Finding Part-Time Work
(Page 3 of 4)
September/October 1973
By Dan Bentley
To qualify as a substitute rural mail carrier, you must have a good vehicle (Shona's route is 73 miles long, with 400 stops), be dependable and available whenever the regular deliveryman needs you. Its great advantage for Shona is that she can earn as much working four days per month-an average of one day a week—as she'd previously gained from full-time employment ... and still have much more time for the children and her own interests.
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Other work, too, has turned up in odd places and at odd times. While I was running a trapline one winter I crossed paths with one particular fellow on a number of occasions. Finally, on a day when I must have looked particularly hungry, he offered me a job. The man had purchased 80 acres of timber from the county, and when trapping was over he intended to start logging the trees. He couldn't pay me cash until the logs were cut and skidded to the mill, he explained ... but if I was interested in helping him he'd give me half a beef, to be worked out at the equivalent rate of $1.00 an hour. This would mean that I'd owe him roughly 150 hours.
I accepted and—as it turned outworked the entire winter for the new logger. In the beginning I brushed skid trails and limbed felled trees with an axe. Then, after the mill was set up, I continued as tail sawyer at the rate of $2.50 per thousand feet of sawed timber. We cut, skidded and sawed 125,000 feet of lumber that winter, and the money I earned (along with the beef, which I still like to think I ate all by myself just to maintain my strength) carried us through the cold weather in good shape.
The above story, by the way, is really an example of how you can get the things you need if you're willing to trade your labor for them. If you go into a winter and find yourself short of feed for your stock or food for your family, go to a neighboring farmer and offer to help with his chores, wood cutting, fence building or other work in exchange for hay or oats or whatever else your family needs. He'll be more likely to hire you in this way than to pay you cash ... at least if he's a good old everyday dirt farmer and not of the new "gentleman" breed.
Once your neighbors know you're willing to work, they'll come looking for you when they need a hand. Chores tie a farmer down and once in a while when he has to leave his place for a few days—usually out of necessity—he likes to have someone he ran count on to do his routine work.
