The decline of stuff.(The Straggler)(Column)

IN his book The Missing of the Somme, Geoff Dyer describes some WWI film footage he has been watching of soldiers on the Western Front:

 
   Every piece of equipment looks like it 
   weighs a ton. There were no lightweight 
   nylon rucksacks or Gor-tex boots. 
   Things were made of iron and wood ... 
   Everything weighed more then. 

He goes on to quote some lines from the war poet Ivor Gurney:

 
   We marched and saw a company of 
   Canadians, 
   Their coats weighed eighty pounds at 
   least. 

This passage came to mind the other day while I was talking to my plumber. I had called him in to get an estimate for removal of some pipes. Our house came to us with an old-fashioned heating system: huge ancient cast-iron radiators upstairs, baseboard pipe heating downstairs. We put up with this for some years. Then last fall, having come into a little money, we called in a firm to install a spiffy new system that blows air through vents. The project left us with a great deal of now-redundant old galvanized-steel and copper piping to be removed, not to mention those cumbersome great radiators. So I called in the plumber for an estimate to remove it all.

The plumber sized up the job briskly and gave me a quote. It was a little more than I wanted to pay, so I attempted some bargaining. This probably wasn't appropriate, but I have picked up the bargaining habit from my wife, who has the Third Worlder's refusal to take any quoted price at face value, and will haggle over the price of a subway token. Surely (I said to the plumber) the extracted metal piping would itself be worth a good deal as scrap?

The plumber smiled a superior smile at my ignorance. Scrap metal? Forget it. Yes, there were a few dealers still in business on Long Island, but they took in only copper and brass, and didn't give much for that. It was not worth trucking it over there.