The Economy and the Need
for a Chain Saw
February 2008
With the economy sinking like a rock, I’ve started thinking about the Great Depression, which started with the market crash of 1929. I had nothing to do with the Crash, because I wasn’t born yet. So don’t try to blame me. I made my entrance at the “bottom” of the Depression, in 1933, when, as I understand it, life had gotten really tough in this country. As far as I could tell, though, my folks hadn’t even noticed we were having a Depression. They had been on the bottom all along.
We had no washing machine, dryer, radio, refrigerator, running water, indoor plumbing or anything else that required electricity, because power lines would not reach our little farm until I was about eight years old, at which time we still couldn’t afford all that stuff anyway. You might think this was an extremely insecure form of existence, but it wasn’t. We could get our fuel for heating and cooking out of our own woodlot or even out of the national forests that surrounded us on almost all sides. My mother canned like crazy all during August and into the fall and my father killed more-or-less-edible wild creatures, so we almost always had something to eat. Some of our neighbors shot and ate what they called “gophers,” but what, I know now, were actually Columbian ground squirrels. Had we known they were squirrels, we might have eaten them, too.
I remember there would be some point each fall when Mom would say something to the effect of. “Well, there, we can survive until next summer.” Then we would settle back and read books and pop corn and make fudge, while the winter winds piled drifts up to our eyes and other places. When summer arrived again, my folks would start preparing for the next winter. It was nice, unless, of course, you were, say, five years old and had to make a trip to the outhouse by yourself on a dark and snowy night, with wolves howling in the mountains.
Actually, I hadn’t paid much attention to the economy, maybe because I didn’t have any money vanishing in The Market. You have to have money in the markets in order to worry about it vanishing. No, what really caught my attention was that a banker friend of mine bought a chainsaw.
That was scary. Even worse, his wife was complicit in the purchase. I could almost see their minds working. “No matter what happens now, at least we’ll be warm!” My friend is a person who knows how to add and subtract and probably even do fractions and long division, so it startled me when he bought a chainsaw. He no doubt has money in the market, and he’s the kind of guy who knows stuff about the economy.
“Maybe we should buy a chainsaw,” I said to my wife, Bun.
“Are you crazy?!” She said, thoughtfully. “No!”
“But if we have a Depression, at least we’d be warm.”
“Who cares if you’re warm if you’ve cut off some major body part with a chainsaw? Or even a minor one!”
“Yeah, but…” I argued.
“No!” She said. “I don’t want to hear anything more about chainsaws!”
“But we could sit around the fireplace in the evening and read books and pop corn and make fudge. At least we’d be warm.”
So far I haven’t been able to get Bun to budge on the chainsaw issue. It did occur to me that I could buy a chainsaw for one of my sons-in-law, and he could cut wood in the national forest for both us and his family.
“What’s a chainsaw?” he said.
So I guess that’s out.