Crab in the boat

In these crazy days of endless wars, Euro debt crisis, an economy torpedoed by exotic financial instruments, our continuing culture wars here, and the ever-increasing complexity of our lives, jobs and relationships, I was so refreshed the other night as I watched Captain Sig Hansen on Discovery's popular "Deadliest Catch" make the most beautiful and simple remark:

I want to put the crab in the boat

Boom. There it is. That's Hansen's job, in nine monosyllabic words. He takes the crab out of the water and puts the crab in the boat. Then he takes the crab out of the boat and puts it on the dock. Then he puts the money in his bank. It's the same for an oil man (Leatherneck?) who takes the oil out of the ground and puts it in the tank. Lumberjack: tree out of the forest and into the chopper. Discovery Channel has tapped into our romanticism for raw, back-breaking, resource extraction, the stuff our economy used to depend on before we let the gods of finance rule us.

As a white collar, somewhat educated guy in my mid 30s, whose day job is sitting in front of glowing screens fixing abstract & complicated problems, I feel the draw toward this type of labor. I imagine lots of white collar guys end up romanticizing blue collar labor at some point in their career. The banality of the white collar labor was the theme behind Office Space, remember?

I'm under no illusions that I could be a crab fisherman, but it's good to know there's still men in America like Sig Hansen making a living putting crab in the boat.