Andy Goldsworthy on Tech

Sculptor Andy Goldsworthy writes on his process: "The work itself determines the nature of its making. I enjoy the freedom of just using my hands and 'found' tools - a sharp stone, the quill of a feather, thorns. I am not playing the primitive. I use my hands because this is the best way to do most of my work. If I need tools, then I will use them. Technology, travel and tools are part of my life and if needed should be part of my work also. A camera is used to document, an excavator to move earth, snowballs are carried cross country by articulated truck."*

I am very comfortable with this pragmatic approach to technology. The problem (here begins my opinion) is not technology, in itself, it's in the adoption of technology, or technique, as "the way" (or even "the best way") to fulfill a desire. When a community (artists, for example) discovers a piece of technology that makes a part of their job easier, or a technique is developed that introduces efficiencies into a process, this is not a bad thing, per se. But if technique precedes meditation, exploration, and inspiration, then creativity withers.

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*From the introduction, Andy Goldsworthy: A Collaboration with Nature.Take a look at Andy Goldsworthy's other books at Amazon.The DVD, Rivers and Tides is a very good documentary, rich and satisfying. Remember, if you can find these books at a local independent bookstore, get on your bike and go. Photo of The Neuberger Cairn (2001) at SUNY, is from Wikimedia Commons, and is in the public domain.

Old Places (The San Gregorio Store)

From the so-close-and-yet-so-wonderfully-far-away dept., a 30 minute drive from Silicon Valley will take you to a place that feels far, far away and a long time ago. The San Gregorio Store is a place that could be the Anti-Tech Museum. The single building is essentially the downtown of a sub-300-population oceanside community (most of which is not visible from the store), what used to be a hotel and hub for San Franciscan weekenders in stagecoaches.

The store, which has been in operation for 120 years, is simple in architecture, and is filled with stuff of simple goodness. While, on the other side of the Santa Cruz mountains, Silicon Valley patrons can now sit down in restaurants with touch-screens for ordering their food (and then for playing video games), the San Gregorio Store has no flickering screens at all. It does have a historic bar to sit at where conversation happens, and tables set up by a wood stove and shelves of books for borrowing (and others for buying).

The store is isolated enough to stock some essential groceries, but not so much that you'd come here if you needed to stock up. But you can find a good selection of local beers (at the bar and in the fridges), oil lamps, glassware, denim, cast iron cookware, some good looking puzzles, socially progressive reading matter ("World Atlas of Biodiversity"), posters (of Bob Marley, Albert Einstein, and Marian Anderson, for example) and bluegrass music (live, if you come at the right times). In what may be the only nod to the store's proximity to Silicon Valley, you won't find cowboy hats here, only "cowtechnician hats".

It is a country store, but "country" in the way that only a large metropolitan area like the San Francisco Bay Area can produce. In other words: liberal, humanist, and intellectual, where in some other places, "country" might mean conservative, hick, and unread. Bay Area "country" means laid back ... in a socially and politically intense kind of way. The prices also betray the fact that the store is close to a major metro area: it's a bit hard for me to justify buying a t-shirt for over 20 bucks. But if that's the price of keeping a place like this on the map, then it's cheaper than a museum (and there is none of the staged feel of a museum to the San Gregorio Store).

The San Gregorio Store is on Hwy 84, just off the Pacific Coast Highway and just North of Pescadero, another old California town. Take 84 west from the store for one minute and you're at the Pacific Ocean, where the breakers will drown out all the noise and memory of the modern world. Take Hwy 84 east for thirty minutes and, as you re-enter the modern world, one of the first restaurants you'll come to is Buck's of Woodside, where bits of famous and ground-breaking computer technology are framed on the walls, gifts from famous and ground-breaking tech pioneers, many of whom were funded in part while lunching at Buck's with venture capitalists. That's the spectrum right there: the old towns of the Pacific Coast on one end of the 84, and a Silicon Valley deal-making hub on the other. Noisy waves to the west, bits of tech to the east. ... Go West, (low tech) traveler*.

The San Gregorio Store
 37°19'37.21"N
122°23'12.07"W

*that is, find the point on your compass which leads you away from industry and development for a spell, and go that way.

Home-Made Leather Wallet

This is my wallet. There's not much to it, so there's not much to say about it except ... that two pockets are enough and it has no plastic card holders to get old and cracked, no Velcro to startle librarians when you open it to take out your library card (and ultimately to get fuzzy and useless), and no strange and expensive hide (eel? Snake? Ostrich?). The leather of my wallet (cow butt, I'm sure) is so thick and wonderful, it will never crack and fray like the thin and delicate stuff that men's wallets are usually made out of. If it's not clear from the pics, the pockets are only accessible when it is opened past 180 degrees: nothing ever falls out, even when it's lying open and flat.


The pockets are deep and wide enough to carry lots of stuff: it carries cash, cards, a little emergency kit (made up of some bandages, bike tube patches with sandpaper, a sewing needle, and a small wind of dental floss for emergency repairs, or emergency flossing) some duct tape folded over a wallet-sized piece of itself 10 times (the second-most used thing in the wallet), pictures, and a plastic ball point pen cut to fit at the bottom of one side under everything else.

The only competition to this wallet in my eyes is the duct-tape wallet given to me by my friend Linda ... but that wallet has been nabbed by my daughter.

Making kid-simple things like this out of natural materials gives me lots of pleasure: it's free or close to it, and has an organically satisfying feel that can't be beat.

(Low) tech writer principle #3: a truly functional and durable thing made by yourself or someone close to you is a wonderful thing: unique in the world.

Here's a pen/pencil holder I made from the same scrap of leather. We disassembled an ancient, worn out shoulder bag my wife had gotten at the Monastiraki market in Athens when she was a kid (she grew up there). These bags, when new, are usually stiff and faded, pale and dry from hanging in the traditional leatherworker's shop year after year--they have not been treated, oiled, or otherwise preserved. When you first get one of these bags and empty a whole bottle of neatsfoot oil on it, it looks like you've poured water on desert clay. But once it's been oiled a few times, the thing takes on the rich and deeply beautiful quality of fine leather. Which is what it is.


It's filled with good tools of the low-tech variety.

Dirt. Trail. You Walk on It.

We live in a world where hiking-boot manufacturers have been compelled by some misguided sense of environmental responsibility to sell low impact tread on their boots, as if walking on a dirt trail with boots might hurt mother earth. Worrying about the erosion that walkers cause in the wilderness strikes me as wasting good environmental energy on a non-issue. So: you buy your gear, made in a developing country by poor labor (or worse, child labor), drive all day to the mountains in your V-8 SUV, leaving a trail of to-go cups behind you, and then, because you are environmentally sensitive, you try to not leave footprints on the trail. The dirt trail. Like every dirt trail that humankind has been walking on since the dawn of time .... Heck, since every wild animal in the world has been walking on since the dawn of time. Should we go barefoot? Maybe Bighorn Sheep should wear booties to minimize the impact of their mountain climbing? Maybe packhorses should be shod in Crocs?

I've backpacked and hiked close to 1500 miles in California's Sierra Nevada and in other places in the world, and I've seen a lot of trail. The kind of boots we used to wear (in the 70s and early 80s) were heavy leather and took a hundred miles or more to break in ... they also had quite a bit more tread on them (Vibram!) than the boots you can buy today. You needed that tread to survive the salt-and-pepper granite of the Sierra high country--like walking on the coarsest sand-paper--and to keep your footing in the mud when carrying 80 pound packs. And yet with all that tread underfoot, the only time I saw trails suffer from erosion was when a trail had been poorly laid. Some trails become creek beds after a rainstorm, if they are laid along a natural runoff. And I remember one spot in the Emigrant Wilderness, where a trail had been laid right along the floor of a meadow, instead of along its sloping edge, and had, over the decades, become a four lane highway in the soft dirt: as each "lane" became too deep to walk in, hikers would walk next to it, making a new trail. But almost everywhere else in the mountains (and everywhere else I've hiked) trails appeared almost unchanged from year to year. I know there was always trail work going on to repair damage from water runoff, fallen trees, etc. But I can't say I ever saw that the presence of humankind was especially hard on the dirt along a trail. Sure, at times, there was litter, or initials carved in tree trunks--people impact the environment negatively. But walking? ... Sorry, but walking, even in boots, is a perfectly natural thing to do that the earth is perfectly capable of surviving. Thank you very much for your concern.

