On Bodies & Labor
Considerations from Sarah , Summer Solstice 2022
Summer solstice, that time of year when most farmers have just gotten through the grueling hustle of spring and are beginning their harvest season. How many backs right now are bent over rows of strawberries or hauling crates of summer squash in from the field? My body, just unfurling from our own harvest season and big plantings for summer, hurts just thinking about it. Our last winter squash went in last week, so while our backs are still getting plenty of wear and tear over here, these days our main jobs are weeding, watering, and preparing beds for our first brassicas and carrots. Most are jobs that can be done sitting on a tractor or standing with a hoe, though standing with a hoe was still pretty punishing on yesterda'y’s hundred-degree first day of summer.
It’s so strange about bodies: whether they are an object or a tool, whether we identify with them or not, like them or not, get external affirmation from or about them. Whether we feel like minds with bodies or bodies with minds. I never felt like I had the right kind of body until I started doing physical work. It was too tall, too large, unfeminine. In the world of standing around and talking in the office or at parties, it didn’t serve me well; I was always a head taller than everyone and the cute boots everyone was wearing never came in a size eleven. I didn’t think I looked quite right, so I certainly didn’t feel right. To shamelessly quote my friend Jules Ohman’s new novel Body Grammar, a coming-of-age story so much about our relationships to our bodies: “She didn’t know how to differentiate movements, posture, or whatever. Her body felt so vague to her sometimes. She often forgot she was there.”
As soon as I turned to physical labor, my tall, broad body went from being an encumbrance to my greatest asset. The relative stasis of my previous urban life made me think of my body primarily in terms of what it looked like rather than how it felt. My only glimpse into another physical world was when I ran, but that was always brief, never the central structure of my life. Physical work changed that. It was no small relief, being able to throw my weight behind a pallet jack and make it move, see in concrete terms the product of what my body could do. I felt strong, capable, and confident. Not that I never felt physically awkward again, but I didn’t feel it at work. At work I felt profound joy in my body, in being able to reach easily across a pallet, in the innate muscle I had in my long limbs, in my body’s endurance and resilience. It might be the entire reason I continued, the entire reason I farm: to put this body to good use.
In Body Grammar, part of the main character’s journey to connecting with her body is a detour into international modeling (which obviously makes for a fun read). When she first watches someone else pose for the camera, it is “the first time Lou ever saw anyone so aware of their body and its movements outside a context she was already familiar with, like dance or yoga or running. This was a whole new body grammar.” And indeed, learning to work physically in any way is an art form. For a long time, I did pretty good. I never got severely hurt, never had carpal tunnel, never had my back go out. In truth, I have spent the last decade or so feeling pretty fucking invincible when it comes to physical tasks.
Me: a bit immobilized with back pain, sending out the CSA bulletin
But those were my twenties. I turn 35 years old in a few days, and my body feels different than it used to. As I began working on this newsletter a few months ago, I had my first sudden spasm of back pain that laid me down on the floor of the cooler where I was sorting potatoes. I no longer feel invincible, which of course I never was; no bodies are. I worry now in a way that I hadn’t before about what my body will feel like in five or ten years. I want to take care of it, and don’t quite know how. I have a thirty-degree curve in my spine. Is that the problem? It doesn’t feel like the problem. It feels like I’m just already tired, and aren’t we all?
So I’m thinking about bodies lately, and labor, what happens when our bodies are our most crucial tool and even more so when other people’s bodies become our tools. I’m thinking, as summer begins and farmworkers’ bodies are wielded like machines to plant, tend, harvest, wash, pack, and ship our food, as are workers’ bodies everywhere, what costs we should be willing to bear for our food, what cost I’m willing to bear on my own body.
It’s crucial to note: I chose and continue to choose physical work. I began working in a warehouse and bindery and decided I liked it, and I had the freedom and privilege to find my way to farming when I could have done any number of other jobs. If and when I decide or my body decides that I need to stop, I have the resources and resumé to find another kind of work.
