Rocky Cape Christian Community

Operating a computer is one of the least intelligent things I have ever done. All I need to know is how to sit, how to type, and use a few cells of my brain.

Time after time I hear people walk up to this machine and exclaim about its marvelous functions. Typically they’ll say: “How did you ever learn to do that?. . . It’d take me a lifetime just to figure it out, etc.”

Such people arouse my amazement. I am amazed, not at them, but at the American society that has given them such a warped view of intelligence.

What it takes to be “intelligent” in these United States, it seems, is to impress others. An impressive education, an impressive vocabulary, making much money at a white-collar job—and you’ve made it. People will look up to you as to one of the intellectual set.

But you know, I find that type of intelligence is often ignorance in disguise.

I have a much harder time relating to ignorant people in these United States who think they are intelligent than what I have with intelligent people in third world countries who have always been told they are ignorant.

One day I walked three hours along a precipitous foot trail into a canyon of Mexico’s Sierra Madre. Tropical foliage clung to rock walls above and below us where no wheeled vehicle, no power lines, no telephones or electrical appliances had ever come. We had one mule. The rest of us travelled on foot. Occasionally we met a tagora-clad Indian, but the deep silence of the canyon remained unbroken until suddenly, rounding a bend, we saw the tiny houses of Cerro Colorado village perched high above the river. The town had no streets. A mule trail led down the centre of it and into the wilderness beyond. Hand-constructed houses of sticks and adobe sat among flower beds beneath the mango trees. Their walls were hand-plastered with mud. A pail on a rope with two pulleys brought water up from the river, far below. A few windows had glass in them and I wondered how it got here on muleback. The villagers did their cooking on wood stoves shaped from clay. They used kerosene lamps for light after dark. They ground their corn on stone metates to make tortillas. They cooked their beans in hand-crafted clay pots. And Doña Julia, the old lady we had come to visit, greeted us on her veranda where she makes her family’s clothes. I noticed her Singer sewing machine, a turn of the century hand-crank model.

Doña Julia’s son-in-law is a miner. In spite of a handicap (he had crippling arthritis as a young man) we found him harnessing up his own pack train and preparing to head out for a several-day excursion into the mountains where he works his mines. His harnesses were hand-made from rawhide. His burros were raised from village stock. And he showed us the churumbelas (large stone, water-powered, grinding wheels which crush the ore) down by the river. Using a kerosene lamp and his own mercury, this man separates valuable metals from his crushed ore.

Everyone in Cerro Colorado spoke slowly, courteously, in Spanish. Descended from the families of Castilian miners who arrived in this part of Mexico 300 years ago, they have maintained the familiar integrity, the manners, and the values of Europe in the Middle Ages.

By the end of my stay in Cerro Colorado village I realized that these people deserved higher marks for their intelligence than I. I marvelled at their industry, ingenuity, hospitality, courtesy, group solidarity, perseverance, management, and knowledge of skills for survival. How, I wondered, would my wife and I fare in Cerro Colorado? How would the hamburger-generation American, raised on TV, sports, and electronics, fare?

I grew up on a farm and remember well the jokes we used to share about “city people” who’d come out to see us. How intelligent would those college educated city people appear in Cerro Colorado? I should have asked Doña Julia’s grandchildren who flocked about us while we were in the village.

That night we lay in our hotel room in the 300-year-old town of Batopilas, Chihuahua. A kerosene lamp (made from a coffee jar) flickered on a little table, casting dark shadows behind the ceiling beams. Our hand-washed bedding smelled faintly of soap. Outside we could hear the river roaring through the canyon. Children laughed and played in the plaza. (Minus TV and electricity they had little reason to sit indoors through balmy, tropical evenings.) Burros, and the occasional man on horseback, were the only traffic on cobblestone streets. Then the bells rang for evening mass and we heard the frail singing of those who gathered in the church, floating out through the laurel trees. As I lay in bed, my limbs aching from a long day of foot travel, I began to wonder how much nicer our “advanced way of life” was than theirs.

I grew up without electricity, automobiles, electronics and the news media. Now of all the skills I have acquired, which ones would benefit me in Batopilas? In case of national disaster or drastic changes in our present world system what would be of use for my family’s survival?

It pays to ponder and evaluate what we have learned. The following list shows the approximate ages I had when mastering certain skills. The skills I evaluated on this scale: A = skill necessary for survival. B = skill valuable for survival. C = unnecessary skill.

