| By
Pete Sperling
One of the unique things about backpacking
is the ability to accept any job that you develop when your
wallet is empty. When you’re broke at home you find
ways of avoiding the shitty jobs that no one else will take.
I’ve never met anybody in Canada, post-University,
who’s said, “Sure, I’d love to work in
38 degree weather pulling weeds for 10 hours a day.”
When I arrived in Perth on the west coast
of Australia, I had been travelling around the country for
7 months and had recently purchased a car to drive across
the desert. This put quite a strain on my wallet and forced
me into an immediate job search. After a week of job hunting
and a failed interview with a landscape company, I realized
that I would have to leave the city.
I registered with Workstay, an agency
that specialized in finding short-term work, usually on
farms. A day later I got a call telling me that they’d
found work for me and I was to report immediately. I had
a job on a farm in Gingin, a small town about an hour away.
I was to start in 2 days. What I would be doing was uncertain.
I reported to the Gingin Hotel and found
Hughan, the man at the helm of the Gingin work operation.
He seemed like a decent chap but wouldn’t tell me
what I would be doing the next day. Someone would pick me
up in the morning and show me the way to the farm. That
was all I needed to know. I had already done some fruit
picking on the east coast and assumed that this was what
I would be doing again.
How wrong I was…
Two other backpackers showed up the following
morning we all headed out to the farm. After a 15-minute
drive we arrived. The first thing I noticed was that this
was not a vegetable farm. What normally would have been
fields and orchards were enormous grey sheds. We headed
towards the sheds. As we got closer we heard a great roar
coming from within the compounds. Snarls, growls, and piercing
shrieks filled the air. Perhaps the Aussies were actually
be as smart as they were always proclaiming and found a
way to clone dinosaurs.
Unfortunately, this was not the case.
The cries I heard were pigs. I had stumbled
onto Jurassic Pork. We were told that the pigs had picked
up some sort of disease (non-transferable to humans, uh,
I think…) that needed to be eradicated. Our task was
to clean the pigs and their pens thoroughly so that no organic
matter was left for the disease to live in. We walked over
to the workers’ hut and I was given my new uniform:
a one-piece brown coverall, a huge white apron, rubber boots,
glasses, ear muffs, and a face mask. I was wearing enough
rubber to pass as an extra in an S & M flick.
I was guided to the first shed and was
handed my weapon, a single pressure washer. Entering the
massive shed I had visions of being sucked down a toilet
like in Trainspotting. Bringing my facemask down over my
nose dulled the putrid smell enough to make it only slightly
unbearable.
I picked up my washer and used it like
a flamethrower, engulfing the concrete walls and steel bars
with water to several years-worth of fossilized shit. This
had amounted to a substantial amount considering each 6-meter
square pen held at least twelve pigs. To add to the fun
the pens had limited drainage that turned the pens into
a scatological wet dream.
Things were going as well as they could
be when you’re cleaning shit, when I discovered the
joys of corners. I shot a blast into a corner. It ricocheted
right back at me along with a mass of newly loosened shit.
It hit me square in the chest, splashing up onto my facemask.
I looked around expecting someone to start laughing at me,
but all I got were a few jealous grunts from the pigs. I
finished the pen and emerged looking as if I had just lost
a mud-wrestling match -- badly. My shiny white S & M
apron was now glistening brown.
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