Word in the Woods #2: 16 Tons of Shit
By Comrade-Editor Ian Woode
My girlfriend and I rented the Mothman Prophecies about a year ago.
The legend goes the 7-foot tall, red-eyed monster buzzed around Point Pleasant, West-By-God in the weeks preceding the 1967 Silver Bridge collapse. Following the tragedy, the menace fluttered off — some say he was a demon, others a curse placed on the land by an angry Native American chief. Still others say he was an alien, or a bad omen before a disaster. After all, there’s tales he perched on the cooling towers right before the Chernobyl meltdown 21 years later.
Either way, the folkloric consensus is, this motherfucker caused the bridge to collapse and killed 46 people.
What I expected was a period piece complete with slicked backed hair, tucked in shirts, and pink poodle skirts. What I saw was a Big Lots bottom bargain bin thriller featuring Richard Gere whispering “I gotta go” like a trucker on the verge of a nervous snap. Like Silent Hill, the film rejects the Appalachian rhotic rhythm in favor of a plain flat Midwestern cadence. The grand finale — the bridge collapse — is an uninspired vehicle for Richard “The Gerbil” Gere to plunge into the Ohio River, fish out Laura Linney, and collect a couple million bucks.
It was definitely no Runaway Bride.
After groaning about the $4 she burned renting this travesty from YouTube, my ol’lady said, “You ever notice when they do movies in West Virginia or some rural place, they always say, ‘They’re good, hardworking people?’”
It comes from a throwaway line in the movie, wherein Officer Mills — played by Linney — explains to Mr. Gere that a family who has had supernatural run ins “weren’t the town tweakers, but good, hardworking people.”
It’s a platitude we hear all the time, whether at the box office or the ballot box. Good, Hardworking Americans. Salt of the Earth. The Heartland. The imagery of the old man with calloused hands who fed his family for 50 years shoveling shit. A superlative meant to give us a warm, fuzzy feeling inside, a nostalgia for the times of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Nowhere is that descriptor more applied than Appalachia.
Contrary to what J.D. Vance asserts in Hillbilly Elegy, Appalachia isn’t a doldrums of idle folks sniffing pills and collecting SSI checks. Data from the Appalachian Regional Commission shows the entire region’s unemployment rate (stretching from Upstate New York to Northern Alabama) was 5.4 percent between 2013 and 2017, the same as the national rate. In central Appalachia, commonly referred to as West Virginia and parts of bordering states that might as well be, that rate was 7.4 percent. While these numbers don’t account for under-employed people or folks who have dropped entirely out of the job market, it shows the narrative that Appalachia is one giant HUD project is false.
Hell, even if someone is legally disabled, it doesn’t mean they ain’t working. I’ve known plenty of guys drawing a government check who made full-time jobs out of scraping metal, cutting grass, and fixing cars under the table.
We’re a region of good hardworking people. Taking pride in that work, that willingness to get out there and bust your ass day after day, week after week, year after year, is a good thing. But there’s another attitude — a brother to the “job well-done” feeling — that takes it a bit further.
I call it Oxen Pride.
To pay my bills, I travel a good piece of Southern West Virginia, Southern Ohio, and Eastern Kentucky gutting houses. One day I might be ripping a room of sheet rock down to the studs, the next I’m tearing out the cabinets in a kitchen and popping up the hardwood floors. I’ve worked in houses charred so severely by fire, a structural engineer shut down the job site, lest the roof cave in. I’ve been in houses where the floor has a cat-piss stench so strong, it’s rotted out the subfloor. It’s dirty, but it pays the bills.
A couple of months ago, I worked 77 hours in a week. At the end of the stretch, I dozed at the wheel. Luckily, I caught the first nod, lit a cigarette, and pulled off for a cup of bean juice. My sex life had turned non-existent; any work on this publication halted. I was tired, sore, and pissed — at some point a minor depression settled in.
Despite all the negative effects at some point at 65 hours, the strain turned into comfort. I began asking myself, how hard can I go? How far can I push myself? When will I break? Can I go past the point of collapse? Can I outwork the rest of them? Like the horse Boxer in Animal Farm, I started repeating the mantra “I will work harder.” Not because I expected some reward — besides the overtime — not because I wanted to get ahead. The only getting ahead at this company is when you’re broken and they find a replacement. As the hours crept closer and closer to 80, I wanted to prove I was the toughest sonofabitch in the shop.
That is Oxen Pride.
