Common Sense And Other Tales

During my first overnight camping trip, at the age of four, my dad taught me how to make an archery bow out of a green sapling and nylon string. At five, I could tie several knots and differentiate between tinder, kindling and fuel. Peter appeared when I was eight or so, and by then I could pitch a tent, wield an axe, lash a fence, rig a fishing pole, fire a black powder rifle and properly sharpen a knife.

“Peter just has no common sense,” my dad would say, shaking his head. Dad led our church’s all-male scouting group, which met every Wednesday evening. We drove 40 miles each way to these meetings for several years, as we did to two services every Sunday, during the time when Pastor Steve led the church in Webster City. For a period we picked up Peter along the way. This guy had a knack for breaking everything. To this day, you can’t go on a camping trip with my family and ask, “Who broke this?” without the inevitable reply- “Peter.”

As an example, while setting up tents at the beginning of one camping trip, Peter asked if he could help. “Sure,” my dad said, “Grab one of those tomahawks and hammer in those tent pegs.” Yes, we did have several tomahawks lying around. Oh, does that seem weird to you? Also, our tent pegs were railroad spikes. Anyway, Peter took a hack at driving in a railroad spike using the sharp end of the throwing hatchet instead of the butt-end, leaving a remarkable chip in the blade.

Peter was several years older than me; closer to my brother’s age. My brother knew algebra. Peter did not know left from right. I began to wonder what common sense was and why Peter didn’t have it. Dad began taking some extra time to thoroughly explain things to Peter. I asked why Peter’s own dad didn’t teach him these things, and my dad explained that some kids don’t have responsible or attentive dads and others didn’t have dads at all. It occurred to me that common sense was something akin to things your parents are supposed to teach you.

My first pocket knife had raccoons etched on the blade. When I showed it to Peter, he couldn’t figure out how to work the locking mechanism that keeps the blade from slipping shut. After demonstrating how it worked, he promptly closed it on himself and cut a finger. I quickly fetched a band-aid, hoping I wasn’t going to get in trouble for being in part responsible for the mishap, and watched wide-eyed as Peter futilely tried to figure out how to apply the bandage. I eventually had to adhere it myself. Peter had no common sense.

Dad had given me this knife during a strange fishing trip a few years prior. We attended a much closer church in Fort Dodge then, and it was evenly divided into the older teenage kids- Sean, Jay, Troy and my brother, and the younger grade school kids- Stevie, Trent, Jeremy and myself. Honestly, the other kids were a bunch of hoodlums. Fort Dodge was a poor and rough-and-tumble town. My dad was in charge of the older kids and Jeremy’s dad was in charge of the younger kids. Jeremy’s dad taught us the scouting group's Code and the definitions of some of the strange words it contained, including “loyal,” “courteous” and “obedient.” I specifically recall him defining loyal as, “You know, being loyal to someone or something,” which I realized was no explanation whatsoever. I wondered if he knew what it meant.

On the day I received the knife, we went fishing near a spillway in Fort Dodge, and were given strict instructions to be very careful around the dam- no getting near the water, no running and no climbing or crossing the protective barriers. Before long, us younger kids had gotten bored with fishing and were running, climbing and shoving each other on top of the spillway.

Suddenly, we noticed a commotion below where the big kids still were, and Jeremy’s dad seemed to be attending to my dad, who was holding his back. Without knowing what was going on, I decided I’d better start following instructions and stopped horsing around with the other kids. Shortly thereafter, one of them slid down the spillway and probably would have drowned if my dad hadn’t gone in after him and fetched him out of the water. (I honestly don’t remember which kid it was, but for easier readability later on, I’m going to suppose it was Trent.) After that, it was time to leave, and as we packed things up dad gave me the raccoon-laden pocket knife with strict instructions as to its proper usage, and I considered this my reward for being relatively obedient.

The scouting group meetings generally consisted of a morality lesson and a fun activity. One activity was ring-toss, which consisted of attempting to throw wooden shower curtain rings around the neck of one of a cluster of soda bottles. The reward for accomplishing this feat was the bottle itself, but since I didn’t particularly care for soda, I found the game a bit tedious. One day while this activity was taking place, Peter revealed a box, and inside was a set of handcuffs replete with key. These things were pretty much the coolest thing I had ever seen.

Peter said they belonged to his dad, who was a cop. By this time I had determined that Peter didn’t have a father, because of the common sense thing, so this bombshell surprised me. However, Stevie’s dad at that other church was a cop, too, and Stevie was the worst behaving kid of the bunch. So it seemed even police officers could be bad fathers. After that, I’d continually ask Peter to bring the handcuffs again, but he never did. Also, his stories pertaining to his father’s occupation and whereabouts was in constant flux, so I began to suspect he was inventing him like Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird.

On one camping trip, while a few of us were milling around in our tent, separate from the adults, the taboo topic of girls came up. “What would you do if a girl drove into the campgrounds right now?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, uninterested. It seemed a stupid premise. Girls weren’t allowed on these camping trips. Anyway, I had a sister who wasn’t particularly mysterious, so I was simply glad for the respite from one being around.