Reducing the tread on hiking boots to minimize our impact on the dirt trails in the wilderness is wasted technology. It's a tech solution for a non-existent problem. The real problem is the incursion of civilization into wild areas. The problem is sprawl and the spiritual distance between people and unspoiled wilderness. The problem is roads and internal combustion engines and plastic packaging and sin. If you want to know what the problem is NOT, the problem is not the desire of a single person to walk on some of the unspoiled dirt that remains in the world. The presence of footprints does not spoil the wilderness. If you want to know what spoils wilderness, just look at the wilderness buried under your favorite city.

Find a dirt trail, preferably one with no view of anything concrete or glass or metal, and preferably out of earshot of any industrial noise, and walk on it with no guilt whatsoever.

Old Steel Knives, and One Cheap One

I'm glad that the blades on my pocket knives (I have Leatherman and Swiss Army knives) are stainless steel, because they have to survive in the wet, in bags I carry while commuting, sometimes in the rain, or while otherwise roughing it. But in my home, I much prefer the non-stainless variety: some are folders (Opinels from France), some straight bladed (flea-market beauties, as above). These blades are sharper, more flexible, and have considerably more character than any stainless blade.

Stainless steel knives are ... stainless, and so keep their shiny look. Big deal. Stainless steel is either inexpensive and horrible (inflexible, nearly impossible to sharpen, and brittle), or horribly expensive. When kitchen geeks test knives and make recommendation purely on quality, it could cost you well over $150 (sometimes closer to 800) per knife to follow their advice. When they make recommendations for those on a budget, you can still expect to spend more than $50 on a decent knife (with a plastic handle).

But you can also find an old steel knife at a garage sale, or estate sale, or flea market (like mine) and spend well under $20, then spend a little time with some steel wool, and uncover a beautiful old tool. The handle will be beautiful wood, and maybe you'll even find one with shiny brass rivets like mine. The old wood handle adds fathoms of character, feels warmer and just nicer in your hand, and is in fact more resistant to bacteria growth than synthetic. That may seem counter-intuitive until you realize that air drying kills bacteria and wood promotes this. a crack or seam between plastic and metal does a great job of creating the kind of environment where stuff can grow.

My steel knives may need to be sharpened more often than an expensive stainless steel knife, but they sharpen like razors. They may need to be protected a bit more from water, but I personally like the patina that metal takes on with age. Age = patina = character = signs of life. Old steel looks, and feels, more natural. That is ... aging and showing signs of age and wear is natural, and, in my humble opinion, beautiful.

Allow me to cut to the chase: our culture is obsessed with youth and health: we hate it when anything shows signs of age or wear (before you suggest jeans with holes in them, please note: those holes are probably not signs of age. They are signs of something else, less impressive). Our fear of age and the signs of age applies to utensils as much as it applies to our faces and bodies. And our attempts to counter the effects of age, whether in our own flesh, or in our tools, introduces layers of complexity and expense, and is successful very little of the time.

(Low) tech writer principle #2: When a technological solution is devised to counter the effects of nature, it generally results in a thing being more complex, less flexible, less functional, and/or more expensive.

There are some simple carbon steel blades being made these days: Sabatier makes some blades that are not stainless. The problem is that the cheap ones cost close to a hundred bucks and have plastic handles. If you want such blades for cheap, you've got to go searching for the cast-offs, and it may take some care to restore them and their handles. But, for me, the satisfaction of polishing an old steel blade and cleaning and oiling an old piece of wood matches the pleasure of using the old tool.

For all the benefits of stainless steel (you won't catch me suggesting that spoons shouldn't be stainless), I don't trust it. I wonder if it doesn't all come down to our distaste for stains ... stains that remind us that nature wears things down, marks things with the passage of time. Oh, alright, it's nice not to have to worry too much about rust, and stainless steel blades will not be ruined by an absent minded cook who doesn't dry their blades and can't be bothered to oil them. But then, should we let people who are so absent minded and lacking in respect for tools use sharp utensils anyways? I love old knives partly because you have to take care of them. There, I said it.

Don't even get me started on serrated knives. The only reason why these un-sharpenable knives sell so well is that a salesperson comes into your home and tells you what you already know: your knives have not been sharpened in years and are dull. Instead of solving this problem (by selling you a good, easy-to-use sharpener so you don't have to throw away your knives), they sell you another one: a knife that won't dull so quickly, but that can't be sharpened by you when it does. This is not to mention the fact that serrated knives have to saw through food, which in some cases just feels wrong. Now, a sharp straight-steel blade cutting through a nice steak? That feels right.

There is one exception to my dislike for serrated blades. There is no other blade for cutting fresh bread. It has to be serrated for something so soft. Thankfully you don't have to spend more than 20 dollars to have lots of good choicesfor a bread knife (but, of course, if you want to spend more than $150 you won't have to look far, and the choices are few and far between if you want to have a nice wooden handle). The knife below was $6 new, at a fancy kitchen shop no less. The serrations are not some unnecessarily fancy design, but simple scallops that can be sharpened at home with a needle file, or a rotary grinder, which is how I did mine when it was 5 years old and needed a little refresher.



When the handle began to loosen a bit from repeated washings, I just wrapped it tightly with a common whipping, a beautiful and simple binding knot that I use often to repair tools, or finish some other kind of craftwork. (Knots is a subject to which I will have to return.)

Cast Iron

A number of years ago, we decided to buy a nice frying pan for our kitchen. We briefly considered nonstick (Teflon or whatever flourocarbon-based coating is out there these days), but we simply had seen too many of them become un-coated with use. Was this our fault? Maybe. Maybe we weren't careful enough with the dreaded metal tools. But the question is meaningless: we will never buy a coated pan again.

We decided to buy a stainless steel pan, serious and heavy, from some famous company whose name you'd know, but I can't remember. It would be the kind of pan you keep forever, we told ourselves, to make ourselves feel better about the cost. We researched the options and ended up spending close to 150 dollars that Christmas on The Pan. We bought special pads (that wouldn't scratch it ... yes that is a problem with stainless steel: if you scratch it too much the rougher surface is harder to clean) and learned how to clean it with special powdery chemical stuff so that it would be pristine (again, so nothing would stick to it). One of its features was carefully chosen layers of different materials in the thick base to transfer heat evenly. Sadly, Within a few months this impressive base had warped and the pan rocked on the stove-top. Since the handle was a long heavy piece of stainless steel itself, the pan always rocked in the direction of the handle. This made it really hard to cook sauces or fry things, as liquids pooled in the downhill third of the pan. We thought that maybe because it was designed as a "stove top" appliance, that it would be able to withstand stove-top heat. Our mistake.

The last two pots I've bought for our kitchen have been made of cast iron. The fry pan (left) that replaced the stainless Pan was 20 dollars at a camping store, and it ... will. never. warp. How does it cook? So nice. I followed directions I got on the Web, seasoned it well with oil and lots of heat, and never looked back. If you could feel the surface of the pan, it feels almost exactly like a non-stick: not really greasy ... dry ... but slippery. And it really doesn't stick: I can cook eggs on it, no problem.

