Dirt Work by Christine Byl Page A

from Ellen Wilson, we laughed remembering hitches where we’d parted the algae from the top of this pond in order to swim. The raft would have filled half of it. Could we really have been that desperate?
    What tourists say to a female traildog: How’d a pretty girl like you get a job like this? What, are all the men too lazy? I wish I could have done that when I was young. My, you seem strong! Well aren’t you something. I’ve always thought a dirty girl was pretty sexy. Who carries your tools up here? I’m gonna divorce my wife and marry you both. Can my boys have their picture taken with you? If your mother could see you! Can my girls have their picture taken with you? For shame!
    Midsummer, after a grueling hitch—long miles, heavy rocks—I looked down at my body and could see that it had changed. I had muscles: me, the shrimp of my family, the one with thin skin and angular bones. Over the first season of trailwork, it felt as if I had finally shifted from girl to woman, not with gentle rounding, the fatted ass and softer weight that many women describe, but instead with a taut curve of shoulder into bicep, the imposing loaf of thigh muscle above bony knee. My body felt purposeful and competent in a way it never had, as if it could take control, set the terms. I could hike twenty miles at a quick clip, move uphill bearing burdensome loads. I could lever large rocks, carry with one hand what used to take two arms close to the chest.
    That summer, I showed off my arms for anyone. I parodied the strongman’s pose, inviting irony to take the edge off my pride, but in a tank top at the bar, I flexed when asked, let total strangers squeeze my biceps. I’d never been drawn to the passively feminine wiles, and in my new arms I felt the intoxication of latent power, the knowledge that I didn’t just look a certain way, but could force something to happen—lid from a jar, hand off my ass—that I could take the world into my own hands, give it a firm grip, kick it in the balls if I chose. Women have long been told that our bodies are to be presented, arranged for viewing, and that our power comes through flirting, a psychological dominance that stands in for physical strength. Goodbye to all that, which had never suited me. I felt power in my body. By itself.
    I pondered explosive behavior out of context; I looked at my hands and wondered what they were capable of. Could I break a spirited horse? Chop a board in half with my bare hand? Wring somebody’s neck? The violence surprised me, and to any onlooker, I would have seemed still laughably slender, no one to run from in a dark alley. Yet what I imagined I was capable of had changed; I lifted without thinking, spurned the grocery bagger’s assistance, reefed on tight lug nuts, lit into a task without fear of failure. In trailwork, this meant I could quickly get in over my head, because I was by no means invincible (few people are, though Max seemed close, and kept me striving). Sometimes I got a log into my arms before I realized I couldn’t go anywhere; with the rock bar, I could convince myself I was indomitable instead of just aided. Though I had long admired tenderness and vulnerability as much as strength, that summer I relished the bravado of muscle, the swagger of look what I can do. This is why the nouveaux riches spend their money so quickly, I thought. It’s hard not to use wantonly a thing you’ve always wanted, slightly out of reach.
    By now, I’m long used to my body and its rhythms, the way it’s shaped and remade by a task. In a summer with lots of uphill hiking, my quads are hard as sandbags, and it takes a bit to raise my heart rate, steady as she goes. After a month of rock projects, my lower back twinges in the morning but my abs are something to write home about. Log work shoves my lats along my spine, bricklike but tender to the touch, and my hands are coated in pitch. On a front-country