I got my first paying job very soon after I turned fifteen. Growing up in a rural area in Indiana, I always had plenty of chores and responsibilities, ranging from cutting the grass, caring for chickens and horses, cleaning barns, assisting my old man in the remodeling of our home, felling and cutting trees, and a seemingly unending quantity of landscaping for my mother. While less than enjoyable, it taught me to embrace hard work and 'suck it up' when I was in a shitty (haha, you'll understand later) situation. In the years and months leading up to my fifteenth birthday, I couldn't wait to get a job and actually receive a paycheck for the work I did. I was the youngest of five children in the house of a podiatrist who charged his patients ethically rather than what the market deemed acceptable, so there was never enough money for allowances or anything like that.

My older brother had worked for several years at a livestock trucking company and the owner was a family acquaintance and a member of my parents' church, so it was no problem getting big bro's old job. Now, for anything in this story to make sense, you need to first understand how the livestock trucking business functions and what my job really entailed. The way it works is that farmers, meat packing companies and livestock yards place contracts for deliveries in a 'pool' which livestock shipping companies can review and offer bids on. The bids flucuate based off of fuel costs and a few other variables but, long story short, once the bid is accepted a truck driver will drive to one location or another, pick up a load of cattle, hogs, sheep or other livestock, drive them to a second location, drop them off and return home. Simple, right?

Well, driving contracts from one side of the country to the other usually takes several days and, obviously, animals eat which then results in them shitting, and the fifty-five foot livestock trailers can get pretty messy. The trailers are built with grates in the back corners of them that are covered so that nothing falls out onto roads as the trucks cruise along, but they can then be uncovered once the truck returns home and is in need of cleaning. That's where I come in. As well as performing some simple maintenance on the big trucks, I was also responsible for cleaning out the trailers every weekend once the eighteen wheelers returned. We had a special barn designed just for the task, with large, two inch, industrial water hoses and a gently sloping floor with drained into a buried 10,000 gallon railroad tanker. Once in the tanker, the shit-water would be agitated with a large pump to ensure that it stayed mixed and that the solids didn't settle at the bottom, then the mixture would be pumped up above ground level into a special grate that would separate the water from the shit, dropping the shit into the back of a dump truck to be hauled off to a compost yard while the water was diverted into a special septic system.

Livestock trailers are built with multiple layers, kind of like a bi-level home, with a "ground floor," a "top floor," and two landings that split the difference. Using principle of 'shit rolls downhill,' the top level must be washed out, followed by the two landings in the front and rear, and the bottom level is washed last. Often times, the trailers are filled with several bags of wood shavings, which would become very heavy once sprayed with the large hoses, so I would shovel the shavings out of the trailer before blasting out the floors, wall and even ceiling with high pressure water. Don't ask me how, but cows can SOMEHOW shit straight upwards. I can't even figure out the physics of it.

One fine Saturday morning, I strolled into work with a smile on my face which was destined not to be there very long. I backed the first trailer into the wash-house, shoveled out the wood shavings, sprayed out the four sections of the trailer and finished up in record time, leaving nothing but a pile of poo encrusted wood shavings beside the trailer. I pulled the second trailer into the barn, and this is where things began to go awry. This trailer had not been filled with shavings before the livestock had been loaded, so four or five days worth of cow shit, which is notoriously soupy, had turned into a thick, dried paste about two inches thick, that is both sticky and slippery.

Somewhat irritated, I climbed up the side of the trailer, flung my hose through a side door and went to work on the top level. As hard as the poop was baked onto the floor by the summer heat, it took me quite sometime to clean out the top level. After climbing back down the trailer, I discovered that I had quite clearly fucked up. I hadn't ever pulled the covers of the two grates in the floor of the bottom level, and eight or nine inches of murky, brown, shit-water was splashing back and forth like Lake Michigan at high tide. Muttering to myself about my own imbecility, I climbed into the bottom of the trailer to slosh back to the grates and open them up to allow everything to drain.

One small thing I forgot to mention earlier is that livestock trailers are constructed of thin sheets of relatively weak aluminum, so the sheets on the floor and walls are stamped with ribs or grooves to give them added strength. As I took my first step to splash towards the grates, my rubber boot heel came down on one of these ribs in a rather unusual way, causing my left foot to go shooting out ahead of me. For what felt like an eternity, I crashed and trampled around in the water, arms cart wheeling, trying to regain my balance or grab something to save myself from the Murky Water of Death. Alas, there was nothing for it. Down I went with a splash like a fat man cannon balling into a calm pool.

On my rapid date with gravity, my instincts took over and I managed to throw my arms behind me to try to catch myself and keep my head out of the water. As water and cow poo washed over my legs, hips and most of my torso, I couldn't help but feel a sense of elation and victory knowing that my primal, predator instincts had literally kept my head above water. In hindsight, it was probably this sense of accomplishment that directly led to these next events, because that's just how things work out in my life.

As I attempted to push myself upright with my arms to regain my feet, to my utter horror and dismay, my rubber-gloved hands slid on the slippery, submerged, shit floor, and this time my whole head plunged down into the smelly, watery grave. My scream cut off with a choking gurgle as I sucked in a huge lungful of shit because I needed more air for my next scream. I firmly believe that I know what it is like to experience water boarding, because in my panicked state of coughing, choking, and drinking mouthfuls of the literal shit that was filling my mouth, nose and lungs, I could neither sit up nor get my hands underneath me without them slipping, sending me splashing back underwater like a submerging submarine. All I can say is "water boarding works!" If you asked me any question imaginable, I would have answered to make it stop.

Seconds turned into minutes, minutes turned into days, days turned into weeks and I finally managed to catch the edge of the side door frame with my right hand. Coughing and spluttering up brown water and cow shit, I dragged myself out the door to flop down onto the pile of wood shavings that I had shoveled out the the first trailer. Gasping for air, I rolled onto my back just in time to see the thick, red hose with it's big, heavy, industrial nozzle come hurtling down from the top level door at me like it was a demented, kamikaze, dive bomber python raining down death from above as it pounced on me from an aluminum, shit covered tree.

I woke up with the hose draped across my face, my forehead feeling like it'd had a run in with Thor's hammer, waves of pain coursing through my head. Trying to give a groan of pain, I coughed up a glob of cow shit instead, sending an even worse shockwave from my eyebrows to my neck and back. As I lay there trying not to cough again, gritting my teeth and curling my toes, I slowly inched a hand up to move the hose my off my face. Once removed, I closed my eyes and waited for the pain to slowly subside. As it lessened, I gradually pushed myself up to a sitting position, then kneeling, then slowly stood, my head feeling like it might fall off at any second. As I took careful, measured steps back to the shop to take a shower, I vowed never to work that job another day. Three years later, I finally left.