who woulda thunk it

 

A year ago I was wrapping up my last course in Texas and then all of sudden... it was time to go into camp mode. March 2021 was full of confusion, imposter syndrome, interviewing new staff, goodbyes, and contemplative road tripping. Has it truly been a year since then?? It's got to be at least three years... so here is my attempt to lay out *parts of* this past year in the form of:

Things I never thought I'd do ever but it happened.

I'll try and make it a fun mix. 

Never thought I would....

...be in charge of an entire program during Covid. I really had the thought "Gosh I'm so glad I don't have to be in charge" SO many times during early 2020. Even when I came to the Cove to help Vini run the one camp session of 2020, I was very glad to be a co-plotter and not the final decider. But of course.. we were in charge of all those masking and testing and symptom tracking decisions this past year. And we still are.. dammit.

...actually enjoy hanging out with babies. A lot of people in my life had babies this year. And I shocked myself by really enjoying my time cooing at, walking around with said babies, and ooo-ing and ahhhh-ing at them eating solid foods. Turns out babies are pretty cute!

...be solidly in one place for a whole growing season. In April with the help of Scott and Eliza I turned the first beds in the garden, and in late November Jennifer and I put the last layer of hay on top of the freshly weeded garden so it can rest until spring. I loved every bit of having my own garden. Even when the ram pump didn't work and I couldn't for the life of me stay on top of weeding, being down there to see the huge sunflowers and troves of tomatoes brought me a ton of joy

...drive an old ford tractor. This is the tractor David has at the Cove to mow all the fields every fall so that they don't turn into forest. I had to learn to start it and stop it... neither of which are at all simple because 1. There is no starter, you have to touch two wires together for the correct amount of time 2. If it's too cold and you mess up on the said amount of time, you can't start it 3. It will only stop on very certain terrain because it barely has brakes.

   ...speak in front of 300+ people. Public speaking is definitely my least favorite thing. Vini always joked about how scared I was during my very first inspection skit as a wee 16 year old staff member where I got up in front of the entire camp and was visibly quaking... so maybe it was weirdly fitting that 14 years laster I stood up with my dear co-directors at Vini's memorial service and gave a speech. I sure as heck tried to not look at anyone during our speech, but was pleasantly surprised that I did not quake and in fact, it went pretty well. Here is us and the shirtless guy who kept circling on his bike during the service.

...help evac a camper from an overnight accompanied by two goats. There is just no way I could have every predicted that... I mean come on. It turned out to be our only good story of the summer. Like, when anyone asked for how summer was : "well... this one time..."

... haul a dead deer carcass from near the main lodge to a farther woods location. Just part of our duties as camp directors... I never knew! And I am definitely not looking forward to that part when I return to the Cove in a few weeks.

And surely there are a million other things that I can't think of, but I need to finally post a blog, so that's all I got! 

West Texas Quarantine Log

Greetings from Redford, TX! I have been living here since September and have neglected to blog for lack of time and a plethora of other things to keep me entertained, so now here I am ~ a week in to our Quarantine of sorts. It's Saturday and there is not a whole lot going on because for once in our outdoor educator lives we are observing proper weekends.
I thought I'd give my dear readers (aka my mom) a glimpse into the life of our Redford Quarantine. Not gonna lie, it's been pretty swell, especially when I compare our situation to friends who are stuck in their apartments in big cities. Hopefully this post doesn't come off as me bragging about how great we have it. We do have it great, and we are very lucky to have been able to stay here for some extra weeks. We're trying to enjoy this community time while we have it because we know from watching the rest of the world in isolation how special our situation is. In ten days we, The Quarantine Ten, will be going our separate directions into this changed world because the Texas base has to close down to save money.

But until that time comes, we've been keeping quite busy with service projects and events and have set up a system for living here. I'll give you a run down:
We had a long meeting once it was established that ten of us would be staying on base for as long as we possibly could. To stay here we would have to contribute 20 hours of service to base each week to earn our room and board and we would also have to abide by the Outward Bound community living guidelines as directed by the CDC. No physical touch, bleach down every surface two times per day, use your own bathroom only (luckily we each have our own bathroom), don't go into other people's rooms, one person is the designated errands runner.
We had to move things out of the Melon (where we keep tools and supplies) so that we limit people going in and out of certain spaces.

