Urban Tools Looking for Adventure

by Lauren Bille

Lately I have been thinking about the environments that we live in, and the tools that we need to live in them well.  Adding fuel to my thoughts, on a morning NPR commentary, I overheard that once a tool has been created it never dies, it just gets used differently, by different people, in different places.  Although certain tools are missing, even obsolete in an urban environment, they’re often common in a more rural way of life.  What started as an exploration of rural and urban tools, has quickly become a question of where tradition lives strong in the modern urban world. I needed to do some research to understand how tools and the environment shape our lives.

My first call was to Kylie, the daughter in Spooner and Daughter Farm near Cooperstown, who can’t live without her beaten up Belarus 1974 tractor, collinear hoe, spading fork, and trug tub for planting and harvesting.  I currently never use any of those tools, but then she noted (almost scientifically) that the most important tool she uses is a notebook and pencil to keep track of when, where, and what she has planted. Daily, she tracks the details of which are critical to cultivating the land. Like Kylie, Sam, a fruit, vegetable, and flower farmer from Mendocino Valley, California has his own set of tools.  He never hits the field without his knife and pliers. He depends on both an oscillating and hand hoe, sturdy mud boots, a Rototiller, and watering journal. And my friend Devin, a farmer with experience on urban and rural farms all over the world, says he needs his harvest knife, scuffle hoe, crescent wrench, flat head screwdriver, and pitch fork. Although each of these farmers seem to have similar purposes and daily tasks, they prefer different tools. Many of these tools that have been around for centuries, some for thousands of years.  Less than a hundred miles away from New York farmlands, I rely on an entirely different set of tools. Tools that are seemingly more modern, convenient, and readily adapted to my urban day-to-day.

By distance, I am quite close to farmland.  Yet, far from the territory where anything from the 1974 Belarus to the age old hoe would get me anything more than a parking ticket.  Instead, I rely on my smart phone to keep my life thriving. I rely on this tool not just as my phone, but for text messaging, internet access, photography, games, music, movies, generally keeping my life organized, and yes, it also serves as my virtual paper and pencil. I could write this blog from my smart phone. I currently have a 2010 model and within a month of my purchase, the company put out a faster, more mega-pixeled phone. By next year, there will be more efficient and capable phones and within a few years- mine will be ancient, if it is still working. There is nothing from over 100 years ago that my most important tool resembles.

If all the tools that have ever been created are still being circulated and used, why is it that most of the tools in my own life were invented for a much more modern world?  Is there any ageless tradition in a NYC lifestyle? I only need to venture a few miles, or to other destinations in the world to find a whole new set of tools that define and shape our work, crafts, and lives.