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A friend got me thinking about John Fogerty the other day, and I went searching for more recent videos of his on YouTube. This one happens to showcase one of my favorite Fogerty songs, “Fortunate Son.” (There’s a longish intro, song begins about 58 seconds in.) It’s a fantastic rendition that shows the power of live rock & roll at its best and makes a very timely statement as well. According to a commenter on the YouTube page, the drummer who steals the show here is Kenny Aronoff—and you should probably do whatever he says. Have your computer hooked up to good external speakers or decent headphones and crank this up LOUD!

Excellent, excellent music. Behold the thunder and the rage.

Behold the modest young dude working his butt off doing dangerous work. You should have seen him going up and down the wall of wrecks using the chains as climbing ropes. This is interesting to me.

There was a time I did vaguely similar things, back when bones almost never broke and if they did who cared. But I’m not, uh, drawn to such activity any more. I honestly don’t understand what’s happened since then, either. After all, I’ve never broken a bone in my life. Maybe it’s the knowledge that if I fell or jumped from any decent height, my internal organs could rearrange themselves in strange new ways.

Between my freshman and sophomore years of college, I worked a full summer in the mighty pea fields of the jolly Green Giant. This was somewhere in Washington near the Oregon line. We lived in barracks in an actual labor camp surrounded by barbed wire with armed deputies watching you enter and leave. There was a handful of college guys in a work force of migrant workers, hobos, and ex-cons. After mandatory lights out, there’d be jokes (?) about “gettin’ the grease gun.” I saw men squeeze the juice from Sterno with a piece of cloth, mix it with orange juice concentrate and drink it. A couple of months earlier in the dorm, the word had been, “You can make really good money in the pea harvest with the overtime!” Yeah, yeah. I can’t believe I actually went out there and stayed. Going back home empty-handed was unthinkable, though, and summer with my parents would have been unbearable. And so I stuck it out.

I had numerous manly experiences working for Green Giant, and most of them were terrible. Riding out to the pea fields in the back of an open truck at 4:00 a.m. comes to mind. But toward the end of my sentence, I moved up to the job of “mechanic” on the hulking stationary harvesting machines, and that was cool. The huge contraptions sat side-by-side in a line, a dozen of them at least. They were brightly illuminated at night by ordinary incandescent bulbs that ran off electricity generated by the six-cylinder engines that powered each one. I wonder how they did that. Either there were two generators per engine, one for its own starter battery and another putting out AC, or else the bulbs were DC. I doubt we had inverters. Anyway, replacing broken or failed bulbs was one of the main duties of a “mechanic.” That, and replacing cotter pins in the gears that turned at the ends of long steel shafts.

I say cotter pins because that’s how they functioned, but what we really used were simply nails. I’d have a pocketful of them and a hammer. All of a sudden the peas would stop rolling into the heavy wooden boxes because a gear was spinning freely on the shaft. This meant I had to shut down the engine, wait for the squeaking and clanking to stop, climb up on top of the thing (about 15 feet), and pop a nail into the hole. Bang the ends over with the hammer, climb back down, hope the engine starts, and off you go. Each machine’s crew got paid based on the number of bins they filled, and speed was crucial.

What with one thing and another, I never made much money, but I did have enough to buy a Kay guitar that weighed 600 pounds and might have worked in place of that hammer. My parents were extremely disappointed and refused to pay my $800 tuition at SMU. Three days later they hauled me off to Austin, and I enrolled at the University of Texas (hook ’em, Horns!) for just $50 per semester. All in one day, mind you: pay the money, dump me in double room in a private rooming house with some other abandoned idiot, and drive away. Given the nature of Austin, U.T., and my own propensities, however, that turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me, which means I must have planned it all along.

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They’re leaving! If that’s not a miracle, I don’t know what is. And as metaphors go, this one is just fabulous. Those hulks have been part of the neighborhood scenery for way longer than the decade I’ve been here. The entire operation, from smashing in the roofs with a forklift, stacking the wrecks, and chaining it all down, appeared to be the work of the 20-something guy who drove the truck up here two days ago. I walked down the road to take some pictures, and he came over to shake my hand:

“How’s it going?”

“Wow, this is AMAZING!”

“Why?”

“Man, all the WORK it took to get those stacked up there!”

“Eh…”

“It must be wild to drive a load like that down the road!”

[shrugs] “It’s all right…”

Now, I am supposedly well educated, have lived a lot of places, and done a lot of things. But I never learned to drive a semi, smash cars with a forklift, and stack them three deep on a big-ass trailer, much less crank it all down tight with heavy chains. This kid has no idea how impressed I am. At every step of the way, he could have been maimed, and the whole mess still has to hit the road and get somewhere in one piece. The thought of all that weight pulling on those chains is inherently terrifying to me—if one of them breaks, it could take off an arm. There’s all kinds of other stuff stacked up in there, too, where you can’t see it: axles, wheels, a couple of engine blocks… the very thought of it starts me feeling around for smashed body parts. I wouldn’t want to be behind this rig going through the canyon—if you live here, that means canyon of the Rio Grande from Taos to Velarde—but I wish the driver well.

That was this evening. My morning was restless and strained. I’d gone to bed in kind of a mess, woke up briefly in the middle of the night realizing I wasn’t depressed, but still got up too early. Worried about my breathing, actually. No, there’s nothing wrong, but one can think oneself into any condition. At any rate, I decided I wouldn’t take my usual four mile hike—because of being tired and neurotic and all, plus it looked like rain—and was well on my way to ruining a perfectly good Sunday when my wife suggested I might feel guilty about not walking. (Well, now that you mention it…) I’d talked myself out of it due to some other idiocy, in other words, like not being famous yet. Who knows. By that point the immediate “problem” was that it was already getting on toward noon, and I knew what walking then would do to to me. But I decided to go for it: I’d do my hike, get hot and exhausted, clean up, eat, then sleep the rest of the day!

It was stupendous.

Every part of it, but especially how utterly different the most mundane things feel in the absence of guilt. IMMACULATELY CONCEIVED. Like my two-and-a-half hour nap under a blanket in the cool adobe bedroom, oh God… Being better off or younger or more accomplished wouldn’t have made that nap any better. Pretty radical for this sinner. Not a one of my parents’ generation related to me would ever have understood.

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[Sea shanty, origin unknown]

Under the moldy elk, and over the bounding main
some things are so terrible, you never can explain
and when the wind do blow, with icy rain and snow
it’s under the moldy elk, and over the side we go

Chorus:
Under the moldy
under the moldy
under the moldy elk
Under the moldy
under the moldy
under the moldy elk
Arrrrrrr

Under the moldy elk, and in the blackest night
no one on the crew, would e’er turn on a light
’cause when you down below, and no one else can know
it’s under the moldy elk, and over the side we go

Chorus:
Under the moldy
under the moldy
under the moldy elk
Under the moldy
under the moldy
under the moldy elk
Arrrrrrr

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