Born in the Wrong Century

We've been doing a lot of snowshoeing lately. This is Emerald Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park.

A couple of years ago I bought an old straight razor for shaving, but I never could get a nice edge on it. I came across it today and did a little research. It's a Joseph Elliot, and this particular model, with a wooden handle, was manufactured between 1820 and 1850! How many faces this little instrument must have shaved in the last 160-190 years!

I found a service that can restore old razors like this one. I'm going to mail it off tomorrow and hopefully in the next 4-6 weeks it'll be good as new! I'm pretty excited about it.

I also took the liberty to hand write the letter I enclosed with the razor. It's so rare that I hand write anything these days, and when I do it's never more than a word or two. It felt good to write sentences and see what it looked like. I even wrote it with a pencil - not a plastic, disposable mechanical pencil, but a real wooden pencil by Forest Choice. Supposedly these pencils are manufactured from trees in "well-managed forests" and don't contain paints or other toxic materials. It's not as green perhaps as a quill pen and homemade ink (which I know how to make and am waiting for this autumn's walnut harvest for the raw materials for my ink) but it'll do for now.

I actually spent the entire weekend chained to my computer. My classes this quarter are particularly time consuming, and work is kicking my butt too. There's just a lot going on. I've noticed that the more the modern world tries to tighten it's grasp on me, the more I resist it and long to escape it. Maybe my 190 year old straight razor or homemade pen and ink aren't going to save the planet or mean anything at all in the grand scheme, but they bring me comfort I can't quite explain.

I kinda lost it today in one of my online classes. There's an ongoing discussion forum on the topic of fire modeling. We're discussing the technology behind predicting the spread of wildfires using GIS. Some goofy girl said something innocent but stupid about how she hopes GIS can help stop all forest fires and we can all live happily ever after. I launched into a multi-paragraph diatribe about the incredible ecological benefits of natural fires, and how today's wildfires are the disastrous result of white man's superiority complex, brought about by his technology and misguided belief that preventing forest fires will somehow be better for the environment and our pocketbook. By stopping the small, natural fires, we've created millions of acres of land with decades of unspent fuel. Now when fires do ignite by lightning or a careless camper, they turn into massive blazes that create their own weather systems and send roiling clouds of ash and cinders a thousand miles into the sky. Rather than grooming forests and rejuvenating the landscape, the obliterate everything in their path. As I pointed out to her, it's our over-reliance, our unquestioning faith in our own technology and presumed brilliance that created the environmental problems we so desperately seek to "manage" today.

Sometimes I really wish I could go back to the year 1750, wander off into the western wilderness, befriend some natives and just do my thing like the early mountain men did. Maybe it would suck, I don't know. But the fantasy sure sounds nice. Insofar as I can guess, the only thing I'd miss is books. I like learning about food and nature, and what's going on in the natural sciences. But I suspect that life might make up for that because if I were friends with the natives I could learn a lot of cool things about the natural world that you just can't get in books. I wouldn't need to read about balance in the natural world because I'd be living it.