a halt. Or I should say that my dependence on unsustainable products assembled by children eight thousand miles away can. And it would’ve happened sooner if duct tape hadn’t solved the problem last time it arose, a few months ago. (And what goes into duct tape? Where is it made? What are the workers paid? Is there toxic effluent flowing into some unfortunate river as a result of the Miracle Fixer? The regular follower of these Dispatches knows that I don’t think all Globalization is bad – that inter-cultural trade has in fact been going on for as long as there’s been more than one culture. But that the sustainability of Digital Age globalization is what I’m concerned about. It’s a small planet, with only so many rivers, trees and oxygen molecules.)

Regardless of the answers to these important questions, the facts on the ground are as follows: I’m down to one wheelbarrow. The surviving one is about a nine-minute walk away, full of goat shit, and now we’re close to sundown (we’ve lost about twenty degrees in mercury since my son was laughing at me). Where else but the box store, or the box hardware store, can I find a cheap tire pump at 7 p.m. on a Sunday?

Where would Charles Ingalls get one? Of course, he’d build the entire wheelbarrow, from scratch, without nails or bolts. In perhaps twenty minutes. Maybe I should Google “make your own wheelbarrow in under an hour with no power tools.” Maybe I will.

The pioneers didn’t have those Insta-fix tubes of tire goop, neither. (I’m averse to using these, by the way. Obvious toxics coming from obscure auto parts factories being one of my few phobias, and tire fix goop seems to me to be a vestigial, for-now overlooked example of some banned chemical reaction -– in the category of liquid smoke and DDT -– certain to produce some sort of –ioxin.)

For now, I’m going to suck it in (my wheelbarrow situation, not tire goop) and survive with just one unsustainable, Globalized wheelbarrow. But on our next town trip, wearing our rural costumes (overalls and cowboy hat), my son and I will brave the Swine flu vapors and the fluorescent sleep machines in the box store to buy yet another crappy pump. Because note to bachelors: there are few things that make a woman happier than keeping her warm in winter. Even the rarely-bathing Charles Ingalls recognized that.

It’s dinner time now (the hose by the goat water was already frozen by evening goat milking), and the moment we put the day’s eggs in the fridge, my boy and I made sure to wash our hands thoroughly (with Fair Trading, fair-paying Doctor Bronner’s soap) before scarfing the meal of Funky Butte Ranch-sauced pasta my sweetheart had made. It’s not like working with the pump made us visibly dirty — not unusually, anyway. But with box stores and the bad sides of Globalization on my mind, my thinking went like this: if there is so little accountability in the consumer supply chain that humans intentionally put cadmium in children’s toys, surely only heaven knows what’s in wheelbarrow axle grease or maquiladora pump grit.

You are aware that you live in a galaxy in New Mexico at night –- the smear of its denser regions is palpably visible when you hustle out to the woodpile before bed, your breath a cloud of steam, accompanied by a nineteen-month-old. My kid already helps explicitly with the collection of kindling and even small logs – in what I call his Bam Bam mode. It’s a joy to watch.

So maybe the reality that my wheelbarrow is on Injured Reserve is a blessing in disguise. The fact is, if it had been working, we wouldn’t just have heard that Great Horned Owl. Nor seen that shooting star. Thanks, crappy Asian merchandise. Now we’ve got to bolt inside and warm up beside the fire, getting cowed (no, let me say “inspired”) by the from-scratch building capabilities of that show-off Charles Ingalls.

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