Then we decided on jobs and crafted a Quarantine Living Agreement.
Kevin had all the projects in mind so he was elected to be Bob the Builder.
I was obviously the Post Master, responsible for checking the mail.
Arty was dubbed 'The Explorer' and is responsible for trips to town every three days for groceries.
Maxx is 'Senor Limpiador' or 'Profesor Maximilian' because he is the best at Spanish and is responsible for a weekly Spanish lesson and for making the daily bleach solution
Nina is the Laundry Lady- since we can't go to town for laundry anymore she does it at her house
Jaimie is the Town Scribe- she made all our informational posters
Dan doesn't seem to have an assigned job but he's in charge of the burn barrel
Bennett is the Party Planner, keeping up with our schedule of social events
Brian is still doing his normal job of Program Director
Yoshie and I are tag teaming the food room- we are the Ration Rats and operate the "store" on base where we give out dried food if people need more

Every Sunday we have community dinner. We have to be served food by the cooks, but otherwise it's a pretty normal affair. Tomorrow is Indian food, last week Arty made this beautiful array of dishes.

We have a projector in our community space so many evenings we watch a movie. So far we're watched O Brother, Where Art Thou, Gladiator, 1917, How to Train Your Dragon, and Moulin Rouge. We're been board gaming a ton, armed with hand sanitizer in case we accidentally touch our face while gaming, and a rule that we have to wash our hands before and after. We've collectively played 8 games of Pandemic, 1/2 a game of Twighlight Imperium, and talk of Catan has been in the works for days. We had a hilarious cooking competition a couple nights ago. Each team was given 5 ingredients from the food room and had 1 hour to craft an appetizer, main, and dessert using those ingredients plus whatever else from their personal food that they wanted.

Tonight we're having open mic night, and already today we had trivia hosted by Willie over Zoom. A couple days ago our Spanish lesson was a mock courtroom where we had to split into two teams and argue about the ownership of a dog. As you can see, we're pretty dang busy, and I haven't even gotten into our projects during the day.

As I said, we're expected to do 20 hours a week and Kevin is our task maker. A big project has been filling the ground of the gear-clean station out back with small rocks to promote better drainage. We devised a system of digging for rock 50 yards away from the site and loading it into a wheelbarrow using a giant hand-made sieve to get rid of the dirt.
Another project is painting: we are still working on painting the inside of the Melon, and we unearthed two bathrooms on base that were covered in dirt and random stuff and have painted them and turned them into what will soon be the most popular bathrooms on base, once Nina figures out the plumbing. And it'll bring our grand total of bathrooms on base to 12!

It really is an ideal situation. Very limited contact with the outside world, a very fun community to be in, freedom to socialize and be outside... I love it. Every day I go on a bike ride, typically at sunset because the days have been pretty toasty. We have our neighborhood pups that come visit every couple of days. Someone is always baking something delicious. We do 15-minute ab workouts every other day. I think reality is going to hit pretty hard when our time here is up, but for now, everything is peachy. And boy do we have a lot of canned peaches in case we get really desperate.

Doubt in the desert

I’m writing to you from the one-week point of my road trip, and the week and a half point of being out of a job. For this post I’ll go back in time to a few days ago, where my mind was in a quite different place than it is now:

After a day hiking in Zion National Park, I spent a layover day in town, lurking in the library switching off between watching Grey’s Anatomy and looking for jobs (well let’s be real, I was mostly watching Grey’s). Searching for jobs sent me into a spiral of doubt about what I was doing, living out of my car in Utah with no job prospects. My only future plans were to fly to the east coast for closing weekend at camp, and then fly back and keep traveling. I had a couple hours of slight panic- could I buy an earlier flight east? What was I doing here, wandering in Utah?? I could be home in DC or helping out at camp, sleeping in a bed in a mentally comfortable place!

It was getting towards evening, so it was time to get back in the car and find the next campsite before darkness at 7 pm. I drove out of Zion through the Carmel Tunnel, and stopped my car at a gorgeous slickrock slope. I got out with bare feet and ran up the slope. The red rock beneath my feel, the wind whipping over the desert, my tiny car below me, the bright blue sky… my doubts melted away.

