Summary
Last spring, my brother asked me to hire some kids to help with the annual ditch cleaning by his land on the Pecos. At $10 an hour, we got plenty of takers, including [Brandon Brown], who'd already graduated. As anyone who's tried it will attest, acequia cleaning is unhappy work, long hours of cutting through carpets of overgrown grass, shoveling wet dirt over 6-foot walls of willows. It's also communal work: The diggers are lined up and assigned 10-yard stretches, or tareas, and the line doesn't advance until every tarea is declared clean by the ditch president, or mayordomo. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my students, who could be loathe to lift a pencil, were eager to pick up the shovels. I can still see Brandon chopping at the brick-hard earth of the acequia wall with a flathead, toiling to square the cut before the mayordomo came by. As the day stretched on, and my own back began to ache, I expected to see the boys slow down. They didn't. Through blister and sunburn and Dr. Pepper daydreams, they kept digging for China. And they weren't working that hard for the hourly wage. They were working that hard because they understood they were an essential part of the line. They understood that everyone was depending on them to get us through that stretch and into the next, and the next, until we could finally climb out of the ditch and get home to a well-deserved shower, a cold drink, a clean couch.
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Extract
Down the Line
After six years of teaching in the public schools, I've learned how to deal with a Googled essay, a water fountain scuffle, the under-the-desk text messager. But the news that hit our school one morning last month caught me completely off guard: Brandon Brown, a handsome basketba...
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