I rarely need water for cleaning and never use soap. I put in a couple tablespoons of cheap salt, a dab of cooking oil, and use a paper towel to work it around. The salt acts as a nifty abrasive. Water comes in handy if we've cooked something with sugar in the sauce: it helps get the sticky out. And if something has stuck to it, I just hit it with the metal spatula to scrape it clean.

As you can see, our pan is not afraid of metal utensils. The only thing I worry about with our cast iron ware is breaking our cheap stove under the weight of it. This will be one more of those things that our kids fight over when we're gone. The $150 pan will probably be given away.

This cast iron pan is the epitome of low tech perfection. One single piece of cast iron. Unbreakable, unbeatable, beautiful.

Bicycles

I remember attending a fundraiser for a Christian organization that was involved with micro-financing in an African nation. At the beginning of the evening, a missionary presented slides of life in this unquestionably poor nation. But as she showed pictures of the locals riding bicycles between home and work, making the point to the fairly wealthy audience that bicycles were their only form of travel, I detected more than a hint of standards projection - the assumption that these Africans were somehow not at an acceptable standard of living because they couldn't afford cars, or at best that they were to be pitied because they had to ride bicycles everywhere. What? I personally prefer my bicycle to a car. Sure a car is sometimes very helpful, and my family has one (in an area where many families have more than two). But there are so many reasons why I prefer bikes. I'm not so stupid as to imagine that the poor prefer poverty, but to look down on a culture that runs on bicycle power is to mistake simple and cheap for destitute. Wrong. Poverty sucks. Bikes do not. Not having a choice sucks, but cars are not the best choice most of the time. A "car in every garage" will not be the sign that this African nation has a sustainable economy. When everyone in the society can care for themselves and their families, and pass on the blessing to others, then the society will be healthy. I assume bikes will continue to be the primary form of transportation in many a developing economy.

I love bikes because they are supremely efficient machines and even the most expensive, highest tech bike is low-tech compared to where the big money goes. And no matter how much carbon-fiber they contain, they still have the lowest carbon-footprint of any serious transportation. All it takes for me to fuel up for a ride is to eat yummy food. I do not emit any toxic fumes when on my bicycle, and, just for the sake of argument, if I ever did you'd be glad I was on a bike rather than sitting in a car. When I ride, I burn calories, help my heart, and clear my head at the beginning and end of every work day.

Cars ... can go faster and farther and carry more stuff. No argument there. But if the existence of the automobile makes us more able to shop farther away, and makes developers more bold about building big-box destination stores, which can sell stuff cheaper, which in turns drives smaller local shops out of business, which in turn, makes it necessary for us to have a car so that we can shop farther away ... then, I have a problem with cars. And this is not to mention all the problems our planet has (local and global) from the noxious by-products of automobiles.

I ride everywhere, but it isn't always easy. Suburban city planning caters to the automobile. It is inconvenient to commute and shop by bicycle - stuff is just so spread out. And bicycling is often dangerous. I taught my children that when riding on city streets, they should "ride like prey"; imagining that every car was a potential bike killer. It's not just theory with me. I'm constantly having near misses, and two years ago, I was hit by a UPS truck one late autumn night. Even though I had blinky lights all over me, I simply was not the car she was looking for as she pulled out of a driveway onto El Camino. I was a bit shakey when I started riding again, but I still ride.

The bike above was built from recycled junk parts and is one of several I have (click on it for a bigger view). I also have a fairly inexpensive folding bike for travel. I have a mountain bike I bought while working at REI. I have a road bike that was given to me. But the bike above is my pride and joy: I should probably give it a name. I built it from a rusty, beat up Nishiki Colorado mountain bike frame. I took a year collecting parts for cheap and free. I ended up spending about a hundred dollars on new parts and Rust-Oleum. The bike has one single speed and a coaster brake. It needs nothing more for the flatlands on the San Francisco Peninsula, but I've ridden it up into the hills and even off road. I think it says "bicycle" more than any of the others currently cluttering my porch. Until I think of a proper name for it, I call it my "Two Wheeler" because it looks and feels like the first "real" bicycle you get when you graduate from a tricycle.

