By Justin Isherwood

I’ve wondered if cops still say “roll down the window please?”  Knowing that electric windows don’t actually roll.

I do miss manual windows.   I miss manual door locks.  I even miss that comical exercise of inertia once used to move manual seats.  While I don’t actually remember cars with hand cranks, but if I did, I’d miss them too.

The modern world it seems has an abiding grudge against manual labor.  In my workshop I have a manual pencil sharpener.  The grandkids think it is such a giggle to sharpen pencils.  At least they know what a pencil is.

To continue my confession, my shop is now equipped with a half dozen rechargeable drills replacing the bit-brace, the egg-beater drill, the Yankee drill.  The Yankee drill was such a marvel, to include the spring-loaded spoon bit that was an amazingly fast way to poke a hole in a board.  No key chuck to mess with.  Once was a variant of this as worked as a screw driver.  Built a boat with one, only to wonder afterwards how to get that boat out of the cellar.  I not the first carpenter faced with such a problem.

I have wondered how many calories we’ve lost to our lives with the subtraction of manual doors, manual windows.  It is that we don’t even tune radios any more, just hit the preset button or let the thing grind out the stations in order of frequency all on its own.

We don’t unlock the trunk or crank back the moon roof.  I believe it was Volkswagen as started that, a crank-equipped sunroof.  Once that was pretty posh.

The question being … is there in this loss of manual, a certain absence to human fitness?  For the most part we don’t sweat any more, don’t even shiver.  I was raised by a tribe that believed shivering was appropriate training for survival.  I have yet to see a weight loss clinic espouse shivering as a method of weight reduction.  Admittedly a touch desperate but so is stomach stapling.  Isn’t shivering what Nature designed fat for in the first place, a caloric furnace, but you have to get cold enough to fire it up?  There exists a nasty theory that this is what menopause is all about, to warm the cave.  I can’t remember the last time I went into any public or private building during the summer that provoked a sweat.

Summer heat and sweat were once almost formalized patterns of our judicial and legislative systems.  A trial held in a hot courtroom is a different kind of justice.  I cannot imagine the Scopes Trial without that ingredient of sweating jurists.  To think legislation in a hot sweaty hall is probably a different kind of public policy.  Maybe good things come of legislatures that sweat.  When the legislative process strips down to their undershirts and bras, smells each other’s armpits, experiences each other’s close-up humanity, maybe people gain a separate kind of honesty.

The impact of all this has nothing to do with our comfort.  Cities are the hotter environs and more the heat islands because of intense air-conditioning.

The heat extracted from buildings has to go somewhere as should mathematically work-out about even, calories in for calories out, except the mechanical component isn’t that economical, and we cool our businesses and homes well below ambient air temperature.  Modern buildings are so consistently equipped with air-conditioning that windows don’t open, often not even provided with heat reflecting shades.  A public room equipped with a circulation fan requires a lot less power than with a compressor attached.  Modern homes aren’t designed with porches, with a roof overhang to shade windows during the summer.

Because of universal air we forget nature’s essential providence, we don’t add sufficient trees to the urban equation.  The standard shopping mall parking lot is a death trap of a heat sink by mid-summer.  The risk is such that they should probably have warning stickers.  Treeless and paved.  The sheer unattractiveness of the standard mall parking compliments their potential for heat storage.  Every car in the lot, its windows rolled up, is a crematory that can kill should the occasion permit.  To note the first thing we do when we arrive back at our car is turn on the air, and what was a good mileage car just slipped into the gas guzzler range.

How many vehicles in summer traffic have their windows rolled down?  To confess somewhere the other side of 55 mph rolled-down windows aren’t much fun.  In automotive culture this has a cascading effect; rolled up windows heat the car, the air is turned on, and we drive faster because we don’t have to put up with the buffeting.  Collectively we lose 20-25% of our fleet efficiency.  To think maybe the Interstate should have a summer-time rolled-down window rule.

Returning Interstates to 55 could save 30% of our country’s CO₂ emissions, a Dutch energy study revealed.  Those who need to get there faster could use the train or mass transit. Were there such a thing as a train or mass transit.

The vintage photo of President Carter posing with a 55 mph sign sometime during the energy crisis of 1976 now seems vintage indeed.  This act alone saved 125,000 barrels of oil per hour, 40% was at that time imported.  About one tanker per day.  The U.S. currently uses the equivalent of 50 tankers per day.

Conservatives, bless their hearts, want to balance the national budget, my question is, why not balance all those budgets?  Energy, water, CO₂ , methane, concrete, fertilizer, jobs, jurisprudence, sexuality, race?  To admit sometimes the task of a writer is to ask for too much.