men at work

Took a short walk this afternoon as a sort of reward for staying focused at work as well as an effort to avoid future visits to the chiropractor. Since working a desk job I've had at least two visits, during which he explained to me that the long hours of sitting cause the vertebrae in my spine to settle into one another, eventually pinching a nerve which causes the muscles to spasm and tighten up in an effort to protect the damaged area. The first time this happened I found myself crawling around my in-laws' house because standing up straight was simply not an option.
My office building is a rarity in this underdeveloped area, surrounded by wide expanses of field put to various uses. Across the street is a weedy field populated with horses that I can see running or grazing at various points of the day from the office windows. Behind and around our office a farmer usually grows corn. This year looks more like hay. Other fields seem to be empty but for wild brush and weeds; someone's real estate that they are waiting to develop when the price is right. Each field is surrounded by uniform wire fences, many of them broken in spots.
In place of sidewalks, most of the roads are lined with gravelly shoulders, dotted with weeds, rocks, and assorted litter. Standout items on my walk today were a hubcap, a rusted bolt, a fine-tipped ball-point pen that I almost stooped to pick up, a used condom, and a dark backpack almost entirely hidden by a bush; I idly wondered if the backpack had been dropped there as part of a drug exchange.
Towards the end of the road, a new office building is being built. Looking from the office across the horse pasture and the trees and roofs of a few residences I can see the cranes working, and occasionally I can catch glimpses of the burnt-yellow machinery creeping through the dirt of the construction site. From the road, I saw steel beams forming the earliest skeleton of the building to come. All office buildings look the same at this stage of development, deep-red I-beams teeming with men in orange vests and neon helmets. I watch these men lowering harnesses, taking measurements, guiding the crane's dangling loads, casually mingling with the giant behemoths that will, in a matter of months, turn this chain-link surrounded wasteland into a new commercial space filled with sedentary office workers like me taking great pains to avoid the chiropractor.
I don't know anything about the men's individual duties, even less about the whole construction process, but I reflect with something close to envy that they don't have to take afternoon walks to keep their vertebrae from compressing. A second later it occurs to me that these men must be a great deal more prone to back injury because of their overly-strenuous jobs than I am from mine. Long hours of heavy lifting, bending, twisting, with scarcely a moment to sit down takes its toll on a body in a very different way. The thought takes most of the envy away with it and leaves me shaking my head at the irony. Each of us picks our own poison.
As I turn back to the office, I see a grey-haired man in a button-up shirt and khaki slacks walkng up the road behind me. I recognize our company's in-house legal counsel and wave my greeting to him. He smiles back and says, "Oh, hi. I felt like coming out to get some air and some sun. I was falling asleep there in my office and just had to get out."
He passes me by, walking along the fence-line of the construction site, throwing glances over at the progress the machines are making, probably envious that those helmeted men aren't on the verge of nodding off up there on the beams of the structure they are wrestling with for their livelihood.