The Call of the Wild Man

...society can never prosper, but must always be bankrupt, 

until every man does that which he was created to do.

-R.W. Emerson, Conduct of Life

How's this for a connection: Ralph Emerson and The Turtle Man?

There's a show that I am rather fascinated with: The Call of the Wild Man, where this crazy hillbilly named Ernie aka Turtle Man, goes and catches all kinds of critters, from snakes to raccoon, with his bare hands.  He has the prerequisite charisma, and silly catch phrases, like "Live Action!" and a crazy trilling noise that he does.  He's basically a Kentucky version of Steve Irwin.  He makes like $80 per critter removal, and often gets some sort of barter system type reward, but he seems to genuinely love what he does, and he does something that most people think is just plain crazy.  Thanks to the miracle of television he probably gets more income from letting a bunch of cameras follow him around than he ever would from the actual work that he does.  Likewise with the impressively bearded boys on Duck Dynasty, they are national celebrities because they do something slightly unusual (make duck calls) and because they are interesting characters that people will watch on TV.

I never thought I would say this, but reality TV may actually be on to something.  At least on the cable networks, like The Discovery Channel and A&E, they seem to have found that people doing what they love to do is a marketable commodity.  Whether it's Turtle Man, or the Gator Boys, or Fast n' Loud, or Duck Dynasty, they seem to have a stable of unusual characters doing the rather marginal things they love to do, often with impressive facial hair, and that is a recipe for good television.

Why?  The pure crazy of the things they do is only a part of the equation.  At the core of their appeal is a world where the "mass of humanity lives in quiet desperation" as Emerson's gardener once said, doing jobs they hate for a lot less money than they think they deserve.  They look at people who live life on their terms and follow their true vocation as heroes.  Going back to Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, people who lived on the edge, on their own terms, have been American dreams.  Shows about homesteaders in Alaska and people mining gold are a continuation of that fascination.

There is a basic human need at the core of all this: a satisfying vocation.  It's something that I managed to more or less fall into, so I don't have any magic secrets to tell, but I have given it a lot of thought as a parent.  Even when my kids are in elementary school, I am watching their talents and their dreams.  No one ever dreams of becoming an underpaid cashier at Wal-Mart, but a lot of people end up there because they don't know how to follow their actual dreams.

I watched an interview with Mike Rowe, the host of Dirty Jobs, a show built on the premise that people are interested in seeing how the nitty gritty jobs that are absolutely necessary to our modern society get done.  Rowe is now fronting an organization called Profoundly Disconnected (check it out here: www.mikerowe.com ), which hopes to address the gap between the supply and demand for skilled tradespeople.  We have become a nation that emphasizes white collar work as the American dream, because of the image, because getting dirty seems like it is a bad thing, but we are running ourselves into the ground.  We can't all be doctors, lawyers and accountants (Lord, what a terrible dystopia that would be).  But who wants to spend their whole life working at McDonalds or Wal-Mart?  Not too many people I know.

I discovered something when I was in college, working for a summer in a sheet metal shop for a local business that installed HVAC systems.  The skilled trade world is starving for people who are actually smart enough to go to college.  Seriously, within two weeks of working there, the shop foreman literally begged the owner not to send me out into the field with an installer to just hand them stuff and carry things around.  I had learned how to run the shop machines, how to organize components and fabricate duct work, I was, rather quickly, useful.  In contrast to a kid from the local Vo-Tech school who had been there six months and was still pretty much only good for handing people tools and carrying things around.

On my end the deal wasn't too bad either, because I actually liked what I was doing.  Unlike some of the other menial jobs I had held, I felt like I was making something, being productive and actually learning a little each day.  Before I went to seminary, while I was doing various jobs I found much less rewarding, I often thought about that track, the skilled trade track, where you learn to make things other than words and paperwork, but by that point I had a $50000 education and, other than three months of sheet metal work, no marketable skills.

As a society, we need to put people in touch with resources that help them figure out what they're called to do.  My son wants to drive a bulldozer.  He's nine, that might change, but he is a very hands on sort of kid, he loves to figure out the way things work and build stuff.  I'm pretty sure he's smart enough to be on the college track, but I find myself questioning the wisdom of trying to force him down that road.  What if he's called to be a carpenter or a mechanic, or a bulldozer driver?  "Well what about architecture or engineering?" the voices of well meaning grandparents chime in, "aren't then he could do what he loves and be educated."

Yeah, but they're different things, and the question of calling can be pretty darn specific.  Architects and engineers rarely get their hands dirty.

I think we are blindly biased as a society.  We have bought an assumption that there is only one path to success, and we are rather fascinated by people that have not taken that path and yet found success despite going their own way.  Robert Frost's Road Less Traveled poem is used ad-nauseum at graduation ceremonies, which is at least slightly ironic, since what graduation ceremonies imply is that you have gotten rather adept at treading carefully down the path that was prescribed for you by parents, teachers, professors and guidance counselors.

Don't get me wrong, I like education.  I am called to do a job that requires a Master's degree, but I think that not everyone is called to do the same thing, and maybe the world needs people who are intelligent and talented to swing hammers and turn wrenches every bit as much as it needs people to work in the world of words and numbers.  I think that God, in great wisdom, has made us different, given us different talents and callings, and I think we really will be bankrupt, until we all find and follow our callings, and until our society recognizes the equal value of those callings to the larger community.