The Steampunk World
My grandfather is a tinkerer, just like me. His camper is festooned with welded-on attachments. His old satellite dish has become a giant mushroom, shading his power mowers, which are themselves souped-up in ways the designers never intended. He would never buy anything that he could make. And he never, ever, throws anything away.
Sometimes his desire to create outweighs even cost or efficiency. I suffer from the same problem. If it CAN be done, it MUST be done, time and reason be damned! This drive to modify and scratch-build, when it would be so simple to just buy what you need, is what separates him and I from my father, who is very mechanically inclined but never builds or fixes anything unless it needs to be built or fixed. It's as if there are two genes on our DNA, one which grants mechanical aptitude, and the other the desire to create. My brother sure is creative, but he isn't particularly interested in devising just the right tool for dragging the pond. But when the two genes are present in the same person, the world is suddenly burdened with clanky, junky, dangerous machines made from scrap which get the job done but only in the most obfuscated and sometimes silly way possible.
My grandfather's father-in-law, it seems, was also this type. From what I've heard, at least, he was at least crazy enough not to pay attention to what was and wasn't possible. A Dartmouth-educated engineer, he jaunted about the tropics building canals for the United Fruit Company, never to be found without his huge pipe and his gin and tonic. Once again his gene skipped his daughter, but she married a man with it anyway.
Now, HIS father-in-law, my great-great grandfather, HE was a tinkerer. He was hired to wire up the town of Santa marta, Columbia, with telephone service. Afterwards, while he was repeatedly failing and then eventually succeeding at establishing a coffee plantation, he pursued his hobby of building machines such as water pumps and grist mills using locally available materials and parts. His creations got him into Popular Mechanics around 1913, an article I am desperately trying to find, as I am leaving tomorrow to travel to the developing world and build machines such as water pumps and grist mills using locally available materials and parts...and I did not know these things when I decided to do it.
It is certainly not coincidence that here, 100 years later, I am engaged in the exact same lifestyle as my forebearer. But is it social? I can't deny that digging around in my grandfather's junkyard was a favorite pasttime of my youth. Yet there's something more, a *drive*, that compells me to do the things I do. This gene, which seems to be carried dormant by the females yet expressed in the males of my family, has been reinforced in me at least three times. Often I feel like I don't want to do these things, yet I do them anyway. Of course I don't want to give up my comfy life to live in poverty in the diseasey tropics! I am simply in the grip of my destiny.
And so, tomorrow, I head off to Ghana to follow in the footsteps of my ancestors. I'll write when I can.
Sometimes his desire to create outweighs even cost or efficiency. I suffer from the same problem. If it CAN be done, it MUST be done, time and reason be damned! This drive to modify and scratch-build, when it would be so simple to just buy what you need, is what separates him and I from my father, who is very mechanically inclined but never builds or fixes anything unless it needs to be built or fixed. It's as if there are two genes on our DNA, one which grants mechanical aptitude, and the other the desire to create. My brother sure is creative, but he isn't particularly interested in devising just the right tool for dragging the pond. But when the two genes are present in the same person, the world is suddenly burdened with clanky, junky, dangerous machines made from scrap which get the job done but only in the most obfuscated and sometimes silly way possible.
My grandfather's father-in-law, it seems, was also this type. From what I've heard, at least, he was at least crazy enough not to pay attention to what was and wasn't possible. A Dartmouth-educated engineer, he jaunted about the tropics building canals for the United Fruit Company, never to be found without his huge pipe and his gin and tonic. Once again his gene skipped his daughter, but she married a man with it anyway.
Now, HIS father-in-law, my great-great grandfather, HE was a tinkerer. He was hired to wire up the town of Santa marta, Columbia, with telephone service. Afterwards, while he was repeatedly failing and then eventually succeeding at establishing a coffee plantation, he pursued his hobby of building machines such as water pumps and grist mills using locally available materials and parts. His creations got him into Popular Mechanics around 1913, an article I am desperately trying to find, as I am leaving tomorrow to travel to the developing world and build machines such as water pumps and grist mills using locally available materials and parts...and I did not know these things when I decided to do it.
It is certainly not coincidence that here, 100 years later, I am engaged in the exact same lifestyle as my forebearer. But is it social? I can't deny that digging around in my grandfather's junkyard was a favorite pasttime of my youth. Yet there's something more, a *drive*, that compells me to do the things I do. This gene, which seems to be carried dormant by the females yet expressed in the males of my family, has been reinforced in me at least three times. Often I feel like I don't want to do these things, yet I do them anyway. Of course I don't want to give up my comfy life to live in poverty in the diseasey tropics! I am simply in the grip of my destiny.
And so, tomorrow, I head off to Ghana to follow in the footsteps of my ancestors. I'll write when I can.
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