by Taylor

“These people” are educated, they vote, and they are human. They have families, friends, people they don’t get along with, problems. In spite of myself, I find myself allowing them access to my thoughts and feelings. Second of a series.  See Part One.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="233" caption="Mine tour guide, Pogo Mine, 2008. Photo by Christen Bouffard (iconoclith on Flickr). Used per Creative Commons licensing"][/caption]

“Ain’t no rest for the wicked!” A commonly-heard anecdote in this place. If only those that uttered it knew just how apt I once found it, considering the source.

No, these aren’t evil people. Just confused, and with no real curiosity to explore the depths of what our profit-driven social system would have them believe. Ignorance, it would seem, is truly bliss. I’ve had the chance to know this, first-hand.

We of the more left-leaning communities suffer from our own brands of ignorance. We assume that the characters that occupy the space in which I currently exist, are uneducated. We assume that they lack drive to vote, or do anything besides consume PBR. We assume that Geico’s TV ad, which touts, “It’s so easy, a caveman could do it”, applies in a way that is humorously ironic to these individuals. I can state with a fair level of certainty that the educated, aware, progressive factions of our society have assumed wrongly, on so many different levels.

I have met more drillers with bachelor’s degrees out here than I can count, many in Accounting or Business Management, or Sciences. Their reason for doing this work? It lets them work in the great outdoors, it allows them to see different parts of the country — and sometimes, the world — and it pays well. And I can say that these educated walking contradictions, to a man, believe, first and foremost, in their Second Amendment rights, are at least some breed of Social Conservative, and worship the ground Sarah Palin walks on. If there are those that don’t fit this bill, then they have remained silent, or blended in. Those of us that must be malleable in order to camouflage recognize it easily in others.

“These people” are educated, they vote, and they are human. They have families, friends, people they don’t get along with, problems. In spite of myself, I find myself allowing them access to my thoughts and feelings. I find my carefully constructed walls compromised as I find things to like, if not admire, in each of them. The human desire to find camaraderie anywhere will always win out over social cliques…or, in microcosms of human society such as my workplace, we’d all kill each other. Stranger things have happened, especially in three weeks’ worth of work-imposed isolation from society.

My duty rotations run three weeks on, one week off. Just enough time to become acclimated to camp, and for paved roads, vegan food, and safe spaces for queer people to drink and date to become foreign concepts.

For three weeks, I’m not Taylor, I am the Medic. I am not genderqueer or even really gay, but I AM “butch enough to hang out with”. I am not Leftist, I am Middle of the Road…at least, outwardly. I drink with “the boys”, even if it is cheap, bad beer, and even if I don’t actually drink with them, I just hang out and sip my water, or tea (this particular company allots each employee two beers per day…believe it or not, such camps do exist, but usually, only in the explorations phase).

For three weeks, people that would ordinarily have nothing to do with me — in fact, I rather suspect they would literally like to take a shot at me, ordinarily — profess that they “have my back”, and will help out in the event of a serious incident. A few are sincere. A greater number are likely responding to what our inner psyches rail against in an environment such as this: Loneliness.

Though the armor plating of my alternate self does not fall away, there is a strange merging of that armor and my sense of self, such that, I may begin to breathe and feel as a different person. If my super-power is compartmentalization and putting on a good act, my kryptonite is forgetting where the act ends and I begin. I find myself relenting (or even acceding) regarding topics that, in another space, place or time, would leave me running rabid circles around my brain in order to piece together a rational counter-argument…or a back-handed comment, whichever comes first.

I become acclimated to the pejorative terms so casually slung about. My head no longer turns at any racial slur I might hear (and there are many). Jokes about various bits of male anatomy being inspected for health problems become commonplace in my proximity, and I might laugh a bit, before telling the offending party where to stick it. Here, sexual harassment sensitivity training is often defined as “telling you where the line is, and how to stand on it, without quite toeing over that boundary”.

For all our collective differences, though, the members of this camp work with each other as well-tuned pistons and crankshafts in a much larger engine that occasionally backfires with no apparent reason. Indeed, the dynamic of this camp was once described to me by a co-worker thusly: The world’s largest, most passive-aggressive, dysfunctional family imaginable. Avoidance of interaction, entirely, is not an option here, so one opts, instead, to either soften the rough edges of individuality, or to become a chameleon.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="640" caption="Leaving Colorado Creek. Photo by Travis S. Used in accordance with Creative Commons licensing."][/caption]

 

Tags: economy, environment, feminism, work