Chinook
by George Hosier II  - May 7, 2008

Ingenuity

Nowadays everything is disposable. That’s really annoying. A guy used to be able to fix his own stuff when it broke without having to buy a new one or pay a computer geek to install a new motherboard that costs more than the original item. They call it modern convenience, but I just call it expensive.

Take a coffeepot for instance. It’s a real basic concept. Get something that holds water. Scoop water out of a puddle down by the creek. Put it on a fire until the mosquito larvae stop wiggling. Then dump it through a filter full of ground up coffee beans… and…Presto! You have coffee. In the old days, if you wanted to get fancy, you might stick a percolator in your coffeepot. Then the boiling water would gurgle up a little tube, spurt into a perforated chamber that held your filter full of grounds, and then drip back down into the coffeepot as fresh, hot coffee for your drinking pleasure.

It was pretty much idiot proof. There weren’t many parts to break unless you burnt the handle off in the campfire, or stepped on your percolator, or you forgot to dump out the old coffee for several weeks until it ate a hole in the side of your aluminum coffeepot. However, in those rare instances, a little old fashioned ingenuity would quickly remedy the situation. You could use a coat hanger wire for a handle or hack off a piece of copper tubing to repair your percolator. In the case of the corrosion, a can of Radiator Stop Leak boiled in your coffeepot for five minutes usually took care of that problem. It also had the added advantage of imbuing all the coffee thereafter brewed in that particular pot a peculiarly robust punch similar to sucking the dregs of a moonshine still.

The other day I picked up one of these newfangled coffeepots from Value Village. It came nestled in some kind of plastic rack that had more lights on it than a Christmas tree. There were buttons and knobs and dials sticking out of it everywhere. It even had a clock on it. Not a real clock with a big hand and a little hand, mind you, but one of them digitized clocks that show red numbers on a little screen.

I asked one of the gals that worked there if the thing was any good. She assured me that it did indeed perk. Well, I wasn’t interested in how perky it was but it seemed to be in one piece and fairly clean, so I brought it home with me. Boy, was that a mistake! I should have trusted my instincts, and left it sitting right there on the shelf beside the Flowbee hair cutting kit. What kind of idiot makes a coffeepot contraption out of plastic, anyway? As soon as I put it on the fire it started wilting. The top of the rack gizmo thingy melted right down into pot of coffee I was brewing and made it look like a lava lamp. It tasted horrible, too--even worse than Stop Leak coffee.

Then you have these modern cars. Am I the only person that remembers the day when you could grab your toolbox and a good socket set and pretty much fix whatever needed fixing? You needed the right parts of course, but those parts fastened on with bolts and nuts, they didn’t plug into USB ports.

Not too long ago, my car was sputtering. It sounded like a carburetor problem. I thought I’d pop the hood, give the idle adjustment screw half-a-dozen turns, beat the air filter against my thigh, and wiggle the choke lever with a pair of Vice-grips. That should have been all that was required to have her purring like a kitten in no time.

Yeah, right! I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy! Can you believe that the stupid car doesn’t even have a carburetor! How are you supposed to run a car without a carburetor? When I called the mechanic to tell him that somebody had stolen my carburetor, he treated me like an idiot. He snickered something about fuel injection and told me I’d better bring it in so he could hook it up to some kind of expensive machine and run a computerized diagnostic scan on it. He was offering a special price that week of only $399.95!

My Dad never would have needed to run a diagnostic scan. He could tell just by listening what was wrong with any vehicle: “That’s your U-joint. Better replace it right away. You have about a hundred and fifty more miles if you’re lucky.” Of course, I never wanted to listen to my Dad. I’d tell him it was just a loose muffler bearing, and keep driving it until 137 miles later I’d find myself sitting along side of the road, scratching my head, wondering why the rear end of my vehicle was propped up in the air by a drive shaft that was imbedded 18 inches into the blacktop.

When I was a kid, one of the things that awed me about my Dad was his ability to fix anything. If it wasn’t fixable, he could improvise something to do the job as well as or better than the original part. If he couldn’t fix it or customize it, he’d make it from scratch. Half of the furniture in our house had been made in Dad’s little shop out back. The other half sported legs or backs or spindles or drawers that had been custom built by Dad’s callused hand.

