Chapter 4 - Being All You Can’t Be: Robinson Crusoe as a Communist of One

Summary

Sometime before war became permanent and before political violence became overtly intertwined with recovering national greatness, joining the US Coast Guard seemed like a reasonable idea. It seemed reasonable partly to extend a life at sea without having to do what we Westies called “humping creates.” From what I saw as a kid from those round-the-clock shifts going on at the port, a longshoreman's existence loading woodchips, cement, rice, and fertilizer, bound for China and Japan, always seemed as exotic as it was forbidding. Better stick with construction on terra ferma and closer to home. If swinging a hammer for living meant rising in the predawn hours and suffering the summer heat, and even with its share of heavy lifting, at least you could go home at night.

Weekends could also be your own. My weekends meant working just a half-day on Friday to make the bus out of the valley to the coast before the evening fog set in. It felt generous of the boss to understand because this kind of work was hardly work at all. A deckhand on a salmon boat in the Pacific Northwest enjoyed remarkable scenery, cool temperatures, salty breezes, innumerable cross-species encounters, and characters galore. Exhaustion never felt as satisfying as it did on the dock after who knows how many hours riding swells. You could fish, trolling for hours, and not catch, but still walk away with some money in your pocket as well as some good stories to tell. If the bite was on and the wholesale price was right, a good weekend's haul could bring in enough to cover a year of state college tuition. And that promised work of still a different kind. The boat meant for me the last bastion of unalienated labor, which is eventually how I thought about professing English once my tuition was paid.

But, as deck hand, I had no need for college; and what's more curious still, no one in my family had ever spoken of college and respectable employment in the same breath. College was at best conceived as a momentary escape from the inevitable grind of people who actually work. Those two terms—college and work—were as alienated from each other as was the idea, once I got toward the end of my first degree, that I’d go on for two more.