When Was the Last Time You Sweat Through Your Jeans?

Two summers ago, I worked on a cattle ranch in Wyoming. As an irrigator, I was responsible for flooding cattle pastures to grow grass. While there were some great perks to the job: being able to look up at the towering Grand Tetons or sitting back and watching a bald eagle soar overhead, the monotony of moving irrigation dams for 9 hours a day, six days a week, in the blazing Wyoming sun got old. So old that now anytime I put on jeans for work, I am thankful that I won’t have sweated through them by the end of the day. But the impact that this summer left on me, more than the feeling of wet jeans stuck to my legs, was respect and admiration for the people I worked with.

Antonio* is 60 years old and has been working on the ranch for 30 years. After he finishes his nine-hour shift at the ranch, he goes to manage the night crew at a local restaurant until the early morning and has put seven kids through college doing this. His father Miguel is 78 and has been working on the ranch for 23 years. When the irrigation season ends in October, Miguel goes back to Mexico for three months to visit family. After those three months, Miguel returns to Wyoming to work construction, until his job at the ranch starts up again in April. All the 78-year-olds I know are either retired or dead.

The sun is slowly rising in the sky and a cloud of fog hangs above the pasture. The grass is still wet from morning dew, and the groan of the ATV motor fades off into the mountains. Herds of cows begin to look in our direction with stares of confusion. Antonio and I are at the eastern most corner of the ranch, looking past barbed wire fences and trout ponds to the Grand Tetons towering into the blue cloudless sky behind them. But between the edge of the ranch and wall of mountains, lays a dirt road and a handful of incredibly expensive houses.

We finish pounding a steel post into the ground, and I turn to look at the mountains, thinking Antonio is doing the same. But the early morning silence is interrupted by Antonio saying, “Those fucking houses man. Fuck, they’re so expensive.” I realize that and reply, “It’s pretty crazy,” but not in a tone of astonishment, as it could very well be one of my friend’s homes from school that I’ve visited. But Antonio continues and says, “That road. That’s where those fucking rich people go running. See that guy over there.And this is almost said with hatred.

But this hatred was a feeling that I had could relate to. It was the way I felt when I was knee deep in mud irrigating pastures, and a couple on the bike path would ride by and stare at me. It was the way I felt when my jeans were soaked through with sweat, and I watched people 100 yards away smoking cigars and playing golf.

But what got me through these moments of indignation was thinking about the other life that I would return to at the end of August. The life where I could go biking with my friends or sailing with my parents. The life where I could one day work for a company with a slide in its office, not in a field. And the life where owning a ski house didn’t seem entirely out of the question.

Antonio and Miguel are two of the happiest and most kind people I have ever met, but for them, it isn’t a matter of counting down the days until they go back to their regular life and thinking about climbing the corporate ladder. Their reality is working their asses off just so that they can support themselves and their families.

Every day since the end of that summer, I am amazed that people like Miguel and Antonio are able to get out of bed in the morning and believe in a better future. And I give them the highest level of respect for not saying, “Fuck it” and giving up because I probably would have.

*I have changed the names of my co-workers

The Ascent

A community of storytellers documenting the journey to happiness & fulfillment.

Jeremy Paly Batchelder

Written by

Working at Gauntlet Networks and RelayNode. http://www.jeremybatchelder.com/

The Ascent

A community of storytellers documenting the journey to happiness & fulfillment.

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