Approximate Age    Acquired Skill                              Evaluation

2                           German language                        B

3                           pumping water                            C

5                           feeding animals                           B

5                           English language                         B

5                           reading                                       B

5                           tending herd of grazing cattle        B

6                           driving horses                              B

6                           hoeing weeds                               B

6                           planting vegetable seeds               B

6                           writing                                         B

6                           picking rocks                                C

6                           braiding onions for storage            B

6                           basic mathematics                        B

6                           winnowing beans                          B

7                           cleaning out animal pens               C

7                           harvesting and threshing grain       B

7                           grinding feed for animals                B

7                           putting out a grass-fire                   B

7                           washing clothes on a scrub-board     B

7                           transplanting greenhouse seedlings         B

7                           picking wild berries in the woods             B

8                           harnessing a horse                      B

8                           riding a horse on a cultivator         B

8                           drying apples                               B

8                           putting up root crops for winter storage   B

8                           butchering and plucking poultry               B

8                           milking a cow by hand                  B

8                           splinting a broken bone                B

8                           making butter in hand churn         B

8                           planting trees                              C

8                           playing baseball                           C

8                           tying rope knots                           B

9                           making and repairing fences          B

9                           starting wood-fires in a stove         B

9                            baking with a wood-stove             B

9                            drawing chickens and small game           B

9                            stuffing sausages                         C

9                            scalding and scraping hair from a pig      C

9                            using a grindstone                        C

9                            saddling a horse                          B

9                            singing and reading music             C

9                            cranking a hand-start motor          C

9                            picking tree fruits                         B

9                             ice-skating                                  C

9                             pruning trees                               B

9                             tying sheaves of grain by hand                B  

l0                            splitting wood                              B

l0                            repairing horse harnesses            B

l0                            mixing concrete                           B

l0                            canning home-grown fruits            B

l0                            doing research in public libraries             B

l0                            sharpening knives with a whetstone         B

l0                            setting traps                                B

l0                            using hand-tools (hand planer, handsaw,

                              hand-turned drill, etc)                   B

l0                            using a scythe                             B

l0                            playing soccer                             C

ll                             stooking grain                              B

ll                             dehorning and branding cattle       B

ll                             skinning fur-bearing animals          B

ll                             boiling curds and making cheese             B

ll                             making hemp rope                       B

l2                            using a hunting rifle                      B

l2                            stacking sheaves of grain and loose hay  

                              onto a moving wagon                   B

l2                            preparing a book for publication              C

l2                            keeping a two-horse sleigh on a snow trail        C

l2                            using a manual type-writer            B

l2                            repairing wooden spoked wheels            B

l2                            sketching and elementary graphics          B

l3                            digging post-holes by hand                     B

l3                            cutting fire-wood by hand in the woods    B

l4                            plowing with five horses               B

l4                            dismantling old buildings               C

l4                            sawing logs on a portable mill       B

l4                            repairing leather shoes                 B

l4                            breaking in a colt                         B

l5                            logging by hand and horsepower             B

l5                            laying brick                                            B

l5                            shoeing a horse                           B

l5                            raising a barn                              B

l6                            opening a car door                       B

l7                            turning a steering wheel               B

l7                            driving a tractor                           C

l7                           photography                                C

l8                            identifying and picking edible mushrooms         B

l8                            teaching school                            B

l8                            plugging in an electric appliance              B

l8                            driving a standard vehicle             B

l8                            using a telephone                         B

l9                            giving artificial respiration             B

l9                            steering a boat                            B

l9                            riding a bicycle                            B

20                           doing body work on automobiles             C

20                           Plattdeutsch language                  B

2l                            cleaning intestines for sausage     B

2l                            Spanish Language                       B

2l                            driving in big cities: Mexico City,

                              Los Angeles, New Orleans, etc.              B

2l                            building a house with plastic, tin,

                              boards, tar-paper, and bottle caps          B

2l                            doing banking and immigration transactions       

                              traveling by bus and train in foreign  countries   B

24                          making adobes and suquete         B

24                          grinding corn in hand mill              B

                              editing German, Spanish, and English mss.

                              writing school textbook                 C

25                          editing a periodical                       C

26                          making raw-hide and car-tire guaraches        B

26                           handling French correspondence         C

27                           sun-drying rice                             B

28                           operating a computer                   C

Tallying the skills I have learned gave me an appreciation for the values of my “old-fashioned” (Orthodox Mennonite) background. And it renewed my determination to pass those same values on to my children. I am appalled as I think about the thousand and one skills which our grandparents had, and which most of us have lost. What has happened to us? Is this loss of basic intelligence a programmed thing? If so, who is programming it? For what?

We have fast become a generation of specialists—specialists in our chosen fields—learning more and more about less and less until we know everything about nothing.

I have tasted of both worlds: modern America and l9’th century America. I do not feel bound to one nor the other. It is my privilege to take the best of both cultures to use for the glory of God. And with the help of the Bible (not with the ungodly society in which I live) I must decide what is intelligence worth having and what is not.

If you’ll settle for having your children become college graduates, computer technicians, astronauts, or the secretary of United Nations—fine. But I have higher aspirations for our children.

I want them to learn how to start a fire and milk a cow.

Peter Hoover, Farmington, NM, 1988