The Old Guy
On Friday I rode the Standing Rock transit bus up to Bismarck. Five dollars for a one way ride is an incredible value. The bus stopped in the worn remnants of the once and still town of Fort Rice. Fort Rice is a town that rests on the earth like a Roman ruin, streets and the scattered remnants of buildings suggesting a more salubrious past. It is also the kind of town where zoning is left to the whims of each and every landowner. How else can one have a threshing machine and several train boxcars in their side yard? As we pulled up to this very house, I marveled at the flotsam and jetsam of American industrial and agricultural detrius. I had a notion to ask if he had any old two row planters or one row potato diggers out back, since I am looking for one of each.
As we stopped, a man who looked just like the stuff in his yard, worn and tough as iron, scraggly beard and the wizened look of a mechanical philosopher schooled in the university of experience. He made me think of the sages of machine wisdom that I sought after in my youth. Old founts of knowledge about the mysteries of long dead machines like Sigbert Haugen and Odin Rud taught me many things that didn't come from books.
When he sat down, he started talking and didn't stop until we reached Mandan. He spoke with an expletive spiced, colloqual accent that was as difficult to understand as some of the stronger flavors of British, Australian or south asian Indian English. I listened intently like a student in school waiting to access an encyclopedia of experience.from a man who had worked in the business of destroying things at the end of their life. He talked of bridges, buildings and even water towers he had dismantled, his very life written bold by the landscapes he had cleared. As we drove, he reminisced about passing places and the people and events he had known. Here was a man, that given the the chance, would teach me the history of the past two thirds of a century as his interaction with deconstrucing that which had once been constructed. As he got off the bus and we headed off to our next destination, I wished there had been more time to sit and mine this deep well of experience.
As we stopped, a man who looked just like the stuff in his yard, worn and tough as iron, scraggly beard and the wizened look of a mechanical philosopher schooled in the university of experience. He made me think of the sages of machine wisdom that I sought after in my youth. Old founts of knowledge about the mysteries of long dead machines like Sigbert Haugen and Odin Rud taught me many things that didn't come from books.
When he sat down, he started talking and didn't stop until we reached Mandan. He spoke with an expletive spiced, colloqual accent that was as difficult to understand as some of the stronger flavors of British, Australian or south asian Indian English. I listened intently like a student in school waiting to access an encyclopedia of experience.from a man who had worked in the business of destroying things at the end of their life. He talked of bridges, buildings and even water towers he had dismantled, his very life written bold by the landscapes he had cleared. As we drove, he reminisced about passing places and the people and events he had known. Here was a man, that given the the chance, would teach me the history of the past two thirds of a century as his interaction with deconstrucing that which had once been constructed. As he got off the bus and we headed off to our next destination, I wished there had been more time to sit and mine this deep well of experience.
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