ROCK ISLAND, IL

By the time we retired the five-unit Jacobsen gang mower (which we pulled with a ’39 Allis Chalmers) and began using an early-model lightweight fairway mower—a used diesel made by Lesco that we picked up cheap—I had become, though I say it myself, a fairly scrupulous sculptor of fairways, greens, fringes, and aprons. I remember coming in from mowing fairways one Friday. The superintendent, Bruce, was heading out on a Cushman to check on something. I hollered for him to go take a look at eight.

The eighth hole was a 145-yard par three with an hour-glass fairway. I’d double-cut it at diagonals with only three of the five units down and then finished the edges in three passes, two coming from the green and one between them going toward it.

The result was an impressive checkerboard look with beautifully curving edges of contrasting passes. The green itself was plush and healthy, and the bunker freshly raked and edged. This was a golf hole.

As I drove to the maintenance building I turned to see Bruce standing at the back of the tee, arms folded across his chest, looking at the fairway as if it were a woman disrobing.

Maybe I shouldn’t impute to Bruce my way of looking at fairways, but it is true that I tried to feature the lines and curves on the golf course the way a woman who knows what she’s got tries to feature her own lines and curves. My work lent itself to interesting comparisons, and I had become interested—attentive and “enlivened,” as Matt Crawford puts it, “by a sense of responsibility” to the thing at hand.

I certainly don’t mean to offer one of those “chattering interpretations of oneself” that Crawford warns against. I’m trying instead to illustrate in another way what I think he intends by “spiritedness,” which he calls “an assertion of one’s own dignity” that manifests itself in actual work. “To fix one’s own car”—or to double-cut a fairway and dwell meticulously on its edges—“is not merely to use up time, it is to have a different experience of time, of one’s car, and of oneself.”

Which is to say you could quit after you’ve cut the fairway—or after you’ve got the car started. But “cut” in the one instance and “started” in the other don’t necessarily satisfy, and this business of satisfaction is, I think, crucial.

Consider, for example, Crawford’s discussion of the mechanics in Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance who butcher a job because they are mere spectators to it. The anecdote gives Crawford occasion to meditate on the loss of that very “spiritedness” in work that so interests him. Pirsig says the guys botch the job because there is “nothing personal in it”; Crawford, hoping not to botch a job, finds himself stumped by an oil seal and at one point realizes that he is thinking not about the owner of the bike but about the bike itself. In doing so he hits upon one of the most important features of skilled manual work—viz, that finding the truth about a thing “requires a certain disposition in the individual: attentiveness, enlivened by a sense of responsibility to the motorcycle.” The mechanic “has to internalize the well working of the motorcycle as an object of passionate concern. The truth does not reveal itself to idle spectators.”

Nor does beauty. There were idle spectators aplenty in the decade I spent on that golf course learning a trade while otherwise attending college and graduate school. These spectators, many of them white sons of privilege, were mostly just lazy in the manner of many white kids. But the deeper truth is that they were altogether disengaged from the work of the golf course and therefore cut off from the beauty it could have offered them. They weren’t just idling in neutral; they were idling in neutral with the clutch in. Now and then one of them would put gas into a diesel engine, but that was the least of their offenses and the least of my worries as the assistant superintendent. Such idiocy owed to a certain lack of experience and attentiveness, but it was no great offense against the artistry on offer to them—an artistry as pleasing as the conduit jobs Crawford speaks of, which, as a hack electrician, I can appreciate.

That I was sometimes regarded by the patrons of that golf course as that guy who’s still here and not making anything of himself always amused me. Three comprehensive exams behind me, maybe one more dissertation chapter ahead of me, and still I wasn’t “making anything” of myself. I never took offense at the condescension. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t anywhere near as miserable as were the patrons who had “made something” of themselves. That decade of golf-course work might have been the happiest—and was certainly the most useful—of my life, and there can be no doubt that Bruce was the most important of all my unofficial teachers. Under his patient instruction I learned a lot about turf and trees, about engine repair, about plumbing (most of it eighteen inches below the turf), about back-lapping and adjusting reel mowers (a pleasant and almost musical job), about how you circle a problem until you hit upon the right solution, about how to approach with confidence a daunting repair job, whether above ground or below ground or in the maintenance shed or in the pump-house. Things get solved when you learn to ask the right questions.

“What and what else?” as my eighty-year-old neighbor, Tony, likes to say—a man who can do almost anything except read Dryden. When I raise the hood to my ’83 Dodge pick-up truck, he shuffles over with all the slant-six specs fresh in his head and the know-how and tools to put them to use. Were it not for Tony, I wouldn’t know how to grind the valves in a Briggs & Stratton engine, and changing out the U-joints in my drive shaft would have been a much more complicated affair than it ended up being.

A while back a colleague borrowed that same Dodge, only to come squawking back up the street a half hour later. I didn’t hesitate to jack up the front end, pull off the front passenger-side tire, remove the bearing, pack a new one with grease in exactly the manner Crawford describes, and send my colleague back on his way. He for his part was damn-near speechless—a rarity for academics—to find a member of his profession competent at anything involving a breaker bar, much less a bearing. But I was merely attempting to do “justice to intuitions that many people have, but which enjoy little public credit,” which is the noble mission accomplished in Shop Class as Soulcraft. I’d had a different experience of time, of my truck, and of myself. And I hope for many more.

That quick repair, to say nothing of countless others, I owe to Bruce, who never held himself above the jobs we did. He always worked with attention and care—even when, at the half-assed stage of a job, we evoked the stock remark: “let the next guy worry about it.”

The next guy inherited a good golf course. He certainly inherited an improved irrigation system. I took a lot a pleasure in opening the ground, replacing a swing arm, solenoid, and sprinkler, and then putting the site back together, the sprinkler head set just so and the incisions almost scarless—and eventually invisible, for all grass is as flesh: it knows how to heal. And I took a great deal of pleasure from knowing that that sprinkler was going to pop up at 3:13 a.m. and water the northwest quadrant of the practice green.

The quilt-maker in China, Crawford says, is abstracted from the effects of her work, whereas the local carpenter lives in proximity to the effects of his. He can see it withstand–or not withstand–the judgment of time and, because of his “spiritedness,” reap the satisfaction that rightly belongs to him and to those who taught him his craft.

My own work testifies to this, and the pleasures of it are tremendous. They register not only in the palpable, though certainly there, but also in the mind, in the memory, in what is felt along the heart and in the blood.

Which is why I think understanding Crawford’s discussion of wakefulness at the end of this fine book (“in rational activity together with others . . . we find our peculiar satisfaction”) depends at least in part on our having done such work—and on our having learned to be grateful for the chance to do it under proven masters. Heir first, benefactor later: that is every man’s experience of time, whether he wishes it so or not. If the work be good and the man attentive, then will both ripen through time–that is, by time’s mercies and hardships–and the man, because of the work, will have given himself at least an outside chance of dying a spirited and well-wrought conduit of knowledge and skill enlivened by gratitude.

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