An Open Letter to Mike Rowe

My family spent part of our spring break in Washington DC . The capital doesn’t disappoint. It’s a wonderful mix of beautifully crafted idealism and cheerful, blue-collar determination.

Walking the grounds at Arlington Cemetery, my 10 year old pointed to a headstone marked ROWE and asked, “hey look, I wonder if that guy is related to Mike Rowe?”

“Well, “ I answered, “he probably is because getting buried…”

Is a dirty job.

We are fans of the show.

Later that same day we found ourselves wading through a crowd of immigrant activists that was later estimated to be 200,000 strong. We didn’t know if this was just another Sunday in the capital or a sign of sea change, but we were glad to be witnesses, glad to feel the energy.

I must have had a far off look in my eyes at dinner that night, because my wife asked, “what are you thinking about?” I grinned sheepishly because the truth was a little embarrassing. “Mike Rowe”, I confessed.

“Micro? Do you mean like micro fabric or micro-technology?”

My sons and I exchanged glances and raised eyebrows. She is not nearly the fan that we are.

“No. Mike Rowe. The guy from “Dirty Jobs”. I was just wondering what he thinks about immigration.”

The show is about “hard-working men and women who earn an honest living doing the kinds of jobs that make civilized life possible for the rest of us”. From what I’ve seen, a heck of a lot of these jobs are done by immigrants. On this trip alone, our cabbies, our maids and our busboys were, in large part, from someplace else. They seemed to fit the bill.

I tried to remember how many of the real people he’s worked with and filmed were immigrants. I understand that, for on-camera interviews, it’s important to find spokespeople who can be understandable and clear, especially when Mike isn’t. It’s best to have someone whose first language is English. But the show doesn’t seem to reflect the idea that the least desirable jobs go to those freshest to our soil.

At my high school job, no one wanted to bread chicken. It involved taking ice cold chicken pieces, ripping extra fat from their skin, then covering it with a fine seasoned powder, as quickly as possible. It left your hands painfully cramped and your body covered with a chicken smelling ooze. Usually the job was rotated among the employees, to prevent open revolt, but occasionally it was used as punishment for being late. I remember a kid was fired for throwing chickens away so that it appeared he’d done the job without actually having to do it. Eventually, the job was taken permanently by someone who would do it cheerfully and well…an immigrant.

Mike Rowe believes that, “hard work needs a PR campaign.” This seems to align with the message on so many of the placards I saw at the DC rally, “Immigrants Work for America’s Prosperity”. Immigration policy is too complicated for both Mike Rowe and me, but I think that “Dirty Jobs” is the perfect place to acknowledge the contribution of new Americans to hard work.

So what do you say, Mike? How about dedicating an episode?

The Byzantine State

Each year, at the beginning of the week I teach my AP World History class about Byzantium I tell the following true story:

When I was a junior at St. Thomas I took a whole semester on the topic that we will cover here in one week. It was an upper level course attractive only to history majors so I was surprised when I walked in and there were 12 young men who I had never seen in any other course. I was even more surprised when, several minutes later, a priest walked in and the entire class stood and began to pray. What is a confused suburban Lutheran boy supposed to do in a situation like that? I jumped to my feet and tried to follow along.

The priest was the teacher and I was the only student in the class who was not a seminarian. Father Welzbacher was one of the smartest and most knowledgeable men I’ve even met. He had a deep, jowly voice and a jutting bald forehead that seemed to have grown with his learning. Educated at the University of Chicago, the only thing he ever brought with him to class was a worn leather Bible. He would lecture an hour and a half four days a week without a single note. Of course he was a hopeless academic and impatient with both youth and current events. On at least three occasions that I can remember him addressing a modern topic, turning more scarlet than his usual pink and bellowing righteously, “that is a sin against God!”

It is probably the hardest class I ever had. The lectures were dry and the tests, just two of them in the term, were brutal.

This is what we call, in the trade, an “anticipatory set”. It introduces students to a topic and gets their attention. For whatever reason, this one is gold and I usually have then in the palm of my hand for the rest of the hour. Whatever my reasons for telling it, I’ve been doing this long enough to understand that every student takes something different away.

Never was this more clear to me than after an e-mail I received from a parent on the first day of winter break, within weeks of my story to my class:

I just wanted to respond to a couple things going on at SES lately. There has been much talk here at home about evolution and all the issues that go with it. Kids are very impressionable and K*** has been militant about the theory and separation of Church and State. All fine and good. But kids seem to take it to another level and one of her friends decided she didn't believe in God anymore. That concerns me. Fortunately, K*** seems to have worked through all sides now and hopefully has rested on the co-existence level. I wanted to thank you for telling the class you were Lutheran. K*** respects you so much and everything you say she deems above all. Also fine and good. We are also Lutheran and I appreciate for K***'s sake that you shared that. We are political liberals but also strong ELCA people. They can co-exist!

