Winslow Wawro '15 addressed the student body at Church Assembly
on Thursday, November 6. He discussed how much he learned about himself
through his arduous summer job experience.
View the video of Winslow's talk here. Following is the transcript of Winslow's talk.
One part of summer that I always liked was unplugging my alarm clock, or setting it on very rare occasions. Last summer, it was quite a change to have mine plugged in, and set to 5AM for nearly all of June and July. It was even more strange to be on a bus at 6:30 every morning, riding to work at the Newport Tent Company.
For the first few weeks of work, I was terrible at my job. Putting up and taking down tents requires carrying huge amounts of weight on your back, in the form of anything from massive center poles to rolled up pieces of canvas to heavy wooden tables and stacks of chairs. Many of you have probably witnessed the construction of the graduation tent here, or at least sat under it at some point. Basically, I helped put up and take down tents like that (both smaller and larger) for all of June and July.
At first, the whole experience was plainly demoralizing. Every muscle of my body was so sore I felt like I was doing permanent damage. It would take all the concentration I had to not drop some of the objects I was assigned to carry. To make matters worse, my coworkers (who were mostly middle-aged men that had worked manual labor jobs for their whole lives) would find amusement in watching me struggle, and would sometimes be downright malicious towards me. It was quite a reality check to come from the Abbey (where every adult wants to see you succeed) to the Tent Company (where most adults were utterly indifferent, and some even aggressive). My schedule was day to day, so that I never knew if I was working the next day until I punched out. The length of the work weeks would vary, but in the beginning it was 8-11 hours a day, six days a week. By the time the bus would drop me off in the afternoon, I had time to do nothing besides make my lunch for the next day and go to bed. It is hard to convey the overwhelming despair I felt during those first weeks of June. My life had become nothing but time spent at a punishing job that I hated every minute of. It was hard to see how things would get better.
With time, my outlook brightened. The physical demands became easier as time went on, and I started to actually enjoy spending time with the people I worked with. At first, this was no easy feat. In fact, when we were getting into the Navy Base in Newport to put up a graduation tent, I was among 3 of a 20-man crew that passed a background check. The rest were kicked off the base for felony drug and assault convictions. Over time, though, I came to see that most of them were really nice, funny guys that had an incredibly positive outlook on life, despite some of their situations. Their attitudes made it harder for me to feel sorry for myself.
Another aspect of the job that became easier to bear was the frustration. Initially, I would deal with flashes of uncontrollable anger because I was bad at what I was doing. One day, as I tried to grab a cinder block off of a pile, two of them fell on my foot. The pain was almost unbearable, and I found myself furiously looking for someone to blame. I grabbed the cinder blocks and walked over to the truck, my mind racing to find an outlet for the anger that built with every step. But as I heaved the cinder blocks into the truck and turned around to get more, I knew there was no one to blame but myself. I came to realize that that was true about my job too. I was there by my own choice, and I could leave if I wanted to.
I slowly started enjoying learning new skills. I mastered tying the wind knot, which holds the side poles and tent together, an important part in making sure the tent doesn't blow away. Driving in stakes with a sledgehammer was impossibly difficult at first, but by the end of the summer I got the hang of it and actually liked doing it. Honestly, I never really looked forward to going to work, but by focusing on simply learning the basic elements of my job, the harder parts became significantly easier to bear.
In less than 7 months, those green trucks with the white Newport Tent decal will drive up to the holy lawn, and guys I've worked with will get out and put up the graduation tent. That tent will be the last thing we walk into as Portsmouth Abbey students. As I sit under that canopy of canvas, I will surely think of the mornings spent carrying stack after stack of chairs, and the afternoons spent tying wind knots and swinging sledgehammers. But more importantly, I will appreciate the maturity and confidence those experiences have given me. Most of you have learned similar values from other events in your life, and those times and places that transformed you as a person will surely run through your mind as you sit there. Just as the tent is a portal through which you enter a high school student, and then step out alone into a brave new world, so it is a symbol for life. Construct your tent badly, and it will sag and eventually collapse. Construct it well, and you can make something that will endure.