I remember when I was little, like four or five, looking at my old man's hands in gruesome awe. His knuckles were constantly bloodied and battered, like a gutter fighter's. They always looked painful and I remember in my little brain wondering how a man could still work with his hands butchered the way they were. He wasn't missing fingers or anything horrible like that, but in my child's eyes I imagined he must of been incredible if those horrible cuts didn't bring tears to his eyes.
My old man had to. In his early twenties, he and my mom were making a home out of the two bedroom trailer they bought that sat under the rim of Tableland. The mill job he had evaporated, perhaps as precursor to what would occur later in the 80's, and this job kept the mortgage getting paid, food on the table and clothes on my and my brother's backs. Putting together wheel lines was one of the few jobs out there. I remember in the morning, calling him "ham" as slid the sliding glass door shut. For some reason that cracked me up. I don't understand why; I don't try to. It was just funny. Once in a while I'd put on his big, thick boots. The tops came up to my knees and the foot of the boots felt like something earthy and ancient. They were work boots. Those boots more than likely represented the toil of my grandparents and their grandparents and their grandparents.
I think back to those golden days like Cather does Nebraska in
My Antonia. They seemed so simple and so happy. The old man didn't have a drinking problem and the biggest worries seemed when mom could get the stuff she put on layaway. My summer days were spent looking up at the blue skies and the clouds and running through the brush (well, as far as our mother would let us!) with my little toe-headed brother. We fast friends back then. I'd load my pockets with obsidian chips and thought the diatomite cliffs on the roads were hills of gold. If there was trouble on the horizon or blood beneath the carpet, I was too young to know or care. One thing I did realize, even then, as he looked down at me and shut the door, was that he was virtually a stranger to me.
When I was thirteen, my old man found me a job flood irrigating. I remember riding around in Tim the Irishman's pickup, him and my dad drinking beer, showing me the small ranch I'd be responsible for. I vaguely remember them asking me if I thought I could handle it; hell I didn't know if I could or not. It was only my second job ever. But I knew what was expected of me and said yes.
I had never set a dam in my entire life or cleared cut outs from a ditch. That spring, before school got out and after baseball practice, my old man showed me the ins and outs of flood irrigating. The dark May clouds let enough evening sun through as he taught me to read the land and how to get water to high spots. His old Chevy diesel pickup, a hand me down from his boss, ambled along the ditchbanks as we scared up ducks and black birds. We'd spend many hours talking politics and discussing this and that later on, but those days seemed like the first days I understood what he was about. He was no longer a stranger but a real, tangible person. I understood the pride he took in his labor and why he was afraid of me and my brother ending up as pasty, office-worker types.
Earlier today I set the dams for this place for the first time since we bought it. There's been enough rain to keep us from having to irrigate it, but now the greenness of the pasture is becoming accented with the white and tans of the dead grass and dry horse shit. Looking across the land, I read the checks and knew I had set my dam in the wrong place. A little shovel work bailed me out, but now I know better.
There's an honesty in this toil that I don't get from sitting at this computer. Even as I studied tom become a copywriter, there was a sort of pride of using my brain and wits to wrap around a product or service to get someone to emotionally connect with it to produce an action. Even in that, it seemed more like honest, hard work. This, this helping people get their stuff found, feels more like the regurgitation of knowledge than anything. There's work. And at times I do need to look at things creatively, but it's not like advertising. In the toil of the men in the fields, they earn their rest. Their backs hurt, their hands are calloused, their skin burnt red from the sun and bumpy from the mosquito bites and thistles. With this, not so much. There's tired and there's exhausted, but the body grows soft as do my hands.
These times seem less simple and less golden. But time and awareness tarnishes everything. I hope as the girl gets older and she comes with me to move the dams, to play in the flood waters, perhaps put on my huge-to-her irrigating boots, she looks back on them as golden times. I also hope she doesn't look at me as a stranger like I did at my old man as he left every morning to do whatever it was he needed to do to keep us in food and a home.