No one is as militant about the separation of church and state as I am. As a result, when we teach the theory of evolution, I take great pains to keep my own beliefs as veiled as I can. The only place and only way I can remember revealing my Lutheran roots is in my introduction to Byzantium. Despite this parent saying some very nice things about me, there was no way I could reply that she was about as wrong as she could be. But I had to respond, didn’t I? So I crafted a response that is born as much in my history in customer service as it is in my long career in teaching:

Thanks for your message. I've long been amazed and humbled by the influence I have on students. I take it very seriously. My strategy is to be respectful, positive and patient. In the end, students are going to come to their own conclusions and their time with me represents only a small fraction of all the information they acquire and process. Most students, including K***, are far more the product of the conversations they have in their homes.

The e-mail gets even more interesting in the second paragraph, but I’m going to indulge the luxury of having very few readers by making it a New Year’s cliff hanger.

Groups in Tents

Part of the magic of a group trip is how well you get to know your companions. Being with them constantly and seeing their private quirks and routines, sitting near them at all hours of the day, hearing how they eat, watching how they fiddle, smelling them before they have a chance to cover their scent. You know them quickly and intimately.

This is magnified with teenagers, who are more casual than adults and thus willing to let you in to their worlds. They are also not as practiced at hiding their foibles, so they either let it all hang out, or overcompensate self-consciously. It is easier to love a teen at these times because they are at their most genuine and their most vulnerable.

As an example, I was talking to a student named Jenny on my recent trip to Florida when she casually mentioned her 20 year old sister’s battle with alcoholism. It was a passing conversation. I asked if she was the oldest child and, bam, bam I learned of her concern for her older sister and her continuing struggles. She trusted me enough in that moment to share that far away from home, her mind was on her sister, Stacy.

A big part of what you discover about the secret lives of teenagers comes from what you overhear from neighboring tents. The zipping and unzipping of a frantic search for something lost, the soft arguing and the loud gossip. The squirming, the scratching, the farting, the snoring. Trip leaders quickly learn how to filter out the annoying while staying on alert for the disruptive. Soon, even the annoying becomes the cricket song of a tenting teacher’s half sleep.

One night in the middle of our trip my colleague and I heard a sharp cry, a ripping of a zipper flap and hard footsteps in the dark moving toward our tent. That, and a crying voice calling my name. These are sounds that get you out of your bag and on your feet quickly. Jenny ran up to me sobbing as I stumbled out of my tent and said, “my sister was hit by a car.” Then she pushed her cell phone to me like it was diseased.

Even as I write this I have to take a deep breath to continue.

On the other end of the line was a mother who had just lost her child. She spoke with the calm matter of factness that comes with the shock of grief. Stacy was hit by a car while she was crossing the street in a crosswalk. She was on her way home from an AA meeting and was celebrating her third month of sobriety. She was brain dead.

I don’t know how I was able to speak lucidly, but I did. In some shock myself, I was sympathetic and concise. We would take care of Jenny’s grief on our end and do our part to bring the family back together as quickly as possible. I did not know the mother at all, but we were connected in those minutes by the love of our own children and our care and concern for Jenny.

The logistics are boring, but you can imagine that they weren’t easy. Complicating matters was irregular cell phone reception and the necessity of working by flashlight. My trip team, my three colleagues in Florida, get high marks for handling the situation. We are four men, two of us parents, with 40 student camping trips between us. We were exhausted, but we each took a role and performed it efficiently and well. You always hope nothing will go wrong in the field, but it generally does. I was glad not to be a rookie that night. I was glad the others weren’t either.

Less than 24 hours later, Jenny was home and our trip was back on schedule with nary a glitch. I believe there were students who didn’t even know what happened. But I do. I was as close to the situation as a stranger can be.

Another Day on a River

I'm going to tell you a story that is 100% true and leaves out no details unless they are irrelevant or uninteresting. I'm telling it to see if I can make you laugh, but honestly, it's also a metaphor for my whole life right now.

I went on the annual SES canoe trip down the Canon River today. 200 teenagers, half of whom had never canoed before, were herded down a beautiful Minnesota river valley at the peak of autumn. All of them returned alive and each of them had an experience they will never forget.

Can you imagine the logistics? Buses, permission slips, canoe rental, helping the kids prepare for how to dress and how to canoe, getting first aid kits and arranging chaperones. And then you have to prepare your own bag, not forgetting to pack extra clothes and food for those children whose parents might forget. This year, as most, this last prep occurs after the first round of parent teacher conferences, which we had last night from 4-8.

I have to make special arrangements for my family and I volunteer to work half a day for free because I love that river and I love those kids and I really believe in my heart that canoeing down a cold river in the peak of fall makes everyone a better person for their whole life.

