I had just graduated from high school and was looking forward to attending the University of the Pacific in Stockton, where I grew up. I was also looking for a summer job and, luckily enough, UOP offered me the following financial aid package: first, they would help me to find work; second, I would work; and finally, they would take all of the money that I had earned. This plan was elegant in its simplicity.

It wouldn’t be too hard for them to find me a job; in fact, all they had to do was answer the phone because local businesses used the Student Employment Office as a ready source of unskilled, low-wage labor. I knew they wouldn’t be expending a whole lot of effort on my behalf, but then again I also knew that beggars shouldn’t throw stones, so I was ready to take whatever they gave me. (Except maybe stripping. I’m very private about my body.)

I ended up working as a roguer for the Asgrow Seed Company, which I enjoyed more than I thought I would. I remember one day in particular because fortune smiled down upon me twice, and while that smile was slightly crooked (if not downright rakish), I’m not complaining. Things could have been a lot worse.

As jobs go, roguing is pretty straightforward. You peer down along a row of tomato plants, making out a fairly uniform, bushy arc to the greenery. You will also see some bigger, scraggly plants that disturb this cylindrical pattern. What you want to do is whack out these rogues with your machete. (It’s very therapeutic.) You see, Asgrow had long since concluded that their customers wanted to buy only fertile seeds, so it was economical for them to pay someone to remove the infertile plants.

In this case, they hired several someones, but I must admit that I can recall only one name: Joe Crocitto. I’m horrible with names. Really, I lock them away in some dark recess of my mind (I forget the name of the place) where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. But that’s okay, we’re really only going to need one actual name for this story (Joe Crocitto) and I can just resort to titles and the like for everyone else. It’ll be fine, trust me.

The Boss was a nice guy. (See how well that worked?) Kind of skinny, pale, polite, with wire-rimmed glasses, and we all liked him because he bothered to make sure that we didn’t drop resoundingly dead from such things as dehydration, heat prostration (not prostitution), or a split skull. That man taught me everything I know about roguing tomatoes.

Come to think of it, that’s not entirely true. My dad taught me that the best way to get tomato plant sap off my hands was to pull apart a tomato and rub the juice all over. (All over my hands, anyway.) That’s a really good thing to know when you’re a roguer because your hands get coated with sap.

But everything else I had to learn from the ground up. Did you know that pimientos are peppers? It’s true; they only look like little bits of tomato. That’s one of those things that I had to learn in the fields, because some knowledge you just can’t get from book larnin’.

The Boss relied on a couple of experienced farm workers to see that we really were learning to tell the difference between the good plants and the rogues. Other than that, these guys didn’t say very much to me, except to swap simple pleasantries about things like Work:

Them: “Hey you! Not that one! That’s a good one!"

Me: “Okay.”

the Weather:

Them: “If you’re freezing in the morning, put your hands in your pants.”

Me: “Okay.”

or Health:

Them: “Watch out! That crazy guy’ll take your head off with his machete.”

Me: “Okay.”

You know what I mean. Basic conversational stuff like that.

The other roguers were a mixed lot. To begin with, there were a couple of other UOP students who had the same financial aid package as I did. They were both two or three years ahead of me, and they spent most of their time chatting together while they were working. One of them was a young woman who was friendly enough, and the other was a guy who was both friendly and big. I liked him. He kept the crazy guy from taking my head off with his machete.

Then there was Joe Crocitto. You’ll hear more about him later. I’m not sure why he was working there. He was a younger brother of Frank Crocitto. Frank and I had a lot of the same classes together since seventh grade, at which time we weighed 100 pounds (apiece). I remember because the PE teacher wrote it on our gym clothes. Nice guy, Frank.

That completes our cast of characters.

And now, in order to set the scene properly, you will need to know more about our working conditions. First, there was the 100-plus degree heat, and then there was the zillion-and-one percent humidity. (I think it was a zillion-and-one. Maybe it was a zillion-and-two.) And let’s not forget the part about getting caked (not naked) in mud and sap, or the repeated lower-back strain. Roguing tomatoes didn’t make a man out of me (which is another story entirely), but it did give me a great deal of respect for people who do this kind of work day in and day out.

On the positive side, the rats preferred running to fighting.

The mosquitoes on the other hand (and leg and face and so forth) were more of a problem. Swatting became habitual.

Which brings me to the first piece of luck I had that day.

You see, I’m borderline ambidextrous, but I seem to favor being right-handed somewhat, which means that I wielded my machete on the right side.

So it was with a considerable amount of luck that I looked down and saw a mosquito on my zipper, because I followed my primitive instinct and crushed it with a mighty right-handed swat.

Yes, as I lay nauseated in the mud, warming my hands, I thought about how lucky I was that, for no particular reason, contrary to my natural tendencies, I had been holding my machete in my left hand.

That’s my kind of luck; it’s called: Things are Great because Things could be Worse.

This brings us to the second lucky break of the day, which requires an aside in which I will give you a more detailed description of the scene.

The agricultural land around Stockton is all dredged-up delta, a patchwork quilt of low-lying fields enclosed by casually misaligned grids of levee roads. Some levees look out over fanning rows of tomatoes, onions, strawberries, rhubarb, asparagus, lettuce, and just about every other type of sun-loving produce on Earth. From other levees it feels like you could just step straight out onto the tree tops, wandering above orchards full of fruit and nuts.

