The Ape and the Machine

A while back, my phone stopped charging.  I was on a road trip with family, and though the phone was plugged into a 12V to USB connector, it just wasn't taking a charge.  I'd watch it struggle, the charging graphic flitting on and off as I navved our way home.  It didn't lose charge, but neither could it seem to bump up above 65%.

It's a cheap refurb Samsung, because that's how I roll.  Sure, it was a hundred and seventy five bucks, but it still chugs along nicely at a fraction of the price of new.  Refurbs do that, right up until they don't.

It was, rather obviously, something to do with the connection between the phone and the charger cable, which is the increasingly ubiquitous USB-C.  Either the phone was dying, or my cable had given out.  When I got home, I slotted a USB fast charger into the phone, and that worked like a charm.

So the issue was the cable, or rather, the pluggy bit.  Well, good, I thought.

Cables are cheap, and we dispose of them much as we dispose of things we perceive of has having little value.  This was the same one that had come with the phone when I bought it, so it wasn't exactly built to last.

I could just order another one.  It's what we do.  You don't bother fixing such things.  

Only, looking at it, I found myself wondering what a fix would entail.  Did I really need to add more waste to the world?  Here, an object so complex that for most of human history, creating it would be beyond the ken of even the most skilled artisans or scientists.  It is capable of transferring both power and gigabits of data, carrying as much information in a second as all human writing from our first scratches on cave walls through to the founding of the American republic.  Why dispose of it?  What was most likely wrong with it?  

For the twenty four pins on interior of the two-sided USB-C connector to work, they've got to come into contact with the pins on the receiver.  The connector, being made of inexpensive metal, is entirely capable of deforming over time, loosening to the point at which connections are inconsistent.  That diagnosis exactly matched the nature of the failure.  

So fixing it should be straightforward.  Just apply force.  But how to do so without breaking it?  I have no pliers that are adequately delicate, and the odds of just mashing it into uselessness seemed high.

Then I realized, well, no, I did have what I needed.

I picked up the cable, and delicately placed the connector in between the canines of the right side of my mouth.  I touched the tip with my tongue, feeling the coolness of the metal.  A tongue is a remarkably sensitive organic instrument, really rather excellent at perceiving small things and infinitesimal variations.  

Then I bit down, applying a tiny but slowly increasing amount of force to the center of the connector.  A moment passed, and another, and then my tongue felt the metal give, ever so slightly, the very smallest of movements. 

I held it up and peered at it through my reading glasses.  No visible change.  Good.

When I plugged it into my phone, it worked perfectly.

A win for the higher primate, I suppose.

Ashes to Stay

Every winter for the last several years, I've had to figure out what to do with ashes.

On a night that's below fifty degrees, I'll build a fire, a crackling dance of light and warmth that fills our home with a primal comfort.  We human beings evolved with fire, and evolved to delight in fire, and the place of the hearth in our lives only changed during my parents generation.  After countless millennia, the scent of carbonizing oak or pine or sycamore has been supplanted by the cool glow and flicker of our screens, the soft time of story and quietness around the open flame replaced with the bingbamboom bustle of one thing after another, scrolling ever downward.

It's a loss, it is, because in our frenetic rushing about we are forgetting things.

Like what ash is, and what ash does.

In our disposable age, we assume that when we have used a thing up, it no longer has worth.  We toss aside teratons of plastic nothings.  We crumple wrappers, we plan for obsolescence, we create a wastestream, a Heraclitan torrent of the unvalued and forgotten.

But ash isn't waste.  Ash isn't worthless.  Nothing God makes is waste, even the greyblack remains of the flame.  It only seems so because we now think in shallow, rushing, wasteful ways, flinging ourselves from moment to moment and missing the whole.  

When I clean out my hearth, I do not discard the ashes.  Ashes are precious to a gardener, rich with calcium and carbon and micronutrients.  Ashes are pitchforked into my compost.  Ashes feed my garlic, plumping the bulbs that have been patiently enduring the winter.  Ashes enrich the soil in which my asparagus grows, and a diet of carbon can keep them yielding for decades.  I'm setting three small beds aside for a new plant this year.  I'm eager to experiment with okra, a plant that is remarkably nutritious, easy to seedsave, beautifully ornamental, and will adapt well to our rapidly warming Midatlantic.  

What does okra love?  Okra loveslovesloves wood ash.

To appreciate ash, one must be unhurried about it.  Over patient years, you learn the richness it adds to the earth, come to know the living things that thrive and grow as they take that ash into themselves.  When you smell the cut garlic on your fingers, snap the first spear of asparagus in the spring, or taste the nutty crunch of fried okra?  

You see the value in what the fire has left behind, and that life has reclaimed and made its own.