Falling Porcupines and Other Semi-True Tales of Northern Wisconsin
The setting for my new book, HOT (writing as Julia Harper) is northern Wisconsin, despite the fact that I neither grew up in nor live in Wisconsin. I did, however, once have The Summer Job from Hell in Wisconsin.
It was the summer after I graduated from college with a degree in archaeology—an undergraduate degree which is almost completely useless, by the way. I got a job at the State Historical Society doing archaeological field survey. The job title sounds sort of sexy, but in truth I was doing the archaeological equivalent of digging ditches. Armed merely with a shovel, a sharpened triangular mason’s trowel and a small, hand-held dirt sifter, I and a band of similarly armed summer employees did shovel tests along a highway expansion project in northern Wisconsin.
What exactly is a shovel test, you may wonder? Picture being in the middle of the woods in a line of people fifty feet apart. You walk fifty feet forward, dig a hole and sift the dirt looking for things like projectile points (arrow heads) and charcoal and anything else that might signal that people lived here long ago. Then you do it again. You do it all day long, stopping only for lunch or to drive to a new site or to dodge any falling porcupines. (This actually happened to a co-worker: he was nearly taken out by a porcupine falling from a branch above.) You might also stop if you got heat prostration, but not always.
Did I mention the heat wave? This was the summer of 1988 and the Midwest was suffering through a combo drought and heat wave, the worst in living memory. Roofers were falling off roofs because they were fainting in the heat. Did we stop when the temperature rose to over a hundred degrees by noon? Oh, heck no. We just slapped on more DEET and waded into those tick-infested woods. I was the only person crazy enough to wear a long-sleeved shirt and jeans tucked into socks. I was also the only person on that crew who didn’t get Lyme’s Disease, despite all the DEET we drenched ourselves with. I achieve the title of Tick Queen for having the most ticks on my body at any one time—thirty-seven.
So there you have it, one of the worse jobs (among many terrible jobs) that I ever had. At least I got a book from it.
Cheers!
Elizabeth
www.elizabethhoyt.com
www.juliaharper.com
Bless your heart. But as you said, at least you got a book out of it! 
