Thinking Straight, Thinking Sharp

I never went on a company picnic, but I do remember a few Methodist picnics from Elsdon, and some others from the Cub Scouts or something like that. They were usually held in the Cook County Forest Preserve. I liked the eating part but, when they started doing the sack races and the three legged races, I would usually wander off by myself and look at the trees. I never claimed to be normal!

It's funny how humans tend to think in terms of straight lines and square corners, when nothing in Nature is like that. I wonder where we got it from.

When I used to do volunteer work at the Bliss Fest, one job that we did was stake out an area along this wood line. There was a row of campsites along the edge of the woods, with an access road running in front of them. Across the road from the campsites, we made a parking area that was designed for two rows of cars. Beyond that was a row of concession stands, which somebody else staked out. Beyond that was the concert area, which ran all the way down to the county road. Now we knew that the county road ran straight east and west, and so did the wood line, so we would measure so many feet for the campsites, so many feet for the access road, and the space left over was for the parked cars. We would start out at one end with plenty of room for our two rows of cars but, by the time we got to the other end, there was only enough room for one row of cars. It all looked perfect while we were staking it out the day before but, when the campers and the cars showed up, you could see how that parking space got gradually narrower from one end to the other. We marveled at this for several years in a row and couldn't figure out what we were doing wrong.

This field between the wood line and the county road was an old abandoned farm, and it only got mowed once a year, just before the festival. First we would do all the staking out and then, while the concessioners were setting up their booths, this guy would come with his tractor and try to mow the field. I don't know how many times I brought up at the meetings that it would be better to do the mowing before all the staking out and setting up activity began. Everybody always agreed with me at the meeting but, come the next festival, they would do it the same was that they always had. When I bought my own tractor, I resolved that we would never be setting up in the tall grass again. I would come out there several days before and mow the damn field myself.

First I made one pass around the perimeter, then kept spiraling in towards the middle. About halfway through this process, I noticed that the un-mowed portion in the middle was starting to resemble a triangle. I wondered how this could be, since I made my cuts fairly uniform. Then it dawned on me that the wood line did not run a true parallel to the county road, it was closer to the road at one end than it was at the other. The guys who staked out the concession stands must have been measuring from the county road instead of from the wood line the way our crew did. We had just taken it for granted that the field was a true rectangle, and that its opposite boundaries ran parallel to each other. That's what it had always looked like to me until I realized that it wasn't. After I knew the way it really was, it never looked the other way to me again.

Okay, when I told you that a sharp knife was safer than a dull knife, I forgot to mention that's only true if you know the knife is sharp. If you are used to using a dull knife and then you pick up a sharp knife, or if somebody sharpened your dull knife without your knowledge, you are likely to cut yourself the way you did. I guess the knife being sharp or dull is not as important as it is that you know that the knife is either sharp or dull and conduct yourself accordingly.