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Almost any time you read about life in the hinterlands
these days, you'll encounter the phrase lone eagle.
It refers to someone who works at home, generally in a
remote spot, and exports that work to some place with
money, generally through a telephone line.
As nearly as I know, the locution was coined and promoted by Phil Burgess of the Center for the New West in Denver. Now, the Center is a fine organization which even lent me some non-smoke-free office space once when a project required my extended presence in civilization, but it is also true that USWest is a major source of its funding.
Keep that in mind as we look back more than a century. Then there were railroads strung across the West, eager for more traffic and for some way to sell all the land they owned. They hired agronomists to figure out what crops would grow best, then recruited farmers, from as far away as Europe, to populate the territory and, not incidentally, to provide traffic for the railroad.
Move to today, and here is US West with lines strung across the West and eager for more traffic on those lines. Encourage this lone-eagle phenomenon -- households that run up $300 a month or more in phone bills, because almost everybody they do business with is somewhere else -- and the phone company should prosper, just as the railroads once did.
I'd be a hypocrite if I said there was anything wrong
with this. I was a lone eagle before the term emerged, and
lone eagle
is certainly a more convenient locution
than unemployed guy who writes and plays with computers
in the middle of nowhere and operates out of his house
because he can't afford to rent office space.
Although lone eagle
is convenient, it isn't all
that accurate. It conveys the image of a powerful creature
who emerges from the aerie at sporadic intervals, swoops
down to grab a fish or rabbit, then returns to contemplate
the world in solitary splendor.
That's about as far from the truth as it's possible to get. Lone eagles are hardly solo operators. We need an immense infrastructure of phone lines, overnight express, postal service, suppliers, tolerant friends and repair personnel to keep all sorts of complex machinery running. And the newer variety, rather than content themselves with the local tavern and post office, seem to require coffee bars and cellular fax machines.
Real eagles are migratory; lone eagles may venture to an
occasional conference or workshop, but are generally such
stodgy stay-at-homes that their children complain often
about how we never go anywhere.
Real eagles go out and look for their plump and juicy prey, then seize it and kill it. We lone eagles are more like hungry vultures who capitalize on roadkill -- we take what we can get because we can't afford to be picky.
Clearly, another term would be more appropriate. A rural
economic development specialist has proposed
burrower
-- an anti-social creature that spends most
of its time holed up.
That fits, and if you look around the burrow, you'll generally find piles of junk, amassed in the hope that somewhere in the heap, there will be the part you need to keep a computer running at 3 in the morning (one benefit of this lifestyle is that you get to pick which 100 hours a week you work).
Given that tendency to acquire and store stuff, pack
rat
or camp robber
works even better than
burrower
or eagle.
A friend in Florence refers to himself as lone
magpie.
He says he doesn't have full eagle status
because he broke down and took a part-time teaching job --
which apparently means he spends some time chattering, a
speciality of magpies.
Perhaps this is a progression like Boy Scouts. You might start as a camp-robber with some after-hours consulting, and work through the vulture and magpie stages before you're a full-fledged eagle.
But what comes next? I propose the raven. There's a whole tree full of them across the street. They never seem to lift a feather, yet they're sleek and smart. They must know something that the lone eagles don't.
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