Then there are those levees that dam back the water. What you see off of one of these levees depends upon the season and the irrigation schedule. A creek bed can get dry as an old dirt road (or a new dirt road, for that matter), but sometimes the water’s just running kind of low, and you can see islands out in the middle that look perfectly dry, but which are really only thin crusts of baked (again, not naked) mud that will crunch under your footsteps, leaving you mired up to your waist in tarry goop. This will happen no matter how often you think you’ve learned your lesson. Creeks are full of muddy lumps vaguely shaped like lost shoes.

Then there are times when the water is running right up at the brim, looking like an inviting crick with its picturesque cattails, catfish, crayfish, frogs, sawgrass, and red-winged blackbirds… until you glance back down over the drop off of the other side of the road. You realize then how deep the water really is, how much water there really is. The creek seems just as friendly as ever, but it has earned some respect. You turn around to face the fields, imagining trees, houses – people – submerged, and you grow to appreciate the burden of the levee.

The dynamic is simple: when you let water through a levee on purpose, that’s irrigation; when it comes through on its own, that’s flooding. The levees turn flooding into irrigation, and pipes of many sizes (some of them big enough to walk through) are buried crossways through them to control the flow of water between the fields.

What’s important to this particular story is that a levee road can get narrower at the place where a pipe runs crossways under it, because the dirt packed over the pipe erodes at the edges and crumbles away. It gets to be like driving over a narrow bridge, except without the railings. If you drive off the edge, you’ll only go into the ditch… but since this is a levee, that ditch might be twenty feet deep with nothing but tomatoes to cushion your plummet. If you’re lucky, you might just drive off into the water… when it’s running high.

Imagine what could happen if you were driving along a levee road without knowing anything about this sort of hazard.

Go ahead, really, imagine it.

Good. Now let me tell you what did happen.

After work, on the day of the Mosquito Massacre, I was giving Joe Crocitto a ride home in my mom’s Audi, when all of a sudden he starts swearing like a nun (no, not the kind with the vow of silence, that would just be stupid) while stomping wildly on the passenger brake. All the while he’s chinning himself on the padded handle over the door.

What he saw, and I did not, was that a lot of the dirt had crumbled away on the right-hand side of the levee where it ran over a big pipe, narrowing the so-called “road.” Now, Joe somehow sensed that I had been planning to use that missing part of the “road” to hold up the right side of the car, and his Tap-Dance of Doom was just his colorful way of suggesting that I consider a new strategy. Well, I’m an accommodating driver, but unfortunately, the best alternative that I could come up with on such short notice was “Stop!” because when you’re twenty feet up on a narrow roadbed loosely paved in dust, gravel, and despair, “Swerve!” is just not a good thing.

So I pumped the brakes, the car slid, and the right front tire went out over the edge of the levee. The road scraped grindingly under the car, and it was only pure, unadulterated friction that kept us from screaming over the edge… we stopped right where the levee was crumbling down over the pipe. With three wheels still on the road (give or take), the front passenger area was tipping down off the levee, and Joe was saying, “Okay, I’m just gonna crack this door, and when I count to three, we jump!"

Now, I was trying to ask him if he meant that we would jump on three or on four, but he didn’t seem to hear me over his rapid shouts of “One!” and “Two!”, so next thing I know he’s running down the embankment, dust clouds puffing up under his heels, yelling, “Threeeeee!” You’ll just have to imagine that sound trailing off into the distance.

Me? I was still sitting in the car.

Why? Well, for one thing, I figured that Joe was on the downside of the car, so if I stayed where I was, then the car would be less likely to go pitching over the edge, rolling over him on his way down the hill. For another, since I was on the driver’s side, I wasn’t struck so strongly by the sense of imminent peril, so my brain was content to let me just sit there without hassling me. And finally, as long as I was still sitting where I was, my weight was keeping me from having to explain to my mom how I had crushed her all-time favorite car. And it’s just as well that I had all these great, made-up excuses to sit there, because I still had my seatbelt on.

Now, wouldn’t that have been funny, me trying to jump out, only to get dragged down the hill by my seatbelt, rolling repeatedly under the car? Hilarious. I could have been in one of those gruesome Reader’s Digest stories.

So while I waited in the car, admiring the natural beauty of my surroundings, Joe walked a short way back up the road to ask some people to push the car away from the brink of disaster. The fact that I was blocking the road home probably had nothing to do with their eagerness to help.

I clearly remember The Boss, and the big friendly guy, and Joe, all crowded in front of the car on the remaining part of the levee, pushing back against the grill, trying to get the fourth wheel back on the ground. All I was supposed to do was sit there and function as a deadweight (which by now I was quite good at), and then give it a little gas to help drag the car back onto the levee.

There was a little trouble at first, until Joe cleverly suggested that I put the car in reverse. Sure enough, taking it out of drive helped the whole plan come together.

You see how lucky I was? I didn’t run over three nice guys, and I didn’t plunge the car off the edge of the levee, which meant in turn that I didn’t crush my mom’s car, I didn’t play “Lady of Spain” with my spine, and I didn’t spend the rest of my life in jail for vehicular manslaughter.

All in all, I’d have to say that things went nowhere nearly as badly as they could have.

On top of all of this good fortune, remember that I didn’t whang myself stoutly in the crotch with a machete.

Yep. No doubt about it.

I am a lucky man indeed.