Lifestyles
It’s A Dirty Job
You couldn’t pay most people enough money to dive into alligator-infested swamps to recover golf balls, haul tons of rotting restaurant garbage by hand—one burlap sack at a time—or wrestle with a 250-pound ostrich. But to Mike Rowe, they’re all part of the job description and an honest day’s work.
Rowe, host of the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs, has made a career out of tackling the nastiest employment listings in the classified ads. The result is some of the best clean fun to be found anywhere on television.
“Everybody has had at least one dirty job,” says Rowe, who has just spent the day collecting uneaten food from a Las Vegas buffet and lugging it out to a farm in the desert to feed 4,000 hungry swine. “This one just happens to be my 109th. I love the fact that when the pigs at the restaurant are done, the pigs on the farm step in to clean up the leftovers.”
If Rowe’s face looks familiar, it’s likely because, under all the grime and grit, you probably remember the 44-year-old Baltimore, Maryland, native from the dozens of Tylenol commercials he starred in before wading into the muddy waters of Dirty Jobs.
“With this show, I get to meet the people who do the jobs that make civilized life possible for the rest of us,” he says. “There’s always a rock to lift up and something under it, and very little of it is predictable or pretty. I was on the ostrich farm for all of five minutes when we startled one of them. An ostrich is basically a dinosaur that stopped evolving thirty million years ago. They have giant eyes, huge feet, and massive bodies, and they can go from zero to fifty miles per hour in five seconds. One of our guys had left his door open on our truck. The ostrich went running, hit the door, and tore it clean off its hinges.”
In cleaner days, Rowe was a professional singer—that’s his voice narrating the Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch, a series chronicling the daily life of Alaska’s crab fishermen—considered one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet. Recently, he also suited up to host this year’s edition of the network’s annual Shark Week event. But after flying to the seaside town of Durbin on South Africa’s coast to assist in a shark autopsy, Rowe discovered that his Dirty Jobs schedule wasn’t so easy to put on the back burner.
“I heard about a nearby primate rehabilitation sanctuary and thought, ‘Wow, primate rehab. Is this like the Betty Ford Clinic for monkeys?’” laughs Rowe. “We had a couple of days in the area, and even though we were there for Shark Week, we decided to check it out for Dirty Jobs. We showed up, and it turns out the people that run the place are well-meaning, but kind of crazy. The center is located deep in the jungle, and they have twenty-five Vervet monkeys living in their house. These Vervets were running amok. Among them was an alpha male who hated us from the second we stepped out of our vehicle. He saw us as a threat, and within minutes of our arrival, he came flying out of the trees and cut the top of my head open. He then circled around and got our camera girl. He didn’t bite her, just bounded off her head and scratched her. The sun was setting, the roads were too bad to risk driving back in the dark, and we were pinned down at this monkey sanctuary, being held hostage by insane primates.
“We were quickly hustled into the house, but as we were discussing ways to guard each other’s backs, the kitchen door flew open. A gray streak raced across the floor. My sound man, Chris, started to scream. I looked over and he was down on the floor in a puddle of blood. In that instant, the monkey had bitten Chris to the bone right under his right calf, severing his Achilles tendon. We were truly under attack, and the owners of the center were completely ineffectual. They took us out to a shed in the jungle with bunk beds and gave us sticks to defend ourselves with. All of this happened even before we’d started filming the story we went there for! We didn’t have any other choice but to wait it out. I bandaged Chris up the best I could, and when we finally made it to the hospital the next day, he took thirty stitches. I’ve seen every feel-good monkey movie, from Bedtime for Bonzo to War Games. That’s not the way it is. In the real world, monkeys have mouths filled with very sharp teeth.”
Rowe hasn’t lost any sleep over the incident, or most of the other temp jobs he’s held during the taping of a Dirty Jobs episode, each of which usually takes two days to complete.
“Most of my nightmares tend to come before I do a job, not after. Case in point…early on in the show I went to Shawnee, Oklahoma, to noodle for catfish. We were scheduled to shoot the episode the following morning,” Rowe recalls. “That night, I was flipping through channels and came across a two-hour documentary sponsored by the Texas Board of Health called Please Don’t Noodle. It was a public appeal for people to stop doing this job that I was about to do. Noodling is an ancient form of underwater fishing perfected by the Native Americans that’s now illegal in most states, but not in Oklahoma. You go to a bayou, swamp or river, wade up to your neck, and feel around in the mud with your bare hands for catfish. You stick your hand into a hole, hoping the catfish will bite you, and when they do, you grab them by their bottom jaw and pull them out by hand. It’s big business in Oklahoma. You’ve got fishermen from the big city that sign up for these noodling tours going home with less fingers than when they started.
“I saw it done with my own eyes and I tried it. I got a twenty-pounder; they go up to a hundred pounds. Guys were pulling out forty- and fifty-pounders all day. These things are big, but it isn’t their teeth you have to worry about. It’s their lips, which are like sandpaper. If they grab onto your hand and spin, that sandpaper takes the skin right off. The real horror of noodling, however, is that there are also alligators, copperheads, water moccasins, snapping turtles, and gar lurking in those catfish holes. Gar is the demon-spawn of the eel and the alligator. Picture a thick, muscular snake with evil teeth. So, you’re looking for catfish, but you can wind up with anything hanging off your arm. There are only a couple of these jobs I would never do again. Noodling is one of them.”
Since Dirty Jobs premiered in November of 2003, Rowe’s old Tylenol days have come back to haunt him. He’s had his contact lenses melted off his eyes while working as a blacksmith, and to date he’s suffered four bruised ribs. The latest happened during a segment in which Rowe was restoring freshwater streams by knocking down illegal dams that prevented steelhead salmon from spawning.
Claudia Pellarini
“I went to swing the sledgehammer and it got away from me. I fell off the dam, right onto my face,” says Rowe. “I’m also missing two toenails at the moment due to a cow trampling my foot in the episode where I worked as a cattle wrangler and rancher.”
Rowe took his knocks hosting Shark Week, too, and suffered numerous bites to his left leg during the testing of an experimental anti-shark armor suit designed by ocean biologist Jeremiah Sullivan.
“The suit looks just like the kind of chain mail armor Galahad or Lancelot would have worn. It’s made of 400,000 very small stainless steel rings spot-welded together. You put this thing on to go scuba diving, and it’s supposed to provide a certain measure of safety with it. My job was to help Jeremiah build the suit, then test it,” says Rowe. “We went a few miles out off the coast of Nassau, threw a couple of pounds of chum into the water, and created a feeding frenzy of about forty sharks. The water was a boiling mass of gray skin and white teeth. Jeremiah and I jumped into our suits, took the chum basket down to the ocean floor, and the sharks followed, creating the same frenzy at a depth of fifty-five feet down as they did on the surface. They latched onto shoulders, arms, and legs and tried to tear us to pieces. The suit works, I’m happy to report, but if the sharks grab you hard enough and shake, the rings start to come undone and small openings occur and a wayward tooth will get through.”
Carl Roessler/Getty Images
With his Shark Week duties over, Rowe is once again up to his elbows in sludge and sweat for a third season of Dirty Jobs. His latest hard labors include operating an antique printing press that runs with overpoweringly noxious ink, working in the garbage pit of a trash-to-electricity plant, and dismantling floats from the most famous parade in America, the Tournament of Roses, long after the clock’s run out at the Rose Bowl college football game.
“Unfortunately for the guys that clean up after the parade, those floats, which are made out of fruit and flowers, have been sitting in a hot warehouse for weeks, so you can imagine what it was like,” says Rowe. Making TV is a dirty job. But making Dirty Jobs might just be the dirtiest one of all.