Light On Dark Water

Sunday Night Journal — May 30, 2010

Friday night when I went for my usual
walk to the bay with the dogs there was a car, a dark red Ford
Explorer, parked in the turnaround at the end of the street. It’s
not unusual for teenagers to come down here on weekend nights and
have a party on the bit of beach or in the woods, and although they
really shouldn’t be there and may be doing things they
shouldn’t be doing, I generally ignore them as long as they
don’t seem to be doing any damage and don’t leave a bunch
of garbage behind. They must have been in the woods, because I didn’t
see or hear them, though I did catch a whiff of smoke, which always
concerns me a little. One group that I did eventually chase away had
been there repeatedly, camping overnight in the woods and making big
campfires during a long dry spell, and I was worried about the fires.

Saturday morning, again on my usual
walk, but somewhat later than usual because it was the weekend, I saw
that the car was still there, and I noticed that the license plate
indicated that the owner was a member of a fire department. There’s
a point where the direct path to the water branches off to the left
toward where a tiny creek empties out into the bay, and where there
is usually the biggest stretch of beach. Taking that path, I found
that three or four young people were fast asleep on the sand, though
it was after 9 and they were in the full heat of the sun. I figured
that if they were sleeping that soundly they probably had not only
stayed up most of the night but had sedated themselves with alcohol
or drugs. Again, I left them alone, and although the dogs and I made
a certain amount of noise, none of them seemed to have moved when we
left.

Late Saturday afternoon, around 5:30,
having completed some other chores, I was about to give the larger of
the two dogs, Lucy, a bath, and decided to take her outside first, as
she had been sleeping behind the chair in my study for some hours. I
remembered the kids on the beach. The car had been gone for some
time, though I hadn’t noticed them leave. I thought I’d
go take a look and see if they’d left a mess.

Only a few steps into the woods toward
the water, I heard an odd rushing sound and wondered what it was,
thinking at first that someone must still be down there. When I
reached the point where the path branches toward the creek, I was
astonished to see flames climbing a dead tree on the other side of
the creek, and all the underbrush around it ablaze.

For a second I was stunned. For perhaps
another second I considered whether I should rush back to the house
for a bucket, but it was immediately obvious that this fire was well
beyond anything I could cope with. A storm was coming from the west,
and a strong wind was blowing off the water, whipping the flames
furiously—I could see that they were spreading quickly, even in
the few moments I stood there. So I ran—something I have not
done since I had back surgery in 1992—the hundred yards or so
back to the house and called 911.

An hour or so of excitement followed. I
heard the police dispatcher describe the fire as “a grass
fire,” which I didn’t think quite did it justice.
Fairhope has a volunteer fire department, and apparently many of them
were out of town for the Memorial Day weekend. When a small truck
with a small crew arrived fifteen or twenty minutes later, the fire
was that much bigger. The truck was too big to get down the path and
close to the fire. And after making a brief attempt to go at it with
portable fire extinguishers, the crew called for assistance and more
equipment to combat what I heard them describe now over the radio as
a major fire. It had the potential to be a serious disaster: the fire
had started on the northwest corner of a patch of woods maybe six or
eight acres in size (that’s really just a guess), and the wind,
which had increased, was pushing it south and east, toward houses.

In another ten or fifteen minutes
another truck arrived with a portable pump, which the crew fed from
the bay, and a long hose which enabled them to reach the forward
point of the fire. And then the thunderstorm finally arrived, first
with a light rain and then a drenching downpour, and between the rain
and the work of the firemen the blaze was extinguished.

My guess is that the kids who had spent
the night on the beach intended to put out their fire and thought
they had, but had left something smoldering until the rising wind of
the approaching storm blew it into flames again. I described the car
to the firemen, and they showed a sort of pained amusement at the
fact that it had displayed a firefighter’s license plate. They
said there was no one in the Fairhope department who drove a dark red
Ford Explorer and guessed that it must have come from some nearby
municipality. I suppose it’s possible that they weren’t
telling me the truth, not wanting to get some colleague into trouble,
but if they did recognize the car I’m sure the owner will hear
about it.

This adventure left me feeling pretty
appreciative of the fire department, and got me thinking about all
the work of the world that requires straightforward physical labor,
often difficult or dangerous or both. (Of course fighting a fire
requires a lot of knowledge and skill, but in the end it’s a
tough physical job.) We don’t value it as we should. Perhaps
it’s appropriate, since it is the mind that sets men apart from
animals, that mental labor should be more prized and more rewarded
than physical labor—but up to a point only. Those kinds of work
which are primarily mental have meaning only in and because of the
more physical labor of others. My own job in information technology,
for instance, in which the mental labor is demanding but the physical
labor consists almost entirely of typing, would be utterly useless
apart from its role in supporting the organization that employs me.
It does not directly produce or accomplish anything in the world
outside the computer, but rather manages information about that
world. And I would not be able to do it without the support of people
laboring with their hands, doing everything from assembling the
computers I work with to cleaning the building in which my office is
located.

I grow impatient with hearing about
“the information economy,” about “knowledge
workers” and their privileged position in our economic life.
Pundits seem to have a sort of gnostic view of the economy, speaking
as if it were a totally incorporeal thing consisting only of
financial transactions. They recognize that there must at some level
be actual goods and services, but these don’t seem to really
matter in themselves. What is important about them is that they be
produced as cheaply as possible; it doesn’t matter where, or by
whom, because they are only the raw material of the real economy,
which consists of marketing, investment, banking, and so forth. And
even most investing, which in theory involves placing one’s
money at risk on an enterprise that one believes worthwhile, is only
a form of gambling, in which the real investment is brief and
abstract and based only what “the market,” meaning other
gamblers, will do.

There is a practical disdain in the
upper reaches of our society for anybody so slow-witted and naïve
as to make a living with the actual work of his hands, a disdain that
is independent of political categories. (If anything the active
disdain is stronger in the “liberal” camp, which may
give more lip service to the lower-class laborer but doesn’t
actually think very highly of him—but that’s a topic for
another day.) And there’s a presumption that the end point of
social development is for everyone to be a “knowledge worker.”

But nobody calls for a knowledge worker
when the woods are on fire. And I doubt that if Jesus had been born
in our time he would have been a banker or a stockbroker or a
computer programmer.

There is a growing gap between the
people who run the gnostic economy and those who have no direct role
in it and are seen as existing only to serve and support those who
do. I think this is one of the many forces pulling our country apart.
It isn’t very visible yet, and the effects are slow to develop,
but they may prove to be very powerfully destructive, especially if a
strong wind begins to blow.