What a load of crap

The summer after my junior year of college, I got a job shoveling poop for a living. It's really surprising the things you'll agree to when you are a poor college student. It was like this: I was planning on staying in my university's town during the summer because I was taking 15 credits of classes during July. I needed money to pay my summer rent, and jobs were scarce.

The stable job that I applied to had been advertised as a horse feeder, stall cleaner, and possible horse exerciser. Shoveling crap is not normally my cup of tea, but I had previous horse experience. I mean, I shoveled horse manure every week for nine years. I had ridden horses and trained horses and chased escaped horses and fed horses for all of my 4-H years. I had done it wearing rubber boots, overalls, and plaid flannel shirts. I could totally feed a stable full of horses and lunge them in the arena. I could haul some poop in a wheel barrow.

I started the gig the week after moving into my new place. On a quick visit "home" to my parents, I picked up my old leather gloves and rubber boots, because stall mucking is dirty business. My mother was shocked to learn that I had volunteered myself to shovel manure. I had complained about it all the time as a child. "But I'm getting paid for it now," I told her. Money makes all the difference.

I went to the stable every afternoon and got rid of that poo faster than an expert babysitter changing a dirty diaper. I had to haul in saw dust to lay down on the stall floors. Let me tell you, get a little bit of wind going on, and this is not a fun chore. I filled water buckets, carted hay, and got covered in dirt. By the third or fourth day my blisters turned to calluses, my back hurt worse than a mother who is nine months pregnant with twins, and the amount of sweat that dripped down my body made me yearn for the very moment I could take a cold shower at home. It was hard work. I told myself I was going to get ripped. Surely all of this upper body work was going to make me have the best biceps of my life.

The hardest part of the job was climbing the Mountains of DooDoo Doom. I wish I had a picture, but that would be pretty nasty. Imagine this: an area the size of a small parking lot. Like your dentist's parking lot. It's designated just for horse manure. It's already covered. There's no where else to dump it. The boundary lines are overflowing. So what has been done? A second layer has been dumped. There are two by four boards of wood lain on top of the dried poo, which act as a sort of bridge for the wheelbarrow. But in some areas there is a third layer of crap. You have to push the wheelbarrow up the Doo Doo Mountains in order to dump it. After flipping the wheelbarrow over, the wheel gets stuck and you have to yank it out with a great amount of force. The sun is blazing overhead, your feet are already soaked with sweat in your boots, and the freaking wheelbarrow won't cooperate.

I wondered to myself how high the stable owners would let the manure pile get before they got a tractor and spread the poo out across the rest of their fields. Or whatever it is people do when they acquire six tons of poop. My answer: not during my time of employment. Not that summer. Maybe they would do it before the rain came in the fall. Because getting a full wheelbarrow of crap up a four foot high pile of manure so that you could just dump more poo onto a dried out layer of poo has got to be much easier than pushing a load full up a hill of slippery, squishy, rain saturated poo. And there was nothing easy about doing the job when it was dry out.

Geez, if you are still with me by this point, I'm going to change the direction of this story. I think you get it by now. There was tons and tons of poo.

One of my summer courses was an on-line PE class. I know, right? On-line PE. Why didn't they have that when I was a nerd in high school? We were supposed to keep a log of the exercises we did. I fully counted an hour and a half of shoveling and hauling poop as exercise. Only I made my log say "rollerblading" or "jogging," because that sounded more legit than "hauling crap." I mean, it was back breaking work. The amount of sweat that rolled down my body could have filled the kiddie pool that sat in the back of my townhouse.

Let me tell you, the only thing good about these sorts of tortuous jobs is that they build character. If I include all the work I had to do as a child growing up in the country, add in my summer stable job, and then count a few other life experiences, I would venture to say I have built enough character to construct a ten-story building. I mean, how much character must a person build before they can just enjoy the structure? To stand back and let people admire what has been made?

"This is Joelle. Construction began in 1985 and has continued for the past 25 years. A bit of character was built every consecutive year. In 2007 a large expansion of character was added during a remodel. Due to the work, Joelle's spine has compressed 1/4 of an inch and she now stands at barely five feet tall, but her character building is very much evident through her I-will-finish-this work ethic, seen in all the torturous jobs she's ever held."

You know what one of my favorite moments of satisfaction was? When I moved out of that townhouse and threw those nasty, stinky, well-used boots straight in the garbage, never to be worn again. Because I swore I'd never muck stalls again. We'll see if that lasts. With my luck I'll end up marrying a cowboy who has a whole barn full of horses.