The United Farm Workers updates Instagram page is a fascinating follow, in turns horrifying and awe-inspiring. Watching that video of celery harvest, I feel the giant gap between my experience of farm work and these. What I see first, I have to admit, is the immense speed and skill of the farmworkers. It looks, for a moment, like fun. Is it any fun? I see the bent backs, the worst possible position, and how impossible any other position would be to keep up with the pace. My own back twinges. How many of the workers in the video would choose their work given myriad options for stable income? What would it take to make farm work worth choosing? The work being done on that question is led by United Farm Workers, the largest and most enduring farm worker union in the country, which you can read about and donate to here. The UFW Instagram shows US Senators working with farm workers for the day, supposedly to impress upon them the obscene working conditions in order to impact policy. I wonder what they think the solutions are. I wonder what they do feel at the end of the day, whether it feels more or less like work to them.
My back twinges, sure, but I don’t envy the senators their jobs. I have become addicted to the kind of work where you can see concrete results at the end of the day. In fact, if I can’t see those results, I feel like I haven’t done anything. “Work” to me has come to mean the physical moving of material, whether books or soil or vegetables or weeds. Nothing else quite counts in the way that matters: not bookkeeping, not writing, certainly not sitting and thinking. All of that is satisfying in its own way, but to accomplish anything in those tasks I find I must separate myself out, forget my body, get lost, in a certain way, into worlds of numbers or words or thoughts that are both there and not there. Manual labor lets me know I am here, that my body is here, that me and my body are in fact one and the same. It lets me know that I exist, which is all I’m ever looking for.
In Eula Biss’ incredible book Having and Being Had—a collection of essays which I will most certainly return to in a future newsletter on property and land ownership—she draws out the idea of what work is in ways that feel useful and familiar to me. She’s similarly inclined to the physical, and at least for a short stint at the parks department in New York where she “would hurry through my paperwork to get to the other part of the job, walking the streets of the city inspecting community gardens and delivering shipments of dirt, which I shoveled from the back of a pickup truck.” And she similarly always had the privilege to leave. Her coworker “finally said, softly, You don’t have to work so fast, you know. Office work, for him, was a reprieve from work in the field, as we called it.”
It does feel damn good to shovel a truckload of dirt. It feels good to be a woman shoveling dirt, and it feels especially good the first few times you do it. But the thing about shoveling: it’s never done. Biss’s coworker knew she “wouldn’t last long—I’d find an office job—and he would remain, working the field. He didn’t have a college degree, and he wasn’t going to get another job. This, he explained, was his life.”
Biss left that job, of course, and is now a professor and writer, but she’s still trying to figure out what counts as work, what work means, why our perceptions of work vary between satisfying or arduous, necessary or pointless. “Toil is the word [John Kenneth] Galbraith uses for work that is fatiguing and monotonous and a source of no particular pleasure. Like many people whose preferred work is not physical, he assumed most toil to be physical labor...he does not mention the toil introduced by the computer. The endless filling of little boxes, the esoteric software systems, the repetitive stress, the physical toll of sitting all day staring at a screen.”
Nor, probably did he mention the joy of a mid-row dance break from weeding, or the feel of the earth against your back lying for a moment in a field path, curved perfectly for a human body, or the magic of multiple bodies together lifting something very heavy. “I just want to lift heavy things,” Anna’s old coworker used to tell her every day.
I think most people, even those who choose the air-conditioned office, have a sense of the satisfaction and pleasure in short stints of physical labor, of seeing a physical task completed. Isn’t that why everyone’s so into mowing their lawns?
“I would still have plenty of work,” Biss writes, “even without my job. I would have the work of writing, the work of research, housework and yard work, and the work of caring for a child. Work, in fact, is interfering with my work, and I want to work less so that I can have more time to work.”
She tries to help us make distinctions between all the different kinds of work, the kinds we do for money, the kinds we do for ourselves, for our families, for our communities. How much work is bureaucracy and how much is the thing itself. How much of either the work we do for money or the work we do for ourselves involves choice and power, and how much of it feels like we are inextricably caught in the capitalist machine? “This, I guess, is what Marx meant by workers alienated from their labor,” Biss writes, “That phrase didn’t mean much to me when I read Capital twenty years ago, but now it does.”
I chose farming in part to exactly not be alienated from my labor. To be myself the means of production. I thought farming would mostly be the thing itself. It worked, to a certain extent: I never feel alienated from my labor. I feel other things: stress, guilt, anxiety, sore, tired, unsure. I’m no longer clear on which part of farming is the real part. And I’ll be honest: I even occasionally miss feeling alienated from my labor. It made weekends more fun.
