The group with the circle tattoo

I have mixed feelings about explaining my stick and poke circle tattoo. I flutter between wanting to be asked about it because I love it, to balking at telling people the real and important story behind it. The story of my entire season in New Hampshire, and the story of losing my friend Reed. A simple question about my tattoo could become a huge conversation that the person who asked about my tattoo didn't necessarily want to enter. That story a hugely personal thing to share. But then here I am displaying this new symbol right in the open on my arm. As I go back and forth with my own feeling about sharing, I've come to the conclusion that I will never ask about someone's tattoo unless I know them quite well. 

The circle is a symbol of many things. For Reed, it meant pretty much nothing, just a funny idea of a tattoo to get. For the rest of us, it means community-- how we circled up everytime we met up to eat or to work. It means connection to each other and to Reed. It is an aerial view of a cake, or a rock bar. It means nothing and everything at the same time. For me it's also a highlight of fairly shitty birthday. I am usually really excited about my birthday, but last year it came four days after Reed died. I took it off facebook, I avoided it, and no one at Bear Brook even knew it was my birthday until the evening when they wondered why all these cakes my mom had bought had suddenly appeared. I came to realize over the day that I had made this connection between grieving and not celebrating my birthday, but really they were separate things and it was ok to be wished a happy birthday, because it meant more connection with my friends who I cared about but didn't have it in me to reach out to. Getting the tattoo after that realization turned my night around.

My tattoo is something I think about constantly. When I push my long sleeves up I touch it, when I have short sleeves I look at it. It never makes me sad, but it is a way that I remember what happened. Sometimes I am still in denial that Reed drowned, that those weeks of sadness weren't sprung from losing Reed in the river on the beautiful September evening. I look at my permanent tattoo and know that it is real. I think about the quick decision to get it, the excitement in the lodge of being the 5th one to get it that night. Of sitting and drinking a beer to ignore the stabbing needle and getting distracted by a fun conversation with Aimee. Of waking up and looking at it and loving it. Of how we all sliiightly peer pressured others to get it, how beautiful it was to see Calvin tattooing Steff and Drake and Maura on the field in North Conway during our big hitch meet up.

I love my circle. I know it's permanent, but I check for it because once I had a dream that it rubbed off. To sum it up: It's a reminder of loss and also of belonging, it's my favorite thing that I wish I didn't have. As much as I feel conflicted about explaining it, it's a way to open up conversation. My circle and Reed's death are things that will always be there but I will get more and more used to their presence/ realness. 

Also to insert a HP reference that maybe doesn't make sense but it still about circles: Because a circle has no beginning!

Ode to staying in touch

As I once again start gearing up to transition jobs, I’ve been thinking a lot about the transient life I’ve been leading. Every few months I meet new people and we form a new community complete with our own inside jokes and memories. My current job is slightly different. I did want to work here for the community – I live and work with the same group of awesome ladies, and there’s a networks of four huts total, each with a few people who I have come to know over the past couple of months. I haven’t forged deep relationships with the other hut people because I just rarely see them, but we share an interesting job and there are always stories to share.

The real reason I took this job to be back in Maine, and bide my time here while I figured out what would come next. After I ended my life-changing experience of living communally with 28 others at Bear Brook, I wanted some time to recharge. I wanted a job that was interesting but not mentally taxing. I wanted to have time to be in touch with my network of friends spread all across the country. Time to write postcards (one per day, at least, and I’ve stuck to that!) and even time to write lengthy and important letters in this cozy mountain hut that I currently call home. But most importantly, I wanted to be close to people I was already close with. I was reminded of this last week when I popped by Bar Harbor for a quick 20 hour visit. I stayed at my friend Eloise’s house, and we stayed up catching up and chatting about all kinds of things, including how much we cherish time spent actually visiting people. I do it all—I call, text, snail mail, email, facebook stalk, snapchat… but really nothing compares to visiting someone in person. To get a chance to see their room and their collection of trinkets, to hug them, to see their expressions when they tell you a story, to cook with them (or in the case of most of my recent friend visits, to eat the delicious food they cook for you), to bring them gifts from your travels or current home, to go on a new adventure together.  

