From the Series- “Misadventures of a Working Stiff”
Having recently retired, I am temporarily, staying near where I grew up. And I find myself reflecting on the early days of my working life, and in particular, the dreaded summer job.
My favorite year of college was my sophomore year. The freshman year, spent in a dorm, was in many ways an extension of high school- in dorms, being fed (at least I think it was food) ,a class load of prerequisites that was more of that ilk (calculus, physics , maybe even gym(?). I would be entering Architecture school in my junior year, so the sophomore year was a transition; the first year of living off campus, 5 room-mates trying to figure out how to live on their own in a North Buffalo flat.
But most memorably, there was the class load. It was a potpourri of electives- Graphic Design, Art History, the City in Film, History of Urban Planning, Creative Poetry. It felt like my whole world was cracking wide open that year, both intellectually and socially. The year culminated at a fancy dinner given by the Poetry professor, a Black Mountain school poet of some renown, who invited a couple of select students to a dinner with other literary lights from the school. I was told I was there not because of my poetry, which was appalling , but because of my journal. It was a great year. Then came summer.
At the end of the school year, we all headed back home, and that meant for most of us, a summer job. For some of my lucky cohorts, that might mean a cake summer job at dad’s law office, or returning to that cushy job at the department store men’s shop. I was not so lucky. For that summer, I was to toil on the country roads of Upstate New York, working for the County Highway Department.
Each summer, the highway department hired college students for the summer. These were minimum-wage jobs working on road crews. There was paving, tree-trimming, ditch-digging, and of course, flagman duty. Each morning, we would assemble in the County Garage , where the good old boys who manned the shop assembled their crews (us) for the day. The shop took me back to high school years I thought I had left behind. You had your crew leaders and their sycophants, teasing, guffawing loudly, and the quieter types around the perimeter. In high school, I was part of the latter genus. I dreaded every morning in the shop as we awaited the day’s sentence .
The days were hot – 90 degrees with soupy humidity. It felt like out on the road, for every guy operating a machine, 2 others leaned on shovels. I remember one crew chief, one of the loud ones, lets call him Ole Bill, who seemed to have it in for us “smart-ass college kids”. So of course I got put on his crew. I thought early on it would be good to not bring up the whole poetry thing.
It did however leak out that I was going to Architecture school that fall. One of our tasks with the ditch digging was periodically building stone walls and culverts at future home driveways, and Ole Bill thought “our architect here” would be perfect for that. Ole Bill always found fault with my culverts, and delighted in showing the college kid how it should be done. There I would stand on the searing hot pavement, getting another lesson on how to choose the right rocks.
The days were interminable, despite the fact that it felt like we were on break more than at work. There was the 45 minute drive to the work site, which included a stop at a diner for coffee, lunch at another diner, then the the afternoon break, then the long drive back to the shop to clock out. I think we worked for 2 hours. Back in the shop, after our time on the roads, Ole Bill always had something to say about the college kids under his jurisdiction that day. All my focus would be on that minute hand to hit 3pm. And at the click of 3, in went the time cards, and out went the sophomores, who made a beeline for the nearby village bar and the balm of 25 cent drafts of Utica Club, a watery local lager.
The nadir of my summer though was yet to come. At some point every summer, every crew was assigned to collect road kill around the county. I quickly became an expert. You had your garden variety well-past-expiration kills. These smaller mammals were flattened and could be spatula’d into the truck like stale pancakes. You had your more recent kills, which were messier, but largely handled by the front-loader. And you had your deer. The deer kills ranged from clean to beyond horrific, and required all hands to clean that up. It was during one of the “deer scrapes” that I remember having a melt-down. How was it in the span of a few months I had gone from an early highlight of my intellectual development, to scraping dead dear off a country road. From meeting the poet Robert Creeley over martinis and charcuterie at an elegant townhouse in Buffalo, to being told to grab that stray antler next to the “Road Work Ahead” sign.
I was determined to quit and told my parents as much. My father thought this all a good life lesson. I asked him if HE had ever scraped a deer off a road. As usual, I lost that argument, and the following Monday , I was back in the shop. But much to my delight that Monday, Ole Bill was nowhere to be found. There was an accident involving a tractor , and would be out those last few weeks. Free at last.
So my last few weeks, I would be working with Webb. He was one of the quiet ones , and it would be mostly just me and him. There were some ditches that needed digging and a few stone walls to be built (I had improved). We said little those first few days, but eventually, he opened up. Told me his story. Wanted to go to college but needed to work, and got this job. He asked me about college, about architecture. Eventually took me by his house to show me a barn he was building behind the main house. It was a lovely building , complete , as I recall now, with vernacular touches only someone who lived his whole life out there would know. He was rightly proud of it.
The last day we all headed back to the village bar. All us “college kids” had become regulars. It was an exuberant happy hour for us- we could all put this “Lord Of The Flies ” experience behind us. That day , Ole Bill made his return in the bar, hobbling in on crutches, recounting his accident to his posse. And there was Webb, at the bar, nursing a beer. I hadn’t seen him there before. I went up and thanked him again for showing me his barn. We talked for awhile, and wished each other well.
As I headed to my car for the drive home, I still remember the excitement washing over me. Soon I would be back to college, starting Architecture school. As I drove home, I reflected on the summer. Maybe it was the golden early evening sun on those beautiful farms, or more likely the Utica Club, but I realized it had actually been a pretty good summer. It wasn’t til a few years later that I realized the summer job may have meant more than that. Being capable of navigating between worlds was an important skill, and many of the perceived differences between people of different backgrounds were often superficial. The roots of who I was, and would be, would always be embedded in this place, no matter how much I might otherwise evolve…………But I still hated Ole Bill.
A few weeks ago, I was driving some of those same country roads. I still knew this part of the county like the back of my hand, even after 40 plus years. I thought back to this job, and the beginnings of my journey as a working stiff. I wondered if any of those old culverts were still around. It was early evening, the best part of the day in these parts, when the heat eases off and the early evening sun illuminates the upstate countryside in golden hues. It felt good to back here.
But I needed to focus, because up ahead, traffic had slowed. I could see cars were slowly navigating around something in the road. Was that an antler?
urban ambles 