View from the North 40: A historical moment should be celebrated

I successfully built and hung a gate this week. It bears pointing out that I conquered my nemesis, the hanging of a gate, by getting the thing hung level and plumb. It swings freely and quietly both to and fro. It looks good doing it. I should be giddy, overjoyed, brimming with pride and other degrees of over-the-moonness, and yet no.

At best I feel a sort of grim satisfaction.

I was raised well before the era of participation ribbons, nobody cared about bolstering our feelings. If we wanted a sense of pride, we’d have to work for it — for years — and any attagirls and attaboys would have to come from a skilled and life-hardened master of the Greatest Generation.

Perhaps, a child born while the Greats were in the process of earning their reputation had survived enough hardship and hard work to qualify as judge of jobs well done — or not.

These generations were masters of their craft, spawned by people who left everything to carve out a life in the New World — or they were the masters who survived and succeeded despite many of those pioneers.

If you followed the lines in their faces, you could trace their lineage back to their prehistoric roots, imagine their ancestors bringing a mastodon to a grisly end, then serving it up for lunch.

Because that’s what they had to do just to survive.

ScienceDaily.com summarized in Dec. 21, 2021, a study by researchers from Tel Aviv University that was published last year in the scientific journal Quaternary Science Reviews, saying that early humans — from Homo erectus 1.5 million years ago to neanderthals to modern humans — hunted the largest animals they could find, like 13-ton elephants that dwarfed our modern elephants.

In fact, the researchers said, each age of early humans hunted the largest species of animals to extinction or to such rarity that the species often didn’t survive. Then, the humans would alter their hunting techniques and weaponry to hunt the next smaller animals. They did this over and over until they realized — about 12,000 years ago — they needed to start ranching and farming to raise enough food for themselves.

The wild cattle they were domesticating weighed up to 3,200 pounds, with horns almost 3 feet long.

I’m assuming it took a pretty stout barricade to keep those animals fenced in and, considering those horns, they probably had specialized handlers. Stout handlers opened and closed gates made, no doubt, of entire trees and the small, quick handlers worked with the cattle. The small, slow ones didn’t live to tell any tales, until someone figured out, about 6,000 years later, horses could be ridden as well as eaten.

My ancestors survived the hardships of life through the millennia, so I could sweat for two days using battery operated hand tools and pre-milled lumber to build a swinging gate small enough that a middle-aged woman could lift it. All this to hold in place horses that I own and throw resources at for no other reason than to have fun. Well, also because they make me happy.

And while we are on the subject of happiness, I will say that I approve of encouragement, often to the point of too much, as a way to aid learning and personal growth. I — with my withered flower growing from a crack in a rock, weak and puny ego that needs propping up even if only from myself — have been known to high-five myself for remembering to turn the air conditioner on before the house gets hot.

Normally, I would have celebrated a job well done, a nemesis conquered. Maybe my response was tempered by the weight of my ancestors and their survivalist DNA being trapped in a descendent who took more than a dozen tries over a span of 20-some years to give herself a better than 50% chance of finally hanging a gate correctly on the first try.

I have to say, though, in the process of writing this column it has occurred to my that it took countless generations of humans — of at least 21 species — almost 2 million years to figure out how to domesticate animals. So if it took me a few decades to become a self-taught gate engineer, maybe I’m doing OK.

Maybe when I’m out there using my perfect gate today I will do a little victory dance.

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The ancestors are just going to have to put up with me because I slay big words for a living not big elephants at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .