It was A hot summer’s day, and I was ready to inhale several thousand calories’ worth of lunch and sit in front of the swamp cooler for the rest of the afternoon. I was probably 16 or 17 and had spent the morning moving pipe or building fence or chopping down the accursed burdock that was constantly springing up along the irrigation mainline running along the upper end of the hay field.
I don’t remember exactly what chores had occupied my time that morning, but I recall being tired and hungry (as teenage boys have a way of becoming the instant the specter of work raises its ugly head). Just as I was sinking my incisors into a deliciously enormous ham and cheese sandwich, the phone rang. It was my grandfather, who lived just a half mile away.
“Bart lost a load of hay up Goose Creek,” he informed me. “Want to come with me to help him?”
I didn’t, but I didn’t suppose that would make a difference, so I said sure, I’d come along.
My uncle Bart makes his living farming just south of Burley, Idaho, about 25 miles from my childhood home in Oakley, and he’s as good as God makes them. He’s big, strong, reticent and generous to a fault. His handshake is somewhere between firm and python-like, and he generally drives as if the devil himself were on his tail, maintaining a calm air of serenity all the while.
On this particular day, Bart was hauling a semi load of alfalfa hay to one of the several ranches tucked away in the desert foothills along the Idaho-Utah-Nevada border. When Grandpa and I arrived on the scene, hundred-pound hay bales were scattered for 100 yards along the winding dirt road. Thirty or so had broken apart, but, for the most part, the load was safe, albeit scattered down the hillside among the sagebrush and junipers.
And there was Bart, exuding his typical preternatural cool, happy as could be, lugging one bale at a time back to the truck and tossing it onto the flatbed trailer. This was just the kind of wreck I lived in fear of causing—20 miles from help in either direction and with only yourself to blame. Yet here was my uncle, smiling at me as I stepped out of the pickup as if to say, “C’mon, you know I just pull these stunts so the rest of you have a decent story to tell.”
Long story short, we got to work, and after a couple hours Bart once again had an (almost) full load of hay to deliver, and I had a new layer of sun on my farmer’s tan with which to impress the ladies. Crisis—while not even remotely averted—at the very least subdued.
And you know what? It was a dang good day. Sure, there had been a fiasco that wasn’t my doing, and I had been called upon to aid in saving the day. But what I’ve come to realize is that no matter what line of work a guy goes into, he’s going to be involved in a train wreck or two along the way. A feller ought to feel lucky when he gets to clean up the mess under the summer sun, breathing in the scent of hay and sagebrush, rather than in some boardroom full of stuffed shirts breathing down his neck.
Testifying before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee in 2011, Mike Rowe, host of Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs, said this: “In a hundred different ways, I think we’ve slowly marginalized an entire category of critical professions, reshaping our expectations of a ‘good job’ as something that no longer looks like work.”
Rowe’s words are true, and it’s a shame. That day up in a high desert canyon, cleaning up a huge mess, with no sound but our labored breathing as we lugged bale after bale up the hill to the truck, ranks above just about any day I’ve ever spent in a classroom or office.
They say the worst day fishing (or golfing, or whatever a person’s particular weakness may be) beats the best day at work. Poor saps; their work sounds miserable.