The day begins by 5, when either your alarm, others being awake, or the call to prayer wakes you.
Those first few minutes of awakeness are conquerable with the knowledge that they’ll be followed by a 20 minute van ride upon which one can nap.
Upon waking up upon arrival at site, those second first few minutes of awakeness are conquerable with the knowledge that breakfast is about to occur, and there will be some combination of jam, Turkish Nutella, and çay (tea).
But eventually, breakfast ends, and the walk to the trenches occurs. This, too, is conquerable with the knowledge that the day’s heat is not yet upon us. That thought tends, however, to promptly backfire, as oh gods today’s heated wrath is coming soon, but that too is conquerable with the knowledge that 3.5 hours from now, there will be break, and I have juice and cookies for the occasion.
Then we arrive at the trenches, which is honestly incredibly exciting. It’s as though reuniting every morning with a friend who always has a good story to tell, but you’ve got to push some of their buttons before they’re willing to tell it. For the next hour or two, that thought is its own reward, and the working zone is entered.
What happens next depends upon luck: if sometime between 6 am breakfast and 10:30 am break an exciting find or other manner of discovery is made, that is more than enough of a morale boost to push through to that juice and cookies. If, however, those 4-some hours are spent merely churning through dirt, rocks, soil, dirt, rocks, and soil, then some more excitement needs be generated. A fine example of this would be the Trench 5 Working Song, whose final verse I shall relate in the moment, but imagine first (for proper context and experience) several college students, drenched in sweat, covered in dirt, and with more sweat on top of that, swinging mattocks and pickaxes, hurling rocks larger than bread boxes off a high hill, and shoveling all that lies beneath them into buckets for tossing. With that, the twelfth verse:
On the twelfth day of Field School, Antiochia gave to me:
Twelve meters of fill,
Eleven stinging bees,
Ten Calloused Fingers,
Nine giant spiders,
Eight scarred wounds,
Seven bloody splinters,
Six hours of sunlight,
So much grody dust,
Four giant rocks,
Three backaches,
Two horrid roots,
And a whole person covered in dirt!
10:30 am takes a while to arrive sometimes.
But Chronos always gets there eventually, and then there’s 30 minutes of glorious break time.
Which is actually a terrible thing in the hindsight of 11:01 am when work must be begun again.
The first few minutes of post-break are always a tired struggle, but once work truly begins anew, it is often the most driven work of the day, for while the morning is often spent finishing up what was begun the day prior, the post-break time is spent engaging in new plans, plots, and schemes, and novelty is always invigorating. The sun, however, is not.
As noon is approached and departed from, the day’s heat is truly upon us, and so it is good that there is lunch soon on the horizon, for that thought, and the thought of the cold water that accompanies it, is how the final hour of work is conquered.
And once the whistle tolls at 1 pm, and we all depart our trenches to trek back to the school house and our meal, there is one final foe to conquer: the hill upon which our home base sits. And the hill is a fiend. And the sun is hot. And the body is weary. But there is cold water and food on the other side, and so it is that the hill is every day conquered.
Following the glory that is lunch and occasionally the subsequent zen of pottery washing, we return to the dig house, where we shower, and we nap, and we chill in rooms of air conditioning, and we eat, and we rest, and we build up all the morale we need to do it all again tomorrow.