Reading . . . everything

So, one day in August I was walking down the road to Forked Lake with a few members of my Adirondack group, people I’ve known since I was a child. Four of them, two parents whom I will call Julie and Larry, their daughter (aka Lori) and her husband Aaron (another pseudonym), are archeologists. This probably sounds weird, all four of them in the same profession, but it’s true.

Anyway, Lori and Aaron were interested in an old building down by the lake, one that I had passed for years. They walked around the building, theorizing about what its original purpose may have been. Aaron was pretty sure it was an old ice house, which made sense due to its proximity to both lake and road. At this point my dog Reno dragged me off to chase a scent, so I lost the rest of the conversation.

But their speculation about a building that I took for granted made me realize how much our personal experiences and knowledge affect the way we read the environment.

A few years ago, Julie and Larry helped Donald and me pinpoint the construction date of our old farmhouse in Sundown by examining the nails Donald had salvaged during the renovation. When we bought our house, we were told it was built in 1900. However, county documentation lists its date as 1789. Julie and Larry confirmed the 1789 date by examining the square nails. I personally could not tell a 1789 nail from a 1900 nail, but nails aren’t within my field of expertise.

Back to the day when we walked to Forked Lake, Larry tried to figure out whether a tree was a spruce or fir, and this was a topic I could help with. “Spruce,” I announced with confidence. I am not a tree expert but am interested in local trees so I use field guides to identify them. This past summer my nephew borrowed the field guides and, during our dog walks, he examined leaves and bark to determine which species existed in our small part of the world. I helped him to distinguish between a cherry and a black birch – and he surprised me by finding an aspen. I guess you could call our joint effort of identification an example of book smarts, thanks to the field guides.

I wonder when book smarts translate into real life smarts, like when you take knowledge from books and apply it to practical matters like trees. Or nails. I looked up the definition of “book smart” online: “Having knowledge obtained by reading or studying rather than by practical experience” (Wiktionary). So yes, we learned about trees from the book; even though the impetus was practical.

Our reading of the environment based on personal experience was very clear to me as a teacher. Many of my students when I worked in a prison were from New York City, and, although it isn’t that far away, the culture is quite different from the rural culture I am accustomed to.

My city students, pretty much as a whole, were more street smart than me; a trait I assume is learned from an environment with lots of people. In class, when they teased me or joked with each other and saw that I took them seriously, the joke was even funnier. My role, apparently, was to play the straight man to their comic lines.

The definition of “street smart” is “having the shrewd resourcefulness needed to survive in an urban environment” (WordNet). I have heard the term used more loosely, not just in relation to urban settings but as I am here: as understanding people. Reading human behavioral clues isn’t only a skill of city people. My brother-in-law has been teasing me for years, and although I should know better by now, I still believe what he says. Like my students, he thinks this is hysterically funny. Maybe if I read about him and me in a book, I could discover the signs that I miss in person.

I believe that much of our reading skills are survival traits. If you are like many of my students and have lived on the streets, you need to read the environment to survive. If you own your own business like my brother-in-law, you need to be personable to work with your customers and not be taken advantage of by suppliers.

Thinking about rural life, I wondered if there was a term for “country smart.” There is: “Someone who can tell you anything simple life related without skipping a beat but when it comes to other things . . . it’s a wrap” (Urban Dictionary). This definition is a perfect example of the problems we face when reading environments based solely on our personal perspective without the added benefit of book knowledge or research – in other words, facts. It shows the bias of a city dweller, assuming that we country people are clueless (“simple life related”) because we are not in sync with their environment. I may be clueless in some urban situations, but then so might a city dweller when confronted by a black bear digging for grubs or raiding the bird feeders. Different does not mean worse-than. And by the way, the bad punctuation within the definition belongs to the Urban Dictionary, not me.

Back to the Forked Lake walk, when Reno pulled me away from the discussion about a possible ice house, he was in the act of reading scents for clues about the passing of animals, an instinct dating back to his wolf ancestors’ search for prey. He has also taken to eating and ingesting books. Perhaps my dog has the secret to combining personal experience with book smarts.