Satisfying Labor

I've recently began to read Herman Melville's classic, Moby Dick. There is nothing remarkable about that. It is a book that many have started, because it's easy to start something. It's much harder to see something through. I plan on seeing this through; it may take a few months, but I'll do it and write about it every now and then.

Ishmael begins the book by expressing a keen desire to simply get away from it all. It's something we have all experienced; indeed, that's the wisdom in regularly scheduled vacations. But Ishmael isn't looking for a vacation to re-center himself, he is looking for hard work. He is going to sea, but not as a passenger; he is going as a sailor.

"When I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the fore-castle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time.  

What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way— either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content."

I don't think I'll ever be mistaken for a hard worker; especially not the old school brand of hard workers (steel mill workers, farmers, factory, etc). But I find myself, every now and then, wishing I could spend a week or two in the fields doing back breaking labor. There is something satisfying about clocking out at the end of a long day of manual labor that cannot be matched in another other line of work.

     

You go home, sit down for dinner, and know that you earned it today. Not that that feeling doesn't come in other careers, it does. But there is just a special kind of satisfaction that accompanies manual labor. 

When we were in Kuwait before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom a few of us were tasked to build bunkers around base. This was up to 16 hours of hard work in temperature over 100 degrees. We would each take a shovel, grab a few sand bags, and fill and stack them until the bunker was complete. It was, hands down, the hardest I'd ever worked... And I loved it.

Maybe it was because you could look and physically see what you accomplished that day. Maybe it was because the sleep was always good. Maybe it was because your work was your exercise. I don't know, but every now and then I miss it. And like Ishmael I want to get away and have at it again.