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Photo by Brandon DesJarlais on Unsplash

Working-class kids were superficial, too, but they were closer to the bone of what it meant to be alive in this world. They had less to work with, fewer economic opportunities, which allowed them less space to explore, less space to be creative and to think deeply about things unfolding around them. They were more fixed somehow, and therefore, to me, more authentic.

We were just dumb kids. Mid-1990s. I must have been 12, maybe 13. Jason was one year older. I was a rich kid. Jason came from the working-class. I’d always felt that invisible, silent, nonverbal silver thread of tension as a result of our class differences.

At the summer job we worked—clearing trails in the mountains for minimum wage—we sweated our asses off, wearing jeans and hiking boots, cutting out natural dirt stairs into the trails at drop-off points, We used shovels, pickaxes and other tools. Poison Oak was omnipresent. The summer gig was handed to my friend and I by my parents’ friends. Why not? We liked the hard work. Jason was used to it, having worked for his father’s plumbing and heating company since he was six years old. I was extremely unused to it, but I craved nature second only to reading books, flying off jumps doing BMX, and surfing, so it worked out.

The place we worked for, in Ojai, California, the little sprawling valley-mountain town I grew up in a couple hours northeast of Los Angeles, was called The C.R.E.W.: Concerned Resource and Environmental Workers. We did the basics: Clearing trails, repairing damage, cutting thick brush, creating fire safety zones, you name it. Sometimes we did what they called “spike-outs,” where we’d hike a few miles up into the mountains—say along Cozy Dell Trail or Matilija Canyon—and then camp at a certain spot and be there three, four, five days, getting up each morning, hiking to the “work site” and doing our thing for six or eight hours and then hiking back to camp.

What interested me, other than the gorgeous natural beauty of the mountains and forest surrounding the small town I’d grown up in, was the characters involved. For one, the leaders who bossed us around. Most of them were ex-cons. The C.R.E.W. was one of those places where ex-convicts were required to work—or at least encouraged—when fresh out of prison, or else when doing volunteer service after time served, or else while on probation. They seemed old, wise and seasoned to we kids, but in reality they were in their early, possibly mid-twenties. But they looked tough, carved out of stone.

One leader, I remember vividly, told us his story around the campfire one evening, about ten of us, the orange-red flames licking and popping as he told his story, the warm July night air enveloping us like a dry blanket, the noises of wildlife all around us. The leader’s name was Kevin. He might have been 24. He was white, clearly from a blue-collar home, had a red face, pale skin, and an assortment of random scattered tattoos along his arms and upper neck. He told us how, one night, he hit on some girl in a bar—this was in nearby Ventura, 12 miles west of Ojai along the coast—and the “chick” had a man and he and the man exchanged words and the words became shouts and the shouts turned into fists.

At some point, Kevin said, the orange-red flames of the fire making his black eyes look golden and deranged in a strangely angelic way, he’d gotten hold of an empty beer bottle, broke it on the hard bar, and then swung and stabbed the guy two inches deep in the gut. The man went down. Blood everywhere. People were screaming. He ran, took off. They caught him an hour later, walking along Highway 101 like a madman. He was wasted. The man lived. Kevin did six years for attempted manslaughter.

Now he was our trail leader.

Then there was Paul, the “older” man (to us) in his late forties, perhaps 50, who ran the “chain-gang” as he jokingly called it. Tall, thick, bald, blue eyes, nice man. He seemed to often observe me with a beady, eagle-eyed concern, as if he somehow knew I didn’t fit in. Which, of course, I didn’t. I don’t recall anyone else besides myself ever pulling out a book to read before bed at camp. I don’t recall anyone ever asking Kevin or any other leader “what it felt like emotionally” to stab a man. I don’t recall anyone else ever discussing poetry and philosophy during our daily work.

I stood out, also, because I was soft. Jason and I stuck together, of course. We were like brothers. Kevin often stuck us down off the sides of the trails and gave us chainsaws to slash thick brush and clear out the sides, and then he and the others would chop down thin, small trees and dangling branches and they’d send them down the side of the trail to us and Jason and I would slice and dice some more. We hated that particular job.

We were covered in Poison Oak. Sometimes, in July and August, it got close to hovering around 100 degrees. Paul made sure we brought a ton of bottled water. We drank often, wore hats, and took brief frequent breaks to wipe our moist, calloused hands through our hair, feeling the damp sweat, smelling the brush and the flowers and the trees all around us, and our own and each other’s nasty body odor. At night we all swam in the deep creek pool by camp.

When we did the grunt work off the side of the trail with the chainsaws, Jason and I, Kevin lovingly called us Nutsack and Foreskin. I was Nutsack, Jason Foreskin. We considered it an honor, even if the others laughed at us when he yelled out, “Nutsack, Foreskin, get that tree cut into fifths ASAP!”

There was this red-haired kid with a wildly pale face—Irish—named Darren who called everything he liked spiritual. We’d mess with him and point to a bird, say, or a boulder or a random tree or a squirrel or a snake (lots of Rattlesnakes up there in summer) and he’d nod sagely and say, That’s spiritual, man.

And there was this neo-Nazi skinhead kid—which is shocking to the sensibilities now but in the mid-1990s wasn’t as rare—named James. Jason and I were fascinated by James. White—of course—and short, but with thick, veiny hands and muscled, tough arms, and a clean shaved head. He might have been 15. He had a swastika tattooed against his collar bone and he made sure we all saw it by cutting out a little section of his collar. We had some Mexican kids in the crew, one black kid, but other than that we were all white. James didn’t start shit with anyone and everyone generally avoided him. When he got pissed off he’d say, That’s fucking Jewish, man!

There was one leader who was Black. We all liked him a lot. Liam, his name was. He was a bit older, maybe 35 or 38. He wore overalls every day, the same pair, and yet somehow he never seemed to stink. His hair was close-cropped. His eyes were usually solemn, it seemed, and no one ever knew why. Liam was very quiet. If you asked him a question he’d either pretend not to hear you or he’d stop, when working, wipe his brow of sweat with a beige work glove, sniffle, take a swig of his water bottle, shrug, and say he either didn’t know, or else he’d tell you the answer in the shortest, simplest, fastest way feasible.

The whole thing felt, to me, back then, like a sort of alien adventure. I’d always been attracted to blue-collar kids. I don’t know why, exactly, except to guess that it had something to do with my inchoate contrarianism and the fact that often kids rebel by doing the opposite of their parents. Well, my parents were smart, bourgeoise, and highly educated. (Dad had two master’s degrees and was a computer engineer.) Inherently it seemed I rejected this lifestyle, this conventional path, this road which tried its best to make itself feel inevitable.