E Clampus Vitus- Railroad Pass

Historically, the Railroad Pass Casino deserves to be celebrated. Not for the fact it is the oldest remaining casino in Nevada, established September 1931, but because of why it was established in the first place. As an outlet of recreation and entertainment for those working on the dam.

It seems all work and no play makes the animal, human or otherwise, dull.
And there was nothing dull in 1931 as the dam was beginning to be the entity it would become. Men desired a place to meet women, um, duh. They also wanted a place where their play was not regulated, where a sense of freedom could be found. Not freedom itself, for that would be considered scandalous. No, the sense of freedom, up there near the top of the desolate canyon of the desert the men enjoyed the feeling of being nearly free.

Hero's Journey Part II

To get a job, any job that paid you enough to eat and have a roof over your head, this was "all" a man was looking for during the 1930s Depression. His needs seemed desperate to obtain, his wants seemingly without virtue. The Depression at that time had tilted life out of balance and it caused fear in men they'd never expected nor experienced. To be refused meant the same thing for many people. Thus when one was refused a job or opportunity there was a rally among others in the same situation.

Part II of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey (see June 14 Blog to connect to part I) is the Refusal of the Call. In the story Hard Luck the emotions of everyone are riding on an exterior refusal, in other words the refusal for citizens of the U.S. to get what they need was predominant. When fourteen year old Jake Adams knows things are changing because of his response to other people he's around, he refuses the call to allow these changes to take place. Eddie McIntyre is quick to keep Jake in his place, limiting his esteem, and Jake allows this. Cora White is a girl Jake is interested in, but does she know it? And the boss, (and there are many) challenges Jake at every turn and Jake questions his ability rather than rises up to it.

All along, the sentiment of the time is also heaving downward onto Jake. He will need help now to let the changes that need to happen occur. But who will Jake turn to? Part III Supernatural Aid...

Hero's Journey part 1

According to Joseph Campbell, the Hero's Journey is an archetypal pattern forming the under-structure of every story ever told. It is a pattern that illuminates the stages everyone must go through in order to grow. It's a journey of personal evolution that every human being can identify with. And it all begins with The Call to Adventure.

The Call to Adventure is the point at which the person is first given an idea or notice that everything is going to change, whether he or she knows it or not.

In the historical fiction novel Hard Luck, newly orphaned 14 year old Jake Adams arrives at the site where the Hoover Dam will soon be built. Camping in Ragtown, near the Colorado River, with thousands of others like him waiting to get a job at the dam, he is confronted with three things informing him that change is in the forecast. For one, he meets his antagonist Eddie McIntyre, a bit older and a lot more independent, Eddie sees Jake's hidden side the way a gardener knows what's planted underground. Secondly, there's Cora White, a pretty girl that is ill when Jake meets her and he's able to help her get well using his family medicine. Thirdly, there's the big boss that arrives in Ragtown with an entourage to investigate the passage upriver to the dam. Jake is impressed with the way he stays cool despite men literally begging him for a job.

For this story it is other people in Jake's life that furnish the impetus for change. As Jake confronts the mystery that these three individuals hold for him in his life, he can't get closer to them without sensing the change that is about to occur in his life.

Part II will consider what Campbell refers to as The Refusal of the Call.

A day of rest

Today was a day off. A day decidedly "free" in which there was bike riding, preparing a nice meal, relaxing with entertainment of my choice. It was time that "recharged" for more work, necessary is how it felt, needed as much as water itself.

When considering the workers inside the 140 degree diversion tunnels, working shifts from 4 am to 12 noon or 4 pm to 12 midnight, every single day with no day off for months at a time, the stress seems unimaginable. Four dollars a day with a buck fifty taken out of that for meals, these were overworked underpaid champions of a project that could not be recreated in the same way today.

Yet it's interesting the values at the time the dam was being built, in that the men could eat their fill of all kinds of food at every meal, but to keep their job they had to continue on, like the river itself, to meet the demands seemingly already etched before them.

Which is why the width of the tunnels, the height of the dam, all the work inspires admiration and at the same time is a reminder that such amazing feats often require a negligence of need.

Why Society

We are interdependent as all nature is, and the work at the dam replicates this truth a thousand times over. For the men that blasted and mucked the diversion tunnels could not do one without the other. The concrete poured could not have ever been done by one man alone. We need society to build, to do a job, which is not saying anything about the ethics of the job.

Why society is seen at fault for so many blunders may be that when like-minded people come together stuff happens. Stuff that nobody accounts for, stuff that no one really needs but then must deal with. Which explains the need by some to escape society, to be rid of it, to be done all the way from its core.

Men who came to the dam for work did so because there weren't a lot of job opportunities available at the time. They also came because of the shear opportunity to build something of such dimension. Those that came for the second reason often left before the job was done, upon seeing that this society of workers, as interdependent as they were, also were being snowballed into a project that treated men as machines. Or men as a labor force that could be controlled.

Society or societies are indicators to be used to identify patterns, cause and effect, the institutionalization of ideas. Do we buy into them? Do we avoid them all together? What seems to count for more is that we recognize our interdependence upon nature and in fact, to really "be alone" is a romantic notion, a fantasy, a fallacy.

Eddie Vedder - Society

Xavier Rudd