I feel lucky and stretched thin at the same time, because as I bounce from job to job and land in various wonderful communities, I feel more and more desperate to keep in touch. I’m grateful for this time in Maine that I’ve used to see most everyone I know here, mostly from college. Even if we just spent an hour together, it was still time in-person. I hadn’t quite realized until I moved back to New England that I had a really amazing community here. I can drive to most any part of the state (well, coastal areas let’s be real) and find an old friend to have coffee with. That’s pretty neat, and something that takes a while to build. When I move Westward to start my new job in Idaho, I’ll be missing these Northern friends more than I think I can realize at this point. I didn’t mean to come back to New England at all, but I wouldn’t trade my 10 months in New Hampshire (which led to my current winter in Maine) for the world. This area draws people back, and sometimes they just never leave. I have always said that I didn’t want to be drawn back to Maine, that I liked living here for college but I’m outta here and on to new faces and places. But jeez, I’m just feeling really glad that I ignored Past Annie and let New England draw me back for another round.

But, I have a lot more places I want to see, so I’m making the decision to cut the cord of familiarity and that rugged rocky Maine beauty and head out to find my next community. I’ll be once again living communally at a remote base and on the trail with a trail crew corps in the Salmon-Challis National Forest in Idaho.  The lure of my next chapter in the great West makes it difficult to feel present here in Maine, but I’m going to try. And you can bet that for my last month here, for my trip down to DC, my measly day in DC and on my road trip to Idaho in April I’ll be stopping by to see as many friends as humanly possible!

Learning by doing

Oh boy, i've been living up at my "hut" for over a month now and I have yet to blog about it! Typical! So instead of blogging about actual life in the hut, I'm just going to tell you about my skiing adventures. And show you some pictures of my commute.
Here is Stratton Brook Hut, perched on a hill:

Before even seeing the location of my hut, I made it my goal to be able to ski down the entire way without taking off my skis by the end of the season. Then, I got to my hut. I live on the top of a hill, and there are two main ways to get down. One is a winding snowshoe trail, and the other is the Maine Huts Trail, which is a series of sharp switchbacks down the mountain, tellingly named Newton's Revenge. The handful of times I went down the mountain for my days off I walked the switchbacks and didn't put my skis on until I reach the very flat section. I even sledded the switchbacks, which got me down faster but in a slightly less terrifying way than skiing. I thought I should probably let go of my goal cuz that hill is SCARY and I do not really know how to turn.
Here is my hut-mate Hannah (a bonafide excellent skiier) crushing the last section of Newton's Revenge:

Then came the perfectly timed snowfall. We had no guests for the day on Thursday, so the morning after we got a storm of slushy snow/ ice pellet stuff, I headed down the mountain from my back door. It was perfectly groomed in the early hours of the morning by our resident groomer Mark, and I was the first one to use the trail. And so I could snowplow to my hearts desire. And guess what?? I made it down the .7 miles of switchbacks in under ten minutes, feeling exhilarated and proud and shaky. And I skiied the entire rest of the way to my car (3 miles total) without walking one bit. It definitely required some talking myself into it, and yelling "SHIT" a bunch after some hills, but I feel quite accomplished. And now I will probably never do it again unless we get another perfect snowfall. But hey, I can check it off the list so booyah!
Here is my elated shadow after completing the downhill ski:

A normal summers day

I never got a chance to journal about the day of September 13^th. The evening was the worst evening of my life, but when I think back on the day itself it was such a normal summers day, working at Saint-Gaudens towards the end of a goofy, simple, and thematic hitch. I’m not sure how true this was, but I sometimes felt like Saint-Gaudens was a taboo subject to bring up with the rest of the Bear Brookers who weren’t there. I felt conflicted because I didn’t want to alarm my friends by mentioning the place where our collective tragedy happened, but I also had so many beautiful and fun-filled memories from the same spot.