My thoughts went kind of like this: I am in southern Utah! I love southern Utah! I’ll play on the slickrock barefoot! I’ll watercolor! I’ll hike! I’ll read! I’ll write and reflect! I’ll nap in the sun! I have a whole few days to play here, and I should live it up!

So I did! The next morning I drove to Bryce and got myself a bear canister and a $5 permit to camp in the backcountry. I was going to bite the bullet and embark on my first solo backpacking trip. I spent the day stopping at view points and reading and going to a rad ranger talk about plants in order to earn my Jr Ranger badge. Then I packed up and hiked in to my site, set up camp, and made dinner. And honestly, I was pretty scared the whole time. As I type this I’m currently solo camping in my car, but it feels quite different in a tent a mile into the woods.

But you know, despite a night of kinda bad sleep (because I was too scared to get out of my tent to pee), I had a really good experience. I had days to myself in Utah, to challenge myself and also just do whatever I want. As I keep telling every retired couple I chat with (there have been a LOT of them, my gosh, so chatty), I don’t know what’s next. But as of right now I’m a lot less stressed out about it. I am seeing some beautiful country, taking some time for myself that I haven’t had in a while, seeing friends, and getting my car camping skills down pat.

I’m hoping tonight will be clear enough for another stellar show of the meteor shower that I glimpsed last night. I don’t know where I’ll be, but it’s sure to be swell. And now that I have only one day left here in this slickrock land, it's not enough! I could play here for at least another week! But alas, I gotta travel on. To be continued

Nostalgia Trip

Last February I was camping in the mountains somewhere in Death Valley, working on some odd project involving carrying weird heavy metal objects in backpacking in the blistering desert heat. My time as Wilderness Intern was one of those jobs that was, sweaty, exhausting, fairly rewarding, and unglamorous. It didn’t seem like that sweet of a gig at the time—just a way to break even and work outside in a beautiful place, and learn something along the way. However, I look back on those four months living at the lowest point in the country as the highest point of my year (awwwwww I know I couldn’t resist).

Also made some pretty great frands.

While my fellow roommates were working in air-conditioned offices or interacting with the public, I was hiking in the wilderness and eating ice cream and bumping over crazy 4WD roads and getting weird tan lines. There aren’t many jobs where you can get paid to do that (paid is a strong word, though). My job took me to every corner of Death Valley. I didn’t by any means get to know the park well, because that would take a lifetime. I did get to see a huge variety of landscapes, from crusty geometric salt flats to sagebrush scrubland dotted with burros and chuckwallas. I got to sleep under some of the darkest night skies in the country during the work week, and I frequently took my lunch breaks in the shade of canyons. 

Here's a photo from park service orientation. Pretty sweet field trip to the Badwater salt flats!

My govnt truck hangin' out in some scrubby desert land.

Side note: I miss my lunches there almost as much as the work. Picture a fat sandwich loaded with hummus, lettuce, pepperoni, cheese, mustard, and avocado after a long day hiking up an alluvial fan dodging cacti and creosote bushes. That sandwich was better than the views some days, I gotta say. But on this day, the view was better:

But I guess I’ll stop bragging about how freaking awesome my job was by saying something about how National Parks are totally America’s Best Idea and I’m excited to be working on public lands all summer doing conservation projects. I’ll look back on Death Valley as one of those Golden Times in my life. Carefree desert living, only concerned about having a great sandwich and not dying of dehydration.

Me and Charlie and the Americorps crew on a hitch in the Wilderness. Capital W.

traveling alone

I'm currently on my first ever solo trip. Camping on my own, in my car, in a new place. I have once again not followed through on my blogging promise-- things just got too busy over in Death Valley. But now I'm away in the Eastern Sierras, with lots of time (well, two days) to reflect on my winter and share some snippets with you. But first I'll share about this whole solo-tripping thing.

The pros:
I did not have to plan in advance whatsoever
I can stop wherever I want
I can camp wherever I want (mostly)
I can listen to whatever I want (ahem, Harry Potter and country music)
I can smell bad
I can let my car get super messy
I can change my "plans" without checking with someone
I can just say things and sing things
Two people wouldn't fit super well anyway in the back of the car with all of the shit I have piled in there
I'm more willing to talk to people to get advice

The cons:
No one to share magnificent views with
Gas is getting expensivo
Didn't have anyone to freak out with about the full salsa bar last night
Camping alone is sort of scary/ I'm really good at scaring myself
I don't push myself to get out and hike that much, hence why I'm currently lounging in a coffee shop
Basically surviving on digestive biscuits

So, it does seem like I have more pros than cons. But wow,  I am SO excited to travel with a buddy for the road trip back across the country. Solo-tripping is something that I'm sure I'll do a lot more of, and I'll definitely appreciate it when I do it, and vice versa for buddy-traveling. Gotta have both experiences to appreciate the ups and downs of each.

