Michael Perry - Danger, Man Working

DANGER

MAN WORKING

ALSO BY MICHAEL PERRY

BOOKS

Roughneck Grace: Farmer Yoga, Creeping Codgerism, Apple Golf, and Other Brief Essays from On and Off the Back Forty

Population: 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time

From the Top: Brief Transmissions from Tent Show Radio

The Scavengers

The Jesus Cow

Visiting Tom: A Man, a Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace

Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting

Truck: A Love Story

Off Main Street: Barnstormers, Prophets & Gatemouths Gator

Montaigne in Barn Boots: An Amateur Ambles Through Philosophy

AUDIO

Never Stand Behind a Sneezing Cow

I Got It from the Cows

The Clodhopper Monologues

MUSIC

Headwinded

Tiny Pilot

Bootlegged at the Big Top

MAN WORKING

WRITING FROM THE HEART, THE GUT,
AND THE POISON IVY PATCH

MICHAEL PERRY

WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY PRESS

Published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press

Publishers since 1855

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Text copyright Michael Perry 2017

E-book edition 2017

For permission to reuse material from Danger: Man Working (ISBN 978-0-87020-840-9; e-book ISBN 978-0-87020-841-6), please access www.copyright.com or contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400. CCC is a not-for-profit organization that provides licenses and registration for a variety of users.

Cover design by TG Design

Typesetting by Ryan Scheife, Mayfly Design

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Perry, Michael, 1964 author.

Title: Danger, man working : writing from the heart, the gut, and the poison ivy patch / Michael Perry.

Other titles: Writing from the heart, the gut, and the poison ivy patch

Description: 1st edition. | Madison, WI : Wisconsin Historical Society Press, [2017] |

Identifiers: LCCN 2017018701 (print) | LCCN 2017027870 (e-book) | ISBN 9780870208416 (E-book) | ISBN 9780870208409 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: WisconsinSocial life and customsAnecdotes. | Perry, Michael, 1964Family. | United StatesSocial life and customsAnecdotes. | Popular cultureUnited States.

Classification: LCC F581.6 (e-book) | LCC F581.6 .P47 2017 (print) | DDC 977.5dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017018701

To Miss Grant. Senior year in high school. I took her class for all the wrong reasons. Figured I was sneaking a low-effort credit. Rather than treat me like the adolescent know-it-all I was, she smiled and did her job, teaching me a skill I have used nearly every day for the past 30 years as a means of employment, of feeding my kids, and of utterly unanticipated adventure, joy, and fulfillment.

Miss Grant taught me how to type.

Shock and Awe, Mushing (as Dogsledding in Minnesota: Born to Run), and Running the River Righteous originally appeared in Backpacker Magazine.

Musky Hunting and Poison Ivy Where? (as Itchy and Scratchy) originally appeared in Outside Magazine.

My Daughters Father, The Not-So Handyman (as Danger: Man Working), Tim McGraw: Real Good Bad Example (as Re-Born in the USA), New Years Resolution: Meet Mills at the Widowmaker (as Resolution: I Will Hang with Pals), Health Secrets from the Morgue, Puking (as Meet Ralph), Mike Is Sweaty (as Sweat, the Details), Mike Eats Beans (as Escape from Statins), That Ears Ringing Thing (as The Hellish Din in My Head), Teetotal (as Hey Doc, Should I Start Drinking?), Like Mother, Like Son, and A Philosopher for the Rest of Us (as 5 Timeless Life Tips) originally appeared in Mens Health Magazine.

Greg Brown: Hallelujah Anyway originally appeared in No Depression magazine.

King Pleasure and Letter to Lightnin Hopkins originally appeared in The Oxford American.

Molly and the Heymakers originally appeared in Wisconsin Trails magazine.

The Power and the Glory originally appeared in Runners World.

Sublimation: The Blind Boys of Alabama originally appeared as liner notes in the album Ill Find a Way.

Working originally appeared in the Wisconsin Humanities Council newsletter.

Note: Some of these essays wound up recut and repurposed in book form; likewise, some have been refashioned from the books themselves.

_______________

Also included in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2007.

Also included in The Oxford American Book of Great Music Writing.

Every writer has advice for aspiring writers. Mine is predicated on formative years spent cleaning my fathers calf pens: Just keep shoveling until youve got a pile so big, someone has to notice. The fact that I cast my lifes work as slung manure simply proves that I recognize an apt metaphor when I accidentally stick it with a pitchfork.

I often wish I were purely artful. I am forever indebted to the true poets who led me to fall in love with words afresh and anew relatively late in lifeafter college, when I had a nursing degree and a good job, and figured I was on my way. The poets detoured me with words, immersed me in words, imbued me with the idea that I might want to write words.

I took the leap, and I have never regretted it. But perhaps because I made the leap lateafter working on Dads Wisconsin farm; as a Wyoming ranch hand; as a construction gofer; as a roller-skating Snoopy; on a mental health unit; for a surgeon; on a neurological rehabilitation unit; weekends on the ambulanceI was pretty clear-eyed about the likelihood that I could pay the rent with poems alone. And so I read everything I could about freelancing, and started shoveling.

So it goes until this day, and so it will always go unless I sell a million.

The pieces in this collection are drawn from the past fifteen years of shovel time. We (each piece and this book itself only came to be through the work of excellent, encouraging, and patient editors) divvied them up in sections, but the idea that there is thematic flow is superficially imposed. Basically what you have here is me going to work as the work is offered. There are essays on puke, sweat, and cholesterol. Articles withand youll recognize them when you read themservice sentences, in which the editor has instructed the writer to deliver some actionable information. I hope the inclusion of these more prosaic pieces speaks to the fundamental element of writing as work. Its lovely to weave a wicker chair, but sometimes the client (and proxy mortgage payer) wants a stackable straight-back. Pure art, nope. But even in these pieces, you try to pay attention to the rhythm of the prose, try to paint evocative scenes, try to sneak in a wink, a grin, a moment of compassion.

Some of the pieces are datedin both reference (Jimmy Swaggart and Paris Hilton?) and style, and sometimes embarrassingly so. (In the department of Recurring Themes, it quickly becomes obvious that I am a self-absorbed hypochondriac forever resolving to do better nutritionally and fitness-wise but my follow-through is laughable.) There were times I wanted to cut or revise words or passages that grate on me now in ways they didnt when I wrote them (a few offhand lines about women and one about incarceration really reddened my face). But in most cases Ive decided its best to lay them out there the way they were in hopes that they stand as evidence to some improvement of thought and style on my part. That a knucklehead might evolve.