I spent a week without mentioning it, until finally we were able to share a slideshow of pictures from our time there. Hollie and I sat in front of the entire group and clicked through all of our silly group photo shoots, and tried to make light of this show-and-tell of the last pictures taken of Reed, all the way up to his last hour. Sharing at times was difficult—I was hyper aware of how everyone was reacting to the photos and of what stories I was telling. But in the end I was so glad that we were able to share all the good times we had in the week prior to Reed’s death. It was so important for others to know how beautiful our campsite was, how calm the river looked, how we had had a positive experience every other day of the hitch, how every dinner was a different weird theme.

Here’s my memory of this last workday.

We began the day by waking up to our boss Hilary asleep in the back of her truck outside of our house. She arrived while we were all asleep, and we were super excited to see her. We all drove over to park headquarters and got a tutorial on the weed wackers from one of our supervisors. We goofed around and took pictures of the little cowboy hat on tools and such, and then eventually started work back at our campsite. Our task was to clear away brush that had grown around the historic buildings. It wasn’t glamorous work, but yanking out large swaths of plants is super satisfying. The day was really hot, and I ate loads of wild grapes while we were yanking them out of trees.

The morning started off cold and cloudy. Reed spent a good chunk of the morning by the stoop of the yellow house we used at home base. He was ripping out plants from the stonework below the stairs. He ended up taking out all the stones, pulling out the weeds, and putting the stones back in place. He brought me over at one point to see his progress, and I remember exclaiming over how neat and good it looked. At some point we had to have a safety meeting. Hollie and I called everyone over and we had a check in about all the concerns at our new worksite. This came up because someone had found some bees swarming next to the house.

Marcella, another supervisor, came to visit for the afternoon. We spent a fun couple of hours weeding the stone wall and gossiping about Bear Brook stuff. Mid afternoon Reed had um intestinal issues and he was in the outhouse for a while. So he missed our park contact person coming over to give us a tour of the big white house on the property. We got to learn all sorts of fun information about the house and its history. 

By the time we were ready to tour the old barn, Reed joined us. Some historic preservation people were surveying the barn so we didn’t spend much time there, just looked around and tried to avoid sniffing too much bat guano. We then got a tour of the run-down house next door. I think at this point we were trying to ask our contact Steve as many questions as we could because it was getting to be the end of the workday and we didn’t want to go back to weeding. I’m pretty sure this worked—we probably ended our day with a debrief of sorts, put away tools, and lounged around. However, Reed had a workhorse work ethic so while we all called it a day right at 4, he was still working his butt off to free a tree of its very attached vine. He worked at it until about 4:30 and then emerged successful: vine eradicated! He did accidentally take the very top off of the tree, but he used it as his prop in our group photo shoot. We have about 20 pictures of us on the stone wall with our various props. Hollie is in the lap of luxury, being fed wild grapes by me, being shaded with rhubarb leaves by Maya and Clayton and David, and Reed is in back waving his tree top around for air or something.

Our dinner was going to be Fiesta themed, but we never got to eat it. We left that pot of half cooked beans behind that night, because we didn’t bring everything back with us. I remember finally walking in to the yellow house at night after the officers let us get some space to recollect ourselves. Everything was just as I had left it when I went to go swimming. There were remnants of squished grapes, the measuring cup with grape juice on it that Reed had helped me smash. Postcards that I had addressed with plans to write them that evening. Junior Ranger booklets spread out over the tables. Our crew had one last moment together, in that yellow house. It was just us, finally. No officers, park personnel, concerned neighbors. We didn’t know what to say or do, it was all surreal. I think I tried to say something about how we’ll always remember this moment, but looking back, I can’t remember much of it at all. We were aimless and lost for a few minutes, I know that. I know that there was a pile of Reed’s wet clothes that he had washed in the river. We sorted out a bin that the rescue people had given us—gave everyone back their wet clothes and put Reed’s clothes in a pile, unsure of what to do with them. I think we then dispersed to put on warm clothes and call our families.

I’m not sure why I have this need to document everything about that day, that evening, the return to Bear Brook, everything. Maybe I’m afraid I’ll forget things, or I’m not ready to forget things. I feel like I’m going to be processing my experience and trauma for a while, and so I’m going to do anything that seems remotely helpful. I am filling in the blanks for myself, learning everyone’s stories of that evening, working on having a full picture. I’m writing this publicly because maybe knowing this will be helpful to someone else, too.

