You might be surprised to learn that I know a thing or two about summer. Sure, my torso hasn’t been bronzed by years of sexy lounging beneath the blazing sun. My hair isn’t bleached blond from summer after summer of windsurfing. I’ve never ridden a tube down a river. I’ve never been to a giant summer music festival. And sadly, I’ve never competed in a watermelon seed spitting contest.

What I have done is lay sod. A lot of it. And I laid it outside, all summer long.

I spent seven summers working for a local landscape and excavation company, and the job they start you out on is laying sod. Day after day, week after week, roll after friggin’ roll of heavy, precisely cut grass and dirt. Unfurled, the sod rolls were two feet wide by six feet long. You laid them end to end in long strips, staggering each row by half a piece. With a sharp, serrated blade, you could cut the sod to flow around flower beds, sidewalks, and trees – sawing through the tightly tangled roots as if your were slicing up a cable-knit sweater with a steak knife.

There is no experience necessary when laying sod, and very few rules. Most of the sod I laid went down around recently built homes in newer residential neighborhoods where at least one old retired guy usually strolled over to grin at you and declare, “Green side up!” as if I’d never heard that before. After a few humid months of lugging around gobs of earth in various states of weariness, those old retired guys aren’t particularly amusing. 

At first, it was kind of weird to handle something alive and growing as if it were a sheet of wallpaper or carpet or tinfoil. However, any meditations on mankind’s need to bend the natural world to its own will so it can have natty little patches of Kentucky Bluegrass next to its driveways were quickly replaced with mutterings about the damn humidity. It’s hard work.

Eventually I moved on to more complex landscaping work that required actual skill – like wheelbarrowing around piles of rocks – but when you spend that much time outside, sweating, swearing, and lusting for some air conditioning, you get pretty familiar with what the Wisconsin summer has to offer. Such as ...

    Tiny, little, evil bugs. I have hairy forearms. You wouldn’t stare at them if you were seated next to me at a restaurant or anything, but upon closer inspection, you’d discover that I maintain a small, masculine forest of arm follicles. The same is true for my legs. So if I’m sporting a T-shirt-n-shorts combo, I’ve got plenty of hair out there, a-blowing’ in the elements. And gnats just love it.

Within the scientific community, it’s generally believed that nature designed gnats to drive me insane. I learned while landscaping that they fly into my lush arm hair and cannot get back out. This pisses them off, so they start biting me over and over and over until I slap myself repeatedly to crush their wretched little bodies. Gnats tend to swarm right before it rains, so if you see me walking down the street, arm hair caked with my own blood and a few pounds of squashed bug guts – break out your umbrella.

Dirty snot dirt. When the humidity of the hot Wisconsin summer isn’t crushing you, the dust of the dry Wisconsin summer is blowing right up your stupid nose. If you spend a lot of time working in the dirt, you suck a fair amount of it into your nostrils. Blowing your nose at the end of the day is like squeezing chunky chocolate fudge from your head.

Deeeep tan lines. For well over seven years, I had tan skin extending from my ankles to my knees. Anywhere above or below that territory was the pale skin of a creepy, cave-dwelling monkey creature, born into the darkness. Even after I’d stopped landscaping, the tan lines lingered clear through the winter months. As a result, most of my non-pants wardrobe needed to match the dimension of my work clothes – anything shorter would reveal a strip of blinding white flesh.

Come to think of it, most of what I know about summer is just a long series of gross bodily afflictions involving dirt, bugs, and/or mild skin cancer. So I’m going to stop right there and simply wish you a happy, healthy, and dirty snot-free summer.