Against the Huckleberry Club Website
Someone suggested, at the last meeting, between the compost and the folding chairs, that the Huckleberry Club should have a website. It was said kindly. It was said the way people say most things that will eventually ruin us, which is to say reasonably. A page with the meeting times. A few photos of the tomatoes. Where's the harm?
I want to answer that question. I want to answer it as forcefully as I can, because I think the answer is: all of it. All of the harm. The Huckleberry Club should not have a website. Not a small one. Not a tasteful one. Not one that just lists the hours. None.
You are reading this on a website, I know. I'll get to that. Irony is not a refutation. It's a symptom.
Let me tell you about Jurgis Miškinis. You won't find him in the encyclopedias. I've looked. Maybe he never existed, or maybe he existed so thoroughly that he left no trace. I've come to think those are the same thing.
The story goes like this. Miškinis was born in the 1820s near Vilnius, the son of a minor landowner with more debts than acres. He was clever enough that someone paid to send him to England. He studied at Cambridge, where he read Locke and Hume and argued late into the night with young men who would go on to run railways and ministries. He was, by all accounts, very good at it. He could have stayed. England in those years was the most connected place on earth. Telegraph wires were going up. The penny post had arrived. Every idea in Europe passed through London eventually, and a bright young philosopher could stand at the center of it all and be talked about.
Miškinis went home instead. Not to Vilnius. To the woods, the great pine forests of Dzūkija in the south, where he built a cabin and lived for something like thirty years. He wrote philosophy there. He wrote it by hand and he didn't publish it. When visitors came, which was rarely, he put them to work. Splitting wood. Hauling water. Picking mushrooms and, yes, berries. He would talk with you, they say, but only while your hands were busy.
The one idea attributed to him, the only sentence of his I can offer you, is something like this: a thing that is spoken of everywhere is present nowhere. He had seen the future in England, the world of wires and circulars and reputations, and he had decided that a man who lives in it is never quite anywhere at all.
That's the problem with the website. Not that it's bad, exactly. That it's elsewhere. The Huckleberry Club exists for one reason: to put people in the same patch of dirt at the same time. That's the whole thing. The garden is not a topic we discuss. The garden is where we are. A website turns the place into a topic. It lets you know about the club without being in the club. And once you can know about something without being there, being there starts to feel optional.
People will say it's only a drop. A page. A calendar. But I don't believe in drops. Ask anyone who has watched mildew take a squash bed. It doesn't arrive in proportion. It arrives as a single grey spot, and then it is the season. The online world works the same way. First the hours. Then the photos. Then the comments under the photos. Then the person who reads the comments but hasn't touched a trowel since June and feels, honestly feels, like a member. That isn't a smaller version of the club. That's its corpse, wearing its clothes.
Miškinis understood this. He'd been to the center of the connected world and found that everyone there was somewhere else. So he went to the woods and handed his visitors an axe. Not as a punishment. As an invitation. Be here. So here is my proposal. Take this page down. Not after the next meeting. Now. If someone wants to know when we meet, let them ask someone who comes. If they want to see the tomatoes, let them come see the tomatoes. They're better in person. Everything is.
You know where to find us. Bring gloves.