Gratefuls

When I was working at Calypso Farm us apprentices would bathe in the sauna every Friday and do Sauna Gratefuls. It’s been a while, but ‘gratefuls’ are what I’ve been thinking about today, spurred by having to get my very very dead car battery jumped by many strangers tonight.

So here goes. I’m grateful that my car started—5 random people helped me, and finally a coworker who I hadn’t even met before drove out to help. It took two hours but was on the whole an enjoyable dead car experience. I’m glad that Lucy was just a phone call away and told me that of course I could stay at her apartment for the night, super last minute. I found this when I got in, and it made me so happy.

I’m grateful for my lovely new coworkers for holding down the hut in the craziness of xmas break while I take a trip home. I’m grateful that my mom bought me a ticket home last week. It’s going to make me really happy to be home for a bit and see friends and go to the first bit of bird count. Tomorrow I get to see Becca who is home for vacation from Peace Corps, and I’m preemptively grateful to her family for hosting me for xmas eve and morning. I love how sore my legs are from skiing down from my job. I’m grateful for all the mail I’ve received so far at my new job—nothing makes me feel more at home. I'm especially glad to have so many new pen pals from Bear Brook. I’m so glad that the Bear Brook community is still so in touch despite us being so spread out. Our facebook group is honestly my lifeline sometimes. I’m immensely grateful for everyone who has helped me process my last few months; every conversation helps me. I’m grateful for the moments I’ve felt Reed with me, and that feeling makes me smile. I'm trying to react like I think he would have in situations where I would normally be stressed or worried, because I know he would just laugh. Although it has been exceedingly rough at times, I’m in a way grateful for all the emotions I’ve felt recently—the highest highs and the lowest lows. I'm grateful for google for helping me be sure I was spelling grateful right. I'm grateful to Maya for sending me my stuffed animal porcupine that I thought I'd lost forever. Lots of gratefuls to be had. Right now, I'm the most grateful for the sleep I am about to have. Goodnight!

This Month

I had planned a blog post about all of the knowledge and skills I’ve gained during my season as a Conservation Steward, but I felt like first it was important to share a more personal post about dealing with loss and the amazing community we have at Bear Brook. This is probably the most personal post I’ll ever write but it seemed like a good way to share my thoughts with whoever wants to read it.

(Posting this a couple of weeks after I wrote it)

The Bear Brookers were spread out across the state on hitches and at different parks when they got that call on that Tuesday night. Everyone came back to Bear Brook the next morning to join the group of us that had arrived that night. We then spent an entire week together—crying, laughing, eating, sleeping, cooking, lounging, walking, remembering, hugging, comforting, playing games. That week was the most difficult and incredible week of my life.

This month has been similarly tough and magical, and I’m going to attempt to jot down my stream of consciousness to share with you all what I’ve felt like and experienced. I’m doing this because I want you all to know what has been going on, because sometimes it is hard to tell people individually. It’s also hard to describe this incredible community that I live in to my friends from elsewhere. I want to give a full picture of the range of emotions and thoughts that I’ve been having over this month. I want you to know why it has been so incredible to be here, and I also want you to know where my brain goes when I’m thinking about that Tuesday night. I think it’s important for those who I am close with to know what I’ve been feeling. I also know that I’ve been spotty about telling people that I was the one swimming with Reed that evening in the river. That’s a very important piece of my story. I haven’t included every detail, but talking about that night helps me and I’d be happy to share more with you if you ever want to.

Here are something things that have happened this month, in semi-chronological order. Moments, thoughts, activities, dreams, feelings.

-The faces and the hands of the rescuers reaching out to us to help us up the river bank as the sun was setting

-Sitting under the stars together with our site contact from the park, an hour after they found Reed’s body, waiting for our bosses to arrive and tell us what to do

-Driving back to Bear brook late that night, stopping at the KFC/Taco Bell right as it closed but they let us in anyway, stopping to tie down the damn tarp, stopping to pee in parking lots, stopping for a barf break… the longest car ride of my life.

