Stephen Kessler

Backup beepers beeping from heavy equipment — dump trucks and steamrollers and tractors of various sizes and blades and scoops — city workers in phosphorescent lime-green vests and sun-protective hoodies and hats repaving the street outside my home are filling the air with steamy fumes and the sounds of rumbling motors. The first day of this maintenance project, when residents needed to keep our windows shut and had to navigate a path through the construction zone, felt a little disruptive and inconvenient. The second day, when I don’t have to drive anywhere, I’m able to appreciate what these dudes are doing and admire their skills at tasks beyond my aptitude.

Parts of this neighborhood are being repaved, and though the streets didn’t look that bad to me before, I believe in preventive maintenance — a prophylactic against the dreaded “deferred maintenance” that has doomed perfectly good buildings like the Church Street library — and so I approve of the noisy, stinky work outside my windows because I know when it’s over we’ll have smooth roads and new concrete gutters that will drain rain runoff and provide a sense of municipal order amid the world’s chaos. It makes me think of the technocrats and bureaucrats whose administrative work keeps the city running, but especially of the men out there with their rakes and shovels and monstrous machines.

There’s a pedestrian bridge over the freeway between my house and downtown Santa Cruz where, when I’m walking to or from the post office, I’m constantly surprised and disgusted by the trash that people leave there, not just plastic packaging or empty food containers but uneaten food, pieces of clothing (a lone sock, a dirty shirt, a pair of pants), bodily excretions, sheets of paper blowing all over the place — and graffiti tags on the concrete walls — all cleaned up repeatedly and repeatedly repainted by city workers tasked with some of the dirtiest work in town.

Luckily for them it’s not 100 degrees outside and being out there is reasonably bearable, and I can understand the appeal of working outdoors instead of in an office, and I myself am experienced at picking up trash since my stint as high-school senior class vice president in charge of campus cleanup, so if I needed a day job, I could probably do that. But the guys in reflective vests running those big machines and scraping up the pavement and laying down the hot asphalt and rolling it smooth know how to do things well beyond my skills.

In my advancing years I’m increasingly astonished at anyone’s skill in doing anything well. While I am deeply practiced in my profession and can write or edit or translate almost anything to order, that’s about all I know how to do, so I often must hire a professional for things that others could do themselves. I am in awe of musicians whose hours and years of technical exercise enable them to create spontaneously, but other, less performative kinds of work are equally amazing when performed by those who’ve taken time to master their craft. Even the cashier nimbly ringing up and bagging your groceries and wishing you a good day with a little smile is doing a kind of dance.

These are the selves Walt Whitman was celebrating when he sang of himself, marveling at the American multitudes in their Homeric heroism — trolley drivers and firefighters no less to him than “gods of the antique wars.” The men in the street outside making all that noise, seen in the light of Walt’s inspired gaze, take on an almost mythic aura, and indeed their work is Sisyphean, like that of the painters on the Golden Gate Bridge who, when they get to one end, must turn around and start again at the other.

In our everyday grind, in our domestic grunt work, even unemployable people like me can find some sense of accomplishment; but I nod in respectful gratitude to those who know how to do the things I can’t.

Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays.