Mario Eusi & Maggie Nutria Trappers, USDA Wildlife Services, Cambridge, Md.

You want a dirty job?

Then try trudging through upwards of twenty-five miles of quicksand-like mud each week, sporting thick rubber waders, and suffering harassment by insatiable mosquitoes—all while hoping to catch the Eastern Shore’s archenemy: the nutria. Such is the life of Mario Eusi, a full-time trapper for the nutria eradication project, run by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). “Certain marshes are hard marsh—you don’t sink in it very much,” says the thirty-five-year-old former landscaper. “Other marshes are sloppy, and you sink almost up to your neck. I’ve fallen down hundreds of times. In the summer, it can feel kind of good, but in the winter, you wish that you hadn’t done it.”

For the last four-and-a-half years, Eusi and his faithful sidekick, Maggie, a Chesapeake Bay retriever, have been trapping the invasive species, notorious for uprooting and devouring marsh grass, which results in widespread erosion. To date, Eusi and the project’s other seventeen trappers have combed 120,000 of the Shore’s half-million acres of marshland and trapped more than 10,000 of the furry critters.(Before taking pity on these tidal terrorists, consider this: The USDA estimates that nutria have destroyed 8,000 acres of marshlands in Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge alone.) “Handling the animals is not that dirty, although they’re usually covered in ticks,” says Eusi, who’s been known to wrap his exposed Mario Eusi & Maggie Nutria Trappers, USDA Wildlife Services, Cambridge, Md. skin with duct tape to keep the bugs at bay. “It’s the mud—I get completely covered with marsh muck. But I’d rather be dirty in the marsh than be in an office and be clean.”–K.B.

Randy Roof Waterfowl Cleaner, Chesapeake Outdoors, Chester, Md.

For the past fifteen years, September through January, Randy Roof is up to his baseball cap in feathers. As a waterfowl cleaner for Chesapeake Outdoors, he cleans up to 350 birds a day during hunting season. 

His office is the concrete-floored back room at the Chester, Md., sporting goods store, where he and six others perform their trade. Once he registers the bird’s species and the hunter’s name in a Maryland Department of Natural Resources logbook, it takes about two minutes to run the bird through a de-feathering machine, an electric mechanism with a bunch of rubber fingers that spin in a circle. The feathers are collected into burlap bags and sold for comforter and pillow filler. “You get a lot of feathers on you, and it’s really bloody,” says Roof, who works the floor of the store in the off season. “And then you have to stick your hand in the birds to pull the guts out. The most tricky part of it is handling the very sharp knives. I’ve got plenty of scars on my hands to prove it.”

Once cleaned, the birds look similar to oven-stuffer roasters. And though most hunters wait for their cleaned birds, some drop them off and never return. “We donate the meat to the local Moose lodge,” says Roof. “Or sometimes, customers will come in and ask if we have any left over. None of it gets thrown away.”

While hunters have their own camo-laden couture, bird cleaners are less fashion conscious, preferring jeans and a T-shirt, with only a plastic apron worn for protection. “By the time it’s all said and done,” says Roof, “it gets pretty messy. We use a lot of bleach and water and scrub the floors and the machines really well. It can look like bloody murder back there.”

So what keeps Roof interested in his dirty job? “It’s fun. I like it,” he says. “You get back there, and you get to cut up and listen to the radio and carry on. And you don’t have to deal with the customers."–K.B.

Tony Remeikis Waterman, Tilghman Island, Md.

Working on the water is the Bay’s oldest profession—and by far one of the dirtiest. Just ask Tony Remeikis. He’s been oystering on skipjacks since his high school days. “There were plenty of oysters back then,” says fifty-one-year-old Remeikis. “You could make $700 to $800 a day. There’s no wear and tear—except on your body.

All you need is a pair of gloves.”

And a good set of foul weather gear helps, too. This is one job where it’s near impossible to stay dry. From 5 a.m. to 5 p.m., Remeikis and the other three crew members of the Thomas Clyde, lower and raise the one-hundred-year-old ship’s two motorized dredges in excess of three hundred times a day, scraping the Bay’s murky bottom for the increasingly rare bivalves. “It’s dirty enough,” he says. “You get soaked and muddy, and it’s cold in the winter. Water splashes over us and waves hit us. It ain’t too much fun.”