-Being so scared to go into the lodge, my home, because it meant that it was real

-Sleeping for a few hours in the lodge together because we didn’t want to be alone, watching Wreck It Ralph

-Thinking about Reed when I wake up and when I go to bed

-Laughing hysterically with my Saint-Gaudens crew, the group that was with Reed that hitch, about a hilarious moment during that horrible evening

-Wishing we had let Reed become a Junior Ranger when he finished his booklet, instead of insisting that we all wait to be inducted together

-Wishing I knew Reed better, despite being on most every hitch with him

-Hearing the cries and sobs coming from the other side of the lodge when the last hitch got back on Wednesday morning—unlike any sound I’ve ever heard

-A couple really nice sessions with the counselor that our bosses brought in to tell us about grief and to have someone to talk to

-Sitting out back when Reed’s family arrived, nauseous and terrified to go inside

-When I finally met Reed’s mom and she was wearing the shirt that Reed got her, and we hugged for a while

-How we all gathered around Reed’s family on that Friday night, nothing was planned, and then Matt gave Julie the letter that Reed wrote himself in January. She read it out loud and we laughed and screeched and cried and my heart was so full.

-How hilarious it was that Reed left himself $50 in his letter at the beginning of the program

-Walking with his family to the fire at Spruce talking about farming in Alaska

-Going to temple in Concord on my birthday with Levi and my mom, and telling those wonderful strangers that we were there because Reed had died this week

-Making my brain snap out of images that I made up of Reed floating in the river

-Canoeing on Spruce Pond on my birthday at sunset

-Playing so much Ticket to Ride

-Getting a tattoo of the circle on my birthday

-Spending time at the marsh with Hollie, talking about anything that popped into our heads
-Being giddily proud of myself for sleeping through the night after 5 days of rough sleep
-Sharing a Whoopie Pie with everyone on the porch and giggling about farts

- Levi and my mom giving me countless back massages because I tensed up constantly, holding all of my stress in my neck

-When Sarah and Phinn swung by Bear Brook for a glorious couple hours and I got to show them my life here, and they got to see output report

-We headed out on hitch on that Thursday, 8 days after we got back. Feeling so content in the truck on the way to Franconia, feeling the wind on my face, surrounded by people I love, belting out songs on the radio

-Lying in my tent in the evening of that first day, willing myself to get out of the tent and participate in a group activity that I had no desire to do

-Telling the group that sometimes I just didn’t have energy to give to activities or conversation, that all my energy was going in to basic functioning

-Receiving the most amazing letters and postcards from friends, feeling the love pour in from everywhere

-Biking to Profile Lake after work with Calvin

-Spending two days on the roof of the shelter singing songs and being Roof Gurlz

-When Levi and I spent a few hours just speaking in Spanish and trying to build complicated angle braces

-The amazing sense of accomplishment we felt after completing the rain shelter at the Flume

-When we had a huge hitch meet-up in North Conway during Hitch 7 and we played Tiny Trucks in the field!

-Going over that evening, again and again, thinking about everything that could have been different

-Wondering what the end of the season would have felt like if this hadn’t happened

-Dreaming about Reed’s mom holding Reed’s body in their bathroom, and inch of water across the floor and my book, When Women Were Birds, drenched in that inch of water facedown, and wondering what that could mean

-Waking up and thinking about the river

-Thinking about the moment when I finally let my guard down—I had been holding it together for hours, calling 911 and talking with officers and holding onto hope, and then we finally were alone and I lost it, then called my mom to tell her what happened

-Throwing a crazy 21^st birthday party for Becca, Beer Olympics themed

-Sitting outside at the flagpole during the party, talking to Reed, telling him about how much I wished he was here

-Feeling glad that I told Reed how much I appreciated him a few days before he died

-Not being sure that it is real

-Wishing that everyone had the same images in their head as I did of how beautiful our campsite was and how calm the river looked

-Trying not to freak out when friends are sitting around joking about Wilderness First Responder senarios

