There is no time like labor day to make an audit of your position in the workings of your place. Just a couple of days in defiance of the schedule you are regularly beholden in pursuit of the next paycheck, are a rare opportunity to take in the periphery once the blinders are removed. At least that is the case for me this year. Yesterday, I was lucky enough to spend much of the afternoon in good company between beneath an apple tree and beside a lake on a site that has hosted a farm on a hill up the Maine coast for close to 300 hundred years. When you collect your wage at the end of the week and divide it between dues paid in plastic for shelter, food, energy, and entertainment in the concrete jungle it is all too easy to loose sight of the broader processes that sustain us taking place. Witnessing that the fruit has become full on the trees, mushroom clumps have sprung up in the shade, and that despite my wholesale ignorance of it, a harvest will soon be underway gave me pause to take stock of just how it is that I’ve spent my time and expended my energy.
There is a lot of convolution that takes place to correlate the work performed each day to the base necessities that work provides us for almost anyone living in a modern, technologically advanced society. As a younger man I’d eschewed the promise of an enviable position to begin a career with a degree in mechanical engineering from Northeastern University, to pursue what has proven to be a silly notion, that there was a greater nobility to work that was pure in its necessity. To this end I toiled tirelessly moving weight over distance, pedaling packages across town as a bicycle messenger and after stints working in the energy industry and manufacturing again, find myself in the role of draft mule, hauling peoples belongings as a proud professional mover. The tie that binds Sisyphus to his stone is a comforting one, he knows what will be expected of him tomorrow and he is free from consideration of his own consequence. While it is true that there is a beauty to living by only the first law of thermodynamics it is a dangerous over simplification of the system every one of us is a part of, one in which a bounty is bestowed upon us amidst the cycles of the constant process of entropy.
Among the detritus of the derelict barn and property where I spent the day yesterday there were a number of tools left behind that despite the telltales of decay, showed the marks of people proud of the work they’d done. Steel hammered for blades and wood turned to handles, these are objects that simply and honestly made the work of their fellow man wresting sustenance from the soil more efficient and enjoyable. Maybe this is what it is about the work I do when I am lucky enough to be filling an order as the sole proprietor of Budd Bike Works that I find so satisfying. While not be objects of necessity for the survival of the homestead against the impending winter, they may at least give somebody a vehicle from which they can look about and actually witness that such things are happening. It is appropriate that among the tools that had served the location for so long there was parked a finely made racing bicycle with a widely respected New England frame builders emblem on it that had been passed down between close friends for at least a generation already.
It’s labor day people, time to get to work.
