Another Kind of Education

Just as I never would have guessed that I’d spend my first morning as a Harvard grad push-mowing my parents’ lawn, I would not have predicted that I’d learn about constructing machinery sheds, rebuilding airplanes, or planting raspberry bushes in my first (quasi) job after college. But here I am, on an endless search to pick up assorted skills that float my way.

For all that a liberal arts education purports to develop a well-rounded intellect, character, mind, and so forth, it—or at least mine—somehow neglected crucial topics like: arranging jars, retying curtains, and positioning fruit for interior photo shoots, inspecting the health of wheat plants while attempting to limit the quantity of dust coating you and your camera, translating labels and promotional material for jams made from obscure Chilean berries, figuring out the surprisingly complicated seat-belt apparatus of a small plane, drying clothes (at least a little) with neither a dryer nor sun, and baking bread in a wood-fired oven whose thermometer refuses to read anything higher than 80°C.

I have to admit: when faced with some of these assignments, my first thought might have been—Well, I certainly was not trained for this! Although I’d like to consider myself on the artistic side of the spectrum, styling for interior design photography did not strike me as an obvious application of the study of American history & literature. Nor did I feel myself to have any particular expertise on whether the glass jars carefully-casually positioned on the counter should go oats-lentils-black beans-flour or lentils-flour-oats-black beans.

(Explanation interlude: Doug is creating a photo book on the architecture/ design of Pumalin; two photographer friends came for a week to document the kitchens, living rooms, and cozy nooks of various houses in various areas of the park; I trotted along as tripod-carrier, vase-mover, and pillow-plumpener. Side note on photo: the whisky bottle is actually a soy-sauce/ water concoction; why its presence was desired, I have not yet figured out.)

Yes despite the initial pangs of cluelessness that I’ve felt time after time here, I’m realizing how much I appreciate both the variety and practicality of the tasks on which I’ve been set to work. Chances are, I will never in my life have a kitchen worthy of an interior design magazine; nonetheless, there is something satisfying about realizing that certain ways to arrange simple objects do look more pleasing than others. Even if I never eat a grosella berry, I think I’ve learned something about the marketing mindset through attempting to transform a literal translation that reads “a slippery, gelatinous green jam with a sour taste and strange odor” into something vaguely more palatable.

Getting my feet wet with these miscellaneous tasks has the larger benefit of exposing me to the on-the-ground WORK that gets done here—plenty of people have written plenty of sophisticated essays about the need to revive local economies, but many fewer actually take the time, and the risk, to build, say, a honey-processing facility in rural southern Chile. Any good environmentalist knows that the extinction crisis rivals climate change as a serious threat to the planet’s health, but almost no one executes the knitty-gritty steps required to re-introduce extirpated species, down to the last details such as building a simulated mother-anteater from clay and fur for orphan babies or climbing trees deep in the temperate rainforest to hunt out native seeds.

Thus far, most of my education has judged a person’s legacy through the writing they leave behind. Studying literature makes this bias more dramatic, but nonetheless, across a range of disciplines, the emphasis tends to be (at least from what I’ve seen) on papers published, bills passed, theories proven. Certainly, text lasts long than a well-ordered farm or a revitalized tree-species, and speaks louder than an undeveloped bit of swamp. Yet studying the environment becomes somewhat flaky if talk gets too far divorced from actual land-transforming action. If the real measure of an ideology is its effect on the land community, well, then you’ve got to see it put into play on real land.

Of course, some of the hands-on work I’ve been doing here seem far removed from saving the planet—one might wonder: how do kitchen interiors connect to biodiversity? I could draw the line out between appreciation for beauty and order at home to respect for biological integrity in nature, but I think an equally important connection is that between the getting-it-done-ness that all these projects require…

…And here I am writing about this. I do see the irony there, but, so it goes.