Eighteen
Yesterday in 1988 I showed up on a jobsite for the first time and was initiated into employment in building construction. I'd graduated from high school in May and turned 18 a couple of weeks previously, mid-October. I intended to go to bible college and become a pastor, paying my way through by taking up a 'trade', as had the pastor of my family's little church and a couple of the young men he'd brought on full-time or part-time as church staff. I'm not sure about which noble idea I was more completely in the fog – ministerial calling or the virtues of gaining experience in the building trades. Anyway, along with a few other men of varied backgrounds & stages of youth who'd already done so in the previous year or two, I went to work for another fellow in the church who had a small drywall company. All of these men were to my eyes role models in one sense or another, all physically vigorous & extremely hard-working, establishing families, devoted in one form of service or another to the life of this church. I wanted to be part of that little world of men. This, I think, though I wouldn't have distinguished it then from the ideals of church-&-family, evangelical fervor, self-sacrifice, &c., might have been the clearest notion in my head when I & my bible showed up on a jobsite in Baltimore for the first time, now more or less exactly half of my life ago.
posted by paul bowman @ 5:23 AM
4 Comments:
It sounds like "birthday" greetings are in order - 18 years in the trade is no small thing. You're old enough to vote!
Just in time, too — elections are next week, down south here!
But in fact, it's only 18 years ago, not 18 years of trade-practice. I was a full-time undergrad student through a significant chunk of these years, during my 20s — seven (!) to be exact. There were several years of drywall-finishing (a lot of very long work-days, incidentally, & often six days/week, since I was never very fast by finishers' standards) before college, and I've done a lot of drywall & plaster repair since then, during & after college — but it's been mixed in with some variety of other occupational pursuits along the way. Among the capacities I've employed in my work now for several years, though, drywall & related technique are still key. This week, in fact, I'm serving as mud man on a sort of renovation job (for, I should mention, one of those young men, now a contractor in his early 40s, whom I began in drywall alongside in 1988).
In any case, that word 'trade' really ought to be examined at length sometime. Its long-established sense & connotations in common use, if not necessarily the word itself, are quite misleading in contemporary context, to my thinking. We're a long, long way from the days of apprentices, journeymen, & masters in the building business — not that you can't find any remnants of that order of things or the meanings implied, but that the way building actually happens has increasingly little to do with the roles of trades historically so developed. What were once tradesmen's skills apply less & less to the facts of getting buildings built — we really employ installers in construction, not carpenters, masons, &c. Deep development of skills thought to add up to making one a master or a 'builder', under the rubric of this or that 'trade', seems to be more & more impracticable, in virtue of the economics & technology of building, and can be pretty hard to come by, as I've observed things. Trade employment, in other words, isn't a route toward mastery but mainly toward facility along narrow lines. 'Mastery' in a complete sense tends to be analyzed & its aspects portioned to other job roles come to by separate paths. (There are some regional differences in how the trades have been carried on, though, at least in residential work — that's my sense, anyway, mostly through reading. The shift in culture perhaps isn't equally evident everywhere.) I suppose this line of criticism/inquiry, finally, runs somewhat beyond building — industry in general is the field in view, in some sense.
I should also tip my hat to you for being a mud man. Of all the trades, that's the one I'd go out of my way to avoid (yep: I'd choose plumbing over drywall).
You and a lot of other people. Drywall/plaster is dirty, frequently monotonous work. (That's not to say there's nothing at all to be appreciated about it, however.)
Plumbing though has actually come to seem like pretty interesting work to me. (Should say that the extent of plumbing work I'll attempt myself remains pretty limited — just the localized parts in kitchen & bath redos, nothing house-wide.) It's one occupation, in my observation, that retains a good deal of the old-fashioned building-trade character, the relation of accomplishing things by hand- & eye-skill to gaining a really deep-layered & multifaceted appreciation of the interrelated working of things being intimate & somewhat recursive, and difficult therefore to reduce (so far) to a set array of plug-in tasks. Really a good position, too, from which to understand integration of varied aspects of building, if one's got the investigative mindset. Of course, if one's going to make a living at it, there's (among other unpleasantnesses) the crawling about in dark close cobwebby spaces to accustom oneself to ...
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