When I was very young I found an old telephone my mother had kept from her childhood. Then I found a screwdriver and took the phone apart. It would be nice to say that this was the beginning of a lifelong talent for working with machines, but it was not. Once I was done I had a room full of mysterious small parts and no idea how to put them back together. I remember my mother being very angry. I still have a tendency to take things apart too quickly, not paying attention to how they might go back together. Some old habits are hard to break.
I have come to see that fixing things, like learning to use a gun, is most often passed down from father to son – or, in these more inclusive days, from parent to child. I am proud that daughter Sophia is pretty handy with a cordless drill and has built her own bookcases for her Brooklyn apartment. My father always had an adversarial relationship with tool and machines. His assumption was that a machine was going to break down, so why bother to do anything for or to it. His machines responded to that sort of neglect by frequently breaking down, which fulfilled his expectations. I remember my Grandfather Russell once telling me a story about trying to work on an old Model A Ford with my father when he (my father) was about 16. They had just gotten started when a carload of school chums drove up on their way to the beach. My grandfather finished the job by himself.
My father’s antipathy to the way machines worked was exacerbated by his experience teaching math to middle-schoolers, early in his working life. Mathematics is abstract, whereas the real world is not. A mathematical line has no thickness, but when you draw a line on a board and cut it with a saw, it makes a lot of difference where the saw goes. A saw kerf (a word I am positive my father never knew) is 1/8 of an inch. If you cut one board on the right side of the line and the next one on the left side, you will have one board that is ¼” shorter than the other one. Another childhood memory is of my father raging in the garage that his boards would NOT come out the same length.
So when, as a teenager, I began to have conscious confrontations with machines, my father was no help. By that time his fatalism that all machines – but particularly automobiles – were conspiring against him to break down at the most inconvenient times was so deep-seated as to be a basic part of his nature. It did not help things much that at that point in our lives we came into ownership of a Volkswagon truck. Along with the VW bus, the truck was just about the stupidest vehicle ever to be introduced to America. However fitting it was in German cities where the maximum speed might have been 20 mph, it was a disaster on US roads and highways. It was underpowered to start with, and the extra gearing in the rear wheels to raise it up caused the engine to run at about 10% higher rpm than the bug engine. I know this stuff because our VWs broke down all the time and I had to learn how to fix them.
My father was no help here, so I bought John Muir’s old hippie manual about VWs and began to take ours apart. Unlike my mother’s old telephone, I could not simply leave them in pieces, and I could not finish a job and have pieces left over. When that happened, I learned to go back and find where I might have skipped a step. It was a slow and painful process, with more than a few mistakes.
So who is Jim Jarskey? Jim is a sort of jack-of-all-trades guy in Washtenaw County, in southeast Michigan. We met him when we bought a piece of property there and needed to improve it. This was nearly 30 years ago. We first hired him to do excavations to find a suitable place for a septic field. That expanded to general grading and excavating for various things, and we ended up becoming friends. (The friendship was helped along by the fact that we were always good for a check on our balance owed when Jim needed to pay some of his other bills.) When I had time, I would stop by Jim’s shop to shoot the breeze and watch him do whatever it was he was doing. He had a huge metal building, full to overflowing with dumptrucks that didn’t quite run, trackhoes that were missing tracks, backhoes with busted hydraulic lines and other detritus of the industrial age most of us would rather not think about at all, let alone admit that our lives are to a large part dependent on those machines and the people who keep them going. Jim bought old worn-out equipment, fixed it up and sold it as a sideline to his excavating business. He was secure in the knowledge that there was not a machine in the world that he could not take apart and fix and put back together so that it worked better than it did when he started. He never took me under his wing and taught me things directly, but after a couple of years of being around Jim, some small amount of that certainty rubbed off, and now, when I confront my own fractious farm equipment I have an alternative to loading it up and taking it down the road to the dealer. And every time I find myself surrounded by the myriad parts of a diesel engine or have to root around in the transfer case of a hay baler, Jim Jarskey comes to mind; not because I know what I am doing, but because I know there are guys like him who DO know what to do.