Mulching garlic
“It’s easier and harder,” a friend tells Biss. “She means our work, the work of writing, compared to other work…What’s harder about our work, she says, is that we can’t walk away from it at the end of the day. It’s always with us. We can’t clock out.”
Biss doesn’t say why writing is easier, but we can surmise: because you get to sit down. Which makes farming—or specifically farm management or ownership—a bit of a trick: you can neither clock out nor sit down.
Biss is still uncomfortable with the sitting down. She writes about the “lurking sense of guilt” watching a crew rebuild her chimney while she and her husband work inside, writing. “I know why people hate Mexicans,” her husband says to her, “they work harder than we do.” A stereotype, and yet how many of the couples who hired me to landscape their yards the year before I started this farm did so not because I worked very hard or well, but because I’m a white woman and they were more comfortable having me weed beside their windows, no matter how slowly? “It’s easier, because of the language barrier,” one woman told me, even though we hadn’t ever talked.
Biss sits comfortably inside, watching Mexican laborers build her a chimney. “It’s loud, but that’s not the problem. From where I sit at my desk in the attic, I can see a man pushing a load of bricks in a wheelbarrow up a ramp. I watch him from behind my computer screen as he slowly heaves the load into the bed of a truck.”
I feel that inevitable comparison whenever I am working on a computer, as I am right now, writing this. I feel that even when I’m not watching people labor through my window. I feel it when I stop working for the day even when there are daylight hours left, I feel it when I am on the tractor while Anna and Kate are hoeing, I feel it even when I’m cleaning the house, taking out the compost, putting up shelves in the laundry room. It’s not work work.
My dog sleeps for the bulk of the day, shifting from sun to shade to keep comfortable, lapping up water, lying down again. When I watch her, I’m in awe that this creature has value, and is loved, and, I’d go so far as to say, has a positive impact on the world, while mostly napping. When the golden hour hits, she wakes up, ready to zoom through the field or go for a walk, hunt gophers, lick any bare ankles she can find. Then she goes to sleep again.
Would we all be as valuable, as loved, as impactful, if we behaved that way?
I don’t know, and my impulse, I must admit, is to say no. Two to three hours of waking activity seems a bit slim. Even my dog could do a little more, really. There are an awful lot of gophers out there. But good god, we could do less, couldn’t we? Would everything fall apart?
Farming is hard work, and an even harder culture has been created around farming to glorify the endless hours, the physical resilience, the sweat and sore muscles. We have had to create that culture because that’s how we get compensated: in the immense pride it’s possible to feel over a freshly planted field, a perfectly weeded row, an abundant harvest. The feats of accomplishment that happen every day on a well managed farm are stunning. The stamina and skill and humor that a good crew demonstrates are heart-crushing in their beauty. Farmers offer meager glimpses of what a farm day looks like through Instagram or curated websites, in an effort to let customers and one another know that they are working their fucking asses off, and if we are not going to get paid in dollars—no matter how much we charge for a bunch of radishes or a CSA share, the margins are so thin—then we will get paid in deep pride in our work and the glorification of our labor.
It doesn’t work, of course. Depending on how you’re positioned, pride can get you pretty far, but it inevitably fails: when your body breaks, when your family needs you, when farms try to pay their workers in pride instead of money.
There are so many kinds of work, and so many different kinds of tolls our work can take. There are jobs that are glamorized and jobs that are respected, and jobs that hardly anyone even knows exists. There are “jobs so pointless that even the people doing the jobs don’t see any reason for them to exist…Bullshit jobs [that] are not usually dangerous or physically demanding…But they don’t offer any of the rewards of service or the satisfaction of having done something worthwhile. Many of them involve doing nothing at all.” Biss draws David Graeber’s distinction that “Bullshit jobs aren’t shit jobs, the distinction being that shit jobs involve essential work that needs to be done—what makes them shit is that the workers who do these jobs are badly treated, undervalued, and poorly paid.”
Farming sits in a strange nexus of all these kinds of work. Farming can be and perhaps most commonly is a shit job. It’s a shit job when farmworkers are exposed to toxic chemicals and extreme heat and debilitating smoke with little to no choice over their work and working conditions. It’s a shit job when, as Biss profiles one farmer “Out in the field, on a South Texas farm, a Mexican woman is working without gloves, picking cilantro for $3 a box, which will earn her $39 for a day of work from 5:00am to 6:00pm. I read about her in the newspaper as I lay in bed. The woman’s mother, who was a paramedic in Mexico, now also works as a picker. She tells the reporter that she sees the supervisors leading young women to far corners of the field. She knows her rights as a worker, but she knows, too, that if she makes a complaint she could be deported.”
In small diverse farming, especially when it is done by people with a college degree and other options for a career, and most especially when the ones farming are the ones who own and control the business—and in our case, even the land—it is complexly valued. Small organic farming is romanticized, respected, and as laborious as a job can be. It is vastly underpaid. My days feel neither like bullshit nor shit. Some tasks bend my brain and many bend my back, some tasks are monotonous, and some are frustratingly difficult. Farming creates networks of connection and also many days feels profoundly lonely. In May I cried often with overwhelm; though here in June it feels calmer, more manageable. Nearly every person who picks up food at the farm expresses appreciation and gratitude for my work.
Like a modern marriage, where you’re supposed to find a best friend, lover, adventure partner and roommate all in one, farming is trying to be all the things. Satisfying, ethical, sustainable. We even think it’s supposed to be joyful. It is joyful.
And it’s hard, as is all work.
Cheryl Strayed’s well-cited quote from her Dear Sugar column, in response to a woman upset because writing felt impossible: “Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.”
The implication is that there’s something about physical work, even and perhaps especially the hardest physical work a writer can imagine (“I come from coal miners,” writes Elissa Washuta, in a LitHub article in response to Strayed’s column, “men who lost fingers and arms, the man whose bones were crushed under a rolling coal cart, the one who lived through a leg-cracking explosion, the many whose lungs turned black from decades of dusty inhalations or whose livers buckled under the weight of the after-work rotgut that momentarily knocked out the dread” ), that divorces it from the mind. That when there’s a physical job to do, you simply do it. That you quit talking and become entirely a pair of hands.
How much I’ve wished for that kind of clarity and simplicity. But every single physical job I do is so much more a labor of the mind: how to do it, when to do it, if to do it at all, how to communicate about it, the ferocious task of keeping my focus on the task at hand rather than the million other places it wants to wander.
Washuta has a lot more to say about coal miners and coal mining. “‘They simply dig,’ Strayed wrote. But they didn’t,” she states. “Anthracite miners would routinely strike, defy authority, repeat that “A miner is his own boss,” and walk out when they decided the day’s work was done. And the digging was never simple: every move was a decision that could result in death.”
Studs Terkel’s famous book Working, which profiles different types of workers, is among Eula Biss’s sources. “Among the people Terkel interviews,” writes Biss, “the farmer and the flight attendant and the prostitute and the stockbroker, there are some who take deep pleasure in their work—the stonemason, the piano tuner, the bookbinder, the carpenter who is also a poet. The janitor doesn’t mind being a janitor,” Biss writes, “But he does mind the pain in his back when he shovels snow and when he uses a mop.”
It is undeniable that I am farming in the most privileged way that one can farm. It is also true that my body’s capacity at thirty-five is remarkably different than it was at twenty-five, and the fear I have about what farming will look like at forty-five or fifty-five cannot be entirely assuaged by my privilege. No matter how much I value and re-value the mental work of farming, the physical work will always need to be done. Who will do it? Will I start hiring more young bodies to put through the same wringer? Will I hire Mexican laborers who will undoubtedly work harder and better than I ever did? Will I invest in more and more machinery to offload the labor? What kind of farm would that be? Will I push my body, invest in bodywork and find new and different postures to get through a day of harvest? How much of that can I control?
When I run now, its not exactly for the exercise. It’s to remind myself that my body is not just for work.
A friend sent me Tiana Clark’s poem “My Therapist Wants to Know About My Relationship to Work.” She’s writing about writing, about her relationship to social media and screens and offices, but it might as well be about farming, or any work.
I hustle
upstream.
I grasp.
I grind.
I control & panic. Poke
balloons in my chest,
always popping there,
always my thoughts thump,
thump. I snooze — wake & go
boom. All day, like this I short
my breath.
And by the end:
I bathe now. Epsom salt.
No books or phone. Just water & the sound
of water filling, glory — be my buoyant body,
bowl of me.
