Umbrella Warfare

With the arrival of February, rain has settled in for its months-long tyranny over Cambridge. In curbside puddles and swaths of viscous mud where grass once grew, it will assert its hegemony over our springtime world, aggravating harried pedestrians and turning landscapers’ jobs Sisyphean. The familiarity of the phenomenon makes it no less intolerable—ineluctable and universal, the spring rains dampen life in both senses of the term.

Unequipped with wicking feathers or insulating fur, we humans have no choice but to turn to manufactures to keep us dry. But in doing so, we’ve developed a device whose idiocy and clumsiness outstrips any of the chilly miseries of rain: the umbrella. The scientist Robert Oppenheimer, on witnessing the destructive power of the atomic bomb he had a hand in inventing, uttered in shock, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” One wonders whether Samuel Fox, creator of the modern steel-ribbed umbrella, said anything similar.

If an eccentric inventor was prevailed upon to create a device that pedestrians could carry in order to exact the most possible inconvenience to other people and threaten the most sensitive parts of the human body, it’s likely that the end result would look much like an umbrella. With its deadly metal spikes spreading around at eye-level from an enormously cumbersome circumference, the umbrella is perfectly designed for destruction. Part ninja shuriken, part medieval buckler, and part retiarius’s net, the umbrella is a deadly tool in the hands of the sidewalk bumbler.

The average Cambridge sidewalk is infamous for its inability to comfortably accommodate two people walking abreast. Add a four-foot circle around each person and you have an impassable wall of nylon and steel. In the rain, stepping over the curb becomes an impossibility, and phalanxes of overstressed and rushed Harvard students clump up on sidewalks, knotted up by umbrellas. Cambridge’s Puritan planners simply didn’t have umbrellas in mind when they were laying out the cobblestones, but we insist on jamming the streets with them anyhow.

The predominance of the umbrella on Harvard sidewalks is surely a sign of the tragedy of the commons. The good of the public realm has been subsumed under the convenience of the individual, and personal expedience has been allowed to trump the interests of the commonwealth. Vision obscured by the opaque nylon, the umbrella user becomes a lumbering cyclone of eye-gouging points. The Journal of the American Medical Association in 1978 published a paper on “orbitofacial wounds” caused by umbrella tips, warning that these injuries often go “unrecognized” and stressing “immediate neurologic and radiologic evaluations.”

While politicians haggle over whether it’s safe to carry a handgun on the streets, the umbrella menace remains unspoken in the halls of our out-of-touch government. In fact, members of Congress may be seen regularly strolling through security brashly waving their umbrellas. Last March, an aide to Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) provoked an uproar when he accidentally tried to bring a pistol into a Senate office building. Sadly, the national media has taken a far more tepid interest in the scores of umbrellas that enter the building each day.

Fortunately, the same engineering which brought us the umbrella also brought us something far more useful: the raincoat. For those unfamiliar with it, the raincoat wraps snugly around the wearer’s body, poses no threat to fellow pedestrians, and has the added advantage of thermal insulation. Driving rain poses no threat to the raincoat-clad pedestrian, while the umbrella user vainly struggles to position his or her weapon against the onslaught of the wind. And, if one wishes, the raincoat can be augmented by rain-pants and even gaiters to provide an unassailable guard from the weather’s truculence.

Getting umbrellas off the streets doesn’t mean we just have to throw them away, and critics fearing landfills piled up with mountains of umbrellas should have their concerns eased. Walking on Cape Cod, Thoreau found that his umbrella worked better as a sail to catch tailwinds than as a shield against the rain. There are plenty of good uses the enterprising umbrella owner might put his or her old weapon towards. They can be retrofitted into reflectors for studio photographers, or made into makeshift punch bowls.

And in the utopian post-umbrella world, we will all pleasantly stroll Cambridge’s newly uncongested sidewalks, keeping our eye sockets intact and smiling with benevolence at our fellow pedestria.

Garrett G. D. Nelson ’09 is a social studies and visual and environmental studies concentrator in Cabot House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.