Iowa Farm (1860)
2015
When looking for employment in Joplin, the thing we needed most was flexibility to play shows. A couple of our band members took jobs at a chain home improvement store. The primary reason being that the overnight shift left Friday and Saturday nights off. The pay was just above poverty and our coworkers were entertaining. Most of our hours were without customers, which is probably the only reason I was able to stay at that job for the seven years I did. I enjoyed the quiet solitude of the mostly empty store. At most, we had eight folks working in the entire building overnight. One could easily spend most of the night without seeing anyone else.
I had downloaded a dozen gigabytes of college level lectures I’d found online. Every evening while bringing order to the chaos of freight from the truck, I fell into a million other worlds. From Voltaire to the Cold War. From Alexis de Tocqueville to Francis of Assisi. Long hours of stocking just meant more learning. Somewhere in a hardware aisle of that store was probably the first time I had the inkling of an idea to become a history professor. Organizing industrial cleaners twelve feet in the air, listening to the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, and daydreaming of getting paid to think and create.
My shift was usually over around six a.m. I’d sleep for a few hours and then watch movies or play music in my room. My first punk band was on hiatus and I was in the process of joining my second, so I had more free time than I knew what to do with. I decided to get a second job and applied for factory work. I was under the impression that I had received temporary work as a forklift operator for one of the food manufacturers in Joplin. Work, yes. But sitting on a forklift for my second full-time job wasn’t in the cards. I stacked pallets and pallets of chicken broth. It was around this time of year, and the build up for holiday products had begun. The building was full of nothing but broth, and I feel like the warehouse was 300 yards long and at least 100 wide. Every pallet had at least one individual container of broth that had a seal go bad. Somewhere in the pallet. As we restacked the cartons for distribution, we culled those offensive to the nostrils. Every fall I can recall the months I spent in that warehouse and the smell of rank chicken juice. I got a lot of guitar gear and tattoos during that time but very little sleep.
Years later, I found myself nearing the end of my bachelor’s degree. The lectures were real, and I was plowing fields with oxen. My last three credits as an undergrad came from a living history internship. We demonstrated farming techniques in Iowa through the decades. There was a smoke house and a cellar, both containing farm products we raised through the seasons. We grew wheat, corn, and pumpkins and demonstrated the planting and harvesting methods of the time. Beau and Luke were our plow team, and a fickle one at that. They hammed it up for visitors and frequently ignored our “gee” and “haw” (left and right) to try and plow their own row patterns.
School groups and families alike visited the farms. There were occasionally visitors that clearly were not enjoying the farm education experience. It was usually hot, and by the time a visitor had reached our farm they were nearing the end of their day. Often it was a father who had been making sure his kids didn’t fall into the pig sty or that they didn’t try to ride one of the Percherons off into the sunset. The smokehouse was usually the best way to bring history alive for those folks. They often enjoyed chatting about similarities in our methods and their own backyard BBQ.
Folk singing is by far my favorite job. More than any monetary compensation that I’ve received in the past, I’m grateful for the learning experiences. Traveling around the midwest selling roofs helped me better understand the micro cultures from one Nebraska county to another, but I didn’t know that was happening. I wasn’t aware when I was painting houses full time that it was preparing me to have well-organized spreadsheets for booking. The prep work isn’t glamorous, but it keeps the show running.
My boss is still a jerk and the pay still ain’t great, but the people I’ve met and the experiences I’ve had make it all worth it.
