What he might have felt privately is more difficult to determine, for by this time Washington had become as expert at hiding his inner thoughts from contemporaries and from posterity.

ART APPRECIATION Analyze the painting shown here.  Check out the details. What do you notice? What do you think is happening? What caused the scene in the painting? What might happen after the scene shown? What does this piece make you wonder?

FIrst Job

As a boss, Lynn was not afraid to lead by example, usually outworking anyone on staff. He also was not afraid to get dirty. I watched him unclog the grease trap at the restaurant with his bare hands, and remember helping him muck the stalls in the barn. And of course, he could skin a catfish alongside the best of us.

Speaking of dirty jobs, he and I drained the half-acre pond once in order to add an aeration system to it. We wanted to put some perforated PVC pipe in the pond and attach it to an air pump in order to deliver more oxygen to the fish. With virtually no vegetation in the pond, fishermen never snagged moss or trees in the pond, but the fish had to be fed regularly. Also, no vegetation meant the fish needed a source of oxygen that plants would normally provide.

Enter: the two of us. With the sun beating down on it the exposed mud and fish poo, the pond smelled something awful. Donning our wading boots and old clothes, we stepped into the pond. I was surprised when I sank in the muddy substance past my knees. In order to maneuver in the pond, we had to balance on one foot while lifting the other leg completely out of the mud and repositioning it, sinking it once again up past the knee. This, I don’t mind telling you, was difficult, and we both had our times of losing our balance and ending up on our backs or face forward in the mud (Of course, I’m just calling it mud here, but we all knew, with a smell like that, this was so much more than mud.).

The thing that impressed me the most was that Lynn was there with me. I happily did this hapless job because of the camaraderie we had. It was the payment that I gladly paid for being able to do the parts of the job I enjoyed. Lynn wasn’t wary of climbing through that stuff, and because of that I wasn’t either. He could just as easily have delegated this job to some of the grunts on the payroll, and he could just as easily have barked orders from the shore, but that wasn’t his leadership style. Lynn remains one of my greatest mentors (and yes, the aeration system worked, though fishermen often wondered why the surface of the pond bubbled).