Gone Fishing

As they say.

I wrote a different newsletter for this week, and my heart was not in it, so I trashed it just now at 9:32 pm, the eleventh hour. Sometimes I find the turnaround time for the newsletter printing press too intense for my slow, sweet, dumb brain. So I’m going fishing this week, sort of.

Now instead of the other newsletter I drafted today, you are getting this. It is a note that will tell you I am lying in bed with two snoring dogs, a cat giving herself a good washing, and a book splayed open on the bed. I am cold, still reheating from an ice bath that dropped my heart rate to 41 beats per minute. (It once hit 29, which was pretty cool, but also alarming. 29 is close to zero.)

You should also know that I saw two mountain bluebirds so far this week, there are spears of green grass emerging, and I have the urge to be splitting wood, only on this patch of short grass prairie there is not a single tree. This urge is ingrained in me from a childhood spent in the forests. Here in Montana we have far fewer trees than in the Adirondacks where I grew up, and it so happens that whenever I see the stray hardwood bucked up and piled in a pool of sunlight on someone’s property, I for a moment think myself back home, where such piles are common. These piles are more powerful than they appear, at least to one who knows their scents and their potential for BTUs. I think there is poetry in simple things, too easy these days to overlook and to take for granted until your time runs out, and when it does, you lie there wondering why for so long you allowed yourself to disconnect from things.

So do not disconnect if you can help it. This is very important. Of course you will not listen to me. Lessons cannot be imparted outside of experience. We learn for ourselves, usually the hard way.

A final thing. I went to have a tire repaired at the shop this week, and though the tire pressure sensor was on, the technician found all the tires to be sound. I drove the car into the garage, something they had never let me before do. Then they let me hang out in the shop as they troubleshot. It is extremely loud in the tire shop, and I jumped like a skittish horse at every whizz and bang. None of the men working wore ear protection. Myself, I can hear a whisper fart from a mouse during a rainstorm, and I must wear noise cancellation headphones nearly everywhere I go because of this sensitivity. In the shop, I had to take it. I couldn’t bring myself to put the damn things over my ears, so I jumped around as if being shocked, but all the same it felt good in there.

I grew up with modest, hardworking men who never made much money. Their lives were grounded in practical skills that kept their homes warm and their families dry. I learned to respect these types of men perhaps more than I can learn to respect other types of men, even powerful men. I am drawn to men who are capable. All my life I have been observing them, then emulating them, often failing to replicate their expertise.

In the tire shop, I recognized that sense of meaning and purpose only men totally absorbed in the trades seem to possess. Men at real work—work that is physically taxing—are under-appreciated in the modern economy, and yet if all the tire shops of America were to shutter their doors at once, the grandest occupations would follow suit. Very often, the pay rates for occupations are inverted. One advertisement on a popular podcast can fetch seven figures. Not so for the arborist or the tire guy.

It made me think about work, types of work, and what I consider real work. Plenty of people I know do not know how to use a shovel. There is great pleasure in the use of a shovel, and if I were dealing with someone who was struggling to find purchase in life, I would not recommend a shrink before I recommended they dig a few hundred holes in thick soils, into which they could plant fruit trees, nut trees, or pine trees. After this, they should then weed the garden.

After this, they should then muck the horse stalls. The list goes on.

Anyhow, I backed out of the tire shop. They charged me nothing, though I cost them ten minutes. This only made my respect for them soar. These “lowly” jobs are the foundation of America. I think of this quite often.

Find yourself a shovel, some wood to split, some trees to plant. You are in for a world of good there.

See you next week, perhaps.