The Two Wheeler scorns the arms race to add more gears (road bikes now can have 30), to find the strongest brake technology (side pull -> cantilever -> linear pull -> hydraulics -> disc), to build frames out of more and more exotic materials (steel -> aluminum -> titanium -> carbon fiber), or to shave ounces off so that you can win races. There are precious few bicycle companies out there that don't join the arms race. You will not see their bikes in your local bike shop, but you can find them if you want to. The Two Wheeler is strong and light enough with an alloy steel frame and inexpensive aluminum mountain-bike wheels. The coaster brake requires a hundredth of the maintenance of any of the above brake technologies, stops the bike on a dime, and is insanely durable.

And did you notice that saddle? That's a genuine brooks B-67 made with the same cow parts that equestrian saddles are made from. The saddle is really the heart of the bike. Comfy, springy, and learning the shape of my rear end like no foam-filled, gel-injected, scientifically-designed bike saddle ever could. Furthermore, when the foam in a normal saddle starts to break down, it's a goner; when my leather starts to stretch out a little too much, I'll just tighten the nut in the front 1/4 turn, stretching the leather tight again. It takes a while to break in, but so did the leather boots I wear when I'm backpacking. It's worth it. This saddle will be in my will, and since my legacy will probably be on the light side, this bike seat will probably be the one thing my kids fight over when I'm gone.

My friend Paul saw this bike for the first time the other day and said, "It looks like an old Mercedes." That's also the way it rides. I've already helped one teenager in my church build his own Two Wheeler from a junk bike after he fell in love with mine. I have another friend searching for a frame right now for his new bike that we will build. The Two Wheeler inspires like other bikes can't.

Bottom line: the bike cost me a hundred times less than the cheapest new car (and still a whole lot less than any new bike), is a true hybrid drive (runs on coffee, meat, toast, beer, etc), and provides a long list of health and well-being benefits that even insurance companies can't deny. All I have to do is watch out for UPS trucks.

Puzzles

My wife grew up doing puzzles with her family. I didn't quite understand the appeal until I got a look at the puzzles they did. They came in Gold colored boxes, without pictures to guide you, and were cut from 1/4 inch plywood. The pictures themselves were interesting, full of detail, and some of the shapes were cut to resemble iconic toys: rifle ... ballerina ... boat. Puzzles are very low key, non-competitive, and interesting. Anyone can walk by and spend a few minutes poking around looking for a piece to fit. Amazingly, our 15 year old and our 12 year old each sit at the puzzle table with us at the end of the day. We blast music and lean on each other. As family entertainment, this is low-tech gold.

We've bought puzzles over the years, when we could find ones that had some visual complexity, and the first thing we do, is throw away the picture. (It's surprising that most puzzles are of scenes with very little detail. How do you assemble a puzzle of a sunset scene, when most of it is sky and water?) We don't do a lot of board games together: it's hard to agree on one we all like, and sometimes the competition is hard on the family unit.

This year we found a puzzle made by Masterpiece Puzzlesfrom a picture of San Francisco by Eric Dowdle. After looking at the picture on the box long enough to determine that it was sufficiently complicated, we tore off the picture and chucked it. Oh, man, was this puzzle hard. We've been working on it, on and off, for two weeks.

It's a picture that, by itself, does not appeal to me--you see pictures like this in tourist shops in big cities. But in a puzzle, pictures like this, packed as they are with funny and quaint details are engrossing and entertaining.

In the picture below, you can see the 1000 piece puzzle under construction in my living room, along with a couple essential tools: hot tea to calm down the puzzle masters, and a spatula for moving little groups of assembled pieces without them falling apart. My wife keeps mumbling that her father would NOT approve of the spatula. I thought it was pretty smart.

It's even more detailed than it looks in this picture. Every building has distinctive window patterns, and they are crammed together in the work in such a way that it's really hard to understand how it all fits together until you see it done. Fun!