At the risk of sounding like I'm thumping my chest, a trip like that can't happen without a person like me. I know I'm not the best teacher, even at my school, but if you gotta pick a guy to be in that place on this day, you pick me first.

So I found myself at 8:45 am on a muddy bank in Cannon Falls. 70 canoes were in a line above me, Steaming bodies and red cheeks and nervous smiles. For the next 45 minutes, my job is to bring the front of every canoe into the water, make sure everyone gets safely on, and shove them downstream. Only way to do that is to be calf deep in 45 degree water and to smile cheerfully and confidently at every person in the line, giving the same calm instruction to each one, one moment heaving with all my might, the next patiently repeating what has already been said.

Because I'm the last one on the river, my canoe is the sweeper. The sweeper uprights overturned canoes (two today), it monitors hypothermia, it gives on the spot canoeing lessons ("you are not mixing a batter here, you're paddling a boat"), it reminds people to wear lifejackets, it points out wildlife, it administers first aid and it does whatever it can to maintain the morale of the weakest members of the herd. I'm not claiming I did this myself. I had three excellent partners in two canoes.

Every year, 6 miles into the trip, the teachers at the back end up splitting up and being the rear paddler in a canoe full of inexperienced, shivering and despondent students. Having someone who knows how to steer, has strong arms and knows how to beat exhaustion invariably moves things along. Today, I commandeered one canoe, then added another canoe's duffer 1/4 mile further up. Around me, six people were wearing pieces of my clothing. The duffer made herself as comfortable as possible directly in front of me, wearing 8 layers of wet cotton sweatpants. I only had 4 miles to go, but for the first mile, I couldn't distract myself from the fact that this poor girl smelled like ass. Not BO. Not farts. Ass.

We got em all in of course. And, in a rare departure from the norm, we got em in on time. My feet were numb as hell and I was itching for bacon, but the final job is to get kids to clear out their canoes and get on the bus. At that point the sun was shining and everyone was feeling fine.

Except the French teacher.

This guy left the business world because there was too much pressure in middle management. He's a mealy little know it all who cannot help but tell you his opinion any any subject he happens to overhear. He's got a candy ass goatee and looks like an over the hill satan gone soft. As is the custom of the French, when he speaks to me, one of his hands is always in the small of my back.

He's been asked to check off kids' names from a list made on the bus on the way down. Kid gets on the bus, he's safe and sound and his mom is happy, scribble his name from the list. Easy.

He walks up to me and he's clean and he's dry. He smells faintly of lemon basil soup, but I think it might be a lotion. He places his hand in the small of my back and says, "you know what you should do next year? You should type the names of all the kids who are going and put a check box next to each name. I don't know how to do it, but I've seen it done on a computer. That would make it easier to check these kids in. That's what you should do next year."

As I say, this is metaphor.

Youth Football

I haven't raised aggressive boys.

That isn't an apology. I'm not fond of the trait in others and I've actively discouraged in my sons. I like to think they are confident and enthusiastic and strong willed without being overbearing and selfish. I suspect genetics in involved as I'm not terribly aggressive myself. I stand in lines, I ask permission, I wait to be called on. It isn't that I don't like to win, it's just that I've found that I sometimes lose and I've come to terms with that.

In most areas of modern life, you can be successful without aggression, but that probably isn't true in sports. The whole point is to be the best by beating everyone else, which is tough to do if you don't go after it without hesitating about stepping on a toe or two. At very least I think it separates the best athletes from those who are just playing.

Baseball is one of the few physical games where you can be a little mild as still play the game well. In football, mildness is anathema. I'm still taken aback, being principally involved in baseball, at the unabashed bloodlust of so many people surrounding football. Players, coaches, fans. I don't have sufficient knowledge of the game to ever coach it, but the angry shouting in and of itself is enough for me to want to keep my distance. That's what I did last year.

This year, I liked the guys running the team. Coach Jon must be 6-6 290, but he runs his practices in a voice appropriate for a preschool Sunday school class. Sure, he occasionally loses it in games and throws his visor, or yells so loudly that every square inch of Shannon Park fields can hear his displeasure, but he fights it and often as not comes sheepishly back within 3 minutes with an apology and a "come on, guys". Coach Bob must be the mellowist body builder history has ever seen. He's imposing just in the act of crossing his arms and frowning, but, despite spending some 500 hours with him this summer, I've never heard a cross word. They're a couple of nice, goofy guys and with their good will and encouragement, I was reluctantly coaxed to the player side of the field.

The thing is, the shouters often win in football. Shaping burgeoning testosterone may require some volume, some anger and some physicality. That's mostly what I've seen from the opposing coaches all year. So while our team has speed, it has a good amount of football knowledge, it practices frequently and stays in games, it only has one win.

