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Last modified: Sunday, September 7, 2008 10:06 PM CDT
Coonridge Digest: Labor Teaches Lifetime Lessons
by Freida Marie Crump
Greetings from the Ridge.
The sweat was literally pouring off the teenagers as Herb and I drove by a detasseling crew in one of our nearby seed corn fields last week.
It was the tail-end of the tassel-pulling season, the kids were ankle-deep in mud, and the midwest sun was combining with dog-drowning humidity to make it a truly miserable day to be working outdoors.
And the kids? They were being given the gift of a lifetime.
Prairie Home Companion host Garrison Keillor said that, "After you've dragged a gunnysack full of potatoes down a dusty row in 95-degree heat, everything else in life is easy.
"That middle seat on a trans-Atlantic flight beside the crying baby seems not so bad at all."
Work. Simple hard work. If you do enough of it early in life then it does indeed take the sting off every other rugged endeavor from there on out to the end of your life. Just hard work.
On April 14th of last year, I was competing in my annual Olympics of Angst as I sat at a kitchen table covered with IRS forms, receipts, instruction books and a half-cup of cold coffee. The taxes were due the next morning, and I was still totaling mileage with the terrifying specter of audit hovering over my shoulder.
What, I wondered, could possibly be harder than this? And I thought of the black snake.
Our neighbor had hired six of us local teenagers to stack bales of hay in his barn loft. The guy putting the 80-pound bundles of dried clover onto the hay elevator must have had a hot date that night because he was sending the pollen-packed rectangles into the hay mow quicker than we could grab, haul, and stack them.
Our clothing was thoroughly drenched by noon and now the sun was setting with the promise of another 300 bales staring us into a clammy heap of misery. Bucking bales is not for the timid.
And to give this already miserable day a real kicker, the barn's owner had admonished us before we climbed into the loft, "I want to warn you kids. I put a black snake in here about five years ago to get rid of the mice. He may be close to eight feet long by now. Whatever you do, don’t kill him."
There are few things I hate more than snakes, even in an election year. Can you imagine the terror of knowing that an eight-foot snake might be lurking under the next bale you move?
We didn't even eat lunch. We just sat there and shook for 30 minutes then climbed back into the loft.
The only respite came when it was too late to do us any good. At the end of the day the man's hired hand told us, "Don’t worry, kids. I killed that damned snake two years ago."
But after a few summers like that, nothing has seemed especially difficult.
The farm country has provided generations of youngsters with a chance to find the satisfaction of accomplishing hard work. Walking bean fields, holding hogs for vaccination and castration, detasseling corn, building a fence of hedge posts, using a hand scythe to knock down a weed patch, digging potatoes, spending a day on a ladder picking apples; when you begin your work experience with that degree of sweat and strain, there's little that life can throw at you that'll do much real damage.
The cities and towns have provided their share of grunt jobs to toughen teens for a life of labor. I would imagine that after a few years of drying dishes in the kitchen of a hot cafe or laboring over a fast food fry grill, there's little left in life to faze you.
I mean no disrespect for the less-toughened among us, those who grew up without the advantages of hard work to do, but I do wonder how they survive.
I can remember sitting on the deck of a cruise ship watching the glories of Alaska's Glacier Bay idle by when the well-tricked-out lady beside me started to gripe about the fact that on the following day she'd have to pack and leave her bags outside her cabin door for pickup.
She said she'd been dreading all that tedious packing for three days now and wondered how she'd ever be able to move her bags the 20 feet to the door. I asked her if she'd ever castrated a hundred-pound Hampshire boar. She got up and left.
Some people have no appreciation for hard work.
In my youth I was no model of ambition and energy. I was as hard to wake in the morning as any of today's youth. But thank God somebody, somewhere, taught me how to work.
You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door, but you’ll enjoy the trip.
In real life, Freida Marie Crump is Ken Bradbury, retired teacher, author, musician and playwright who hangs out in Arenzville, IL.
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