There I was out on the high
prairie that angles up to the mountains of the Front Range of
Colorado, digging out Mediterranean sage with a tool of torture
called the pick-mattock. I couldn’t have been paid to do
this. Not only was I there, but over 100 other people were there,
too. The weather was cool and sunny, a wind blowing, and, all
things considered, it was pleasant, if backbreaking, work.
Mediterranean sage is an invasive species with large,
thick, fuzzy leaves. When I volunteered to remove it, I thought,
hmmm, sage from the Mediterranean area would be good in spaghetti
sauce and save me some money. Wrong; it’s not edible,
it’s not really sage, and I am not going to get a free herb
for my effort.
Americans volunteer more than the people
of any other country in the world, and it might be said it is one
of the things that define us as a nation. While I was whacking at
the sage, I started thinking about why we as a nation do all this
volunteering. I know that when people ask me, I reach up on the
shelf and pull down a canned answer. Canned answers are good
because they save a lot of explanation.
“It gets me
out of the house,” is one of my favorites. Another is,
“I sit around a lot at a drawing board and I need the
exercise.” Finally, there’s: “I like to do stuff
outside.” All these answers are true in a way but they are
not the real reason. For example, I go to a sports-exercise center
five times a week to do aerobics, lift weights and play
racquetball. It could be said that all my exercising is so I can be
in shape to do the volunteer work, not the other way around. The
same can be said for my other canned explanations. I am
volunteering for other reasons.
I am not very religious
so I am not doing all these good works to get a seat at the
heavenly reward banquet. I asked some of the others on Table
Mountain why they were there, and I got one answer I hadn’t
thought of: “I want to pay back the enjoyment and the fun I
have had on public land.” But this does not explain the
sage-extermination project because the land we are on, although
public, is closed to the public.
My guts tell me
volunteering is less idealism and more selfishness. I know someone
who volunteered so she could pick up some skills, get experience
and meet people who might hire her. It worked, by the way. One man
volunteered so he could meet women. He did, and he’s dating
one of them now.
Neither of those reasons apply to me,
and in Europe, I suspect that if I spent a day removing sage, I
would be treated like a crazy person. Removing weeds is what some
bureaucrat does. Here, however, I get people saying nice things
about me when they hear where I have been. It makes me feel good
and quite sanctimonious, which must be one of my hidden reasons for
doing it. There is something in the American psyche about our need
to do things and our inflated opinion of ourselves. “While
that stupid @$$#%) was sitting on his calloused buns, I got it
done,” you triumphantly tell yourself and others. I think
this is another of the real reasons for volunteering — it’s
good for the ego.
When you finish restoration work, you
have a sense of possession of the land where you worked. You can
drive by or hike through it and say, “I did that. Why, before
I got here it was a lunar landscape.” That’s pride, one
of the deadly sins, doing the talking.
There are a lot of
base motives in this volunteering business. You can look at those
people sweating in the sun and feel whatever you want about them,
but remember that although faith, hope and charity exist in our
world, what really makes society work are all those baser motives
like pride, lust and selfishness.
It is such a relief to
do something finally for all the bad reasons and get praise for it.
Sinning can be a virtue; imagine that! All of you impatient,
ambitious, lustful no-goods like me should volunteer to express
your baser desires. On second thought, maybe we are all out there
already, and that’s why there is so much volunteerism in the
United States.
Rob Pudim is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He
is a writer and illustrator in Boulder,
Colorado.
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