Back in the Valley
Are we headed for a workaholic relapse or a new way of approaching the job? Probably a little bit of both.
A week ago, I got caught in the closest thing Pictou Island has to a traffic jam when I stopped for two minutes so the mail plane could take off from the stretch of gravel road that doubles as a runway.
When I was back on the ground in Saint Peter on Wednesday, I waited for longer than that at the first stoplight coming into town.
At dinner the night before I flew to Minnesota, Hayley and I talked about the next couple months. We’d both be busy—me with a few big projects to finish at work and a house to empty and sell, Hayley starting her first full year teaching at a new university and singlehandedly rehabbing our post-surgery dog.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
Sounds like an easy question, doesn’t it? Four words.
The answer, though, was complicated. And I’m a guy who’s pretty good at talking about his feelings. (Most of the time, anyway.)
Despite all the twists and turns, despite the things on our to-do list that didn’t get to-done, it had been nearly a perfect month. I tried not to think too much about what was on the other side of the ledger in Minnesota if all of July’s craziness seemed almost idyllic.
To be clear, I know that I’m idealizing Nova Scotia right now, painting that fresh scenery with a warm aura and kind brush.1 It’s all true, but it’s also an intentional choice in how to frame things, one that I feel compelled to acknowledge.
Part of that approach, I think, is me trying to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of a happy and balanced life in Pictou County. The positive spin is that maybe I want it so much that I’ll somehow will it into existence, believe it into being. The cynical read, or perhaps just the realistic one, is that I may be creating expectations that can’t be met and am setting myself up to be disappointed. Or worse, I could be building a sandcastle in my mind and only playing in that platonic ideal of the place, blind to the warts and realities of my soon-to-be Canadian home.
In a job interview once, I described myself as a “pragmatic optimist”—a person who sees the problems and people involved as contours on a map by which we can navigate to a successful outcome. You can almost always get where you need to go, I said. Sometimes you avoid the hill altogether, sometimes you incorporate its slopes into your path, and sometimes you blast right through it.
And sometimes I think I’m full of shit. But then again, a lot of people are. You can be full of shit and still be pretty good at what you do.
I got that job.
A couple hours before we sat down for that last supper together, Hayley had been out running errands while I was at home in Bayview catching up on work emails and preparing for my return to the office. The phone rang. Hayley had a flat tire. Could I come help?
Six weeks ago I would’ve looked up who to call for a tow.
But it pays to be a quick learner. After a month in Pictou County, I knew exactly where to find the air compressor. I checked the hose and swapped out the quick-connect coupler for a threaded insert that would take the air chuck for the tire. A few minutes later, I pulled up to the East End Grocery in Pictou.
The tire was blown so the compressor was for naught. We jacked up the Subaru and were putting the spare on the car when Joe Underwood pulled up. He’s taken care of all of the tire needs for Hayley’s family for as long as she can remember.
“I was just driving by and saw you here,” he said, tightening the lug nuts on the donut. “Drop it off at the shop and I’ll have it ready on Thursday.”
It’s nice to be able to fix your own problems, but it’s also good to have people looking out for you.
Hayley and I were pretty quiet on the drive to the restaurant. We had to leave at 5 a.m. to go to the airport. It would be a late night finishing up some things around the house and getting ready to go.
In some ways, it felt like I’d been in Nova Scotia for months. At the same time, I couldn’t believe I was already leaving. So much had happened, and so much of it was unplanned.
So, how did I feel?
“I’m exhausted,” I answered Hayley. “But in a much different way than I was back and June.”
I love my job, maybe too much. It’s a good job and I’m lucky to have it. But it had been a crazy few years at work leading up to this trip. The best and worst thing about working in higher education, especially where you went to school, is how much you care. Part of my time in Nova Scotia was meant to be a re-charge or a reset, I’m still not sure which.
And trading one kind of tired for another, I thought, wasn’t the worst outcome. I used different muscles in Nova Scotia, literally and figuratively. It felt good to get them moving, some for the first time. Meanwhile, the others were resting—or at least not working as hard as they have been for as long as I can remember.
People sometimes think higher education is a sleepy proposition, especially at a residential liberal arts college like Gustavus. Au contraire.
Besides the usual juggling of projects, I only have one real job for the next couple months: doing everything I can to help our new president get off to a good start. In an industry that’s feeling pressure from many different angles and is increasingly under bad-faith scrutiny, it’s a delicate time to undergo a change at the top.
I love Gustavus. It’s taken a lot but given me everything, including Hayley.
And I’ve always been up for a challenge.
I’ve started reading historian Ian McKay’s The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth Century Nova Scotia (1994) three times so far. The book argues that “The popular conception of Nova Scotians as a purer, simpler, and more idyllic people…is false.” McKay seeks to illustrate “how Nova Scotia’s tourism industry and cultural producers manipulated and refashioned the cultural identity of the region and its people to project traditional folk values.” Can’t both things be true? After all, a caricature is drawn to exaggerate and draw attention to the prominent features of a real person. That’s just marketing, baby. (I’m sure there’s more to it. I should probably finish the book.)