It's early Monday morning on the first day of June. It is our last working day on this assignment. We are sitting in line at Swift Lube in Lake City, Florida, waiting for our turn in the bay for a "10-minute oil change!", as promised by the sign out front beneath "Family-Owned Business". Our crew truck is more than 10,000 miles overdue for service, and we are set to begin our 1,000 mile drive back to Texas this evening.
Beyond my frustration at our other crewmates' neglect of this taxpayer-funded, government-operated vehicle, I find my patience for sitting in a line of idling vehicles waning. Then again, if not waiting in this line, I would be sitting in the same truck at a different location; the idleness would remain the same.
Wildfire season means a lot of sitting around and waiting for a fire to pop. When I'm not too sucked into my phone, this gives me time to read. Sometimes it gives me time to think. I've been working through the same book for a few months now--the longest reading lull I've had in years. That's more of a testament to my screen time than it is to my enjoyment of "The Omnivore's Dilemma," though.
This morning, as usual, Michael Pollan has me thinking. He's writing about the inability to merge industrial and artisal methods of production. He highlights Allan Nation's idea that doing so results in a middle ground that's worse than either alone.
Late in our conversation, Joel asked Bev and me if we'd seen a recent column by Allan Nation in Stockman Grass Farmer about "artisanal economics." Drawing on the theories of Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, Nation had distinguished between industrial and artisanal enterprises to demonstrate why attempts to blend the two modes seldom succeed. Industrial farmers are in the business of selling commodities, he explained, a business where the only viable competitive strategy is to be the least-cost producer. The classic way any industrial producer lowers the costs of his product is by subsituting capital--new technologies and fossil-fuel energy--for skilled labor and then stepping up production, exploiting the economies of scale to compensate for shrinking profit margins. In a commodity business a producer must sell ever more cheaply and grow ever bigger or be crushed by a competitor who does.
Nation constrasted this industrial model with its polar opposite, what he calls "artisanal production," where the competitive strategy is based on selling something special rather than being the least-cost producer of a commodity. Stressing that "productivity and profits are two entirely different concepts," Nation suggests that even a small producer can be profitable so long as he's selling an exceptional product and keeping his expenses down. Yet this artisanal model works only so long as it doesn't attempt to imitate the industrial model in any respsect. It must not try to replace skilled labor with capital; it must not grow for the sake of growth; it should not strive for uniformity in its products but rather make a virtue of variation and seasonality; it shouldn't invest capital to reach national markets but rather should focus on local markets, relying on reputation and word of mouth rather than on advertising; and lastly, it should rely as much as possible on free solar energy rather than costly fossil fuels.
"The biggest problem with alternative agriculture today," Nation writes, "is that it seeks to incorporate bits and pieces of the industrial model and bits and pieces of the artisanl model. This will not work.... In the middle of the road, you get the worst of both worlds."
Nation's column had helped Joel understand why his broiler business was more profitable than his beef or pork business. Since he could process chickens himself, the product was artisanl from start to finish; his beef and pork, on the other hand, had to pass through an industrial processing plant, adding to his costs and shrinking his margins.
My values demand that I live frugally and ecologically. My student loans demand that I work responsibily--economically responsibly, that is. My "middle of the road" between my desires to live in harmony with the land and achieve financial stability is working as a wildland firefighter.
In this job, I make more money than I ever have in my life. The ability to work as much as I can gives me the overtime hours that pay for my loans. In this job, I also get to feel like I earn my paycheck with real physical labor. Sometimes. And sometimes, I sit in a nearly brand-new, idling government truck with the A/C blasting, getting paid for 8 hours of overtime a day, just in case a spark catches the woods on fire and they need resources to respond.
This is where Nation's words (through Pollan's book) hit me hard. I can't blame those words though--I've been standing obliviously in the middle of the road since I started my first wildland fire job. I think it'd be a strong statement to say I'm getting the true worst of both worlds, but I know I'm not getting the best of them either.
In this job--in which we measure our worth in the number of overtime hours we clock a year, in how dirty our clothes are, in how many days it's been since we've had a day off or how long it's been since we've eaten a real meal at our own tables--it's easy to recognize the parallels to the rat-race of industrial and corporate production that I tried so hard to avoid in my early twenties.
I started in this career field almost four years ago making far below minimum wage. I left school without a degree to reset and find something that felt like it could be fulfilling for me. That something was a position with a conservation corps based in Flagstaff, Arizona. I drove across the country with everything I owned and spent three months working on the public lands of Arizona. I lived in one of three communal houses surrounding a common courtyard, slept in my assigned bunk bed, and worked and camped in the woods during our work hitches.
