how asocial
how essential
Tag: Jobs
Back to the precarious nature of scalloping
The crews are out in our deep cold and often nasty winter weather, not just fishing but also shucking before landing their haul. Most of them head out before sunrise, as I hear from my home.
Are they crazy, as some of them contend, or just dumb, as others jest? Even both? It’s more than honest work, no question.
In our zone, boats are limited to a crew of three and a maximum harvest of two buckets of shucked scallops a day. That’s ten gallons, or nine to ten pounds total. Doesn’t look like much for a day’s haul, especially when you factor in paying for their labor, the boat, gear, fuel, insurance, and the fact it’s seasonal and very cold work, even before the regulations that hold draggers to three days a week. Try making a living on a three-day, limited season, income. Good luck!
Officially, ours is a 50-day run spread over four months, but in reality, an earlier cutoff kicks in on short notice to preserve the stock from depletion. In effect, “It’s over, guys,” arrives in the captain’s email, post haste. Last year, that eliminated 17 fishing days, a third of the season. More than an entire month, actually. By dumb luck, my daughter and I were at the docks just in time to stock up a gallon in our freezers.
At least we’re not managing a restaurant.
As this season? We’re holding our proverbial breath. My, those morsels do taste unbelievable.
(Divers have a different schedule, even more limited.)
Think of that when you wonder about the seemingly high price of heavenly shellfish.
Does every act of creation begin with demolition?
Or at least making a mess?
The observation here originates with an artist’s amazement at the mess at the beginning of the book of Genesis in the Bible. As panelist on the Bill Moyers’ PBS series, he picked up on the matter of chaos at the outset. Not the blank canvas but rather all the surrounding disarray, probably including thinking.
More recently, I’ve been seeing that in our own home renovation project. For a while, there was a lot less of our house than when we began. How quickly the Dumpster got filled and another delivered!
Living on $10,000 a day. Or even an hour.
The thought crept upon me the other morning as I was pondering simplicity and frugality.
Yeah, look at the flip side.
I remembered reading a recent New York Times piece on a Long Island boutique that catered to billionaires and noted the owner’s insight that they spent differently. I shrugged it off then but come back to it now.
Suppose your after-tax income came to $3½ million a year? That would be nearly $10,000 a day. (I did miscalculate and put that at $100k a day, a more interesting figure. Still!)
For perspective, the median pay for S&P 500 chiefs was $14.5 million last year, in contrast to an average $56,000 earnings for American workers.
The No. 10 guy on the list, Tim Cook at Apple, came in at $99 million in salary, benefits, and bonuses. More than $240,000 a day. That is, $10,000 an hour.
Ahead of him were the CEOs of companies like Alphabet, Peloton, Live Nation, Sarepta Therapeutics, and CS Disco, plus four I recognized. Please, can somebody tell me what the head of Pinterest is doing to make him pocket $123 million for the year? A tad under $337,000 a day?
As one scion of affluence told me a half century ago, there isn’t much real difference between a $20,000 car (today’s prices) and a $200,000 vehicle, as far as everyday performance goes. Let me add, today’s median family car is far superior to the luxury vehicles back then. Air conditioning? Seat warmers? Cruise control?
As I played with the $100,000-a-day figure, nearly twice the yearly earnings of real workers, I realized how little of that was needed for everyday expenses, even at inflated expectations – how many houses does one need, anyway, or how many hotel suites while traveling? What came into focus was the vanity opportunities: collections of antique cars, paintings, sexual playthings, political hobnobbing. Just name it and claim it.
And that’s where it gets scary, even when you scale back to $10,000 a day.
Conservatives like to quote Lord Acton’s “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” while they pursue the maximization of their personal wealth, which intensifies their power and, thus, corruptedness. Per the logic.
Renting a luxury yacht – $100,000 a week plus expenses, last time I looked – is peanuts in comparison. As is a private jet. They might even be business expenses, paid by the company.
Well, F. Scott Fitzgerald did quip, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”
But I am wondering what he’d make of today’s mutations.
What would you do, given that much at hand?
The Maine image versus reality
“Life as it should be,” as the billboards proclaim in welcoming visitors aka tourists, is a slick slogan ignoring the economic realities most working adults in the state face.
The recent death of a new high school graduate in our county who was about to enter the prestigious Maine Maritime Academy is a harsh example.
He was out lobstering, solo, and got caught up in his gear and dragged overboard.
More common is the hobbling together of three or more jobs, mostly part-time and/or seasonal and lacking paid benefits.
~*~
Yes, the state’s landscape can be breathtaking, especially in summer. But much of winter is brutal, as are the black flies come late spring, and we do have more than our share of trash weasels.
Just want you to keep your impression in balance.
Wealth and fine housing along Midcoast Maine
So much of what you see driving along is picture-perfect New England, reminding me of Cape Cod, if you’ve ever been there. Or maybe looked at a coffee-table photography book or colorful regional wall calendar.
