The clock had previously been set correctly, you see. And this once-correct time had merely been obscured beneath the archaeological deposit of a seasonal daylight savings shift and a seventeen-minute battery outage that I had never gotten around to correcting it for.
Many people, when faced with this kind of circumstance, would have figured out how to set the clock. To me, that seemed an impossibly burdensome investment of time, to avoid which the greater cumulative time spent over the course of many months performing mental calculations to correct for the clock was infinitely preferable.
That instance is only representative, however, of a far more general pattern. Another occurred more recently: the saga of my sprinklers.
Now, I moved into my current residence in the dead of a New England winter; and, as previously documented on this blog, one of the first grim surprises that awaited me upon moving in was about an inch of standing water in the basement—the product of a seasonal snowmelt and a sump pump that was in perfect working condition but had been left unaccountably unplugged prior to my move-in.
I managed to clear this water and dry out the basement, only to have a fresh disaster on my hands a few weeks later.
It being winter, you see, and me having never thought to turn off the water line to the outdoor sprinklers, a pipe ruptured outside as soon as the deep freeze set it. I awoke one frigid morning, in short, to both the sound of gushing water beneath my window and another inch or so of water back again in my accursed basement. Running outside, I saw that a pipe connected to the back of the house had split open, disgorging great belches of water that were freezing in mid-air, creating long stalactites down its side.
I turned off the valve to the outside water and swore never to switch it back on. I also never repaired the pipe. Sprinklers be damned, I said. I didn't need to water my yard, at least not as badly as I needed to dry out my basement. Anything, anything—I concluded—was better than another burst pipe outside; and I didn't feel I could trust myself to remember to turn it off again come the following winter, if I did get the pipe patched up and the water flow restored.
For the following summers, I didn't see much reason to regret my choice. My yard quickly became home to various strange growths—fantastical weeds, alien plants in deep shades of red and purple, some expanding to the size of small trees. During this period, the great struggle of my life as a yard owner was to keep the forces of plant life at bay. I didn't see any reason to give them an extra hand by running fresh water over them multiple times a day.
It was only years later, after my neighbors had finally convinced me to hire a yard service, that the vegetation was removed and the original grass beneath it started to wither.
The situation only really became a problem—as so many things do—when it came time to sell the place. I was forced then to confront the fact that conditions of life that are perfectly agreeable to me would be utterly intolerable to many normal people. And the first step to making my place outwardly presentable again was to re-sod the whole backyard.
This was done remarkably quickly, replacing what had been the hilly and pockmarked lunar terrain of my former lot with a beautiful green lawn. I was amazed at the transformation. And I instantly was seized with terror that the beautiful green apparition before me might vanish under the hot and dry summer sun. Water—those tender shoots needed water if they were to live, and if I were to keep my pristine new yard and not watch it decline back into the smoldering Mordorian ruin it had been before, just in time for prospective buyers to visit.
I did some asking around about how often I should water the new sod. Probably once a week was proper, I figured the answer would be, give or take. A most unanticipated response came back to me instead: twice a day. Twice a day? Who could possible have time for that?
I raced out to the big box stores to find the appliances I figured I would need to avert this chore. A length of hose; an automatic timer, a connector plug; two portable sprinkler units. I hooked these up to the outdoor faucet for my garden hose and spent the evening trying to shake out the rubber tubing that would be needed to connect them. I fiddled with the garden hose valve, trying to get exactly the right water pressure, but discovering that no matter which way I turned it or how I positioned both sprinklers, I could not quite blanket the whole yard.
At some point in this process, my phone buzzed with a text message. It came from the guy who had installed the new sod. He asked me if I'd like him to come back and set up an automatic watering cycle for the yard. I replied, "Yes, please!" though in truth I wasn't sure what he meant. Did he have a better idea than my set-up of the hose infrastructure and sprayers? Did he have some way to arrange them that would provide coverage to the whole yard that I wasn't thinking of? I inwardly doubted, but I thought I'd give him a chance.
He arrived the next day and I showed him around the yard, gesturing at my works. "You see I've set this up here on a timer, but I can't quite get them to reach the whole area," I explained, pointing deprecatingly toward my portable sprinklers but with a presumption of sympathy—one handyman to another, facing down a shared mechanical problem. "This will be a lot easier for you," he said, ignoring my elaborate contraptions and gesturing toward a panel on the wall.
"What's that?" I asked.
"The sprinkler system," he said.
Now, I had known the house had a sprinkler line, at least—it was what I had to shut off all those years ago, after all, during the incident of the burst pipe. But I still didn't know what he meant by a "system." All I could see on the exterior of the house was another nozzle, and I figured that at best this could provide another and more powerful source of water pressure to feed the two portable lawn sprinklers I had just purchased at Home Depot. I still didn't really understand what he was proposing that would be an improvement on the jury-rigged environment I had constructed for myself the previous night.
