I love wearing rubber boots and tying wire. Bundled up under five jackets, right foot wrapped in three socks so as not to slip from its boot, and a back pocket stuffed with wire, I spent the last few days rearranging rocks in gabion baskets and tying them together.
This week I had the pleasure and privilege of joining the West Virginia MDS Bridge Project as they began construction on an 88 foot bridge half an hour from our base. Under the leadership of a Canadian, I joined two Amish boys and a few construction workers from Ohio to build rebar abutment cages, pour concrete, and avoid the sexist and slightly creepy neighbor man whose opinions were about as good as his hygiene (okay, I know that he is a lonely, broken old man and needs people in his life to care about him but he tried to call me babydoll and I am still bitter). It was a week spent beside a sometimes clear, occasionally raging stream tucked next to a Dan Haggerty worthy meadow. It was a week where my heart swelled with sorrow at the chasm of loss the flood left and with joy as strangers and neighbors became friends. Laughter beat back the cold wind as I expanded my repertoire of West Virginia dialect working alongside the local excavator. Unsurprisingly, the week ended with the ever present and unsolvable questioning of identity that rests on my shoulders. How can I be an academic and a farm girl? I love writing poetry in coffee shops and sketching outlines of garden plans. I love browsing the books on library shelves and scanning the magazine section in Orschelns. I love waking up at 5 am to run before a day of class and at the same hour to bottle feed calves. I love that tying gabion baskets as I fund my undergrad reminds me of building fence with my father. I love sneaking philosophy into pre-breakfast conversations with Amish youth about my fear of birds. I love pausing during the midst of a work day to soak in the realization that serving along those whose beliefs differ from mine is living out challenges I have theorized in class. I need academia. I need a safe place where my worldview meets validation and my mind--in all her femaleness--still receives praise. Yet, as difficult as it sometimes is, MDS never fails to remind me that life cannot be lived in the cocoon of an ivory tower. I'm learning, however, through essays and abutments, that I can have my rebar and bend it too. I can force my way through the second verse of How Great Thou Art and offset it by reading Wendell Berry to apply the first verse's implications for creation care. I can smile about the theological implications as I silently observe men who transition from strangers one hour to friends the next. I can be called babydoll--be infantilized and reduced to a pedestal--and, though I struggle to feel self worth, remind myself of the gratitude I have towards the church for creating an environment where I was praised as a speaker and storyteller before I was ever objectified. Ultimately, I can perform manual labor and think of the paragraphs I have written that might turn into papers about working alongside one another. It is burdensome to look at locally grown rhubarb and have a sermon come to mind. It is exhausting to be caught in a conversation with books of evidence supporting your view that can't be mentioned because they are too much to explain. It is frightening to be alone in your awareness of ecological devastation while the project director ambitiously links Trump to Anheuser-Busch packaged water and is met with cheers of "drink up." Yet this is the world I live in. This is the world I want to live in. We went on a tour one of the West Virginian donors set up. It began in the Greenbrier Hotel and Resort and I attended directly after a morning at the job site. I felt uncomfortable, to say in the least, as I strolled through the polished lobby in overall shorts, a flannel shirt, and work boots. It wasn't just that I didn't fit in that day, it was that I did not want to fit in. I had no desire or longing to ever be comfortable rubbing elbows at cocktail hour. I enjoy the company of Amish boys whose country accents are so thick I have to ask them to repeat every third word. I was delighted working with the excavator who hollered across the river "Go kiss a fat hog!" and made me "happier than a donkey* eating briers" when he called me the Gabion Queen. I feel my place in the church and in the world schlurping borscht and munching on verenika (I made a gluten and dairy free version!!!!!) with strangers who are now another extended family. Small towns, rolling pastures, and muddy boots are as important to me as blank notebook paper asking for ideas, the sunniest corner in Fools and Horses, and meetings about sustainable food. They are of equal importance because they are the same. The ivory tower begins and ends under the patchwork quilt of survival work. Likewise, lives of manual labor and their dependence on the planet are enhanced with places of learning. I can't be one without the other. Indeed, I shouldn't be. And that makes me "happier than a coon in a grapevine" or perhaps "cornfield" since I am, after all, a Kansas country girl. *Donkey is the "share with people who you had to cover your knees for at the dinner table" version
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Elizabeth SchragAdventurer. Biblical and Theological Studies major. Borderline Vegan. Rebel with a cause. Archives
March 2017
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