Towards the end of my term with that crew, I was anxiously awaiting the date that my first student loan payment would kick in after the six-month grace period lapsed. Sure enough, no matter how hard I tried to ignore the soul-crushing figure of $1,300/month, Discover Student Loans was keen on cashing in on the tuition money they lent to my 18-year-old self. How kind of them to open the door to an undergraduate degree at one of the country's best engineering programs... at the low cost of a compounding 10% interest rate!
Back to Nation's theory, my time in Arizona was likely my lifetime peak of artisanal production. Everyone hiked in to our work spot at their own pace. We were given two fifteen-minute snack breaks, plus a thirty minute lunch everyday. We worked ten-hour shifts outside in the Arizona heat, but in hindsight, the pace was leisurely and the expectations were low. We weren't given the contracts with our agency partners because we were efficient or particularly productive--the deals were made because we were cheap, available, and we were part of an American program made up of young, excited conservationists working outside on American lands. We took turns cooking and doing dishes every night at camp. We ate each other's meals and planned out the menu to use up our leftovers and keep the perishable things from spoiling as the hitch went on and the ice got lower. We were encouraged to listen to our bodies and take care of ourselves during the workday. The work was not the priority, it was the training and experience. Of course, we still worked and the labor was still hard.
On our off-time, I made up big meals--usually big stews, it was fall in Flagstaff--from the Commons shelves with my roommates. We shared with the house and anyone who hung out in our living room. Inevitably, we'd be eating the same leftover stew for most of our off-days. I got up early in the mornings to enjoy the sunny spot on the couch in the living room while it was still quiet. More often than not, my good friend and roommate would already be in her spot on the opposite couch with a mug of tea and her reading glasses. We'd say a barely audible "good morning" to each other as I passed into the kitchen to start reheating the water in the kettle that I scrubbed back to its original blue color on one of our first days in the house. I scooped out my healthy dose of local orange clove honey into my mug with the jasmine tea bags I scavenged from a long-gone housemate's abandoned cupboard space.
We had lots of movie nights on the couches, or walks around Flagstaff. We put on a memorable Thanksgiving with too many dishes to keep in the fridge. We were living close and taking care of each other. Not many of us were super directional at the time. A lot of people were just passing through on their way to their next seasonal job. Those who had been there a while were maybe starting to make more solid plans of what's next--going back to school, applying directly to the Feds, trying for a Crew Lead position, looking for a position with an organization that pays better (the City of Boulder was considered the big shots).
Sitting in line at Swift Lube, I felt self-conscious about my choice to avoid the Jiffy Lube chain and give the government's money back to a family-owned business. It was Day 114. I don't think it'd be fair to say that tensions were high, but they certainly weren't low either. Everyone was impatient to get on the road, and the boys weren't pleased to spend an hour of our morning in line. But once again, we were on the clock, and waiting for the end of shift would've had to happen regardless of where we were.
Wildland firefighters prioritize efficiency. There is a joke that we do all of our day-to-day tasks as fast as possible: eat, walk, go to the bathroom, fuel up the truck, etc. Daily, someone throws out the "hurry up and wait" mantra that our working lives are built around.
The mentality that this culture fosters would have had us go to the franchised oil change shop, with the justification that it would be faster (whether or not it ultimately was), so that we could finish our pre-travel errands quicker, get to our staging location quicker, and spend the rest of the day sitting and waiting for something to happen. It has been driven into us to use our work hours as productively as possible, even when there isn't work to do. This career field is dominated by a culture of preparedness, efficiency, disregard--verging on numbness--for personal desires (over the crew, the demands of the job, or just your asshole supervisor's preferences), vigilance, and compression--ready to spring at any point.
And yet, with all of that preparation, training, drilling, and hazing, the job is still dictated by the weather and the plants, and we somehow maintain a certain, intentional distance from the world that we cannot control.
We are driving back now--hitting the Florida to Texas stretch of I-10 for the return route. I'm counting the days until Friday, when my paycheck for this assignment will hit my bank account--preemptively inputting my estimated earnings into my spreadsheet so that I can forecast the extra payment I can make towards my student loans.
I am less than $9,000 away from paying off the rest of my interest-bearing private student loans. One way or another, through a miracle, lots of overtime hours, and my goal to use Public Service Loan Forgiveness to take care of my federal student loans, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. That tunnel started more than five years ago, when I came to the realization that I would likely be spending the rest of my life paying back the debt that I owed for going to college. I had that realization while I was still trying to finish my engineering degree, before I let that idea go and swapped it for the assertion that I wouldn't be able to make myself fit into that box for the rest of my life.
And, in combination, those two things--the impending doom of my debt and my disinclination to take the standard financial Rx of a desk job--provided the impetus for the series of decisions that led me into a career as a wildland firefighter. But both of those things are either mostly irrelevant, or soon will be.
After years of chasing the relative stability I have now, I'm finally slowing down to ask, "Now what?"