[Update. I found a company selling expensive wooden puzzles: they look beautiful and fun in the way I remember my in-law's puzzles, full of custom-cut pieces and interesting pictures. Stave Puzzles]


Here's the San Francisco puzzle for sale on Amazon (though if you have an independent local toy shop that you'd like to stay in business, call them first, please):

General's Semi-Hex 498 2 2/4 ... Reasons Why #1

An attempt to begin to explain why these things matter to me. I'll call it Reasons Why #1 because I know I won't get it right the first time, but I'm content to try.

I like technology. I've lived and worked among Technical People my whole life, and it would confound my friends if I called myself anti-tech. I love computers as tools, and do much of my work in front of a screen. I am not a hacker, but I am a "tweaker": I never learned how to work on cars, and maybe for that reason, I have taken to getting under the hoods of my computers. I have built and rebuilt computers and messed with operating systems. I was putting Linux on laptops in 1999, and have even squeezed Linux onto various Macs over the years. I taught myself how to run Linux from the command line (which is harder because there are, like, no pictures).

I went to Crystal Springs Uplands school in Hillsborough, California and graduated in 1984, the year of the Macintosh. Apple's John Sculley had a daughter at the school (a year or two younger than us) - I went to his house once with my friend who was dating his daughter and saw his computer room (among the early Apples, he had a Lisa, rocking a 5MHz processor and 1 meg of ram), and I assume it was he who donated a bunch of Apple IIs to our school. One of my classmates wrote the original Music Construction Set on one of those apples. My dad also got one for the family. I taught myself basic programming on that Apple II and even wrote a small text adventure game (I was inspired by the old Infocom game Zork, which you can now play online, still in glorious text). All this, I believe, gives me what my friends would call Geek Cred. ...



But then there are the pencils. I have a mild obsession with pencils, especially the General Pencil Semi-Hex 498 2 2/4. Mmm, ceder. Some years ago, I needed a pencil to mark up a book I was reading for seminary, and went looking for one. I did not find one pencil. I found fourteen scattered through the house. I would have stopped at one, but my curiosity was piqued to see all the different brands and styles that we'd accumulated. I decided that I couldn't just pick one at random, I would pick the best one. So I sharpened them all and put them to the test. Of course I had to smell each one before writing, just to take note of the "nose" (the winner had that powerful ceder aroma that true pencil aficionados prefer. I think.). After writing with each pencil there were two that stood out. I didn't care for the people's favorite Dixon Ticonderoga, but went with two by the General Pencil company, the last company making pencils in the USA. I liked the "Badger" a lot, but my favorite was the strangely-named "Semi Hex 498 2 2/4". Best pencil I've ever used. It didn't check my affection to learn their factory was nearby in Redwood City. The name describes the shape (Semi Hex refers to the rounded points of the hexagon shape) and includes the model number (498) and the hardness (why 2 2/4 instead of 2.5 or 2 1/2? Who cares? For me it adds to the charm).

Low-tech wonders stand out when compared to their replacements, the products that are manufactured to improve and supplant them. I think of all the ergonomic mechanical pencils and gel-grip disposable pens, none of which impress me or replace my pencil. The pencil has a beautiful simplicity to it, and an efficiency, and 95 percent of it is compostable (versus the landfill that is the fate of plastic writing tools). And there is some mystery to the pencil too. How does rubber (named for it's ability to "rub" pencil marks away) erase the marks of the graphite without causing it to smudge? It's the original word processor, complete with backspace.

My seventh grade science teacher had permanently written on her blackboard, "Even God does her math problems in pencil!" Yet, she found herself living in strange times: the advent of the erasable pen. The question that shook the foundations of Pencilogy? 'Could we use the Eraser Mate to do math problems?' Did God feel that the ability to correct mistakes was the important thing - which would mean that the Eraser Mate might be an acceptable tool - or was God a pencil lover too? Furthermore, did He hate it when I scribbled over my mistakes to hide them, and did that move Him to insist on the correctability of any writing technology ... or was God, like me, enamored of the heady aroma of freshly sharpened wood, the smooth-scratchy graphite marking core, the soft pink eraser waiting to be bitten off? These questions were too weighty for a seventh grader, and for our teacher, who gave up the fight: I remember many smudged and messy assignments written with the erasable pen. The manufacturer said that the easily erased (and so easily smudged) ink would become permanent within days, but by then the damage had been done.

