November 2023

 

 

To Buy or Not to Buy  

 

    Not too long ago, we and dog loaded into a Subaru with a hillock of sleeping bags, pads, books, salami, kibble, and a change of clothing each. In the wayback were a Dremel tool with a chewcanful of router bits and a belt sander.  We were headed to Boise to attend the Annual Powertool Pumpkin Carving Gala and Belt Sander Drag Races.

      America had more in store for us than making merry. When we were a coffee addict’s full bladder away from home, in this case Baker City, we pulled off I-84 into a clean petroleum and junkfood emporium where I was blown away to discover, piled at the entrance, a half-cord of punky lodgepole firewood, shrink-wrapped in armload quantities, five bucks each, and clearly labeled “Made in Canada.” I nearly choked on my corndog.

     The local firewood gypsies, those independents who herd rattletrap pickups with five foot racks over goat trails while hauling cords of red fir and tamarack, were being shotgunned by corporate greed.  Call me protectionist, reactionary, communist, I don’t care. It just seems that something is stinky wrong with the holy economy when an American chainstore gas station is selling bad Canadian firewood five minutes away from a National Forest.  

      An hour later I was chillin’ on a couch in the north end of Boise. The party format was Idaho standard: Play hard, Play safe, Nobody hurt.  Outside the back door of a cozy home in the Boise foothills were twenty pumpkins, two sets of large construction flood lights, a large potting shed table, a fifty-gallon garbage bucket, enough power tools to build a piano, and the sander drag strip, two lanes, sixteen feet long.  

     Inside were a round oak table filled with potluck fortunes featuring individual cream puffs, a vat of homebrewed chili, and a cabinet filled with hangovers including three bottles of Russian vodka. Sitting there I realized that there may be a flaw in my political thinking.  It didn’t bother me that Russians are selling vodka in a state best known for growing its prime ingredient.

     The pumpkin mangling was an exercise in young people’s encounters with power tools. Most mutilators had the same vision, a Jack-o-Lantern with triangle eyes and snaggletooth grin. But the lure of operating the tool overcame the desire for a perfect product. I watched a six-year-old girl with a cordless drill and half-inch spade bit punch maybe a hundred holes into Jack’s head, giggling all the while. I roughed-out a regular Halloween face with a jigsaw, then tattooed it with the rotary tool.  

     The belt sander drags were fixed. I was running a stock Sears 4x24 with 80 grit paper. On my first run of Ol’ Dusty, she flipped sideways, her switch shorted, and she went up in sparks with that electrical odor. The trophy went to the person who had constructed the track, an aircraft mechanic who modified a three-inch sander to include side wheels that made it run straight and true between the rails that divided lanes. The winning elapsed time in this year’s drags was just under one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two, for sixteen feet. Don’t try this on you mother’s Persian carpet.  

     The next morning, we went across Boise to a mega-box store where I entered the Temple of Refrigeration and encountered yet another indicator that something’s fishy in Consumerica. There I viewed the Holy Grail of appliances. For a mere $4,200 one can purchase a stainless steel, side-by-side refrigerator/freezer with ice water dispenser and, I kid you not, built into the refrigerator door, a twenty-four-inch flat panel television screen. 

     I stood in puzzled rapture. Some folks have a small TV set in the kitchen, a replacement for the counter-top radios of old, meant to deliver propaganda over one’s morning cup or allow one to stay current with Don Knotts while cooking the grits. But for whom was this gizmo designed?  Are there folks out there with a kitchen big enough who want to stare at a whole herking refrigerator while studying the effects of wave action on swimwear during a rerun of Baywatch? I was too dumbfounded to get the brand name on this beast, but if you have a very large unfilled niche in your gadget collection, you can get together with one of these babies in several stores.

     Luckily, my space limitation prohibits a full rant about what unbridled consumerism is doing to our planet.  One small last example, though. On that same afternoon, in a store once heralded for its supply of natural bulk foods, I found on the top shelf of the pet food aisle, at two bucks per bottle, three products labeled Chicken Flavored Water, Beef Flavored Water, and Bacon Flavored Water.