Migration

Caribou of the tundra trudge through ten to fifteen winters before fate catches up.   Mine have made it through thirty-eight, surviving longer than the company that made them.  Old-school Sorel Caribous, the ones made in Canada before the company went bankrupt, are legendarily tough.  Not sure if my Levis jacket from high school or the boots are older, but that I trust my feet in the most brutal weather to one of my oldest articles of clothing is testament to quality craftsmanship.

It’s probably not a business model they teach to MBA students these days.  Build a product so well your customers only need one in a lifetime.  It’s certainly not a strategy Starbucks or Apple employ.  It’s a disposable world, and the jobs making Sorel branded Caribous have migrated to China.  Made in America L.L. Bean will be the go-to company if these trusty foot furnaces ever wear out.        

Real snow has finally arrived so the Sorels and Carhartt coveralls come up from the basement for the season.  This is where some people groan or, even worse, move to Florida.  Not me.

There is nothing about shoveling snow I don’t like.

I like that it’s always different.  Sometimes easy.  Sometimes difficult.  Sometimes relentlessly difficult, with wind blowing back most of the progress you’ve made.  It’s always a different problem to solve and that’s fun, right there.    

I like that it is physical.  Man versus nature, at a manageable scale, with hot chocolate available if necessary.

I like that if it gets too difficult, there’s an internal combustion engine waiting.  I like that the snow blower’s carburetor balks at everyone’s touch but mine.  The starting procedure is only slightly less temperamental than an Italian mistress and operating the thing is just as dangerous.  In truth, the shovel is more my speed.

I like the noise the shovel makes as it scrapes along the concrete.  I like the cold.  I like neighbors helping each other.  I like the slope of the driveway.  The south-east ridge of Annapurna is 25,000 feet higher, but only marginally more hazardous.  I even like it when the snow plow comes round again and makes more of the really difficult shoveling where the driveway meets the street.   

I like that it is the polar opposite of my day job.  Outdoors.  No committees.  No agendas.  No voting.  No seven different sets of work rules.  No critique.  No waiting.  Just get to work, and get it done.  That I decide when it is done is one of best parts.  The finished product is my decision, and unlike most of what I do for a living, there is a physically visible result !  There was a problem.  I did something.  The problem does not exist anymore.  That is the very definition of fun.

Shoveling snow is so immensely satisfying, I cannot fathom why people don’t move from Florida to Iowa just to experience it.  There’s a sense of craftsmanship to a well-shoveled driveway or sidewalk that I’m not sure exists in places where folks avoid such genuine exertion.

Time wears down most everything and there may come a time when my shoveling muse fades.  But the idea of craftsmanship, and building a product so well your customer only buys one in a lifetime has me intrigued.  Snow shoveling excellence is transitory (another part of the task I’m amused by) but quality craftsmanship is, at a minimum, intergenerational.

The boots I wear.  The furniture I craft.  The personal decisions I make.  Whether you think about it consciously or not, everything is ultimately an inheritance.  So craft it well.

So too, the professional decisions.  They are a community’s inheritance.  This week will find me in nearly forty year old boots, the City Council voting to recommend historic tax credit projects to the State representing over $120 million in new investment for old factories, and the Council reviewing a new strategic plan for the year ahead.  We are trying to build and rebuild a product – Davenport – so well that it is the only product our customers want or need in their lifetime.

My beloved Caribous?  They were made in a factory in Kitchener, Ontario.  Just like our beautiful old factories here, the sturdy building has been remade into lofts.

Real craftsmanship lasts.