The year just past -- 2020 -- was probably the most challenging year in my nearly 80 years of remembering things. With the covid-19 virus, and its attendant problems of job loss, losses of life, limitations on contacts with other people, disruptions of normal enterprises like schools, churches, businesses, manufacturing, restaurants and entertainment, and so on; and with the addition of the recent extreme cold temperatures and snow and ice, the recent past has been like no other in memory. That's without mentioning the outages of electric power and natural gas supply which came as a surprise in the midst of all our other challenges.
Of course, winters have always been challenging.
I'm remembering some experiences during the winters of my growing up -- things like trying to get the car out of the driveway in icy conditions, or trying to thaw out the frozen water pipes, or breaking the ice covering our woodpile and carrying the wood into the house, or trying to start stubborn tractor engines with the icy wind whistling around our ears, or milking the cows when their tails had icicles hanging from them (not very nice to get swatted with). But I would still rate 2020 as one of the toughest years ever.
One of the things which comes to mind as I think over the years is to consider how the things that we look on as progress sometimes turn into their own kinds of problem.
When I was a little boy, we had no electricity on the farm, no natural gas, no phone, no TV, no central heat or air, no indoor bathroom or plumbing, no water heater other than the pot on the wood-burning kitchen range. Of course we didn't feel sorry for ourselves since it was the same with most of the people we knew. We did have radio, powered by a car battery. Radio was the electronic marvel of the day. We saw ourselves as pretty well off even though we had little money and there was a world war going on.
Electricity came to our farm in 1945, shortly after World War II ended, and we "electrified" the farm very quickly. We soon had hot and cold running water in the house, a jet pump in the well, an indoor bathroom, an electric range for the kitchen and an electric hot water heater; and we even put electric lights in the barn and obtained an electric hammer mill to grind feed for the cows and chickens. But, with those advances, we also encountered some new problems. For instance, if you don't have water pipes in the ground, then you don't have frozen pipes to contend with. If you don't have electricity, then you don't face the problem of power outages. Or, if you don't have gas, propane or butane, then you don't have your tank turning up empty when the weather is freezing cold.
When I was very young, in the 1940s, most of the people we knew were (as we say) "living off the land." Our way of life was for the most part a self-reliant way of life. Our food mostly came from the garden, or the field, or from our hogs or chickens or cow herd. Our source of heat for the cold winter was wood from the trees on the hills beyond our farm fields, our source of horsepower for farm work was old Pat and Mike, our horses. We weren't reliant on power companies, or gas companies, or water utilities, or elaborate equipment vulnerable to breakdowns. We had a bucket for drawing water from the well, a bucket to hold water for use in the kitchen and a dipper for drinking, and we had buckets for milking the cows, and buckets for carrying feed to the chickens and hogs. There was little to breakdown, supposedly, although even buckets do themselves eventually wear out.
I'm a man who appreciates the technological progress that has been made during my lifetime. I am not one to say that we need to get back to the old ways of life. But I do think we need to be remembering that the land, the streams, the lakes, the trees, the livestock, the living plants wild or tame, the animals and wildlife, are our resources, and we need always to consider the impact that our "civilized" ways of life have on these important things.
I also think we need to keep alive some survival skills to deal with those times when our technology-based systems temporarily fail. The Internet goes down. The cell phone battery dies. I realized this past week that I have usually thought of provisions for keeping warm when the electricity goes off. I had commonly thought of gas heaters as the reliable backup source for weather emergencies. I hadn't given much consideration to the possibility that the natural gas might go off. But here we were. This time the furnace had electricity, and the motors tried and tried, but there was no gas. Well, some of the old reliable strategies still worked -- put on heavier clothes, bring out the blankets and quilts, have other backups available. Maybe it is still best not to rely too much on any one source or strategy for energy. Multiple sources, multiple preparations, multiple strategies are still the way to go, kind of like back in the old days.
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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. Opinions expressed are those of the writer. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.