Stick-with-the-plan Soup: The Backstory

On our big Western road trip, we invested a fair amount of funds in food. Mostly we just wanted better lunches than PB&J every day. The end result of our varied lunch endeavor was that we had to cut back a bit on other meals. This cut was most felt at breakfast, where we ate 'gruel' for weeks on end. We called it gruel because after a week of liking it, it got hard to stomach and we had to mask it with copious amounts of salt, nutritional yeast, and sriracha.

Gruel face.

So but anyway I am supposed to be writing about Stick-with-the-plan soup (which coincidentally also involves large amounts of salt, nutritional yeast, and sriracha). Before I talk ingredients, I have to talk Ed Abbey. Our trip was in the fall, which meant that the sun set earlier and earlier. So immediately after dinner, there was nothing more enticing than our sleeping bags... at 7 pm (8 pm if we really pushed it). Lying under the stars on the slickrock, we took turn reading out loud from Desert Solitaire and assorted stories by Terry Tempest Williams.

After about a week, we had grown to love Ed's cantankerous musings. We got a huge kick out of a line from his essay about The Moon-Eyed Horse in which Ed says to himself:
"But you're not clever, you're stupid, I reminded myself: stick to the plan."

This line especially hit home for us, because it was reflective of our lack of any planning whatsoever. We never found a campsite in advance, we never had a solid plan of future destinations, we never planned out our dinners. This lack of dinner planning combined with the random bits of food we had all brought from our previous trips and our aforementioned stinginess on breakfast and dinner led to some interesting meals. There were a few points on our trip (which for some wild coincidence happened directly before a trip to the grocery store) where we had to really scrounge for dinner in the depths of our food crate. What could we mix together to make an appetizing and filling meal?
The answer came to us in the form of Stick-with-the-plan soup. This soup/stew consisted of anything and everything that could potentially taste good together. Dehydrated peas, hominy, soy sauce, bouillon cubes, month-old cabbage, potatoes, rice, lentils, you name it! Bonus if cooked on a fire and some ingredients fall out into the fire because the pot is so full. We discovered that if you put enough salty ingredients in, it will taste delicious. Hominy not cooked, soup looks like sludge? No matter, it was still hot and filling. And it came about from having no plan.

Can you spot the soup?

Anyway, this is all to say that I named my Tumblr site 'Stick-with-the-plan Soup' because it is a smattering of trips and nature shots from my adventures over the last few years. Most pictures are from random wanderings, where there was no plan and yet it all worked out in the end. Just like soup. Ya know? 

So check it out!  I post pretty regularly with pictures of life at camp and of past adventures. As much as I want to update this blog with stories from camp all the time, it just ain't gonna happen. Until next time!

Whatever the weather

This post goes out to Emiry, because it is about how weather is SO COOL.

Yes. Especially in the WEST! Oh boy!

I'm just so very excited about it!

This picture is from my first desert storm (Operation Desert Storm!).  When it rains it pours!

You could say that I am on Cloud 9 when I look at the sky here.

I'm in awe every time I go outside. The sky really is bigger in the West!

But time for a cool factoid that I just learned from Emiry:

The phrase, 'On Cloud 9' is actually in reference to a cloud guide from the 19th century in which cumulonimbus is the 9th cloud.

Well a picture can't capture it, but maybe you can get the idea. This is the view from Thumb Butte.

This picture is from today's trip to Agua Fria National Monument.

We have severe weather warnings right now, which made for EPIC skies the entire field trip. The clouds were reaching down to the ground in places and looked so ominous(ly AWESOME), but then you turned around and the sky was bright blue with fluffy clouds. And the lightning! How do I even describe it?? Jagged bolt lightning like the kind on coffee table weather books! But in real life. I think I'll end this semester with an injured neck from all the time that I've spent looking UP!