A Gent With No Land

"As a gentleman, he was supposed to eschew working for a living," reads a passage from Thomas Jefferson: A Life, by William Sterne Randall. Now, eschewing working for a living sounds pretty much the way I've been living my life lo these last 43 years. However, eschewing working for a living does unfortunately make for a poor cash-flow situation.

Jefferson, though, was one of the landed gentry. Randall quotes Daniel Defoe's definition of the gentry as " 'such who live on estates and without the mechanism of employment.' " Ah, there's the rub. While I meet the definition for lacking the mechanism of employment I also lack the estate.

Jefferson, and others of his place and time, were born into a certain amount of wealth and lived on large Virginia plantations. These estates allowed men like Jefferson to earn income while cultivating a love of literature and culture in general. There was expected to do something with their lives; they were expected to become "men of letters, such as clergy, lawyers, and physicians," but these were supposed to be more avocations than jobs, done without the idea of making money at them. That's what the estate was for and that's what I need. An estate. Others can till the land while I spend my days reading and enriching myself, occasionally leaving the house to make sure everybody is doing what they're supposed to be doing.

Let's face facts though: it's not going to happen. It's way too late for me to be born into a higher income class and, to be honest, the days of the estate may be long gone, at least the kind where the master of the house was inclined to spend his days intellectually improving himself. Texas ranches are akin in size to the estates of old, and similarly, have ranch hands to do the everyday labor while the master does whatever it is he does. Sometimes, what the master does is "public service," and when he comes home from his public service position at the White House for an extended period of rest (how does one survive without a six week vacation?), the master will roll up his sleeves and clear some brush, just as any man's man would do, for about as long as it takes to photograph him doing that, and then he will drive his air-conditioned SUV back to his air-conditioned luxury ranch house. But I digress.

Fire lookouts, people who sit in a high tower in the middle of a forest keeping an eye peeled for smoke (because where there's smoke there's fire) are not exactly members of the landed gentry class. But they do oversee a vast domain of land, something I've always wanted to do. And they have a lot of time to read and think, as long as they are able to spot a fire when they need to. The scenery is most likely beautiful and you even get paid to do it, although not that much. All this appeals to me, but alas, I am again a little late to the party. Lookouts are increasingly being replaced by technology; where there are only 800 manned lookouts now, in the 1930s there were 8,000. Just as I missed being among Jefferson's peers by a few centuries, I kind of missed the glory years of looking out by a few decades.