Peter, however, went into a monologue: “First, I’d bring her back into this tent and close the flap. And zip up all the windows. Then, I’d slowly unbutton her blouse, starting at the top and working my way down…”

“Why would you want to do that?” I interrupted. Peter gave me an indecipherable look. I didn’t know whether it meant my question was stupid or that he didn’t actually know the answer, either. I never got the chance to find out, as Little Steve, the pastor’s kid, quickly put an abrupt end to the conversation.
After pondering this awkward moment, I concluded that this was another example of Peter’s lack of parental guidance. Otherwise he would have known better than to have inappropriate fantasies about girls.

On another occasion, my dad returned home late, and mentioned it was because he had been visiting a kid in prison. It was a kid from the Fort Dodge church’s scouting group way back when who I didn’t immediately remember, but eventually recognized as the infrequent member who had once shown me how to construct an effective paper airplane. How could someone smart enough to know that be in jail? “I think his dad had a drinking problem and might have been abusive,” my dad explained. “Do you remember- we visited his house once to try and help and I even reported his situation to social services, but they didn’t do anything.” I vaguely remembered. “He was the one who threw the knife at me.”

“What?!” This was certainly news to me.

“It was on that same fishing trip when Trent fell in the spillway. At the previous meeting we had done an activity and as a prize I had given him a pocket knife with raccoons on the blade- I think you have it now. Anyway, I think his dad must have found him with it and he’d gotten in trouble for it, because the next week during that fishing trip he drove up, got out of the car and threw the knife at me while I was sitting at a picnic table and it hit me square in the back. Luckily, it had rotated so the point of the handle hit me even though the blade was out but he still threw it hard enough that it really hurt. At first, I thought I’d been shot.”

“That’s not why he’s in jail, is it?”

“Oh no, I figured he had enough problems. I guess I was right.”

Why would my dad now be going out of his way to visit an incarcerated person who had once tried to kill him? It defied common sense, unless I was to stick with my original interpretation of the term.

I find an exploration of the term “common sense” yields more questions than answers. I assume the idea is a derivative of the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious, which I, as a subjective individual, can only see as a load of hooey. I don’t believe I can remember things that didn’t happen to me. Will a bird raised in isolation still fly south for the winter without being introduced to a migrating flock? Hell if I know; nor do I consider the question germane. Instincts are distinctly separate to memory, as the former are things done without a previous sensory influence.

I have no idea how accurate or precise my memories are, nor am I able to perceive to what degree they have been altered, influenced or changed over time. Are my remembrances more or less influential than the actual experiences I’ve had, many of which are totally irretrievable to my consciousness? I don’t know the answer to that question, either.

My friend Eric is fond of postulating, “Can you think it if you can’t say it?” It is a clever question in part because the quest for the answer requires both intense examination and detailed articulation. In the end, I’m of the opinion that the impression that it often takes years to properly explain things that have been known all along point toward the reality that we can’t say much of what we think. An example is the person who can provide the answer to a math problem but is incapable of “showing his work,” or demonstrating the method used to come to that solution. However, even if it is in fact correct, one cannot trust the conclusion without demonstrating a fully coherent process of obtaining it. It would be unjustifiable to place any validity in unexplainable beliefs.

Does an unsolved mathematical equation have a solution? The best answer we can give is simply to try and solve it. Yet, I firmly believe that questions without answers exist in abundance. One seemingly useless thing to do is simply assume an answer and then assume that answer is the correct answer.

At least one impossible question is immediately posited here: If the blade of that knife had found its mark, who would have saved Trent from drowning?” There are no answers to purely hypothetical questions with no applicable predetermined rules. There is no point it wondering, “What if….” Life is what it is, which is to some degree separate from how we remember it to be, unless we are to argue life doesn’t exist at all, but is a figment of our own imaginations. That assumption must be rejected on the grounds that it forces us into an egocentric existence where nobody else matters. Because it cannot be demonstrated otherwise, we must assume the consciousness of the other is as relevant as our own. (I am making an argument that can align itself with Pascal’s wager here: it would be a lesser transgression to assume equality and be wrong than it would to assume inequality and be wrong.)

I often find my mind returning to moments in life that found me bewildered. Many of these seem to pertain to juxtapositions between the world those who raised us intended us to see, and the world as it reveals itself despite them. I am reminded of another scene from To Kill A Mockingbird, when Atticus says, “There's a lot of ugly things in this world, son. I wish I could keep 'em all away from you. That's never possible.” As illustrated in Plato’s allegory of the cave, refusing to question the validity of how we immediately see things is detrimental to our growth.

In the years since Peter, I’ve come to the conclusion that when people say, “It’s common sense,” what they mean is they are incapable of effectively explaining their reasoning, likely because the logic is dubious, so they will instead refuse to answer on the unfounded grounds that the question is stupid. I see no evidence that common sense exists at all, but that some of us are better inclined towards finding reasonable and effective solutions than others.