My Neck, My Back

Looking back, I realize that I originally started this blog to encourage myself to write about growing up in the unique way I did. After the first couple posts, I've kind of gotten off track. Consider this post to be a return to the original purpose of the blog.

I have always hated the idea of going to the gym to exercise. There is something fundamentally broken in a world where we invent machines to do all the work for us (at great expense in terms of social injustice and environmental degradation), then invent machines to keep our under-worked bodies from the inevitable atrophy that results. I like the idea of exercising because there is work to be done. Cardio? Walk or bike to where you need to be. Resistance? Surely there is a ditch that needs digging, or wood that needs splitting. When you live in the country, there is always manual labor to be done.

I always loved doing this kind of work as a kid. Well, that isn't quite true. When I was younger I'd be working with my dad. He'd say, "I want to see the sweat dripping from your nose," in a kind of a half joking way. I was perplexed. I thought he was joking. Or exaggerating. I'd sweated before, but dripping off your nose? Surely that was a myth.

At some point, probably around the time puberty hit and I started to bulk up, I learned to love working. I discovered that sweat does, indeed, drip from the end of your nose when you get going. Especially in hot weather. Splitting firewood, digging a ditch to lay pipe, carrying rounds of wood...I was your guy. I remember on one occasion my dad and I were cutting wood on a steep slope. He, being older and wiser, had chosen a tree above the road, so we could roll the rounds down to the truck. One particularly large round bounced past the truck, off the other edge of the road, and thirty yards down the steep hill on the other side. He said, "Oh well, leave that one." I was having none of it. In the arrogance of youth, I slid down that hill, picked up the forty pound round of oak, and carried it back up the hill. I still remember (and now understand) his look of combined envy and disbelief.

When I got to graduate school, I was working at a computer or a lab bench all day (sometimes not seeing the sun once), and my metabolism started to slow, I discovered that I was going to have to start exercising not to do work, but simply to keep myself from going to pot. Two friends took me under their respective wings and showed me around a gym. One taught me to swim and not to feel too self-conscious getting into and out of a pool. The other showed me around a weight room, acting as coach and spotter. His bulk as all from the gym, and designed mostly to look good. Hence, most of it was on the front. He had nice pecs, good biceps, and abs. I wasn't much at the bench press or doing bicep curls, but when it came to back exercises (seated rows, lat pull downs) I was always adding quite a bit of weight after his sets. I never thought much of it. I had strong back and muscles, that was just the way it was. Thinking back, I think of a couple of particular activities that might have contributed to this fact. Splitting wood for instance. Besides carrying the big rounds, there is swinging the 8 or 12 pound maul.

Then there is swinging a pick. I once spent a week digging a ditch to lay water pipe. You see, we had a lovely spring that was the source of our water for most of my childhood, but it was inconveniently located on a neighboring piece of land owned by somebody else. She had another spring above her house (the one we used was above our but below hers) so had no real use for the water we used. Why pump it uphill when there is perfectly good water above your house that gravity will bring to you? However, at some point our relationship with her soured. She became increasingly paranoid, stopped taking her pills, and began doing things like running naked through the woods, threatening passersby with loaded guns, and filing frivolous lawsuits. We (or more precisely my father) were the frequent target of her ire, so it was inevitable she would stop letting us use her water.

It was a result of this water conflict that I found myself tasked with digging a six inch deep trench up half a mile of meadow, passing the pipe through the culvert under the dirt road at the top, then digging another quarter mile of trench through the forest, across land owned by one friendly neighbor to a spring owned by another friendly neighbor. Lest you get the mistaken idea that we lived in a thriving metropolis here, I should point out that a total of two other houses were within shouting distance of the house I grew up in. And even then, if they were walking on gravel or running the sink, they'd never hear you. Before we got a phone, we used to hold shouted conversations across that very same quarter mile of meadow I became so familiar with.

The ditch digging wasn't actually so bad. There was a lot of it to do, but, unless I hit a root or a rock, the going was pretty easy. To my knowledge, that pipe has never frozen from that day to this, so I guess I got it deep enough. Another time I was asked to dig a new outhouse hole. The outhouse had always been 100 yards up the hill (inconvenient in the dark, or snow, or during a bout of stomach flu). We decided to locate it closer to the house this time. Far enough that the smell wouldn't bother us, but close enough to avoid the long trek in the dark. I discovered, a few feet down, that we had cited the new hole over bedrock. I had put in enough work by that time that I wasn't easily dissuaded. I can also be a stubborn cuss. Telling me I won't, can't, or shouldn't do something will sometimes get my back up, and I will do whatever it is, come hell or high water. This was one of those times. It is possible that my dad had told me it was a bad place for the new outhouse. In any case, I was damned if I was going to give up. I went to the shed and got the digging bar (a 20 pound iron bar with a point on one end and a wide prying thing on the other). I methodically forced that bar into the cracks in the rock, broke it up, and shoveled the gravel out of the hole. The hole on that outhouse wasn't as deep as some of the others, but we used it for a year or so.

Looking back, I'd say that it was experiences like those that made for my non-traditional physique. I have a tight spot in my middle back I can trace to an entire day swinging a Weedeater (when mowing that much area, another tool would be better, but some grass grows on inconveniently steep slopes, and can really only be cut by a fool and a Weedeater).

Most of the time I forget that I grew up in, essentially, preindustrial conditions. Today I use a computer with as much facility as most, text, carry a cell phone, and know last week's internet jokes at least (I know who Rebecca Black is and hate her song as much as the next guy). Every once in a while it becomes clear that my life has not been like those of most people I know. Sometimes it is a skill I have (making a fire, digging an outhouse hole), but more often it is a cultural reference I don't get (Peanuts cartoons for instance). I've learned to fake it. I know that the parents in the Peanuts cartoons spoke gibberish, so I laugh along with everybody else when someone makes a joke about that, but I don't get it. Not really. Most of the time people ignore the awkward moment.