-Successfully dealing with a real WFR scenario at the Flume, where there was a success story and I kept calm and did not panic, and how damn good that felt

-Taking the time to see old friends, visiting Will and Martha in Connecticut one weekend
-Knowing exactly which rocks would crush the best and discovering that I really love making crush

-Dancing in the parking lot at 5:30 am under the full night sky on the last morning of hitch because I couldn’t sleep—reveling that this was my life

-Seeing live music during our day off from hitch
-When Kyle and Ian came to camp with us and we hiked up Kearsarge in the morning in the fog

-Spending time with people here that I hadn’t been as close with
-Playing the G'Day Bruce game that Maura taught us and almost peeing our pants laughing
-Not knowing how to jump the van even a little bit but totally figuring it out and it totally didn't take us 2 hours

-Watching the sunrise from our lookout point on Mount Kearsarge on the last morning of hitch with Ray, Chrissie, and Chelsea, singing Traveller and holding hot water bottles and thinking about how much I absolutely love living outdoors and never want a job that pulls me away from it

-The jolt my heart makes whenever I think about what happened

-Hearing/seeing the officer come up to us and say: “We found your friend Reed, he did drown”

-Thinking about how unable to function I was in the week after Reed died, how I would try and do something like make lunch and get lost in the kitchen and have to go lie down.

-Thinking about how much my shock and grief was linked to my body—the nausea and headaches and exhaustion and fever.

-Gathering the whole group of us down at Spruce Pond for a secret meeting and by total coincidence the full moon rose over the pond and we all watched it
-Getting back to my cabin and having a nice chat with my roomie Natalie that I hadn't properly caught up with in months. She had the fire going in the woodstove and we had a really nice conversation

-Revisiting the beautiful moments before he drowned. The golden hour of light, he was washing his clothes on the bank and laid them out to dry and came sprinting into the water to join me. It was a glorious evening and the water felt so good, and we’d been waiting to swim for a week and we finally were doing it.

-Plotting thank you gifts for our incredible staff who seemingly put their grief and lives on hold to figure out the rest of our program and provide for our every need

-Watching a wild thunderstorm on the porch with a large group of Bear Brookers, drinking hot chocolate with booze and catching up and spending another quality night together

I’m posting this two weeks after I wrote it. Every week it gets easier to not dwell in thoughts about the river. I’ve been happy for many parts of this time. I’ve been surrounded by wonderful people who knew Reed, we can talk about funny memories we have of him whenever they come up, we can talk about our sadness as well. A lot of times I still can’t believe it’s real, and I have to tell myself that yes, this happened. We have now left the place where we all knew Reed, but that doesn’t change how close our already tight community grew after Reed’s accident. Today I will reunite with a whole crew of Bear Brookers who are passing though DC, and I know we’ll stay connected and reach out when we need each other.  I’m looking forward to the times ahead where I embody some of Reed’s spirit and attitude about life. These past 6 weeks have been a whirlwind of action and emotion, but now I can begin to process more fully and reflect on all that I’ve learned from Reed’s passing and from the power of community.

In the woods without a spoon

When you're out on hitch in the woods for ten days at a time, bowl and spoon struggles arise. Sometimes you have a choice of grabbing a good utensil, but sometimes the van is just TOO far away or you just plain forgot it somewhere. List time!

Things we’ve used in place of a bowl:

Measuring cup

Half a Styrofoam tray

Large silver serving bowl

Flimsy cutting board

Salsa lid

Glove

Diced tomatoes can

Coconut milk can

Aluminum pot cover

Nalgene

Plastic baggie

Pineapple chunks can

Jelly jar

Yogurt container

Nothing

Mossy ground

Bucket lids

Wrappers

  

Things we’ve used in place of utensils:

Rubber spatula

Spoon carved out of a stick

Hot chocolate lid

Library card

Tongs

Sticks

Carrots

Celery

A butter knife

Pitas

Tortillas

Jelly lid

Hands

Ice cream spoon from the store

A headlamp

Probably to be continued-- we've still got three hitches left!