It didn't occur to me until after we won, but the in-game chat between team coaches, neither of which yet had a win, was as amiable as a backyard BBQ. It was all "Aw, shucks" and "that was a nice play".

What WAS occurring to me during the game was that our fastest player, the only one to have scored any TD's, was out for the season with a shattered kneecap. That our left guard had not taken his ADD medication. That our safety was asking about the identity of an overflying bird. That our nosetackle was still standing up before driving forward, that our center's pants were too small to be buttoned, that our quarterback believed in his heart that he'd been assigned to the bad news bears, that our 2 back was more interested in hitting the statistician than the linebacker and that our head coach was looking at his watch and talking about going to the Gopher's game.

If the meek shall inherit the Earth, they better hope that the next of kin is even meeker. That is how we got our only win.

There are still claims at our practices that "we can compete with any of the other teams" and "we're getting better every week". I'm not sure if that's coach speak or naivete, but I'm pretty sure its not true. There is still one game left in the season when we might get another win and there are other sports and other seasons. But after countless hours preparing and encouraging, even if it's only once, winning sure is a lot more fun than losing.

Not a Cowboy

Did you know that my wife is fascinated with horseback riding? It comes from all those damn historical romance books she reads, but one of our future vacations is going to be at a dude ranch. I shit you not.

About two years ago, when she revealed this, I asked her, never having ridden a horse WITH her and having a long standing ill ease with horses, "how many times have you ridden?" Answer? Never.

So, once in Tennessee and once in England, we rented horses and rode. Each time for me is an exercise in smiling through anxiety and discomfort for the benefit of my companions. I've ridden probably 20 times in my life and can honestly say I never really enjoyed it. I think I have a good attitude, but it isn't my thing. There just isn't much cowboy in me.

On a vacation to the West, it seemed appropriate to get on a horse. To get a taste of what the frontiersmen and settlers did. There were several opportunities within Yellowstone, but none of them would take my 7 year old niece. Rachel  did some research and found a couple of spots just outside the north entrance in Montana. Because of its location, we picked one called the Slip and Slide ranch.

We drove the two 30 foot RV's into Montana and up a mile long gravel road through a big wooden arching sign to Ryan's 900 acre ranch and home. It's beautiful, obviously. Rugged, but neat. Ryan and his family (wife and three kids) are waiting for us in the driveway and when I get out he shook my hand with the strongest grip I've ever felt. Huge bulging cowboy hands that squeezed me like I was a Canadian circus freak.

We sign ONE form. All of us on one together. No helmets, no body armor (seriously, they give you that in England), no questions about
ability level or weight or comfort....just 3 minutes of fast plain
talk about what not to do and how to proceed. He didn't even ask for
payment until he shook our hands goodbye at the end. He lifted both
my niece and nephew up on their horses with such efficiency that each
of them, surprised, almost went over the top. He would have done the
same with each of us, but no matter how intimidated I am by a horse
(bless you, Poncho, for submitting to my will), I will not be thrown
on top of one.

And off we went before the sunscreen was even fully applied. At the
lead of the line was Ryan's 8 year old daughter, in a pink cowboy hat
and matching boots. At the rear was his seven year old son and 4 year
old daughter, also garbed in pink. Ryan was training a new horse and
basically went up and down the line barking instructions like (to my
brother), "first ask, then encourage, then enforce. Don't make me
take you off that horse and put my little girl on." Occasionally, in
small lispy voices one of the kids would chime in, "go a little
faaasah. kick a little haaardah" or yammer away like an elementary
kid with a new friend. The boy pointed out the best trout lake and
told this great story about the time they saw a cougar. We saw hawks
and ducks and a huge herd of elk. Also bison, which is the livestock
Ryan raises. You can look all around on a horse and not worry about
where your feet are falling.

At the one quarter mark, the boy took the lead. He rode around the
line with his four year old sister and took my niece's reigns, the
two girls then rode ahead to circle back around to the tail of the
line. They were out of sight and I was making small talk with Ryan
when we heard, in the distance, squeals and screams from the two
girls. Ryan's ears perked...really, perked. He road up to the front
to meet the two, who were speeding back and squealing, "there's a
raaahtlah on the trail."

Ryan says (with the tone of "christ, you're gonna scare the
greenhorns"), "use your heads girls, calm down." He rides up and
dismounts. Moments later we see a rattlesnake skeleton fly 50 feet
into the air and into the shrubs. We were told by my sister in law,
who witnessed it, that he had crushed the snake with his boot, grabbed
it by the back of the head and pulled the entire spine out of the
snake's body, then tossed it. When I passed there was a second snake,
head and rattle removed, squirming by the trail.

"All in a days work?" I asked.

"Yeah, pretty much."

"What's the preferred tool for that job?"

"Always seems to be rocks around till you need one, but they work
best. Or a big stick"

He handed my brother the two bloody rattles and we moved on up the trail.