In the world of sweat and hammers, there’s a perverse pleasure in outworking the guy next to you. I can’t tell you how many times that old codger Kurt would tell me, “That motherfucker ain’t worth a count. I can outwork him and I’m sixty years old.” How hard you can push yourself, how much punishment you can take, that’s the name of the game. White collar management might talk about “skills and assets,” but the blue-collar workers measure a man by how productive he is running on fumes.
Oxen Pride can be related directly to the exploitation of our region. From the first pioneers to escape British colonial rule, to the salt mines timber cuts prior to the Civil War, coal in the 20th Century and the gas the 21st, Appalachians have earned their keep with their backs. I’ve heard stories of men picking their fields on their stomachs because they broke both their legs, suffering a third-degree burn in the middle of their shift and getting patched up to finish it out. It sounds romantic, until you stop and think, “They ain’t heroes — they do it because they have to.”
Consider John Henry, the steel-driving man, a mighty Black man legend says was born at 44 pounds and went looking for work after his first meal. As a man, Henry pounded his sledgehammer into a drill while carving out the Big Bend Tunnel in Southern WV. Then one day a steam drill ends up on the job site, threatening to put John and his friends out of business. He refused to be bested by a machine, so he agreed to race it. All day, he worked, refusing to take a break against the soulless device. When the day was done, John bored 15 feet into the mountain, the drill only nine. The mighty man who refused to give up died from exhaustion, with the hammer in his hands.
The implications of his legend are sinister. Historians say he was either a former slave or born to slaves — economic, social, and racial circumstances put him on the railroad in the first place. Some researchers have found he may have been a convict laborer. Steel driving was what he had to do to survive. When that was threatened, he didn’t try to sabotage the drill or band with his fellow railroad men to resist it. Instead, he had to prove he could outwork it. If that’s not Oxen Pride, what is?
Where does this Pride come from?
I have a friend who works security in Lexington, KY. Every week or so, we talk for about an hour on the phone, mainly about work. I trade stories about the nasty-ass crawlspaces I have to work in for tales about kicking drunk people out of concerts. We laugh, we bitch, we almost cry sometimes. One thing is always the same — we compare the hours we pulled. Since he’s mostly sitting on his ass watching a camera and I’m slinging 50-pound bags of plaster, we handicap the contest by 10 hours in my favor. Stepping back and looking at this minor part of the conversation reveals a sad truth about Oxen Pride:
It ties a person’s worth, as a human being, to production. The harder we work, the more we get done for the company. John Henry didn’t beat the drill: he gave the company a leg up for the next day.
Just as racism can be internalized by the Black community, sexism by women, and homophobia by LGBTQIA folks, Oxen Pride is the internalization of capitalist oppression.
There’s nothing wrong with work — our friend Marx argues production is the expression of the human experience. Humans feel good when we get shit done. It’s why old dudes bust their knuckles fixing up a rusted 1969 Mustang. Hell, I get a rush out of hand washing the dishes; seeing those clean plates in the drying rack gives me a boost when I’m in a depressive funk.
The issue is when we’re forced to work by economic necessity, according to Karl Marx. We’re placed in a position where it’s either mop shit-caked floors or starve. On top of that, we have to outperform the other guy mopping shit so we MIGHT get a couple more crumbs on our paychecks. The amount of money the owner is putting into his pocket from our shit-mopping far exceeds the amount we’re bringing home. One day, we become painfully aware of it when pull up into the parking lot in our 1989 Escort, only to see the boss traded his 2018 Explorer for a 2019 model. That feeling of revulsion we feel — that’s what Marx calls alienation. It’s having the fruits of our labor ripped away and getting the stems in return.
Appalachia, like any resource heavy economy, is that tale on a macro-scale. Since the end of the Civil War it’s been one treasure dig after another. Of course, the trees aren’t cutting themselves, the coal ain’t hopping from the seams, nor is the gas gushing out of the shale. You gotta have people to do that. At various times, easily exploitable groups — African Americans, Italians, Greeks, Hispanics — were carted in for it. At all times, the people who lived here did just as well. Generation after generation of large-scale rape and pillage by rich sons-of-bitches up North and along the coasts (and now all the way in China and Europe) have taught a region that its worth is directly proportional to its resources and the strength of its inhabitants’ backs.
Our politicians always talk about resources — people being the most important. In WV, we see a push to clean up the workforce, get folks off the dope so companies can do business here. Not so kids can have their mommies and daddies back, so parents needn’t worry about getting that phone call in the night, it’s so the next big company can have a turn here. It’s not about education, it’s about better workers. It’s not about better healthcare, it’s so we can patch people to get them back to work. When people are resources, they cease to be human.
