My feet are wet. (I know it’s not your fault; I’m not asking you to fix it. I’m just saying.)
“How did they get wet?” you ask. (I know you didn’t really ask; it’s just a rhetorical device. In another sense, I am again just saying.)
Thank you for asking. (Yes, yes, this is another rhetorical device. I remember what I was just saying just two sentences ago.) I was standing in a monster puddle on the street, doing an inadequate job of clearing out the gutter in heavy rain.
Clearing what out of the gutter? (We’re just going to carry on from here without attributing/annotating these little segues, yeah?) (That means *I’m* just going to carry on . . . oh, never mind.)
I was clearing out silt, pebbles, leaves, and plastic bottle caps, all of which had caught on spreading weeds that had broken through the teensy space between the asphalt of the driving surface and the concrete of the (intended) water-flow surface, now actually serving as a water-accumulation surface. (If we had a molded, one-piece roadbed technology, this problem would not arise. Just saying.)
I have to give credit to road designers and surveyors: when free from obstruction, the gutter channels water enthusiastically into the closest drain. I’m quite a water engineer myself: when watering plants in flowerbeds or washing off patios, I can manage slopes or gradients over the space of a few inches or a foot, say, to direct water where I want it to go and away from where I do not. That’s how I know that it’s an impressive accomplishment to design slopes that efficiently and accurately channel run-off water at the scale of a neighbourhood. And then to see that design executed more-or-less correctly in the real world by paving contractors . . . well, it’s a marvel, really.
A marvel, that is, until there is a gutter obstruction. Then the water slows down and whatever the water was carrying pastes itself onto the initial obstruction, further slowing any subsequent water flow in a negative feedback loop.
I know this. We all know this. Most of us have known this since we were kids, puddling around in the back alley in the spring. So why, pray tell, were there weeds growing adjacent to the gutter, waiting quietly to do their worst? Why was the gutter in front of my house obstructed with silt, pebbles, leaves, and, ahem, plastic bottle caps?
Because it only bothers me when it rains and the water backs up.
Economists talk about the tragedy of the commons: the tendency for individuals to maximize their self-interest by taking more than their objective share–more than a sustainable share–of unpriced communal resources, eventually depleting or even ruining the resource for the entire community, including themselves in anything beyond the immediate term. It’s time to talk also about the tragedy of the gutters: the tendency of individuals to neglect basic, often trivially easy, maintenance or needed interventions until even an exquisitely designed system fails.
Not every system failure sees someone standing in a puddle in running shoes in the rain. Some failures might see us sitting in a dental chair as a hygienist tsk-tsks. Some might see us facing a fitness loss from inactivity whose effect is imperceptible day by day, but significant in the space of a year. Some might see kids graduating Grade 12 with Grade 4 reading skills. Some might see inadequate supplies of houses or healthcare services for a growing population. Some might see addicts camping out on the streets or in city parks in open-air drug dens that help to perpetuate rather than to ameliorate the conditions that led to them living on the street in the first place.
Of course, while we’re totting up the mights, you might object that all these outcomes are more complex than a clogged gutter. That they are not the result of one simple intervention that wasn’t taken. Fair enough. But what could it hurt to take the daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly interventions that we know we should be taking? Or if we don’t like should, that we can see we could be doing, even if we can’t precisely predict the return on the investment of our action?
What could it hurt to keep the gutters clean? For sure, when I’m standing in a puddle in the rain, I kinda wish I had.
You have a wonderful knack for allegorizing (word?) simple things!!
Would that we act on at least some of the “extrusions” from the allegory
Jim R – Thank you. And yes, let’s do something(s).
Be kind to your web-footed friends in running shoes!
Tom
Tom – I hope my feet aren’t webby . . . 🙂
Oh, dear! I am standing metaphorically in wet running shoes beside a dozen clogged drains!! And now you rightly point out that IF I had taken simple actions, say, five years ago, that most of them might be running freely this very minute. Mea maxima culpa. The message of importance for some of them may be to return to that missed opportunity to see if it can be righted. And rightly replicated. Others, are already down the drain in a different sense with an echoing “Bye-Bye,” like the refrain in “Life in a Northern Town.”
Laurna – It’s a very understandable human tendency to respond to what hurts now, not to what might hurt some day. But an ounce of prevention, as the saying goes.
Reminded me of a coming of age, for my friends and I. My actual age escapes me, but at some point (about 11 or 12 years old), when spring arrived, I finally was allowed to cut out “ditches” in the back lane ice. Prior to that it was solely the job of all the adult males on the street. Over time at the sons took over the task. Much like our fathers, we loved carving intricate canals down the length of the lane and watching the water flow into the sewer. You had to get up early, because if you were late, someone else might cut the ditch in your part of the lane. Just a fabulous time.
Eric – A delightful memory. I wonder whether kids now will have similar coming-of-age experiences. I remember the men doing this important work in our back alley, too. My mother used to say that they claimed that it was important to manage the drainage of the spring run-off, but she figured they just loved to get out and play in the water. Of course, both could be true.
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Isabel – For want of a nail a shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, a horse was lost. For want of a horse a soldier was lost. For want of a soldier a battle was lost. For want of a battle, a kingdom was lost.
It can all add up.
John – There you go; a proverbial presentation of the same thought. Thanks!
In addition to decisions made, the years add up as well.
That’s worse than the decisions because there is no controlling the years.☹️
John – Ack. And aaack! Oh, well. As someone says, we’re playing with house money now.