Against the Wind

"Against the wind
We were runnin' against the wind
We were young and strong, we were runnin'
Against the wind" - Bob Seger

I used to hunt in the Everglades back in the day with my uncle. From my late 20's to mid 30's, I would spend a week or two a year with a group of older men that were learned in ways that I would never be. I did all of the grunt work around the camp and provided strength for heavy duty details. Even though I was a college graduate, there were few moments spent there that I was not keenly aware that I was ignorant and unlearned in what was necessary to "hunt" in a place that was a full swamp buggy day's ride from the big road.

My uncle was born in 1910 in Plant City. He lived through the depression. He was a miser. No light bulb in his house was over 40 watts. An electric bill of $40.00 or more was rare. He was uncomfortable with my big house, fancy cars and trucks and boats and all of the things that I had. When he died, he had stacks of Treasury bonds that shocked everyone that knew how he lived.

He was a genius in his own right. He made almost anything he wanted to make with wood or metal. He could weld the break of day or the crack of dawn. He crafted tools that others paid a lot of money for. He would crack a 5 lb bag of pecans in minutes by jacking up the rear wheel of his truck, place a contraption he had made that had a chute and "cracking pad" under the wheel, position the height of the wheel just so, put the transmission in gear and voila - cracked pecans faster than you could imagine. The complete hunting camp buildings were constructed in his back yard, marked, broken down and painstakingly taken to the Everglades and reconstructed in the swamp over a period of years.

I don't think he made it past the 6th grade in school.

What he wanted to learn and what he did learn was not in school. He could figure in a heart beat the volume flow difference of a tank that had a larger incoming valve than an outgoing valve and how to set them to be close to equal.

He learned what he did because he wanted to. While all of the teaching professionals and all of the private industry people and all of the politicians and all of the unions and every entity that wants to control education are fighting for control of the classroom because they each know best independently of each other, it may not be surprising that students and parents are left to their own.