11.2.2009 |
3 Comments Chasing the Light in Either Direction
Physical labor, once an invigorating elixir, is now a dummy-down venom. My first job was moving ammonia-soaked patches of horse urine with a four-pronged pitchfork. For some reason the sawdust changed the chemical composition into enormous ammonia cakes weighing upwards of ten pounds. I remember the layers got more pungently nasty the closer to the barn floor I scraped. I guess that is the way with people sometimes too.
The horseshit was a pleasantry compared to the wet chunks. Oblong balls of perfectly formed brown matter had the occasional hay stem and very often, on a frosty morning, were still steaming from the top. I have never observed a horse with diarrhea but I have to imagine they get it from time to time.
I was 13, maybe 14, when I would start my hitchhiking journey to a different town in Fairfield County, Connecticut. The hour was dark when I started out chasing the day. I had my stall assignments and knew where the wheelbarrows were. Inevitably the horse box required a complete turnaround, like washing the sheets, the mattress pad, flipping and vacuuming the mattress and dry cleaning the dust ruffle if you have one. Underneath the fluffy horse litter were wide barn planks, thick like stone, with years of embedded horse waste slime.
Loading the wheelbarrow with this much information was a trick considering the hilly trek up to the manure pile. If it tipped on our way the spill needed to be picked up. Then it was twenty or thirty trips to the sawdust heap and smoothing out the wrinkles of fluff. Said horse was never fully appreciative of the labor once led back into its tidy new shitting pad.
I think my pay was $2 per stall, whole lot or not. I didn’t mind getting up early, hitchhiking, getting dusty and smelly, or even the ammonia cushions. I could carry on my day as if I had slept all that time.
Now, physical labor of any kind, for a sustained period of time, is like a drug with combined effects. My body is spent, but interestingly my mind shuts off too. Any urge to paint, write, read or think is frustratingly stifled by some inner mechanism, or the alien abduction to the golf course where chasing the light behind its mysterious hills and vines will distract me through the dreaded dusk.











