Windmill

I AM LEANING BACK AGAINST MY CAR, which I have parked on the shoulder of the bustling divided highway that connects the city of Lancaster to the distant Pennsylvania Turnpike. Gusts from passing cars shake me as I look across a sagging fence at the sight that caused me to stop: a decrepit windmill, its blades turning slowly in a breeze that I can scarcely feel, standing tall beside a broken barn on a farm that nobody has farmed for a couple of decades. I guess that the water pump once driven by this windmill is long dead, and as I scrutinize the structure from a distance, I find that indeed the long shaft that should stretch from the blade assembly to the ground is gone. But those blades are still turning. I find myself succumbing to their evocative image, one strongly linked in contemporary American minds with our rural past, and I slide into a predictable daydream about what an isolated and quiet place this must have been, back before we went high tech. That simpler time beckons powerfully, and I want to leave my car behind and jump into the image. But I am not paid to daydream. I pull myself out of this reverie and turn my thoughts back to business.

As a sales engineer, when I am not studying the daunting technical manuals of the microprocessors that I sell, I often drive through central Pennsylvania, windmill country. Here the land has been wrinkled up, after ancient collisions with the African continent, into vast regions of gigantic limestone furrows, up to 800 feet tall, that parallel one another as they curve down from New York State and pass on into West Virginia and Maryland. A group of these in eastern Pennsylvania is known as the Pocono Mountains, and one farther west as the Alleghenies. Some smaller stretches have their own names too, like Tuscarora Mountain, really just one conspicuous ridge that stretches straight for 30 miles. Collectively these little ranges, and their siblings north and south of Pennsylvania, are called the Appalachians.

AS THESE SO-CALLED SYNCLINE RIDGES WEATHERED down over the floody eons, the valleys between them became overspread with a rocky silt that in modern times has sustained perhaps 10 generations of sturdy farmers and somehow also nurtured the rural electronics geniuses who started all the companies that I sell to. Here you can drive around a bend on a farm road, say, near little Coopersburg, and come suddenly upon the world’s premier lighting-controls company, sitting unheralded across the road from a Mennonite barn. Or you might be walking in downtown Macungie, a hundred paces from a defunct railroad coal hopper, and inadvertently dead-end yourself in the parking lot of the world’s finest maker of church organs, a company that is expert in replacing the ailing innards of magnificent pipe organs with equally magnificent electronics. In such places some impatient visionary rallied together several shirtsleeved engineers, perhaps with Penn State electrical engineering degrees, and created a little nexus of technological excellence.

By no coincidence, this center of the state is also the birthplace of CATV, cable television. A few decades ago the enterprising folks here could not receive the big-city TV signals from Harrisburg and Philadelphia because those limestone ridges were in the way. So they figured that if they built a big “community antenna,” the CA in CATV, on top of one of the ridges, they could then amplify the clearer signals there and send them through coaxial cable into their homes. In solving their problem, they spawned a global industry built around the technology of collecting signals, now from satellites and the Internet, and sending them into homes.

This emergence of technology is inescapable. It sprouts wherever there is an unmet need that can be resolved, say, by making a circuit board in a different way and populating it with semiconductors, and this happens in Pennsylvania’s windmill country just as it does in Silicon Valley. And here the young rural geniuses, wanting to add a formal problem-solving capability to mere desire, will find their way to fine engineering educations courtesy of the state of Pennsylvania.

SOME OF THESE STUDENTS GREW UP, I AM THINKING now, on little farms just like the one that languishes in front of me. As I continue to gaze at this simple old windmill, I find myself daydreaming once again—for I am only human and want things to be simple—and I become wistful about that time, which of course I never experienced but have often imagined, when one’s day was slow in passing, pastoral, and uncluttered by this technology that I must continue to study and sell.

But I am lying to myself about that simple life. The truth is that my lonely nineteenth-century farmer, from the past that I have imagined, lusted for the solutions of technology just as we do now. In the same way that I was ready for a personal computer 20 years ago, despite never having seen one, this farmer or his father embraced the new steel plow when it was sent his way by John Deere to replace the old cast-iron one. He surely did not reject the mill-sawn lumber that composed his barn in favor of simpler stacked logs. His grain was harvested by a mechanical reaper, horse-drawn in its first incarnations but still a hot technology that turned its inventor into a multimillionaire. And I can imagine this farmer, or his wife, or perhaps his 10-year-old daughter, on a Wednesday stroking the hand pump for half an hour to top up the watering trough and on Thursday watching in grateful awe as a breeze turned the family’s new metal windmill, freeing them all from that particular drudgery forever.

What is still missing in my imagined nineteenth-century picture, however, is a 45-year-old bank clerk, or perhaps engineer, who passes by the farm on that Thursday. He is daydreaming about how grand it was to watch the women and children in the fields reaping grain by hand back when he was a boy and about how peaceful the little town in the valley was before the sawmill was built along the stream here. As he rides by in his sturdy buggy, behind a horse bred exclusively for the purpose of pulling it, he stops suddenly, just as I have. But where I was wistful, he is seething. For he has just seen the future, a harbinger of the onrush of new technology that is sweeping him, despite his desire for the past, toward the coming twentieth century: a gleaming, sinister, well-oiled, high-tech windmill.