Going it Alone Isn’t What it Used to Be

A blizzard is a fine refresher course in self-reliance. When the sky is raging with apocalyptic snow and the governor announces that it’s illegal to drive, the sensible citizen says, “Hm, maybe I should stay in today.”

Case in point, the recent historic snowstorms, which shut in the Olshans for about ten days.

As I mentioned in a previous column, we were prepared. Thanks to advance warning from the National Weather Service, we’d laid in supplies of food and drink. There were fresh batteries for the flashlights, and plenty of candles and matches, too. Dog food? Check. Hand-cranked radio? Check. AK-47s, in case of a complete breakdown of law and order? Doh!

If a fallen branch took out our land line, we were ready with fully charged cell phones. If those failed, we had Shana’s Blackberry from work.

Our oil tank was full. Our sump pump was in fine fettle. The old all-wheel-drive Subaru was gassed up and ready to go.

If we lost electricity, we were ready to use the great outdoors as a refrigerator. Our gas stove would work without electricity. No worries about the municipal water supply, either. Our furnace, on the other hand, wouldn’t work without electricity. But we had a fireplace and a decent supply of firewood.

When the storm hit, we settled in and became spectators. Between the internet and cable television, we had minute-by-minute updates on the storm; hourly forecasts, including on-demand radar imagery (both local and national); and a steady stream of folksy chatter from the local news stations, if we cared to tune in, all of which could have been summarized in a single sentence: “Wow, this is a really big storm!”

As it turned out, we never lost phone, cable, or power, not even for a few minutes, a minor miracle wrought by thousands of anonymous utility employees. We cooked a lot. Much more than usual, in fact. We watched movies. We read. We rubbed the basset hound.

We laughed at the basset hound’s reaction to snow that was five times deeper than her stubby little legs.

We shoveled.

And shoveled and shoveled.

We met some new neighbors. We helped strangers get their cars unstuck.

We sent emails full of mock — and real — outrage about the weather.

Shana’s work was closed. Nina’s school was closed. But my writing desk was open for business. I worked, but instead of the usual solitary slog, my days meandered happily from isolation in my little office to the boisterous scene wherever the Ladies happened to be.

We ate snacks together. We peered out the windows together. We mocked the vapid newscasts, which showcased empty streets and harried snow plow drivers.

Even if the mockery was well deserved, the newscasts did convey a sense of community. Everyone was completely socked in. No one was going anywhere. We were all in this storm together.

What were supposed to be days of self-reliance turned out to be the most social of the year.

Henry David Thoreau, the American patron saint of self-reliance, would have been appalled. Perhaps you remember his experiment, chronicled in the classic transcendentalist tract, Walden, of buggering off to a cabin in the woods near Concord, Massachusetts, and living off the land.

Simplify, simplify, Thoreau urged. The goal, as he put it, was “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Thoreau’s revolt was against the workaday world, the tyranny of government, the pettiness of the bourgeois mind. With the work of his hands, with a tiny profit from his bean rows, and with the eternal words of the poet Homer at his elbow, he planned to reinvent the whole notion of “economy,” sowing seeds of liberty along the way.

Thoreau was a great writer, one of America’s greatest, in my opinion. His work and life are pole stars in American culture, and have inspired popular movements from environmentalism to Libertarianism.

But let’s not forget a few simple facts about Mr. Thoreau. That lovely piece of land he celebrates in Walden was owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. As John Updike puts it, in his excellent introduction to the 150^th Anniversary Edition of Walden, “Not everyone is offered free land to squat on for a personal experiment…”

Thoreau resented the soul-killing world of work that led the men of nearby Concord to “lead lives of quiet desperation.” But, as Updike puts it, “His retreat to the cabin was a luxury financed by the surplus that an interwoven, slave-driving economy generated.”

In other words, self-reliance, even the glamorous, uber-American version proclaimed by Messrs. Emerson and Thoreau, is a philosophical ideal and a watchword for living, but not a terribly practical one. The phrase is often wielded as a criticism of anyone who believes that people actually depend on each other. In modern times, when we’re hunkered down in the heart of a blizzard, even if we’ve done everything in our power to prepare, that dependence is clearer than ever.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 25 Feb 2010
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com