by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Last summer I noticed some neighbours eyeing my backyard property most indiscreetly. These were mostly middle-aged Italian men whose agenda I could only imagine. Actually I couldn’t even imagine their agenda at all. I didn’t know what devious designs these grape-growing retirees had on my home but I spent more than a few nights wondering what they were concocting. There was something in the works, for sure. I just couldn’t tell what it would be.

And then it happened. They struck when I wasn’t looking. I woke up one morning and was shocked at what they had done to my backyard.

I was a target of a shocking and blatant act of reverse vandalism.

Where once my fence post stood - well, it had actually been lying down on the grass for quite a while - was a newly erected pole. They had apparently torn out all the metal mesh, or what was left of the rusting frayed pieces of wire, from the fence as well. In its place was newfangled, bright and shiny stuff.

Without a word of warning or permission, these men had come onto my property and rebuilt my back fence. What had been an ugly, rotten and possibly dangerous mess of sharp protruding metal had been transformed into a functional fence conforming to the highest of suburban standards.

Those of us living in the world of ideas try our best to ignore or denigrate those who lay the bricks, connect the pipes and hook up the electricity. But it’s time to salute those who embrace the Zen of laying, repairing and taking care of business.

Because look around, everything everywhere was built and put in place not by people who teach anthropological theory or postmodernist ethics, but by actual people who roll up their sleeves and get the job done.

I like to imagine that manual workers were highly respected until governments had to figure out a way to keep the postwar population boom of new adults from flooding the workplace, so they tried to convince everybody to defer their lives by sitting in rooms and discussing Nietzsche and Goethe. So nowadays you’ll get sneered at unless you can prove that you stayed in school until at least 27 years of age.

Meanwhile, weenies like myself sit underneath their college degrees and think up clever thoughts while the people who build the roofs above us go unappreciated. But us chroniclers of the world shape society’s values, so, in a fever of callus-envy, we’ve assigned the real workers semi-pariah status and consider bricklayers and other sweatpant-favouring workers to be a fine source of ridicule.

But who do you want fixing your electricity box, an erudite sociology grad with a 10,000-word vocabulary and a wine-tasting hobby or a high school dropout with calluses on his hands and wires on his mind?

I spoke with considerable jealousy to Claude Desrosiers, who came to Montreal from the Gaspé (where the best people come from) in 1958 as a 16 year old and proceeded to help build the Olympic Stadium, the Pinel Institute, the metro tunnels and the James Bay dam. They all have his fingerprints on ’em. (Desrosiers says Montreal’s massive feats of engineering and construction projects were well run, in spite of reports to the contrary. His greatest joys came from digging the metro tunnels. "There was something amazing about that," he says.)

Unlike the hissy, passive-aggressive cubicle mates whom you spend your days with, blue-collar workers forge a noble brotherhood of constant physical risk. Service industry minions might risk paper cuts and staple removal mishaps, but real workers risk the Grim Reaper.

"I never had an accident, but when I was foreman at the Olympic site, I saw a colleague setting up the arches with a crane and one of the arches fell," killing the worker, says Desrosiers, who also relates several other bone-chilling tales of construction-site deaths, with no lack of emotion.

It’s time we start appreciating these people who build and create our world.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca