Sunday, September 30, 2007

back home from chadwick, mo (yay for manual labor and chainsaws!)

Okay, so I know that my last couple of posts have been (painfully) lengthy, and I will try to remedy that from here on out. (lord knows how many more disclaimers like this i'll write in the next year)

We just returned from a national forest in the Ozarks, near Ava, Missouri. We spent the week doing lots of manual labor in a national forest-- mostly to repair the ATV trails to make them safer and sturdier. The forest we went to is one of the few in the country that allows ATVs, and as a result, the trails get quite a lot of traffic over the years; but the problem is that the ATVers aren't just driving all over the trails, but the forest floor as well.

Most of the people that go to this forest have been going for many years and know the trails better than some of the rangers do. The ATVers come not only for the pleasure of driving their vehicles all over the beautiful forest, but also for the thrill of going as fast as they can, wherever they can. Consequently, the trails that the park service has tried to improve by installing con-lock blocks, interlocking concrete blocks which help reduce erosion and discourage speed, have only encouraged more erosion where the ATVers zip around the blocks.

On the first day of service, we were split up into 3 teams: one for each work site on a particular trail that needed to be patched up and protected from further damage. Fresh, clean con-lock blocks were delivered to us and all we had to do was dig up the rocky soil and install the blocks. The areas that had been damaged by ATVers driving around the blocks were subsequently covered up with large dead trees and sticks which I helped weave together so that they wouldn't just roll away if someone stubborn enough decided to try driving over them.

While the work was hard and the sweat was plentiful, it was a good day's work and we walked back to our campsite famished and fulfilled. We cooked 16 pounds of spaghetti, with venison sausage in the sauce, and had plenty for everyone to have seconds and more. We also had salad, and a surprise from the team that had gone grocery shopping: fancy cheesecake. Some slices had caramel and some were marbled and some had chocolate chips on top. We reveled in our new motto: work hard, eat hard.

After chatting around the campfire and showers and a very encouraging debriefing from our group leader, Evan, we finally settled down and went to bed in our massive tents under the gorgeous stars. The next morning, we got up at 7:15 to make our lunches and eat our oatmeal, and were at the new work sites by 8. There was a new team in charge of sawing and swamping. Swampers have a very important task: they pull limbs and brush away from the sawyer after having been felled, so that the sawyer doesn't trip while operating his chainsaw. The sawyers and swampers mostly cut down dead trees that ran the risk of falling on the trails, or cutting down live trees so as to block off dangerous or eroded trails.

The first time I watched a tree fall, I was speechless. There is so much power and energy in a tree that you never encounter by just walking by it; but the sounds and movement and vibrations you experience as this massive, solemn thing bends and creaks and slams into the ground are phenomenal. The death of a tree by the hand of man is sad, but the tree's last words are awe-inspiring.

_to be continued_

Sunday, September 23, 2007

"Boat Access," pirate pranks, and orienteering in the dark

okay, okay, I'm aware that I need to work on being more concise. I'll try.

So we unloaded at "Boat Access" and then stood around for a while, for reasons somewhat unknown to us. We saw Kathleen, the leader of the blue team, which was also dropped off at Boat Access, talking to our leader, Russel, and Bruce, the big boss-- who mostly wandered from group to group stealthily through the woods. Anyway, we waited for a little while and stood around next to a pile of old life jackets on the ground while still examining our weird maps.

I was so excited to be out of those vans and ready to start our adventure that waiting was just about the last thing that I wanted to do. I was practically bouncing up and down like a little kid wondering why we haven't gone into the candy store yet. C'mon, c'mon, the door is riiight there! let's go in! let's go in! candy candy candy!!! So, waiting for instruction was obviously not on my agenda.

Finally, Russel came back over to us and led us up the road a little bit so we could sit in a "raccoon circle" and start learning how we would make group decisions. A raccoon circle happens when the whole group sits, or stands, in a tight circle while all holding a rope tied in a big loop. As long as we are all holding the rope, we are all involved in the decision-making process, and we don't break the circle until the group has reached a unanimous consensus.

This was also a bit of a struggle for me, since there are some rather passive, submissive people in the group, and I did not want to wait around for them to hesitantly voice their opinions. I bit my tongue, though, reminding myself that this is not a youth group or a summer camp. This is my job, and I have to live and work with these people for the next year. I have to treat these people with respect and patience, because they are my coworkers first; friendships will come later.

Russel showed us his much more detailed map which had our prescribed route drawn on it in Sharpie. He said we would only get to look at it for about 20 minutes and then he would put it away for the rest of the trip, so we had better commit it to memory. It was hard to compare it to our maps, which did not have nearly as many "topo" lines or trails on them because of how Xerox machines break down the quality of images a little bit after each copy; but we did sort it out, and were eager to set out in the canoes.

Then we waited some more.

Then we finally got the canoes unloaded, the packs tied inside heavy duty trash bags, in case any of us were to tip over, and the canoe teams divided up among our 4 canoes. The tricky thing about navigating Devil's Kitchen Lake is that it is "filled with underwater snags, the stumps of dead trees from the valley forest that once lived where the lake is today. Fishermen are advised to be aware of these snags. Swimming is forbidden in Devils Kitchen Lake." --Good thing we didn't have Wikipedia with us when we were ready to set off on our journey. Maybe, in some cases, ignorance really can be (slightly) blissful.

I ended up being on point in my canoe, so I was in charge of telling the person steering in the back which way to go in order to dodge upcoming stumps and branches, and also how to get to our docking point. Since we were usually the last canoe in the line of 4, I could watch what the other canoes did, and plan the best route based on who had to row backward out of a clump of dangerous stumps, and who was able to successfully glide around them.

At one point, Russel called all four of the boats together and we floated, rafted by holding onto each other with our oars. He said we could either tie our canoes together with rope and try to navigate the lake in pairs, or we could tie the canoes up in trees once we docked, in order to play a prank on the next group that needed to use them. We opted for the prank.

No one ran aground (well, technically "atree") and we docked safely, with nearly an hour of sunlight left to aid in our pirate pranking. I say "pirate" because by this point, we were already excited that the next day would be National Talk Like a Pirate Day, and were celebrating early. Malcom, my canoe's steer-er, was most enthused about being a pirate. While the rest of the group helped hide oars high in trees, string them out over the lake by tying them off to a stump about 20 feet off shore, and hide the last pair of oars underneath a canoe in the grass; he and I planned out our walking route to get to the campsite, and composed a pirate riddle, which we subsequently tied to a tall plant for the next group to find. The riddle read something like this:

"Heeeear yee!
He who seeks ye oars strung above the salty seas, like ye brethren, must first be findin' hidden treasures aground.
-The mullet scalping, viking dueling, pirate espionage squaaaarrrd"

As it turned out, the group that ended up finding these oars dangling overhead never saw the amusing note, because they were busy tending to their leader, who was having an asthma attack upon seeing this new challenge. They had been the most lost out of any other group, never found their campsite to sleep at, which meant they also never got to replenish their water for day 2. So basically, the pirates made a new enemy, instead of entertaining friends. They also didn't find the two oars we left for them on land, so one of them tried to wade out into the lake to get the oars strung out over the water; then they returned to the land and used a big stick to gondola out to the stump and untie the oars. Sucks to be them.

_more later_

p.s. here's a topo map of the area we hiked.

http://cewalter.tripod.com/id128.htm

Saturday, September 22, 2007

back from the wild!!

This blog will, for the next year, be the chronicle of my adventures with Americorps St. Louis' Emergency Response Team (ERT).

Last night I returned from the Illinois wilderness, south of Carbondale, where we did a trip called "Quest/Immersion," (sort of two trips in one). Not only is this the only ERT Americorps program in the country, but this trip is also unique to the St. Louis Americorps chapter. We also found out that we made a 1 in 5 cut to get onto this team, and that FEMA relies heavily on us for disaster relief all over the midwest. So basically, I went on a unique trip with a really unique group of people, AND I COULDN'T HAVE HAD A BETTER TIME!!

I've come to nickname Americorps "the hippie army" because it is like the US Army in that there is a lot of unknown and fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants about what we will be doing, when we will be doing it, and where we will end up, for an amorphous amount of time. I call it the "hippie army," though, because it is A LOT less militant than the Army, and a lot more about being in touch with your feelings, Native American ideals about stewardship of the Earth, and going with the flow. There is never a fixed agenda, and if there is, it is certainly never in writing, much less etched in stone.

While these observations may be having you thinking, oh god what have I let this kid go get herself into?? --don't worry. It's a fabulous test of my patience, and I never once felt like the leadership didn't have a firm grasp on the big picture of what needed to get done, nor did I ever feel the need to question their ability or competence in getting those prescribed goals met. This is, after all, the second oldest Americorps chapter in the country, and the directors of the program, Kathleen and Bruce, have been the grandparents of the group since it was conceived.

Okay, okay. Enough back-story- it's time for the Quest!

We arrived at the Americorps office at 8 on Monday morning. We were told beforehand to bring our belongings separated into two giant trash bags. One was for the two days we would spend hiking and camping in the wilderness, and the other for the three days we would spend at an actual camp. My old buddy Ben dropped me and my trash bags off at 8:01 and and I went inside to get my pack, which would serve as my slightly more substantial suitcase for the week. We were split into groups of about 15 (there were almost 90 people, including the leadership team) and were subsequently given plastic flagging so we could more easily retrieve our bags once unloaded from the trailer upon arrival in Illinois.

Aside: The thing with Quest is that it's all very hush-hush. All we knew was that we were going into a national forest south of Carbondale, and we would be sweating, hiking, and carrying extra group gear besides what we packed just for ourselves... but other than that, we had no idea what to expect out there.

So we packed our trash bags for Quest and the group gear into our hiking packs, and then flagged our camp bags with our team color and loaded those second bags into the trailer. Once the canoes were hitched up to one of the pickup trucks, our bags were all loaded via an assembly line passing gear from the building into the trailer, and then, finally, we loaded ourselves into the hot vans with weak a/c; we could hit the road. I think we left around 10:30-- which was apparently amazingly snappy performance compared to last year's departure.

We drove east for about 3 hours with only a vague notion of where we were going. When we arrived at a picnic area on the edge of the park, we all got out and ate lunch (PB & J on pita bread), loaded the rest of the food into our packs, and had a big group meeting standing in a circle on the gorgeously green grass. Bruce, the executive Director, led the meeting, reminding us about things such as team work, anticipating each other's needs, proper blister care, and what some Native American chief once said about how our lives are made up of concentric circles, not unlike the rings of a tree.

We finally got back on the road after our 2-hour lunch, and along the way, (our small team of 15) was handed mysterious maps of where we were, and where we would be going. The maps were laminated and had boundary lines delineating the edges of the wildlife preserve, the surrounding counties, and a lake called "Devil's Kitchen." They were topographical maps, but they did not have a compass rose on them, nor did they have a scale or legend, describing what the different types of lines meant.

The van was filled with questions that went unanswered: Is that a trail or a road? Are we on a highway or just a path? Is that a boundary or trail? How old is this map? Are these trails still there, or are they grown over and thus useless? Which way is north? How far apart are these "topo" lines? Is the grid in square miles? kilometers? tens of miles? Where are we going? Where are we now? How much longer until we reach our drop off point? Where is our drop off point?

The list goes on and on, but instead of getting frustrated with our leader's apparent silence and vagueness, our group pulled together and started scouting out clues on the road to figure out how the map corresponded with reality. We watched the clock on the van (since we were told not to bring watches) to see how long it took to get from one place to another. We paid attention to the curvature of the lake's shoreline as we drove around a small part of it. We noted what side of the tree trunks the shadows were on. We decided that we were headed past Little Grassy Lake, over to Devil's Kitchen Lake, and that when we finally stopped, we had arrived a small black dot called "Boat Access." We pointed out that it took no more than 5 minutes to drive from Little Grassy to Devil's Kitchen. We decided the grid was in square miles and that the top of the map was north.


_to be continued_