As admirable as I find it, the landscape also stirs up a tinge of depression when I consider all the wealth this represents along the Seacoast well up into Maine these days. No home in neighboring Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for example sells for under a million, no matter how modest. And then there’s all the new construction, too. Even a half-million for a new condo in what looks to me more like fancy tenements. What a leap from the $13,000 waterfront home one friend bought there 35 years ago!
Moreover, as I think about all of the poverty and decay in much of Maine up my own way, I’m stuck wondering:
Who can afford this?
Just what’s their secret to living?
The Pine Tree State was a shipbuilding mecca
You wouldn’t believe how many incredible seagoing vessels were built in the Pine Tree State. Maybe it’s because we have thousands of miles of coastline and tons of trees.
Just consider:
- The first ship built in Maine was at the failing Popham colony in the winter of 1607-1608. Where did they even get the sails? Yet the pinnace, the Virginia of Sagadhoc, was not only the first ocean-going ship built by English in the New World, but it returned to Jamestown the following year.
- In colonial days, the tallest, straightest trees were set aside as King’s Pines, reserved for the masts of the Royal Navy. Conflicts with the French kept many of them from being harvested before the American Revolution.
- From the 1830s to 1890s, Maine built more ships than any other state. More than 20,000 ships were launched from Maine shores, many from impromptu shipyards built along tidal rivers.
- Bath, with more than 22 shipyards at one time, was arguably the center of action. The town isn’t far from the former Popham colony, where the first ship had been built.
- During the Civil War, Confederate cruisers captured more than 100 Maine-built or Maine-owned vessels. Coastal forts built during the war included Gorges at Portland, Popham at Phippsburg, and Knox near Bucksport.
- In 1862 the screw sloop-of-war U.S.S. Kearsarge built at Kittery sank the C.S.S. Alabama in a crucial naval battle.
- Maine accounted for 70 percent of the ships, barks, and barkentines built in the U.S. between 1870 and 1899. On the East Coast it also could claim to have built half of the three-mast schooners, 71 percent of the four-mast schooners, 95 percent of the five-mast schooners, and 90 percent of the six-mast schooners. I’m guessing a lot of those tall, straight pines could still be found.
- At one time, tiny Shackford Cove here in Eastport had four boatyards. And nearby Pembroke was also prolific.
- The shift to steel vessels largely decimated the yards building wooden ships, which capitalized on the state’s deep forests. Unlike most of the state, the shipyards at Bath, Kittery, South Portland, Woolwich, and East Boothbay successfully converted to metal at the end of the 1800s.
- Today the state has an estimated 200 boatbuilding firms, most of the small and working with composites like fiberglass, laminated wood, and resin-based composites.
What’s wrong with being elite?
As an editor on newspapers where, in an attempt for excellence everyone was giving of themselves totally (many unpaid hours of overtime, etc.), I was always appalled by the charge of “elitism,” which comes to mean “give me mediocrity – not the truth, but pleasantry” – from the same people who would not accept such standards in their professional football quarterback or automobile.
In many religions, however, the “world” of common subservience and society or what some today are more accurately seeing as “empire” is ultimately a mortal trap. In spiritual practice, then, only total effort is acceptable in seeking a holy transformation of this life. If only we can rise to even a portion of it.
As an ancient New England hymn reminded, “Broad is the way that leads to death / and many trod thereupon / but Wisdom shows a narrow way / with here and there a traveler.”
I see that lyric, by the way, as the root of Robert Frost’s road less traveled.
When I ask what’s wrong with being elite, I’m not talking about social status or wealth but something more elusive – something much more humble and loving.
A work shift change and a marriage
When I was rescheduled to the night shift, I wasn’t home for as many meals together, for one thing. Or evenings.
It took a toll on the relationship, especially when she was working a day shift.
On the continuing toll of the Internet on the livelihoods of creative souls
Fellow blogger Gary Hart recently had an eulogy for Outdoor Photography magazine, which prompted this comment from me:
“Your post mortem is one more story of the toll the Internet is taking on the income of many creative individuals. Freelance writers were devastated early on when their secondary markets for republication withered (anyone could already find the piece online). In professional photography, you lost sales to people who found your images posted online and were content with copies they printed out at home.
“Magazines faced a double whammy as content moved to the Web. Not only were sales and subscriptions shrinking, so was advertising, which paid most of the bills. In the case of photography, the products themselves were being rendered obsolete. Film, chemicals, papers, enlargers, darkrooms, and so on became ancient history and then, for the most part, so have cameras. What I’m getting with my cell phone, for instance, is unbelievable (though I know its imperfections, too). As a parallel, you can discuss what happened to the professional wedding photographer.
“Finally, as much as I love paper, I’m using far less of it as either a writer or a reader. Downsizing is one reason but not the only one.”
Jnana's Red Barn 