Road Worker (Jobs of My Youth #2)

Four Brothers, Hudson, Ohio, 4 June 1972

“You are in your youth walking down a long road that will branch and branch again, and your life is full of choices with huge and unpredictable consequences, and you rarely get to come back to choose the other route. You are making something, a life, a self, and it is an intensely creative task as well as one at which it is more than possible to fail, a little, a lot, miserably, fatally. Youth is a high-risk business.”    –Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence

The words happen and happy both derive from the same Old Norse word, happ, meaning “good luck.” I sometimes reflect on how my life has unfolded, and the relationship between what has happened to me and my happiness. I know the latter had something to do with luck but also with finding a measure of contentment among those “simple twists of fate.”

The photograph introducing this piece is worth an explanation. This portrait of brothers – from left to right, Jon, Jim, me, Michael – was taken at Jim’s home the evening of our high school graduation. We were basking in the warmth of our friendship and the spotlight of our achievements. Jim shared the photo with the three of us at the recent reunion of the Walsh Jesuit High School Class of ’72. Studying this fifty-year-old photo, one can almost foresee the trajectories of our lives. 

Jon – in my opinion, the leader of our class – instead of facing the photographer, turns to the rest of us, more interested in our reactions to the moment, already preparing to become the empathetic school psychologist. Jim offers his wonderfully engaging smile. He would eventually apply his gregariousness, love of global travel, and facility with languages to a career with Rail Europe. His signature lighthearted chuckle often punctuates things he’s said, part amused by his statement, part sheepish about his amusement. Michael, at first blush a ball of red-haired energy, is an unexpectedly gentle and soft-spoken man. We are both introverts, writers, poets, who for portions of our lives shared our love of literature with students, Michael at the college level, me at the high school level.

We were fully aware that we stood on the cusps of our lives. Behind our good front of bravado and self-confidence, something else was brewing. One only need notice what we were doing with our hands – well, not Jon’s self-assured cowboy pose, thumbs tucked in his belt, but the hands in pockets, hands in fig-leaf pose, crossed arms – to see that we were unconsciously signaling our understandable anxiety about the future.

Within a week of graduation, I started a job working for the Summit County Roads Department, tending the roadways in rural Twinsburg Township, north of Hudson and east of what would later become the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. I had my father to thank for this government job. He was a liquor salesman, which meant he spent his workdays schmoozing the owners and bartenders of one restaurant or tavern after another. His goal was to persuade those people to put his brands in the well, but he knew the best way to do that was by building relationships. He truly enjoyed getting to know people, telling stories and jokes, talking with them about their businesses. Through all this, he developed the kind of connections that could land me a summer job taking care of the county’s roads.

This was my first time working on a crew. The road maintenance garage we worked out of was home to a dozen full-time workers. I quickly learned who the chiefs were and the pecking order of the rest of the outfit, an order decided mostly by seniority but to some extent by charisma. I was one of three summertime workers, but the only rookie, the others being college students returning for their second or third season. I did what any newbie should do – watched, listened, took mental notes, put up with teasing that seemed a kind of initiation, and learned how to fit in. I dutifully laughed at the jokes, sensing from the reactions of others that they’d all heard the punchlines before. 

Road work is manual labor of course, at times physically demanding, and I sometimes finished a shift exhausted. But I followed the lead of the full-timers, who showed me how to pace myself, and reminded me with their looks that I would gain nothing by showing them up with my youthful energy and enthusiasm. I was grateful for these tips; certain members of the crew took me under their wings in a way that felt paternal or at least avuncular. I learned how to handle the scythes and beat-up mowers we used to trim the grass around guardrails. I learned how to wield a wide-scoop shovel, reaching into the back of the bright orange dump truck for a shovel-load of gravel and slinging it so it spread evenly over fresh tar. I also learned how to lean on that shovel so it looked like I was doing something when there was nothing to do.

This was also my first time punching a time clock. Punctuality was required; I was no longer a high school student, and being late resulted in harsher consequences than a frown from one’s teacher. I’d punch in and then join the crew, who would invariably loll around sipping bad coffee and swapping stories for a half-hour before we hopped in the trucks and headed off to some work site. There was a side benefit to this job: One of the other summer workers was dealing a little pot on the side. A few times that summer, we’d slip away near the end of lunch and meet at his car so I could buy an ounce from him, something the full-timers would’ve never condoned.

During those three months in the employ of the county, “chipping up rocks for the great highway,” I came to appreciate the pleasure of doing a hard day’s work. I took a particular pride in the muscle-tiredness from eight hours of manual labor, the tan lines of being outdoors, and the calluses of working with my hands. I was also given a glimpse into the mind-numbing routines of such work and how it could wear on a body over a lifetime.