As human beings, creatures of nature, we moved from our earliest conditions, of stone-hurling cultures, toward instrument makers, a more distant activity from that for which we were “designed.”
As we distanced ourselves from those early primative conditions, we moved further into various levels of artificiality, perhaps in everything we do today.
I had the opportunity to spend a few hours in the “country” this past week. It was quiet and we felt relatively isolated. We dug into our prepared lunch as we sat viewing this very small lake from inside a gas-heat cottage.
Perhaps a hundred yards away, were two men, one close to being "elderly "and the other perhaps his son. Both were there ice fishing. In itself, ice fishing is a rather primative method of gathering food in the winter time.
They had driven their car onto the ice and they had a gasoline-powered auger that they used to drill holes in the ice. I could count at least 12 holes that they had made in a circle. They didn't seem to sit more than five minutes at each hole as they moved from one to the other.
Then suddenly the younger one picked up the auger and began making a wider circle of holes. He made at least another 20 holes. I wondered at the theory of the increased number of holes, for they were only using a few as fishing holes.
I found it interesting that two people could engage in what appeared to be isolated meaningful outdoor activity, away from the city. I didn't see they got any fish. I would say that they spent less than 10% of their time fishing and most of their time walking to and from the car and drilling holes.
I thought of the relative isolation of this place and the artificiality of the city. But most of all, it seemed that a remaining outdoor food gathering activity, had in practice now, become a mechanized sort of game.
It was the acting out of a play rather than a necessity of survival, more or less a game. This was of course apparent, with the gasoline-powered automobile and the gasoline-powered auger as central elements in a sort of non-urban outdoor artificiality. Ice fishing, a dead culture acted out within our dying-out gasoline-powered culture.
