Earth Works: Selected Essays

The Uses of Muscle

246 hen I was a boy growing up on the country roads of Tennessee and Ohio, the men I knew all earned a hardscrabble living with the strength of their hands and arms and backs. They raised corn and cows, felled trees, split wood, butchered hogs, mortared bricks and blocks, built and wired and plumbed houses, dug ditches, hauled gravel, overhauled cars, drove bulldozers and backhoes, welded broken parts. They hunted game for the table in season, and sometimes out of season. Some of them had once mined coal in Appalachia or trawled for fish in the Great Lakes. Many had fought in Europe or Korea. They arm-wrestled at the volunteer fire department, smacked baseballs over fences at the schoolyard, and at the county fair they swung sledgehammers or hefted barrels to see who was the mightiest of the lot. A brawny, joking, red-haired southern charmer who often won those contests was my father. He had grown up on a farm in Mississippi, had gone to college for a year on a boxing scholarship, had lost the cartilage in his nose during a brief Golden Gloves career. After moving north to Chicago, where he met the woman who would become my mother, he worked by turns as a carpenter, a tire builder, and a foreman in a munitions plant, until he eventually graduated to wearing a white shirt and sitting all day at a desk. He never liked the fit of a desk or a starched shirt, however, so as soon as he came home from the office he would put on overalls and go to work in the shop, garden, or barn. He could fix every machine we owned, from the car to the camera, and he needed to fix them, for we rarely had enough money to buy new ones. Although he grumbled when the tractor threw a belt or the furnace quit, as soon as he grabbed his The Uses of Muscle 247 The Uses of Muscle tools he began to hum. He took pleasure in using his strength and skill, and I took pleasure in watching him. Around our house, whenever anything heavy needed lifting or anything stubborn needed loosening he was the one to do it. He could tame a maverick horse, hoist an oil-slick motor out of a car, balance a sack of oats on his shoulder, plow a straight furrow in stony ground, transplant a tree with its root-ball bundled in burlap, carry my sister and me both at once in his great freckled arms. My mother had strengths of her own, but they did not depend on muscle. City bred, the daughter of an immigrant physician who had worked his way through night school by helping to dig tunnels for the New York subway, my mother read books to me and gave me drawing lessons and hauled me to and from libraries and science fairs in the fervent hope, later fulfilled, that I would make my way in the world by my wits. She wished the same for my sister, who patterned herself on the women as I patterned myself on the men. Although I have a much greater appreciation now for the bodily strength of women, as a boy I saw only their finesse, their ability to get by on little money, their competence in the face of calamity, their insistence on kindness and fairness, their hunger for beauty. While I valued those traits, and wound up being deeply influenced by them, as a boy I fixed my sights on my burly father and his buddies. My father, meanwhile, waited for my body to fill out so I could be of some earthly use. As soon as I was big enough, he put me to work raking leaves, weeding the garden, stretching barbed wire, setting fence posts, clearing brush with a hatchet, carrying water to the ponies. At first I staggered between the pump house and the pasture lugging a gallon bucket. After a while I could manage a five-gallon bucket half full of water, then a full bucket, and finally a pair of them, one in each hand, the water lapping at the brim. None of this labor was mere exercise; it all had a purpose as clear as the sound of the ponies lapping at their trough or the taste of sweet corn fresh from the garden. Before washing off the sweat from chores I studied my scrawny frame in the bathroom mirror, looking...