At the age of 14, I spent an entire month out of my summer painting an all pipe corral with a paint glove and about 30 gallons of rusty red paint. In compensation for this mind-numbing task, I received a very legitimate $6.50 an hour at a time when minimum wage was $3.25 (best I can remember). In addition, on most days, I was able to listen to one of two country music stations (one country, and one country western) on the radio of the old ranch truck. Lunch time was announced daily by Paul Harvey. All and all, not a bad gig.
I spent half of the following summer, at the age of 15, spraying cactus. This involved filling a 50 gallon drum in the back of the ranch truck with a mixture of diesel, soap, and herbicide (totally environmentally friendly, I’m sure), and from that drum filling a 3-gallon hand pump/sprayer, and then walking up and down the swaths left behind by the Brush Hog in order to spot spray each and every half-mowed cactus plant with an ample coating of the only proven prickly-pear cactus-killing cocktail I’ve ever encountered to this day. (The diesel served to burn the plant while the soap ensured the herbicide would stick long enough to do its thing. Mowing the pasture in advance served to provide a grid for spraying while also boosting the killing power of the poison by mangling the cactus fronds. When messing with cactus, you gotta go medieval.)
This job was a bit more daunting because it involved spraying a few hundred acres worth of cactus, on foot, in Texas, during the month of July. The perks? My pay got bumped up to $10 an hour that summer. That increased wage afforded me my first Sony Walkman. Oh yeah. Mix tapes of Depeche Mode, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Midnight Oil filled my ears for eight hours a day, five days a week, several weeks on end.
Even more valuable than that, was a lesson I didn’t realize at the time, but I easily recognized years later. During those summer jobs, I learned mental discipline and toughness. In other words, I learned how to space out and daydream while accomplishing a menial, physical task. I never would have guessed how valuable this lesson would end up being.
This week, I’ve been harvesting my malbec grapes. It’s an easy task compared to spraying hundreds of acres of cactus. It entails clipping, de-stemming, and smooshing thousands of tiny berries by hand while removing flawed berries, spiders, spider webs, leaves, stems, and earwigs. And these days I’ve got an iPad and some comfy Beats headphones to stream hours of my favorite podcasts. (I’ve moved up in the world!)
I like the work. It’s so simple compared to the rest of my interpersonal tasks throughout the day, or the ones that leave me liable for someone else’s health and wellbeing. Pick berry, squish berry. Pick berry, squish berry. Repeat ad nauseam. Notice the progress of the sun moving across the sky in my back yard. Watch a bird steal a few of my grapes before I can harvest them. Say hi to the neighbor’s cat as he contemplates pooping in my garden. Repeat it all the next day, and again the next.
I realize many people would consider this a miserable task. My sons consider it torture. After having them do it for a couple hours a couple years ago, I gave up on the idea. I figured their disdain would ooze into the finished product, and that’s the last thing I need to be sipping on in the evenings. (Plus, why waste my quality spaceout time on people who don’t appreciate it?) What I don’t know is whether my appreciation for menial labor is simply a learned behavior (that could be inflicted upon anyone, like my sons) or if there is something innate in me…perhaps I was preconditioned? Is the lack of appreciation for such tasks a sign of the times? or just my setting? Perhaps the world will never know…or perhaps someday we’ll tune in for “the rest of the story.”
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