Kira Rambles

I’m getting ready to wrap up the season as a maritime historic interpreter at Fort Ticonderoga and move to Kingston, NY, to do winter maintenance on Pete Seeger’s environmental education tall ship, the sloop Clearwater. Moving, plus my first semester of online MFA classes, has me feeling a little overwhelmed. 

On my days off from the fort, I’ve been trying to channel the idea of fatigue duties. Fatigue duty is any labor assigned to soldiers not involving weapons, and, in the 18th century, fatigue duty was whatever trade–like tailoring, shoemaking, or carpentry–that a soldier would work on when not completing military duties. The British army used the trades soldiers already knew, so instead of training a soldier to sew, they would assign already established seamsters and tailors to tailoring. 

Many of us learn our historic trades at the fort, but, otherwise, we use a similar system–and not just because we’re portraying a garrison of 1774 British soldiers this season. We each have a fatigue we work on when not giving tours or participating in demonstrations. Mine is usually maritime trades–boat carpentry or sailmaking, but I have helped build timber frame soldiers’ huts, too. 

At the fort, our fatigue duties are necessary but not necessarily urgent. The staff needs shoes and clothes, and we have a grant to build soldiers’ huts for the 250th anniversary of the revolution, but visitors might not notice if someone’s gaiters need repair, or the huts are behind schedule. They will notice if we don’t do the daily 11:00 musket demonstration or the 14:00 cannon demo. Fatigue duties help us triage. 

Outside of work, I’m trying to separate what’s urgent from what just needs to get done, too, and I’m finding that focusing on one non-urgent fatigue helps me focus. When the Fall packed rain clouds my first day off this week, and the sump pump in my basement told me the roads were slick, I assigned myself packing after I completed my readings for my first graduate class. The next day, when the library was open, and I could walk over without wellies, I tackled some outstanding writing projects after the homework for my second course. One fatigue at a time is doable. I drew the line at wearing my work fatigue coat, though.