End of an Era

On another note, there was a report on ABC News last night that the monastery of Grand St. Bernard had decided to sell the last of the dogs that made their monestary famous. The St. Bernard dog - actually an Alpine Mastiff - was originally bread by the monks of grand St. Bernard to help them rescue stranded travellers who were caught in snow storms and landslides while trying to cross the pass. The big, burly dogs are excellent climbers, and they have a keen sense of smell that lets them sniff out humans even under several feet of ice and snow. They are also extremely affectionate, which makes them ideal for search and rescue; they will lie on top of a half-frozen hiker or climber, using their body heat to keep the person warm until help arrives. Over the years, St. Bernards have saved the lives of over 2,000 people, but all of that is over now.

There are only twelve St. Bernards left at the monestary, and they are being sold. The four remaining monks no longer have the time or money to continue raising the dogs or engaging in search and resue operations. Besides, modern search and resue teams can do the job much more quickly and efficiently, using helicopters and infrared sensors that can detect even the slightest change in temperature that might indicate a person under the snow. Still, one has to wonder if efficient necessarilly means better.

The retirement of the St. Bernards is, to me, akin to the retirement of lighthouse keepers. Sure, the automated beacons installed in lighthouses are more efficient than the humans who used to tend the lights, and - yes - global positioning equipment makes even the beacons obsolete. But in our constant drive for efficiency, I fear we are losing something very important - romance. Oh, laugh all you want, but it's true.

There was something romantic - even noble - about the lone lighthouse keeper tending the light night after night in all kinds of weather, just as there is something inherently romantic about the St. Bernards digging a stranded hiker out of the snow and warming him or her with its body (brandy kegs on the collars were an artistic touch). The same can be said for the men and women who used to sit in fire watch towers in the national forrests looking for the telltale whiff of smoke that would indicate a forest fore, or the people who used to tend drawbridges, or cops who walked beats.

But we can't afford any of these things any more. It's too expensive to keep a person in a light house or a fire watch tower, too expensive to breed special dogs in a picturesque monestary to search for people in the mountains. These things aren't efficient, and we must, above all things, be efficient. We must do things cheaper, work faster, deliver the goods ahead of schedule. As Mary Chapin Carpenter sang:

Now we drink our coffee on the run,
We climb that ladder rung by rung,
We are the daughters and the sons,
And here's the line that's missing:
The starving children [in China] have been replaced
By souls out on the street;
We give a dollar when we pass
And hope our eyes don't meet.
We pencil in, we cancel out,
We crave the corner suite;
We kiss your ass, we make you hold,
We doctor the receipt.

In other words, we can't stop running to our next meeting - laptop under one arm, cell phone to our ear - long enough to enjoy . . . well . . . anything, really. Meanwhile, we eliminate the inefficiencies in our world, even when those inefficiencies are people or cherished ways of living. And in discarding them, I fear we are throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Ghandi once said, "There is more to life than increasing its speed." Unfortunately, for the big dogs of Grand St. Bernard, the speeding world has passed them by; unfortunately for all of us, we have lost one more piece of tradition in our drive towards a more efficient world.