Regular pens left no room for correction. Erasable pens left a gooey, smudgeable mess. Nothing has surpassed pencils for working out the truth on a piece of lined paper, whether mathematical or theological. But what does God think?

I think I know the answer now. I can sniff out a hint of divine terroir lurking in the humble pencil. Is it in seventh grade science that we learn that diamonds and graphite are both made of the same stuff? While the diamond is the hardest mineral known to humanity, and graphite one of the softest, each have the same carbon chemistry. But the real mind-bender is that the more stable and permanent of these two carbon polymorphs is the stuff inside my Semi Hex. Don't believe what DeBeers tells you: graphite is forever. The fact is that all diamonds that have made their way to the surface of the earth are slowly undergoing a transformation into graphite. It's only a matter of time. And so I think I'll risk formulating a (low) tech writer principle. Call it principle #1.

(low) tech writer principle #1: The thing that appears to be the most permanent, the most robust, the most durable, aint necessarily so. Sometimes it is the dull, plentiful, inexpensive thing that wins the day and survives.

Coming to Grips

I am coming to grips with the possibility that I don't trust technology. I don't mean my computer. I mean the impulse to solve problems by subscribing to pre-existing mass-produced solutions. You can find these solutions spit out of molds and assembly-lines and printing presses throughout recent history. Such "solutions" feel soul-numbing to me. I know that sounds harsh, but that's how my soul responds to anything that looks and works the same in any home. It may be fast, convenient, processed food, or a best-selling book about how to solve your Problem, or a piece of furniture that makes everyone within 10 miles of Ikea feel like the exact same unique and interesting individual. I don't want to make grand, sweeping generalizations, but in general when you set out to make a profit, you have to resort to technology to increase your productivity. When you set out to make something beautiful, you have to avoid technology (and by that I mean, "someone elses technique"), because it will stifle your creativity. I know it's not black and white. But I'm not here to argue for high-tech, am I?

I want to catalog the beautiful things I find, the low-tech successes and survivors, the things that make you feel kinda funny in your tummy when you see them, like you "wish you could have one".


Years ago, when I told people I worked in the tech industry as a writer, they invariably asked if I was a "Tech Writer". I would say, "No, I write everything else," by which I meant the business documents and the marketing materials, which was a kind of tech writing, but not in the way people meant (tech writers usually wrote manuals and other documentation). When I got my first full-time writing job, my card said, "Content Producer", which of course meant I filled the Web sites and other marketing pieces with content, but my friend Greg took a look at that and purposely mispronounced it "conTENT producer" which happened to be a good description of me at the time. I was content. I love writing. But it also didn't take long for me to tire of writing about the tech solution that we were working on, and want to write about things with more meaning.

I am not anti-tech. I know that computers are solving important problems in the world (but note with interest that the most impressive efforts in this regard are the low-cost, simple, durable computers that are being made for widespread distribution in developing nations). I myself like computers and the associated tools. I like the computer I am writing on, and do not intend to bite the hand that allows me to publish these words so easily. But I do NOT want to write about such things. There is no shortage of words written about tech. Here in Silicon Valley (and in the Silicon Alleys and all the other places that aspire to cutting edge technological distinction), it's important to pay attention to the low tech things that survive ... these artifacts haven't been rendered obsolete because they serve humanity just fine, even if they are not superstars of progress. It's important because they are worth honoring, and get so little attention in this economy.

And so today I am a writer of a kind further from what "they" meant - a low tech writer, in search of things less technological, less programmable, less homogenous. And when I find them, I'll write about them on the Internets. :)