Mattocks and Mindset

...the different kinds of steel-on-a-stick empowerment

Photo Cliff Scholz

Lately I have sometimes found myself feeling overcome by mental fatigue only to notice a resurgence of energy when I go outside, maybe put on a pair of gloves, grab a shovel, a rake or a pair of loppers, and apply such basic tools to a yard maintenance task.

My current favorite tool is the pick-mattock. Many people don’t know what I’m talking about when say the word “mattock,” so I took a picture of it for you. It’s called a pick-mattock because the pointy side is the pick and the broader-blade side is the mattock. I’ve found the combination super useful in breaking up hard-packed earth and gravel, lifting old wooden posts out of the ground, and many other things.

Mattocks come in various sizes, and the one shown in the photo is pretty heavy. That weight helps with bigger jobs. Many people are intimidated by the thing, and perhaps rightly so. The tool does need to be handled with respect. Nobody wants that piece of steel coming down on a foot, for example. But at the same time, it’s important to remember that the mattock was not invented to make work harder, but to make hard tasks easier.

A few years back when I showed up with it to help install some garden boxes at my wife’s school, people struggling to break that compacted ground with shovels wanted to try the mattock when they saw its effectiveness.

I purchased the pick-mattock shown in the photo in 1986. A client of mine in the upscale Ann Arbor Hills neighborhood asked if I could take on a project removing weed trees there, mostly invasive buckthorns and young maples. At the time I was operating a yard maintenance and housecleaning business out of the back of a Chevy Chevette, loading a push mower, two vacuum cleaners, cleaning caddy, shovels, hedge shears, rakes and other tools into the hatchback. However, I didn’t have the right tools to dig up the numerous small trees I saw growing on this client’s large, rocky embankment. I took the job anyway. I bought the mattock along with an ax and pair of loppers. Suddenly my business had a new sideline.

Today I have the privilege of using the same tool in my own yard, often to pull small trees and uproot invasive vines like way back when, but lately also to uproot and remove tall stands of grass that tend to encroach on my growing areas. Despite its many uses and clear advantages, though, I don’t see many people out in their yards swinging their mattocks. Maybe it looks like too much work. And yeah, it does get tiring after a while. But it gets results.

For me, though, it’s more than that. See, I find that it really easy to get stuck in my head these days. When that happens, like I said, it’s often helpful to get outside and move energy in my whole body. And that’s the thing: using a tool like a mattock really is a whole-body experience.

There is a very real need to build an ergonomic relationship with the mattock if we are to lift it and bring it down repeatedly and effectively without hurting ourselves. There’s the slight bend in the knees as we lift it, the attention to posture, the coordination with upper body and arms and even breath as the implement rises and falls. Ideally, it’s also good to learn how use it both right- and left-handed, and of course, it’s imperative to pay attention to your footing at all times.

“Be here now” isn’t just a good rule of thumb — it’s also a good for toes.

And if all this sounds just a bit macho or whatever, here’s a little story to consider. Last fall a friend of ours brought her teenage son here because he wanted to learn how to split firewood with a maul. His older sister came along. A splitting maul is basically another “steel on a stick” implement requiring a similar focus and swinging technique as the mattock. After he and I had broken up quite a bit of firewood, his older sister grabbed the maul and proceeded to reduce more big logs to handy size pieces. She clearly found it satisfying, probably even empowering. Just watching these young people learn to shatter logs was pretty darn impressive. None of us was any Incredible Hulk, but next thing you know we’re stuffing their SUV with beautiful hand-split birch, with plenty more on the ground left over. Seeing how others just starting out responded to this work and its results helped me to better understand the satisfactions I get from it.

Again, I understand I’m privileged to be able to do this kind of thing, to take a break from one kind of work to engage in another in the middle of a typical day. Goodness knows I wouldn’t want to be swinging a splitting maul or a mattock all day long for a living. But I sure do like it once in a while.

And frankly it seems to me that while the white-collar/blue collar division of labor in this culture may be in some sense “rational,” the results of that rationality are kind of insane. Both mental and physical work tend to be stupefying if taken too far, so why is our economic system structured to encourage us to go to destructive extremes?

Oh, I guess I just answered my own question. Stupefaction was probably always part of the goal.

Still — and here I go thinking again — given all the abundance generated by fossil-fuel powered machines and automation in this society, seems there shouldn’t be so many folks struggling just to get by. I may have mentioned this before somewhere on Substack, but it bears repeating: Back in the 90s I read that the productivity of the average US worker had increased by a factor of five in the previous thirty years. I asked my state rep — an acquaintance who came to our salon at the time — where all that additional productivity went. Seemed a 1960s standard of living would be quite adequate working one day a week instead of five, I said. And please, yes: let me go back to having a authentically private telephone that never needs replacement, mounted on the kitchen wall. I’ll take it. Because, aside from more people having air conditioning and a second car, I really do not see a rise in the national standard of living to go along with the increase in productivity, which I can only assume has continued since then. In fact, with the virtual elimination of one-income households, in my view living standards have pretty clearly degraded.

My elected official replied that a big chunk of the productivity gains were being siphoned off into the military. No doubt that’s a piece of it, but since that conversation I’ve learned that most of the new income being generated since the early 1970s has been concentrated at the top of the economic pyramid — and even more to the tippy, tippy top. So, I guess it boils down to war and greed. I mean, what’s the alternative? Peace, love and harmony? Abundance, grace and shared good will for all? This ain’t Christmas, pal! Better start gettin’ real, real fast.

Such thoughts eventually lead me to seek the healing benefits of Mattock Therapy.

And here we are in a world where some of us wear out our bodies with excessive physical labor and others weaken ourselves by sitting glued to computer screens for a living and not being physically active enough. That seems to be a common pattern. Of course, a lotta folks doing desk jobs will pay for a health club membership, or pay to put a bicycle on top of their car and take it someplace nice to use it, or maybe even hire a personal trainer who might tell us the latest thing is “functional exercise.”

I mean, fine. Fine to all of it: fancy biking clothes, the designer dog breeds that people use to justify taking a walk, the body-building for the sake of image, the yoga for the sake of Spandex rather than the other way around. Whatever it takes. Fine to the after-hours shift from one kind of treadmill to another kind of treadmill.

Then again, you want really functional exercise? Here’s a mattock. Here’s a heavy hunk of steel on a stick. I’ve read that in its basic design the mattock dates back to the stone age, and I can tell you that a well made modern version is pretty much indestructible. Find the glamour and glitz in that. It’s there, or rather something more substantial, which is what I think that brother and sister found out here with the splitting maul. You just have to pick one up. The reason people don’t recognize what’s going on with it is that a big part of the technology is inside the user.

As for me, I can’t tell you how many times an inspiration has come while away from my computer and outdoors. The thoughts that come outdoors (in between tasks that require total mental focus for safety’s sake) are different than indoor thoughts. Task or no task, getting outdoors helps immediately. Then, many people notice that their minds get clearer and quieter when their bodies get active and energy flows into their limbs. Steel-on-a-stick empowerment can be part of that.

And lately it just seems there’s so much collective anxiety floating around, and even though I avoid most media I’m experiencing my own part of it, and as you can probably guess, my own disquieting thoughts can sometimes lead to further disequilibrium. So out I go. Deeper truth here is, I do want these outdoor tasks done, it being spring and all, and I do like the mattock, but to be honest, a lot of the stuff I’m clearing with it is in my head.

Funny, come to think, that it takes a hefty tool like this to get the job done.