There’s Something About Dirt

Summer is almost upon us. When I was in middle school, this time of year meant a return to my summer job: bean-walking. I always found “bean-walking” to be a deceptively friendly term. For those who don’t know, bean-walking means pulling weeds from fields of beans and/or corn at organic farms, which can’t use pesticides. Sure, you’re walking, but you’re also bending down every two seconds to pull weeds, or else you’re crawling on your hands and knees when your back gets too tired to bend.

It wasn’t glamorous work. You inevitably ended up hot, sweaty, and exhausted. Early in the season, your body hurt from stooping to pull out hundreds of tiny weeds, and later on, your hands hurt from trying to grip thick stalks of ragweed. Sometimes you would get cut on the leaves of corn, which are sharper than they look, and your eyes itched when the weeds started producing pollen. We started early in the morning and got soaked from the dew, which was still better than waiting until later in the day when the sun would be scorching. I often thought, when I felt sorry for myself in the field, that it was no wonder that medieval peasants lived half as long as modern people if this is what their lives were like.

We would work steadily for three hours. I always had to power through the final hour. I would stop talking to my neighbor so I could focus on keeping my body moving. I knew if I lost my momentum, I would collapse in a heap and be unable to move a muscle.

It was hard, but after our three hours were up, something happened. All the other kids and I would stand, straighten up, and walk together back to the truck parked on the other side of the field. We moved quickly through the rows we’d cleared, knowing that each inch of field was won with willpower. We’d sit down on the grass and look out over the field drinking cool water, with dirt on our skin and sun in our bones. After bean walking, I felt young, strong, alive. I never had trouble sleeping the nights I worked.

I live in the suburbs now, where people have a different approach to productivity. Here, productivity is sending an email, scheduling appointments, running a long-deferred errand. These things are all important too, of course, but they don’t give me the same sense of earthy triumph I got on those summer days in middle school. It makes sense. Humans have bodies as well as minds. Modern people often make their minds bear all the brunt of “accomplishing things”, and don’t realize how empowering manual labor can be. Working out isn’t a perfect substitute. Exercise is something you do for self-improvement. Bean-walking is a battle as old as farming itself. To this day, I can’t walk by a patch of ragweed without feeling proud of myself for those long hours, and knowing that the patch would be no match for me if I chose to clear it. I suppose the upshot of all this is that I’m grateful I walked beans as a teenager. After all, there’s something about dirt that makes us more vibrant, more a part of the earth we have smeared all over our faces.