The Muddled Male

Foundations

By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male

            I am happy to report that we survived yesterday’s near death experience.  It began with sudden darkness and the shriek of a berserk Church organ as the life blood of the town slipped away one power phase at a time.  Then came reports of critical shutdowns of our comfort and convenience sources.  On one side of the system the people on the hill were left to survive with whatever water was in the water system storage tanks when power was lost and the pumps that move water from wells in the valley to tanks on the hill stopped turning.  On the other side of the system, and in the same valley as the wells, stood other silent pumps that just a few moments earlier had been moving that same water from drains to sewage ponds in Round Valley.

 

            The more serious problem, however, came as I watched my life ebb away one percent at a time and nothing could be done.  My iPhone battery was down to sixty percent, my iPad battery was down to seventy percent, and my laptop battery was down to ninety percent and falling rapidly.  It really didn’t matter, however, because the internet expired along with the shrieking Church Organ, and I was left without means of communication or the ability to think. 

         A friend sent me an email the other day that said, “We had a power outage last week and my PC, TV, and games console shut down immediately, so I had to talk to my family for a few hours.  They seem like nice people.”  At first I thought that Ann, my wife, had composed that email as a not so subtle way of telling me that I had become addicted to gadgets.  I admit that I am constantly checking my email and responding to texts, but it is part of the age in which we live, isn’t it?  Besides, if you don’t text you might never get to talk to your grandkids.  You would think that Ann would at least give me credit for that fact that I don’t have a Facebook page, and I don’t have a Twitter Account.  But when I pointed that fact out to her, she responded that she didn’t even know that Twits knew how to Tweet. 

            So in the calm of a powerless Sunday afternoon I picked up a book.  You know, the kind where you read by turning the pages one at a time by grasping the upper right corner of each page and turning it slowly from right to left as you scan each line.  The book, written by Gerald Lund, is titled The Undaunted and is about the Miracle of the Hole-In-The-Rock Pioneers.  It begins with the story of a young boy who had just turned six and started working underground in the coal mines of Yorkshire, England.  As I read of the conditions in which he and his family were living and working I began to think that a brief power outage on a warm Sunday afternoon wasn’t so bad after all.  But the thing that came to mind most forcefully was the awareness that none of the conveniences I enjoy today were of my own doing.  They were created by others and upon foundations built by someone before them who would never enjoy what I couldn’t get along without now. 

            And so on this Twenty-Fourth of July as we celebrate Pioneer Day watching parades and rodeos and shooting off fireworks (except up here on the hill where fireworks are banned), let’s pay tribute not only to those pioneers who settled the west, but also to your parents and grandparents who never had the conveniences you enjoy but on whose foundation you stand.