I explained about the burst pipe (leaving out the incriminating fact that it had been left like that for more than four years, by this point). He peered at it for a bit, saw that I was right, and began soldering it back together with a blowtorch. I watched with curiosity, still not sure what good it would do us once he had put it back together. What was the point? Why not just use the garden hose, as I had been doing?
When he had finished, he pressed a few buttons on the panel. Then, out of the Earth, sprang a host of black sprinkler heads who had never before seen the daylight—at least not since I'd moved in. It was astonishing. It was remarkable. They were perfectly arranged about the yard in formation so as to cover the entire area. And they could be set to go off twice a day, automatically, whether I was present or no. No need for me to get the hose out twice a day and spray the place down. No need either for me to set up a new automatic timer system. The automatic timer was built into the house.
I was left with the immense relief of realizing that my yard would be alright after all, and that I did not need to do all of the work of maintaining it by hand; but also with the subtle humiliation of having to reveal that I had had a perfectly good sprinkler system in my lawn all this time—for more than four years—and had never once turned it on. Not only that, but I had yet again invented a far more complicated and inefficient method to accomplish the same task, simply because I didn't know how to use and hadn't bothered to repair the things I already possessed.
Part of what this reveals about me, of course, is my sheer mechanical ineptitude—I make no attempt to deny it. But it also reflects my innate pessimism about fate and human nature. Provisioning oneself with a fully-functioning sprinkler system to water and maintain precious sod is not the sort of forward-thinking that I would be capable of myself, so I never imagined that some builder might have thought of it in designing the place, all those years ago.
There is also the democratic impulse than I expect many Americans have—the feeling that it is somehow shameful to leave the incidental manual tasks of one's existence to someone else, or to a machine. One ought to be able to water one's grass oneself. And yet, as soon as I take one of these manual tasks upon myself, I always despair. I rail against the injustice of it. How could anyone possibly be expected to spend time on this sort of thing? How could there be enough hours in the day for anyone to keep up with it?
It turns out, one realizes as soon as the hidden sprinkler heads arise from their depths, that one was not in fact expected to do that sort of thing after all. There are not enough hours in the day. Which is why humankind invented machines to do it.
And, moreover, what began as a democratic impulse only ends up underlining still further one's undeserving privilege. If one has been fortunate enough in life to be equipped with a sprinkler system, after all, one had damn better make use of it, at least. Yet here I was just sitting on it; not even knowing how to use it, let alone appreciate it properly. Shouldn't it belong instead to someone who could do either or both of those things?
There's a character in Richard Ford's The Sportswriter who works on other people's boats for a living. Ford describes him as filled with contempt for "the type of helpless citizen who owns the expensive boats he repairs; the know-nothings with no mechanical skills he hates for the way we take care of property he himself can't afford."
I have no way of knowing whether the yard guy can afford his own sprinkler system or not; nor did I detect the kind of white-hot resentment Ford describes radiating off his character. But I certainly did feel very much like one of these "helpless citizens" when he asked me to stand over by the lawn furniture so as not to get wet, and he watched me see for the first time the hidden infrastructure of sprinkler heads emerging from the ground.
I also projected onto him some of the contempt Ford describes. What a dope, I heard him thinking, though it was really me thinking it, regarding myself though his eyes, as I stood paunchily on the back porch with my fists on my waist, surveying my secret kingdom of sprinkler nozzles I'd never known were there.
So that's the conclusion, then. I tried to be democratic, and ended up seeming the opposite. But maybe this is okay. There's an essay by the law professor William Ian Miller, in which he recounts a visit to his home by a plumber, who sneers at the professor's job. Miller's point in the essay is that what appears at first to be a humiliating encounter is really a redeeming feature of democratic societies.
On the one hand, even under democratic conditions a class hierarchy will tend to emerge in society, according to which someone like Miller—a knowledge worker who rarely performs manual tasks—is positioned "higher" than someone like the plumber. At the same time, however, the existence of a crisis in plumbing reveals Miller's helplessness and dependence, and a plumber is as entitled as anyone else in these moments to sneer at the professor's more "prestigious" choice of career as something ultimately useless that has left him deprived of any ability to respond to the concrete problems of life when they arise.
Miller's point is that one saving grace of democratic societies is that contempt can flow in both directions. The professional with his home appliances can feel snugly superior in his elevated social status as much as he wants to, but the mechanic can know too that the professional is actually utterly incapable of using these appliances, or of fixing them when the slightest thing goes wrong, and is therefore dependent at last upon his services.
Seen in this light, then, my mechanical incompetence is a public service. It is helping to build a more egalitarian society, and provides a kind of cosmic rebalancing of the unearned advantages I received at birth. Long may my inaptitude flourish therefore, so that the great wheel of mutual contempt may keep spinning, and no one be forced to remain for long at either the top or bottom of its spokes.
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