Each cycle of the dredge is called a lick, and each lick can produce up to four bushels of oysters. The load of shells is then dumped on deck, where six-foot-three-inch, 210-pound Remeikis crawls through the slimy debris, culling through rocks and muck in search of healthy, live oysters. “We might get a minute’s break before the dredge comes back,” says Remeikis. “And when it does come back, it gets us soaked with Bay water all over again.”

And the catch of the day isn’t always fresh. “Some of the oysters have already opened and died,” explains Remeikis. “The smell can be awful. It’s hard to explain—like rotten fish and dead stuff. But the worst part is the hard, dirty muscle work. It’s not a job for the timid.”—K.B. 

Kevin MCClarren Oyster Aquaculturist, Marinetics, Cambridge, Md.

It may take a tough man to make a tender chicken, but it takes a dirty man to make a clean oyster. A very dirty man.

Every day, Kevin McClarren, general manager for Marinetics, Maryland’s only private oyster hatchery, gets plastered in the sandy crud that covers the company’s four million oysters in the Choptank River. “Over time, the oysters get dirty,” says McClarren. “Silt falls on them, and we need to clean off the worms, anemones, shrimp, and crabs that grow on them. We get really dirty so the oysters don’t have to. That’s the way the chefs like it.”

To clean the oysters, McClarren and Marinetics’ four other employees wade into the Choptank and haul several of their 3,000 rafts—what McClarren calls “gigantic floating reefs with anchors"—onto a pier. Suspended in the water from these six-foot-by-two-foot rafts is a mesh bag filled with anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 oysters. McClarren and crew painstakingly dump each oyster into the top of a six-foot-long metal tumbler outfitted with an electric motor and spray bar. “The oysters basically get a shower and come out clean on the other end,” he says of the process. Once clean, the oysters go back in the bag, and the raft is dragged back into the water. Each oyster gets washed six to eight times over the course of about two years, until it grows to at least three-and-a-half inches. “When an oyster is ready for market, we clean it with a big, fifteen-horsepower industrial power washer.”

McClarren, who has a degree in marine biology, tries to muster some pride in his work appearance. But even with commercial fishing gear worn over his T-shirts and jeans, his clothes take a beating. “I go to work in the morning looking as bad as people do at the end of the day,” he laughs. “After a few weeks, new work clothes look really bad."—S.A.

Mike Provost Marine Technician, Osprey Marine Composites, Deale, Md.

What’s messier? The wet or dry jobs in a boat- yard? Mike Provost knows both are equally dirty. And loud, itchy, and exhausting. 

Provost is the only Osprey Marine Composites employee trained to operate the hydraulic planer and the baking soda blaster, which are used to remove bottom paint from a boat. “The hydraulic planer works like a wood planer, shaving off the boat’s paint, gel coat, fiberglass, and barnacles,” says Provost. This water-cooled planer ensures that he gets sopping wet, even when wearing a waterproof jacket. “The first swipe you take, the suit starts to leak, and you have soup all over you,” he says.

After building a huge plastic tent around the boat, Provost dons a Tyvek suit, full face mask, gloves, boots, and the kind of ear protection worn on airport tarmacs, then fires up the pressurized, diesel planer. The only thing clean about the entire operation is the breathing air that’s forced through the space-suit-like (and leaky) hood that Provost is required to wear. The fourteen-pound planer, which he holds above his head for most of the two to three days it takes to strip a forty-foot powerboat (one three-inch-wide strip at a time), ensures that he can barely hold up his arms by quitting time. “My free gym membership is right here on the job,” he jokes. And don’t forget the “incredible itchiness” of the fiberglass or its scent as it breaks down. “It smells like cat urine,” quips Provost. 

The work is painstakingly tedious. Rain or shine, he can’t help but wear his work. “If the bottom paint is blue, I’ll be blue,” he laughs. “I’ll come back down to the shop, and the guys will give me a hard time and tell me I’ve been killing Smurfs. I can usually manage to get clean, though, except for my fingernails.”

So what keeps Provost, who studied boat-building, coming back, day after day, year after year, to such a dirty job? Simple: The pay is better than regular work in the boat shop. But that doesn’t keep him from dreaming of a cleaner job. “When I find a sucker to do the planing, I’ll hand it over, because it’s pretty miserable."—S.A. 

