Seasonal work.

Or as a guest said to me yesterday, “poverty with a view.”

I am currently working as an aerial guide at the Nantahala Outdoor Center in Bryson City, North Carolina.

My coworkers and I work together all day to keep our guests safe on the ziplines and high ropes, and then we head back to live in our plywood shacks in the evenings.

For a job where a single mistake could mean the death of yourself or someone else, getting paid barely above minimum wage feels ridiculous, but this is what we signed up for.

“It’s all about the experience,” we tell each other as we debate whether a $5 pizza will fit into our budgets for the week.

“We don’t need money to be happy,” we announce as we sit around a campfire, cheap beer in our hands and the smell of weed clouding our senses.

“This is the good life,” we convince ourselves as we choose not to go to the doctor for a twisted ankle, so we can avoid the medical bills.

When I first arrived at my living accommodations, I insisted on calling the moldy structure a “cabin.” Sure, water came in through the screens when the rain came down harder than a drizzle, and yes, multiple wolf spiders lurked under my bed, but I wanted to use the unhealthy living conditions as a form of character building.

It wasn’t until after I dropped several pounds due to the lack of kitchen and learned that the water was unfit for drinking that I gave into the name that my friends had already resigned themselves to.

Shack.

Just today I walked out of work, pulling my mask and name tag off as I turned back to a friend, “Hey, come by my shack tonight?”

To us, the word “shack” has long since been adopted into the common vernacular we have unintentionally created by way of spending all our days and nights together.

No one gives it any thought.

But the truth of the matter is that our living conditions are completely unacceptable by any standard.

It’s easy to romanticize traveling thirty minutes to fill up a water jug at a natural spring, but in reality, the NOC’s disregard of such basic needs is a flagrant violation of migrant worker labor law.

It’s easy to laugh about the mushrooms growing on the bathroom walls, but in reality, I worry about the long-term health effects of constantly breathing in mold.

And it’s easy to ignore the bad in favor of focusing on the joys we create together within our small community, but I also often wonder who is profiting at the expense of our health.

And no matter how hard I search the web, the NOC’s financials are nowhere to be found.

Is this just the way the world is? My sister keeps insisting that I should stop thinking about it and give in to being a source of profit for those more powerful—or at least more self-centered—than myself, but I find that viewpoint too bleak.

I just don’t know if I have the energy to fight the man right now.