He would go to auctions and garage sales, and poke around until he came across some dilapidated piece of junk that looked like it should be quarantined and incinerated. Suddenly Dad’s eyes would begin to gleam. We Hosier kids quickly learned that the gleam in Dad’s eyes meant our household was about to acquire another treasure. Perhaps that’s why I always felt so special when my aunts and uncles would talk about events that had happened before I was “a gleam in my Dad’s eye”. A gleam in Dad’s eye meant he was about to produce a masterpiece.

He’d saunter up to the seller, hands shoved nonchalantly into his pockets, and in his most off-handed, “by-the-way” tone inquire whether the owner would be willing to let go of that old chair for a couple of bucks. They’d cut a deal. Dad would hurry home and disappear into his shop with the hideous, broken, warped monstrosity, nearly indistinguishable under 14 badly chipped coats of avocado and dusty rose paint.

We wouldn’t see much of him for several days. Occasionally we would hear sawing or hammering or scraping sounds, coming from his shop. Toward evening he would emerge, with chips of cherry wood or curly maple in his hair, emanating the smell of linseed oil. He’d take time out to eat supper and play a family game of Uncle Wiggily or Booby-Trap with us before we went to bed. The next morning, he would be back out in the shop again.

After about a fortnight or so, it would be time for the unveiling. Solemnly, he would escort Mom and us kids out to the shop. Dramatically, Dad would position us for maximum visual impact. The suspense would build as he turned the light on to reveal...something big and lumpy draped in a canvas drop cloth. The smell of fresh-rubbed linseed oil would be tingling our nostrils, which by now were flaring with excited anticipation. Mom would be rubbing her hands together, and my brother and I would be craning our necks, trying to peek through the folds of the drop cloth.

With the showmanship of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, Dad would grasp the drop cloth, pause for a melodramatic beat, and then whisk the drop cloth away to reveal a beautifully restored...18th century oak ice chest, or a Colonial cane-bottomed spindle-back chair, or an Edwardian armoire wardrobe, or a Shaker rope bed, or a Queen Ann hutch. Dad was partial to antiques.

Then he would bask in our oohs and ahhs. “Is that the same rocking chair you drug home from the pawn shop? Oh, Honey, you are so talented!” “It can’t be, Mom. That one had a missing arm and one rocker was broken.” “Oh, I carved a new arm and rocker out of a scrap of curly maple I happened to have lying around. It was nothing, really.”

I like to think that I have inherited that same plucky Yankee ingenuity. I have found that just about anything can be repaired, rigged or built with a Leatherman, duck tape, drywall screws and poster board. I once improvised all of my gear for a fishing trip, just to see if I could do it.

The canoe was created from several old popcorn tins, duck tape, and a couple of 2x4s. The hip waders came from a pair of old sneakers, a dozen tubes of shoe goop, some trash bags and duck tape. My fly rod was a broken-off car antenna, a handful of rusty split rings, dental floss, duck tape, an old thread spool, coat hanger wire and an empty snuff can. My landing net was an old tennis racket, duck tape and a mesh laundry bag. My sleeping bag came from an old army blanket, a charcoal grill cover, stuffing from a couch I found at a landfill and duck tape. My canteen was an old bleach bottle and duck tape. My mess kit consisted of some Ziploc bags, bread, peanut butter, jelly and duck tape. I even created my own bear repellant spray out of duck tape, a paintball CO2 cylinder and a bottle of “Cajun Jack’s Napalm Sauce”.

For some reason, though, my wife doesn’t seem to have the same appreciation for my creative frugality that my Mother displayed toward my Dad’s work. She keeps nagging me about all the duck tape I buy. She thinks it’s ugly and expensive. She tells me it would be cheaper and more aesthetically pleasing to just buy new stuff when something wears out. Well, if you ask me, a pallet full of duck tape cases in the middle of our living room floor is a small price to pay to keep ingenuity alive. I wonder if my wife has checked out new canoe prices lately.
 

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