You know what else is a resource? Livestock. The Ox might not be worked as much in the age of John Deere, but it’s a resource nonetheless. A culture that celebrates working people like beasts of burden is exactly the sort of thing big business loves.
In today’s terms, John Henry was a fucking Team Player.
Arguments can be made that Oxen Pride has as much to do with capitalism as it does with traditional manhood, Toxic Masculinity, or the Patriarchy — as our college educated brethren might say. To a degree, I agree. However, I know plenty of woman who gleefully bear the same yoke. Ever hear a nurse talk about her hours? Hell, I was in a Speedway the other day buying a sparkling water after damn near passing out in a hot attic when I got stuck behind a nurse telling the clerk she just came off a 16-hour shift and was looking to pull a 12 the next day.
Recently, WV Public Radio ran a series about the steel mill closures up in Weirton. In a snippet I caught on the way to work, the reporter discussed the toll the closures took on guys who’d been working there 10, 15, 20, 30 years. Some of those men painted the walls with their brains because they couldn’t handle it. There’s always more to the story, but the fact is, like John Henry, like Nurse Jackie holding up the line, like myself, production determined their worth.
The side effects of this monkey business are profound. Think about the “diseases of despair” model researchers have used to describe the suicide and addiction ravaging the region. Even voter turn-out is lower in Appalachia. Don’t get it twisted — I’m not saying my observation about people taking pride in overwork is what causes these issues. But you can’t tell me it doesn’t play a part either.
The old Marxist adage goes, capitalism creates its own grave diggers. Pulling 60, 70 hours a week takes its toll — it leaves one of two options. Either resign to it or fight it.
Putting a needle into your arm, pushing a pistol against your temple, is textbook resignation. Picking up your marbles and going elsewhere is resignation. Of course, there’s more to the story than that: mental illness, social isolation, breakdowns in familial ties, addiction, etc. Oxen Pride is not the sole reason for resignation — capitalism isn’t even it either. Suicide can be found in societies across history and the globe. Addiction knows no creed, language, class, color, gender, or sexuality. But the resignation to capitalism is certainly a contributing factor.
Taking a stand, refusing to the let the bastards grind you down, that’s the fight. Our hope and our savior is in swinging the hammer into the windshield of the boss’ Expedition.
Karl Marx can be instructive here, but I choose a set of men and women with more weight — our own people. History has shown while Appalachia has been ground to the bone, it wasn’t without a fight. Our fore bearers took up arms against the company at Blair Mountain and they shot Pinkertons in Bloody Harlan. They carried their union cards in their pockets and proudly stood in the picket line. Remember, when Martin Luther King was shot down in Memphis, he was assisting a union drive for trash collectors. The slogan: I Am A Man.
We are not our jobs, not our bank accounts, nor the shit we own. We are human beings with wants and needs, hopes and dreams. No matter what we do for a living, we deserve to be treated accordingly. That’s the message Dr. King was trying to get across. That’s what the miners at Blair Mountain fought for.
That’s a different form of pride — Wild Cat Pride. Unlike the Oxen, a cougar doesn’t know a master. It hunts for its prey and chooses when to sleep — it is truly free.
Wild Cat Pride comes with danger. It risks losing one’s livelihood — a source of fear for anyone living paycheck-to-paycheck. It means being blacklist by other employers — what boss would hire a guy who tried to unionize their last workplace? It means dying — if times get desperate enough, I doubt the company is above firing on the picket line.
Next week, I’ll probably put in between 55 to 60 hours. Until I hit 40, I’ll gobble up as much work as I can. Between 40 and 50, I’ll stretch shit for overtime. After 50, I’ll get surly, that feeling that this is my lot in life will set in. As I get closer and closer to 60, that’s when Oxen Pride will crop up.
I’ll out work every single one of these bastards.
Just another hillbilly hump — broken.
Maybe I’ll get lucky and the Mothman will fly into my work van one night and take us both out. As he bursts through the windshield, impaling my chest with shards, he screams,
“THIS IS FOR YOU RICHARD GERE!”
And on the side of Route 2, under the moonlight, I calculate the hours up in my head. As the blood bubbles from my neck, I laugh, because I realize I’m still in the first week, so if I live, it won’t make a fuck on a 55-hour check.
Or maybe next week, I’ll get my coworkers to sign the cards, and we’ll become a pack of cougars roaming the hillsides.
