This I Believe

I spent my high school summers with a shovel. The cemetery where I worked hired on extra help in June to keep the grounds sharp and green, and maintaining acres of healthy lawn in the long, sunny days of summer required a steady flow of water. That’s where we came in, my friend Elliot and I, with thin nosed shovels, perfect for ferreting out the rocks and roots that encased and occasionally cracked the plastic irrigation pipes.

Diagnosis of a problem began with hints of tan that stretched the length of a valve zone. The grass would have burned in the pervious day’s heat, and would continue to until the problem was solved. Sometimes we could spot a break from the surface, a mound of silt that had pushed up through the soil and hardened into a cake, or a shaded puddle somehow surviving the heat. Most times though, the break had to be found by hand.

Our bosses called us “trench monkeys” and drove to get parts for the patch while we dug. They told us that finding a pipe break wasn’t a problem we could think out. It was a question of moving dirt, plain and simple. They had no sympathy for quitters. One of their favorite lines was, “What does the last four letters of American spell?” And we’d mumble, “I can,” and get back in the hole. In August, when the heat and humidity made work was all but impossible after 3:00 pm, they’d sneak Cokes from the main office and hide the trucks behind the plumbing shack. We four, two elders, two novices, would sit in the concrete and cinderblock structure, still cool from the night before, and lie about girls and cars.

It was in that shaded hermitage that the bosses sometimes got serious. Theirs was the wisdom of manual labor, not a summer, but a lifetime of it, and they wanted us to know. The pearls came out in aphorisms that seemed to me like gold. “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well,” they’d say; “Don’t forget where you came from.” And most important, “You can’t think your way around a problem, you’ve gotta’ dive in headfirst.”

I stop by to see the guys at the cemetery now and then. Not as often as I should, but I hear from them regularly by email. I’m now in graduate school, a writer, my hands soft from disuse. Still, I feel the same rush of wonder and anxiety that the search for broken pipe used to incite when I face a blank screen. The cursor ticks away the seconds. I tell myself there’s no thinking around this. I type a word, and then another.