Modern DIYers Are Huge Wusses

Recently, in an antique store in rural Virginia, I came across the Foxfire books, a high-school class project that turned into an epic publishing and oral history enterprise. Now celebrating its 45^th anniversary, this series of back-to-the-land classics teaches everything from how to build a log cabin to the curative properties of dog saliva to the rudiments of hog slaughter. In Foxfire 3, I found a recipe for apple butter illustrated with photos of some of the Georgia Appalachians whose skills the Foxfire books recorded. A woman in curlers pours the contents of a battered tin pot into a jar. A hunched woman in a leisure suit and a gray pouf dumps five pounds of sugar into a vat boiling over an open flame. Nearby, an equally hunched man with roughened, wrinkled skin plays the banjo.