The Natural World
I just finished reading a very long article in National Geographic that caught my eye, then caught my fancy and finally ensnared my right-side brain’s imaginative component. I am a big title person when it comes to storytelling and this article had a very descriptive, but really unimaginative title. It rambled on about going inside the “factory of the world” (that would be China), and finding that there are still corners that are handmade and untouched by machines. I’m actually surprised I bothered to read it since there is something obvious and mundane about a piece that wants to tell you that artisanal tendencies flourish best during moments of mass production. I think what hooked me was the buried lead that this was written by a guy who purposefully spent ten years (that is a very long time by anyone’s standards) walking thousands of miles around the world, taking his time to “smell the roses” that surround the paths that he chooses. Just this year, a new world record for circumnavigating the globe on foot was set at 621 days of running 16,300 miles. That compares to the author’s journey of 12,000 miles in approximately 3,500 days. While I can understand a person wanting to set a record for running around the world, I have much harder time understanding what motivates someone to wander the world on far less direct paths just to see what he can see. That seems too casual to me and somewhat lacking in purpose. It probably says more about me than it does about him that this leaves me scratching my head enough to read his whole story, all the while trying to figure out what this guy was up to.
The trek taken was somewhat consistent with the path of what is called the Burma Road. The Burma Road was a hand-built road of crushed and compressed gravel, 717 miles long that wound its way from Burma (today’s Myanmar) well into the Yunnan Province of China. It was built in 1937 in response to a need to supply China in its war of oppression against the Japanese. It always struck me as impressive that little Japan could take on massive China, not once, but two times in the span of fifty years. All the more impressive was that China had the backing of Russia, the U.S., Great Britain, and even, for a while Nazi Germany, and still little Japan kept coming. When the Yunnan country folk shouldered their hand tools to build this almost unimaginable road over the Himalayan Mountains, they brought real meaning to one of my favorite quips, “Come in Rangoon”, usually said in jest about the faultiness of early telecommunications. The author walked some of the Burma Road and came away with a feeling of awe in the things that man makes by hand versus the fleeting and relatively flimsy things made by machines, like paved roads.
Perhaps the reason this article arrested my thought process this morning is because yesterday Kim and I took my daughter’s family to Balboa Park in San Diego to see the San Diego Model Railroad Museum. We had never been before even though Balboa Park is a place that has often drawn our attention by virtue of its historic beauty and tranquility. Everyone likes trains and I understand the fascination with model railroading even though I am not drawn to the activity myself. Making things in miniature and agonizing over the details is probably a rewarding activity for hobbyists. But it was less the miniature mania that caught my attention yesterday and more about what I learned of the railroading history of Southern California that made me stop and think. First there was the recreation of the Tehachapi Loop, a track system through Tehachapi Pass. The Tehachapi Mountains are the range of the Transverse Range system that separates the San Joaquin Valley to the north from the Mojave Desert to the south. We tend not to think of Southern California as mountainous compared to places like Yosemite, the Sierras and the Donner Pass up by Reno and Lake Tahoe, but Southern California has plenty of meaningful mountain ranges all over the place.
And while the Tehachapi Loop (built in 1876) seems like an interesting case of man overcoming nature using his geometrical prowess to trump elevation in a confined space, there was an even more interesting patch of track I discovered at the San Diego Model Railroad Museum. It was the San Diego and Arizona Eastern Railway that spans 146.4 miles and was called “The Impossible Railroad” because of the engineering difficulties of crossing mountainous deserts that separate California from Mexico and Arizona. It was only on the third try in the1930’s (more or less the same time the men of Yunnan were breaking their backs on the Burma Road) that a scion of San Diego commerce, John D. Spreckels (who also built the Hotel Del Coronado), muscled his way into completing this treacherous and winding rail line to connect San Diego to the eastern rail lines coming through Arizona. Before going to the museum and seeing all the redwood trestles and multiple tunnel layouts, I had no idea that San Diego was so isolated from the East by anything more than a lonely stretch of the Mojave and Anza Borego deserts.
I am very intrigued by the integration of ideas and the confluence of thoughts. Since I doubt the peasants of Yunnan and John D. Spreckels consciously pursued their goals with an integrative eye, I’m more inclined to think of it as a random confluence. If you’re thinking there were Chinese track workers on the San Diego and Arizona Eastern Railway you would be mostly wrong. Those workers were almost exclusively focused on the Central Pacific Railroad laying track from Sacramento across the widest part of Nevada to Promontory, Utah, that lonely Golden Spike spot north of the Great Salt Lake. The San Diego and Arizona Eastern Railway was mostly manned by Native Americans, resettled southern African American workers miscellaneous white laborers who were coming up dry from their prospecting efforts in the Mojave Desert. The common element with The Burma Road is that these works of infrastructure were mostly done by hand and minimal technology by today’s standards.
I don’t really know how to feel about the notion that the artisanal is better than the manufactured. I know I prefer all-cotton t-shirts to the new moisture-wicking synthetic t-shirts. But I am sitting here in my house that is mostly floored by luxury vinyl flooring rather than hardwood or natural stone tile. The argument the author poses is that there are still many Chinese who live the simple life in the country and even some who have chosen to move to Dali and become what are being called “Dalifornians” in search of a simpler more peaceful existence than that available in one of China’s high-tech urban centers. I really am conflicted because I love nature and technology equally. I’m more inclined to optimistically think technology like AI will make life better rather than more hazardous, I like the connectivity of cell phones and iPads even if I do admonish Kim regularly to stay in the moment rather than with her face in her iPhone.
It seems to me that there is room in our modern world for both the technological and manufactured as well as the handmade and artisanal. I know that living in nature only works for me if I can sleep in the comfort of air conditioning. To me the most appealing design involves the blend of the antique and the contemporary. I love antiquities, but I like them set in a brushed steel and glass curio table. It does not surprise me to learn that there are people in China that are still more bound to the simple handmade things of life. It is more surprising when I hear of one who refuses to get an email or use the internet. I do not want to live in the metaverse, but the hermit’s unconnected life appeals even less. To me there is as much beauty in finely machined or fabricated items as those which are bespoke and created more organically. I do not plan to walk the world for ten years, or even for 717 miles, but I am willing to spend a few hours at a place like the San Diego Model Railroad Museum, where I can cover 146.4 miles of track in a few minutes. Knowing the natural world is out there feels like enough for me.