When I first came to the South End to try my hand at homesteading, I was poor. Real poor. How poor, you ask? I was so poor I hauled washed-up lumber off the beach sometimes as far away as a mile, then up the bluff trail and over to the shack. So poor I used bent nails I had pulled from old boards and bent straight. Trust me, this wasn\u2019t a Johnny Carson monologue: \u2018We were so poor I borrowed air from the neighbor\u2019s tires to pump up mine.\u2019 Followed by a drum roll\u2026<\/p>\n
\u2026 so poor I took a job at Twin City Foods shoveling wet corn husks onto a conveyor belt from 11 PM to 7 AM. Me, a boy who\u2019d sworn he\u2019d never work in a factory. But desperation is certainly the mother of compromise. I was issued a rain slicker and a pair of rubber boots and a big wide shovel, then told to stand under a waterfall of dripping husks on their way to waiting trucks outside that would haul it all off for sileage., \u2018all\u2019 being the operative word and my job was to get what fell off back on.<\/p>\n
My first night, which was also my last, the conveyor belt broke down about 3 AM. The foreman gave the line workers an indefinite cigarette break. They were mostly middle-aged women, toughened by their hard lives and as friendly as scorpions in a rainstorm. I had no pretensions of some factory social life, after work beers, breakfasts at the Viking Caf\u00e9, uh-uh. It looked like Russia on the skids to me under the corn drippings, surrounded by matrons in scarves furiously pulling on their cigarettes hoping the machinery might never start up again.<\/p>\n
My foreman came over and said \u2018bring your shovel and follow me.\u2019 Outside. Cold. Colder yet if you were already wet. He said shovel these husks off that belt — we gotta work on it. I looked at a quarter mile of husks in front of me from Stanwoodopolis to dawn. I said why don\u2019t we get a dozen of these lineworkers and we\u2019ll get it done 12 times faster. He could see I was foreman material right there. Course, that was HIS job and he planned to keep it. \u2018Get shoveling,\u2019 he ordered, \u2018we haven\u2019t got all night.\u2019<\/p>\n
All night was pretty much what I did have. By the time I finished it was time to clean the machines inside, get them ready for the day crew. Nobody showed me how, just gave me a soap bucket and a scrub brush and we went to work. Some yahoo turned my machine on without warning and next thing I knew my wrist was hammered against a stainless steel guard rail. I couldn\u2019t get it freed and I couldn\u2019t make my plea to shut off the power heard until I\u2019d gotten a laceration and a pretty good scare thrown into me.<\/p>\n
I made a tourniquet out of my handkerchief and went to my foreman for some medical attention. \u201cHow\u2019d you manage THAT?\u201d he asked disgustedly. I told him. \u201cWhat do you want?\u201d he asked. I said maybe a bandage, tape, something to wrap up the wound. Fifteen minutes later he came back. Couldn\u2019t find a first aid kit\u2026. By then the gash had pretty much quit bleeding. I was pretty much done reading the bulletin board. Lost hours. Recent accidents. Fingers chopped off in the cutters. Grim statistics. Serious stuff for a place with no first aid kit handy. I got the picture.<\/p>\n
I handed him my boots and my slicker. \u201cYou can take those home with you.\u201d He said. I said Naw, I won\u2019t be needing them since I won\u2019t be coming back. \u201cYou pissed about this?\u201d he wanted to know. I shook my head wearily. No, I said, I\u2019d just like to keep my fingers. All of em.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t quite make the end of the shift. Driving home in the grey light of a dirty dawn, I thought, there\u2019s way worse than being poor. And so then and there I took my first, if not my last, vow of poverty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I first came to the South End to try my hand at homesteading, I was poor. Real poor. How poor, you ask? I was so poor I hauled washed-up lumber off the beach sometimes as far away as a mile, then up the bluff trail and over to the shack. So poor I used […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[7370,6054,7369],"class_list":["post-19244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantings-and-ravings","tag-industrial-accidents-in-stanwoodopolis","tag-twin-city-food","tag-vows-of-poverty"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19244"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19245,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19244\/revisions\/19245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}