A Calling

If you’ve read my blog for a while, you might suspect that It was hard to get over my days playing guitar in coffeehouses and roaming the road. Not so. I put down the pack after a traumatic series of events. Life in those days could be like standing on the edge of a volcano – wondering if you’d fall in with the next step.
No. I miss my life working as an applied anthropologist. In those days, my work could have a positive effect on people. I understood that making the change was more an issue of moving sand grains than mountains. But I was satisfied if I did anything that made a positive difference.

My early days working across the river from Boston were challenging. During the 1980s, there was little money, and I constantly looked for donors to make the essential but small contributions that made the many programs work. Two totally volunteer projects of an ethnographic nature gradually brought the work to the attention of the Smithsonian. Eventually, I worked for the Smithsonian on a flock of research and a Festival of American Folklife. For an applied anthropologist, it couldn’t get any better.
In 1995, the job I had taken in 1989 with the Department of the Interior was “reinvented out of existence” by the Clinton and Gore administrations’ reduction in the size of the government. I went into redundancy happily. Within weeks, the twitching in my left eye went away, the teeth grinding stopped, and the sores in my mouth receded.
Despite doing good things and significant projects, the program was cut. They didn’t even save much money – pennies. My relief came because I had gone from being a field ethnographer who researched and created programs to an office flack who spent his time bouncing down the corridors of officialdom trying to save programs. The worst of it all was the snipping, moaning, and groaning over petty things. Then, some wanted to steal money, position, and credit. I was going home soaked in sweat from the stress of the job.

The day after my layoff, I drove to the coast and spent several weeks working at a boatyard. I sanded and varnished, scraped boat bottoms, and applied bottom paint. It was good.

I eventually came up for air, realized that my time as an applied anthropologist was over, and moved on. It was not easy. Sometimes you have a job. And sometimes you have a career. But only rarely do you have a calling.