Perhaps the closest thing I have to a religion is Stan Rogers. The great Canadian sang with the passion and fury of an Old Testament prophet. He wrote, at times unfashionably, of the things that matter most: home, love, fidelity, history, and the pride that comes from hard labor. If he sometimes teetered on the brink of sentimentality, one can easily forgive the flaw. Indeed, his contribution appears all the more impressive as the years go by.
From Fresh Water, his final album of original material, was released posthumously. Lately, I have been focusing on what it has to say about work and aging. In “The Last Watch,” the narrator is a watchman on a steamboat slated for demolition. Rogers’ inspiration was an actual ship, the SS Midland City, that transported cargo and passengers on the Great Lakes for over a century. In 1955, as it proved too expensive to comply with new safety regulations, it was towed into the Bay of Tiffin and intentionally set aflame. In the song, the watchman, another “old wreck” who is about to be cast aside, is left to pray that “when men with torches come for her … angels come for me.”
Another piece from the same collection, while understated, is even more powerful. This time, Rogers’ immediate subject was the fisherman of Port Dover, a town on the polluted shores of Lake Erie. The twist is that it is not a song about unemployment. They still have their jobs; in fact, “there’s plenty of pay.” Instead, the work has become strangely meaningless as they are restricted to catching the smallest fish exclusively for export . Or as Rogers writes, “it’s all just a job now” (emphasis added). Have a listen:
In this pair of compositions, Rogers speaks to us from beyond the grave. He shows
two sides of a plague — those who have lost their life’s work and are adrift, and those who find (or fear they will find) that their work has been transformed into something from which they are alienated. And the problem, of course, is not confined to mid-twentieth century Ontario. It haunts the landscape of our lives.
Yet it would deny Rogers his scope and due to end with that observation. Instead, I’ll close with his masterpiece — a song that embodies nothing less than a secular resurrection. I often turn to it for sustenance. May it sustain us all.