Work. The dream/invention/invented dream of modern man is to escape from work. Work transformed into something cruel and unnatural and shackling by the Industrial Age and its smoke stacks and assembly lines and fourteen-hour work days. A mechanical degree of separation between one’s life and one’s self-sustenance. And so what was once natural and dignifying becomes toilsome and deforming, becomes work. A wall to be climbed or crushed against, daily. Yet it’s not only the worker who dreams of freedom from toil, but the artist. To be free not merely of work, but of the mundane. Free to make something more of life than survival — in short, free to make something beautiful.
I sometimes wonder if the guys on the job feel the same everyday burden of work as I do. It’s interesting that the stereotype of Mexicans was once of the loafer, sombrero pulled down over his eyes as he dozed in the afternoon sun, because nowadays the stereotype has swung to the other extreme, of tireless worker, day laborer or migrant farmer or landscaper in the August heat, willing to toil for longer hours and cheaper pay than his Anglo counterpart.
The Latinos I work with rarely complain about the task at hand, even on Monday mornings, which for me is usually the grimmest sharpest point of the workweek sword. I find myself wondering if they aren’t more genuine workers than I am. Or if they aren’t “workers” to their core being, who don’t mind at all doing what is merely in their nature. But I know that’s bullshit, an enlargement of the new stereotype. It’s something the upper classes have been telling themselves for generations: the lower classes love and live to work.
The reality is, outside of disparities of pay and conditions, that work is work for all workers. Work is hard, usually dirty, sometimes painful and dangerous, and unless the job is of your own enterprise, only occasionally rewarding.
The other day I was doing a job with S., sistering up 2x6’s to the existing rafters in the roof. It was a difficult task, but we got after it, and the feel of the hefty lumber in our hands and the strength in our shoulders as we climbed the ladders carrying the boards and wrangling them into position, flat alongside the old rafters, straining to hold them there until the jack, extended by a post, was cranked up to drive them the extra inches, the new 2x6 and the old stiff rafter creaking upwards to the string line we’d pulled taught to establish a new level line, and the pop pop pop of the nail gun riveting the boards together, making them one, until all of those motions were a rhythm that made us forget our toil and the passing hours. That’s not entirely true. We didn’t forget the toil, as much as the rhythm of work became an exercise that felt good to our moving bodies. The toil became a half-pleasant task. And the day became a good one because we began to enjoy the job.
But the morning had not started out that way. The morning, for me, had started out with a gloomy Monday resentfulness over being forced back to work. I could tell S. was in a low mood too, though I didn’t know if it was for the same reason. I said something derogatory about the “pinche rafters” we had to hoist.
S. laughed and shrugged his shoulders. “Everyday trabajo,” he said.
“Everyday. You don’t get tired of it?”
“Si,” he smiled pitifully. “But every month, the bills are coming, no?”
That seemed to sum it up, both matter-of-factly, and philosophically. The bills are waiting and so is the work to be done. What escape is there from the cycle? And why must the cycle exist at all, or be so cruel to our human natures? If we don’t like such a life, why have we created it for ourselves?
I have a love/hate relationship with work. It’s been the coal in the furnace of my engine, feeding a long train’s drive towards that ineffable something — art, writing, beauty — which in turn has been an escape, or a diversion, from the demands of economics. The blue collar in me both believes in and loathes work. The good kind — using your hands, shaping materials that in turn shape you, getting a little dirt under your nails and sweat on your brow — is healthy for you. The good kind restores something primal and necessary and animal in us.
My first jobs, started at the age of twelve, were lawn-mowing, baby-sitting, sweeping up construction sites after school, and I paid my first income taxes when I was fifteen and working as a dishwasher for a restaurant in downtown Boise. Since then I’ve done everything from bartending to carpentry, wildland firefighting to river guiding, landscaping to bailing hay. The work has been good for me, and probably there’s a healthy heap in store for me still. But it’s one thing to be working to pay your own way, sticking through a season or two in order to save up pay so that you can cut loose for a stretch and travel and loaf and have time to write or do your thing. Work then is a very practical and direct means to not having to work, to economic liberty.
But when you’re a father and your family depends on you to pay the rent and car insurance and groceries for the week, the sudden $1000 hospital bill, then work is no longer something you can just take or leave, but something that has you by the balls. Then you don’t see the sunny end of the work season, where you’ll be sitting in cafes in Milano, or skiing the peaks above Lake Tahoe, free for a long while to roam and write and flirt with life. No, you don’t see that now. You see one long ongoing epoch of indebtedness and indenturement. How can a workingman make enough money to pay for his family’s well being, when his own includes a fundamental need for time off? For art and life, writing and family, leisure and travel? We all need that, not just the writers and artists of the world. It’s part of our human nature to loaf and observe and fiddle about in the world around us.
I think of how good pre-agricultural peoples had it, and especially the natives of North America, with this vast and beautiful landscape around them. It’s estimated that most hunter-gather societies spent an average of two or three hours a day on subsistence. Three hours of subsistence a day? Leaves a lot of time for pot making and basket weaving and story telling and stick sharpening, doesn’t it? It’s too simple and reductionist to glorify those faraway days. But then, I’m not so complicated after all. All I need is to get satisfaction from what I must do, and to have plenty of time for the things I want to do. Plenty of time for family and art. And having those things, when the time comes to lift new rafters into the roof, I’ll be more than happy to put my shoulders into the job.
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