Shiny stuff

Out at Camp Koolaree, every spring's cleanup is not complete without taking apart the various pack rat nests scattered here and there throughout the shop and cabins. Cleaning, scouring, scrubbing and reclaiming the shiny stuff goes hand in hand with airing, unpacking, stocking shelves, and putting the water system back on line. It's all a part of setting up camp.

I'd like to think the items they take must have a use in pack rat society--that, like the beaver who uses the Koolaree dock as his winter food storage larder, the pack rats are making use of the camp and its shiny stuff  for a purpose that is both useful and obvious, if only one were a pack rat, or had the time to study their movements and social interactions. I suspect, however, that the pack rat population may be closer to humans in its hankering after all that glitters.

In a way they put me in mind of random disappearances of shiny stuff from the plants I worked in not so long ago. In mines, smelters, mills and shops, from time to time something large and bright and shiny would be there one day and gone the next. A part machined for one purpose only, serving no earthly good for any other use, would be set in place beside the equipment it was to be used for, only to disappear from sight, never to be seen again.

Maintenance crews would take note of the missing piece, heads would shake in disbelief and then there would be agreement as someone said, “Shiny stuff, goes missing all the time.”

It did go missing a lot, and somewhere in every industrial town there are basements filled with shiny stuff, hoarded treasures filling someone's trove with bits of this machine, or that equipment.

Of course, there are lots of human habitations crammed to the rafters with stuff that shines in the eye of the beholder. Places where the inhabitants can hardly move, homes so filled with articles of every description that they are fair put to burst at the seams, threatening to spew out years of accumulated stuff at any moment.

We could pause a moment to shake our heads at the clear and present indications of illness as it affects the hoarders amongst us. "Pack rats", we sometimes call them--those whose fascination with stuff gets between them and living, between them and an exploration of who they are, and why they are, and how they might be. We could pause and consider.

And maybe, when we get back from the mall, we will.

Keith Simmonds is a diaconal minister in the Communities in Faith Pastoral Charge serving Beaver Valley, Rossland, Salmo and Trail.