Steve Sarro Veterinary Technician, Salisbury Zoo, Salisbury, Md.

And you Thought your job was bad. Since joining the Salisbury Zoo a year-and-a-half ago, Steve Sarro has spent each workday thinking about poop, talking about poop, and cleaning up poop. From the tiniest chorus frog to the largest American bison, the zoo’s inhabitants produce a lot of excrement, about one hundred pounds per day. But Sarro doesn’t mind. It’s all part of the job. “It’s really no different than cleaning up after your dog, except with a jaguar, there’s a lot more poo,” he says. 

What really excites Sarro, though, is a well-formed stool. As manager of the zoo’s animal medical program, it’s his duty to collect fecal samples twice a year from every one of the more than two hundred animals. “Poo can tell you a lot about the animal, whether it’s feeling well and eating enough,” he explains. “We’re looking for parasites, blood in the stool, or anything else out of the ordinary.”

Growing up in Havertown, Pa., he got a memorable introduction to zoo poo on outings to the Philadelphia Zoo with his grandfather. “The gorillas would always throw poop at my grandfather. Bamboo the gorilla got him once.” Undaunted, Sarro studied biology at the University of Delaware, then spent nineteen years at the Baltimore Zoo, first as curator of birds then as curator of birds, and mammals.

Sarro plays favorites when it comes to feces: “Llama poo is the best, with its little beans that are easy to rake up.” But there are two species who really make him earn his money. The spider monkeys must be shifted to another pen before Sarro and his colleagues can clean excrement from the ground and off of tree branches. “If we didn’t move them, they’d rip our faces off.” And the vultures bring a whole other bodily fluid to the party with their habit of vomiting as a defense mechanism. “We always try to make sure that they’ve not eaten when we’re cleaning up, but no matter how long it’s been since their last meal, they’ll find something to spit up. I’ve been vomited on many times, and there’s very little that smells worse than vulture yak."—S.A. 

Mike Rowe Host, ‘Dirty Jobs’

Oprah’s got her signature white couch. Letterman, a wooden desk. Regis and Kelly, oversized directors’ chairs. But “Dirty Jobs” front man and Baltimore native Mike Rowe prefers to host his hit Discovery Channel show in a less formal setting, preferably poop-laden sewers, dank coal mines, or putrid recycling heaps. 

In this germ-phobic culture, lousy with Purell, purified water, and air sanitizers, Rowe is a man who thrives on mingling with the entrepreneurs of the unsavory and trying his hand at their gnarly, albeit necessary, careers. Perhaps the episode that most deserves a spot in Rowe’s “Hall of Foul” featured the Wisconsin psychiatrist turned septic tank cleaner. “He lowered me into the hold of a pumping station on a harness where the smell was indescribable,” recalls Rowe. “When I asked him afterward what had happened in his life to make him choose this profession, he said, ‘I got tired of dealing with people’s sh--.’”

Rowe, who claims to have held more than 151 jobs in his forty-five years, including a four-year stint singing with the Baltimore Opera and pushing simulated diamonds on QVC, has even brought the show to the Eastern Shore, filming a segment on crabbing with Cambridge-based J. M. Clayton Seafood. “I’ve fished for salmon, shark, cod, haddock, and Alaskan king crab on the Bering Sea,” says Rowe, who spent several teenage summers working outside of Reedville, Va., on a menhaden boat captained by his great uncle. “To this day, though, my fondest memories of pulling food out of the water come from the Chesapeake Bay. As a kid, it was chicken necks and twine. On ‘Dirty Jobs,’ it was the real deal. It’s an honest day’s work, and I’d stack it up against just about any other job on the water.”

A closet writer who has several books in the works about his adventures in dirt, Rowe admits that it’s a delicate balance, serving up the cheeky wit expected of a TV show host while giving overdue respect to the people who make the world’s grimiest jobs go round. “The only honest way to celebrate the competence of these people is to do the work with them,” says Rowe, who spends at least 275 days a year on the road. “It’s an opportunity to simply be a fly on the wall, pay an honest tribute, and say goodbye.”

So which soap does the world’s filthiest man use to remove the pungent proof of his dirty day? “Lava soap works pretty well,” he says. “And I use Dawn to get the grease and oil out of my hair. Soap just doesn’t do it."—K.B.