None of My Business by P.J. O'Rourke

Author:P.J. O'Rourke [O’Rourke, P. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802146434
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2018-11-13T16:00:00+00:00

Innovations That Get No Respect

A gallon of water weighs eight pounds, five and a half ounces. Once a week I fill the poultry waterer in my chicken coop. The waterer holds five gallons. The coop is two hundred yards (one “stink distance” away) from my house. The chicken coop does not have running water.

Therefore, every Saturday morning I fill a five-gallon water can, hoist the forty-one and a half-plus pounds, and carry it …

Like hell I carry it. I put the five-gallon can in my tractor bucket and drive two hundred yards to the chicken coop.

The most important innovations are things you don’t notice that are right under your nose. Or right up your nose—I was filling the water can from the garden hose and the water stopped running and I looked into the nozzle while my thirteen-year-old son was standing behind me un-kinking the hose.

Ready availability of water is an astounding innovation. And we take it for granted. Actually, the way we regard water is worse than taking it for granted. Recall the national hullabaloo when icky stuff started to come out of the faucets in Flint, Michigan? We regard the ready availability of water—clean, pure water—as an inalienable human right.

It’s no such thing. Water doesn’t come from the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Water comes from smart thinking and hard work.

As far as archaeologists can determine, humans didn’t even begin to dig wells until around 6500 B.C. If you didn’t live right next to the river, just getting the day’s drinking and cooking water meant a big backache. Or a big headache, if you were balancing the water jug on your head.

The Indus Valley Civilization created the earliest public water supply system only about four thousand years ago. Water was piped directly into houses—houses, that is, of Indus Valley Civilization bigwigs. If you were an Indus Valley Civilization civilian, welcome to the town pump.

Appreciating innovations that go unnoticed in daily life is something I’m sure older readers can relate to. I’m old myself. Being old gives us a lens into the past and makes us thankful that the past is past.

We’ve used outhouses. For younger readers unaccustomed to the privy, bog, dunny, or “house of ease,” imagine a port a potty that hasn’t been emptied in a hundred years, where the roof leaks, and you sit on a splintery wooden board with a couple of holes cut in it and the Charmin is a corncob.

My parents were old too. My father would be 110 if he were alive. His father was born in 1877. My mother’s mother was born in 1887. According to a Department of Energy study, as late as 1920 only 1 percent of American houses had indoor plumbing and electricity. (Back when being part of “The 1 percent” really meant something.)

There was, maybe, a cold tap from a cistern on the remote farms where my grandparents grew up.

Remote farms reached by way of long roads that were in turn muddy, dusty, and buried in snowdrifts.

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