The Drill
Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--The crew chief wasn't allowed to pay overtime,
so the crew only worked 40 hours a week.
He paid Heap and Brenda for 40 hours
a week, too, but they worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week.
Heap remembered
washing sherds on Christmas Day. All day Christmas Day.
Possibly it was
Thanksgiving Day. The crew chief was off having dinner with his wife, who drove
up to spend the holiday with him.
In the mornings, they got up before daylight
and Brenda fixed breakfast while Heap made sandwiches for lunch.
One baloney
and cheese sandwich, on white bread, and two Oreo cookies, apiece, for lunch.
They worked at the site until the crew had to leave, and then knocked off. But they
didn't go home.
They drove to other archeological sites in the area and surface-collected,
to see what potsherds were represented, and how surrounding sites and their site,
Mt. Nebo, named for a church built on the mound at one time, were related.
The crew chief would stay out walking around in the freezing mud as long as he could
see. Heap and Brenda walked with him. Cold and tired.
When they got home,
Brenda would cook supper.
The crew chief gave her $20 a week to feed the
three of them three meals a day.
She washed and reused her Saran Wrap.
Since the only three meals the crew chief liked to eat were hamburger, burned, chili,
and Italian spaghetti, Brenda was able to feed them on that. Sometimes she made
slumgullion, with bully beef.
After supper, Brenda would do the dishes and
Heap would rebag potsherds, work on the field books, or the plot book. I don't remember.
I do remember he didn't help Brenda with the dishes, or take a turn cooking.
He didn't ride in the back seat of the Jeep, either. He rode shotgun, the crew chief
drove, and Brenda sat in the back.
By the time all the work was done, it
was bedtime.
The house was furnished, so Heap and Brenda didn't bring any
linens. For blankets, their bed had quilts made out of flour-sack prints, on the
top, dungarees, on the bottom, no batting. They were heavy, stiff, and provided
almost no warmth. If you put on enough layers to keep you warm the weight would
nearly crush you.
Why didn't Heap and Brenda just buy an electric blanket,
or a down comforter? They didn't think of it. It wasn't done. Just as they didn't
eat anything different at lunch.
Dr. Dailey warned them. Archeologist are
anal-retentive, Calvinistic people. If you go into archeology you'll be working
with pinched-up masochists. People who fear and loathe pleasure or ease. On the
weekends they washed sherds. From dawn to dark.
It was the way of the dirt
archeologist. It was traditional. It was the drill.