The summers I turned 16 and 17, I had loaded and unloaded trucks and tractor trailers at the produce auction, half a mile from grandmom’s house. I would walk there every day after work, waiting for dad to pick me up. One memorable sunny August afternoon in 1963 and I had sat in her living room watching President Kennedy announce that “yesterday, a shaft of light cut into the darkness,” referring to the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban treaty.
Other times, I had come in for cookies and milk after plowing or discing or cultivating, and had sat and told grandmom of things I had been reading about. Earlier yet, I had been one of the 15 grandchildren who filled her house with noise and motion on her birthday and on some holidays. And before even that, back in the early fifties, my older brother and sister and I would sometimes come in, cold and wet from picking daffodils for the cut-flower trade, and grandmom would fix us hot chocolate. And cookies. She always urged cookies on you as if they were something good for you that you ate too infrequently.
Several lehrs down, a couple of people were arguing about something. I could see the hostile postures, could hear the angry sound, if not the words. I watched them for a moment, mildly curious, then turned back to my work.
I’d almost killed myself, one day, plowing. The plow had a three-point hitch, meaning that it hooked two chains to the hydraulic lifts at the back of the tractor, while the tongue attached directly below the seat, held in place by a pin, which was secured in turn by a cotter pin. One day, as I was plowing, the cotter pin got out, the pin worked loose, the tongue dropped and dug itself into the ground, and the rear end of the plow came flying up and forward toward my head. The tongue dug itself almost vertically into the ground, stopping the plow from going forward the few inches it would have needed to brain me. The tractor was shivering and bucking, its wheels still churning, until I put in the clutch. I backed it out, and the plow tongue came out of the ground undamaged. Walking back, I found the pin lying atop the furrow, rather than being buried beneath the earth, as I had feared. I never did find the cotter pin, but no harm, no foul, and I had a story to tell about the hazards of farming. But who would I have told? My fraternity brothers, coming out of their suburban backgrounds?
It occurred to me, rhythmically throwing boxes, that what I was doing wasn’t so different from most jobs where you worked with your hands. Most jobs had a groove, and the hardest part was finding it and settling into it. Like mixing mud, which I had been doing for the past few days.
Dad was renovating one of the farm buildings, and one aspect of the job was plastering the two-story exterior. He hired a couple of men, and he conscripted my cousin Warren and me as free labor. The three men did the plastering. Warren and I mixed the plaster (which everybody called mud) and kept it coming to them as they were ready for it.
There’s nothing particularly difficult about mixing mud: so much cement, so much sand, so much water from the hose. Dad’s cement-mixer had died long ago, so Warren and I mixed by hand, pouring the materials into a six-foot by four-foot by one-foot slope-sided metal box, raking the stuff forward and back forward and back, using an oversized hoe with two large holes in the blade. We would mix and get a batch ready, then put it in a bucked tied to a rope attached to a pulley at roof level. We would swing the bucket of mud up to the men on the scaffold and they would empty it into a tray and we’d lover the bucket and refill it. Nothing fancy, but there was a rhythm to it. We had to mix the mud soon enough that they would have it when they needed it, but not too soon, or it would begin to harden. Since mixing took a good while, we had to start the next batch before the previous batch was used up. That meant piling the available mud at one end and the new materials at the other, trying to keep the water from flowing into the old batch so it wouldn’t’ get soupy.
My relief man arrived again, chatty as ever. “Lunch. Twenty minutes.”
One day drinking with my friends to celebrate the end of finals. The next day, starting a three-day job mixing mud at the farm. Two days after that, back at the factory.