Last week I was going on about our strange Arkansas weather, and I mentioned a couple of new problems we had on the farm after modernizing with electricity and a gas-powered farm tractor. Sometimes tractors don't want to start in cold weather, and they present other complications that we never faced with our horses. One of our big advances with electricity on the farm was to have hot and cold running water in the house, an indoor bathroom, and water piped to the barn. That was great, and very convenient and nice. But, sometimes the power goes off, sometimes the pump motor burns out, sometimes pipes freeze and burst. When water pipes burst, one may have an urgent emergency on his hands.
Well, our peculiar Arkansas weather is still going about its weird ways. We had that weekend of Dec. 18 with extremely cold temperatures, hovering near 0 degrees. It was enough to have churches calling off services, changing program schedules, and people hustling to get out their winter clothes, take care of pipes and houses and vehicles to prevent freeze-ups. Then, just about as suddenly, the temperatures are back to 50 degrees and 60 degrees. Today, Dec. 29, was a warm day -- at least many of us would say that 60 degrees is warm.
Yesterday, I was listening to KURM Radio at the start of the day, and I heard that a state of emergency had been declared in the Dakotas, because the really bad weather up there had caused a loss of electrical power over wide areas. I'm thinking, back in the old days, when people didn't have home electricity at all, that situation would probably not have been an emergency. The people living up there had been dealing with extreme cold for many long years. They, and the Canadians and the Eskimos had been dealing with even more drastic cold temperatures for ages, without electricity. They knew how to prepare for 50 degrees below zero, or even 80 degrees below zero, and how to build houses that would keep the cold at bay when the winds were howling and the snows were drifting. They knew how to make clothing that would protect from the fierce winds and the biting cold.
I'm thinking about our advances in home heating and cooling. In the old days, we heated the house by burning wood in an old black wood stove. We cooled the house by opening doors and windows and letting the breeze make things more comfortable. We had never heard of air conditioning back then. Air conditioning did begin showing up in the 1940s in movie theaters and certain businesses. But we never dreamed of having cooling in the house. Ok, electricity did make it possible for us to have electric fans in the house, including fans to sit in a window and pull the air through. Now we have advanced to having central heat and air in our houses, with programmable thermostats and many nice features, all dependent on electricity. One of the problems with electricity is that now and then it still goes off! Its wonderful power disappears! Everything stops. The furnace and stove won't run without electricity to power the fan, and the ignition, and the thermostat system. Even if its main energy comes from natural gas or propane, it still needs electricity to function. We used to build houses with high ceilings and openings over the doors to let natural air circulation cool the house. Many of the old-time houses were pretty efficient at self-cooling. Now we build houses that depend on electricity to circulate the air and create ventilation and light up the place. Some of today's houses are almost uninhabitable without electricity.
I'm thinking how we went from having the old-fashioned phones with wires and cords and dials, and moved up to a high technology cordless phone. So, when electric power goes off, we had no phone at all. Now I keep one old wired-type phone in my office room, so we can call on it when the electricity is off. I notice that as our cars get more sophisticated, they have more things to go wrong, more to fix and more to pay for fixing.
I had a car a few years ago that never had ordinary things going wrong -- no flats, no bad batteries, no clogged fuel lines, no ignition failures, no bad spark plugs. The things that went wrong were the monitoring systems that are supposed to tell us when there is a problem, and to diagnose it for us. The on-board control module (computer) makes the car run and start so nicely! Then the control module fails. The repair is hundreds of dollars. Ok, the brake system warning light stays on! Take it to the technician. The brakes are fine. It's a bad sensor! The sensor is supposed to tell you when the brakes are not right. So, it is a hundred dollars to stop the thing from telling us something that wasn't so! Sometimes our wonderful new technologies introduce problems we never saw before. I'm remembering when we never worried about our computers getting hacked. That was no problem at all, back when!
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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge and an award-winning columnist, is vice president of Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Editorial on 01/04/2017