Driving to work the other day took me one hour and fifty minutes.

That is an absurd amount of time to spend getting from one place to another, even by Atlanta standards, the city that is an hour from itself. There were two or three wrecks along the way, traffic backed up in multiple places, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, for no particular reason I can remember, I started thinking about this one field in Burke County.

For years, when I was working at Vogtle, I drove River Road back and forth to the site five, sometimes six, days a week. It’s a little two-lane county road, and along one long, flat stretch there was a big field. In my memory, there was a man out there on a tractor cutting it.

The funny thing is, I do not even know if that memory is real. Maybe I saw him once. Maybe I saw him a hundred times. Maybe I never saw him at all and just constructed the whole thing in my mind over years of driving past that field, or it’s a figment of my nostalgia. But somewhere in my head there is still a man on a big green tractor working that eighty-acre hay field.

And I remember thinking how simple his life looked.

At the time, Vogtle was about as all-consuming as anything I had ever experienced. There was always some issue, some problem, some decision that had to be made, some schedule concern, some contractor problem, some new complication layered on top of all the old complications.

During the Westinghouse bankruptcy, those complications multiplied exponentially, and the weight of it was unlike anything I had ever experienced before. Thousands and thousands of people depended on that project continuing. Their livelihoods depended on it. Their families depended on it. And beyond that, I believed completely in what we were doing. I believed then, and still do, that getting those units built was the right thing to do for our energy future.

So we kept pushing. We kept trying to show progress, keep the project viable, solve the next problem and the next one after that. There was something almost intoxicating about how overwhelming it all was.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, I would drive past this field and think about that man on the tractor. Look at him. He has it figured out, just cutting hay.

Of course, that was complete nonsense.

He probably had a tractor payment, probably had several. He may have been wondering whether he was going to cut enough hay to sell and still put up enough for his cattle through the winter. Maybe diesel was too expensive. Maybe another field was not producing like it should. Maybe the tractor was not even his. Hell, maybe the field was not his. He could have just been the hired man.

Most of the life I had constructed for him existed entirely in my imagination.

And if he ever looked up and saw me driving past on River Road, he may have been doing exactly the same thing. Look at that guy headed to his office job. Probably has good health insurance. Good salary. Air conditioning. Easy work. He’s got it made.

The grass is always greener, I suppose. Although whether or not I would actually want to cut eighty acres probably depends heavily on whether the tractor has air conditioning.

Still, there was something about the field that appealed to me. It was not really about farming, and it was not really about wanting somebody else’s life. I like my life. I did then too. What I wanted, I think, was work with edges.

There is something freeing about hard physical labor when you spend most of your life with too many mental plates spinning at once. You can lose yourself in it. Your back hurts. Your hands hurt. You sweat through your clothes. And for a while, your mind has no choice but to shut up and let your body do the work.

After several months of dealing with the fallout from the Westinghouse bankruptcy, I took several days off and built a patio in the backyard of our house in Evans. I dug the entire footprint out by hand with a pick, shovel, and wheelbarrow, then laid four pallets of flagstone and spread a few truckloads of pea gravel. It was three or four days of solid, back-breaking work.

And I loved it.

Not because it changed anything at Vogtle. It did not. The problems were still there when I went back. The responsibility was still there. The pressure was still there. I probably was not even significantly less stressed.

But for a few days, the pressure had somewhere to go. It was like a steam pressure relief valve. The system was still operating. The vessel was still under pressure. Nothing fundamental had changed. But every now and then, you have to let some of it off.

That patio did that for me.

And unlike most of the work I was doing at the time, it had a beginning and an end. Dig here. Move this dirt. Put this stone there. Spread the gravel. Done.

You could stand back and see exactly what you had accomplished. There was something sitting there in front of you that had not been there before. No PowerPoint. No schedule update. No metrics package due to 15 different executives who probably didn’t understand the contents anyway. No meeting to explain what percentage complete it was.

There was just a patio.

Maybe that is what I still see when I think about that field on River Road. Not another life. Just a pressure relief valve.

The funny thing is, I have a field of my own. It’s on my farm back in Randolph County, on Wehadkee Creek above Rock Mills. I have never worked it. One of my uncles keeps it cut and moves his cattle over it from time to time.

So I suppose there is some irony in sitting in traffic on I-285 wishing I could be riding a tractor around somebody else’s field when I have one sitting there waiting on me.

Maybe one day I will go work it. Maybe I will buy a tractor. Maybe I will make a whole day out of cutting hay or bush-hogging the edges, sweating and accomplishing absolutely nothing more important than getting from one side of the field to the other.

And when I get there, I will be done.

At least until the hay grows back.