Rustic Carpentry

During training two weeks ago, some of us Conservation Stewards were mystified by the concept of when to measure precisely to the T and when a cut or measurement was deemed "close enough." Our boss referred to this phenomenon as Rustic Carpentry. The "precise" versus "we can live with it" measurements are a strange line to walk. A wrong measurement during the very first steps of laying the foundation can offset the entire project, but a half an inch difference in the diagonals of our timber frame box is ok to move forward with. This level of discernment ability will hopefully come to us with time. For now, our crew seems to be making do (ahem we have almost completed two beautiful camping shelters!) with our combined skills, logic, measuring tapes, and pencils.

Our crew of seven split into two different groups for a good part of our hitch because we had to complete our first shelter left over from training and build a second shelter entirely from scratch. That split left Max, Chrissie and I to start and finish the entire foundation of Shelter 2. We were completely on our own, with only our detailed notes from training and our memories to guide us.

I wish I had kept track of the amount of times we said “Is it level?” during the laying of the foundation. My guess is upwards of 200. The foundation leveling process is the most important time to be precise, at least to my understanding. We used a transit to find out how to make our foundation perfectly square, and to measure how high each foundation block had to be to make the entire structure level. The transit was simultaneously our best friend and worst enemy. If the transit gets nudged and gets unleveled without anyone noticing it could mean that we’d have to take all of our measurements all over again, which would be agonizing because laying our foundation in its entirety took two days. Luckily we kept each other in check and our transit remained a close friend. It’s been locked in the trailer for almost a week now and I sort of miss it, come to think of it. Here is a picture of us hugging the transit. If you look closely, we are hugging it without touching it at all! We must keep it level!!!

We have a bunch of fancy exciting tools to use, such as the transit, the chop saw, the table saw, and the nail gun. We can measure our cuts exactly and make boards perfectly level, just like in the frontcountry carpentry world. So what makes this Rustic Carpentry? Is it the way we have to string lengths of extension cords together to reach the campground bathhouse to get power to our tools? Is it because we occasionally have to hide our generator in the woods to minimize its awful noise pollution? Is it the way we stuff all of our supplies in our small trailer top to bottom at the end of every work day? Maybe, but I think the main thing that defines this fabled rustic carpentry thing is that we have to scrap together our combined knowledge and memory recall and general know-how to make this project a reality. We have to make boards fit by stripping down other boards in half. We can figure out when something has to be exact and when we can just “live with it.” We have to sometimes phone a friend or a boss when we forget how to do a certain task. We have to rely on each others’ moods, energy levels, and motivation to get through the challenges of a huge time crunch, a noise polluting job in a populated area, long work days, inclement weather, and just camping and cooking together in general.

And lo and behold, we are making it work. I’m writing to you from the end of Day 9, and this is what our structure looks like. 

I’m so proud of this crew for giving this project our everything. We managed to build an entire beautiful shelter after getting trained in carpentry two weeks ago. For some of us, it was our first time using any of these tools. Before this hitch, I wouldn’t have taken a second glance at the rows of tools at Home Depot. After this intro to carpentry I wandered the aisles and practically drooled over the miter saw. I’m so impressed with our lingo and accumulated knowledge at this point of our first hitch. If this is just Hitch 1, I can’t wait to see how much we all know in the end (but also I can because it is going to go by SO fast). 

Day 1, Hitch 1

I am writing to you at 10 pm from my gently swinging hammock in our lovely campsite/ construction site at White Lake State Park. I just heard a loon calling across the lake, and a dad telling his child to “always remember the sound of a loon.” I’m wiped out—we had a loooong first day. It is really starting to sink in that this is real. Hitch 1/ building a shelter/ being on our own/ leading ourselves. Our hitch team, Team Ultimate Hummus, had a couple of instances today where we sat around discussing next steps and realized that Wow we are really out here, this is it! We have fledged the nest! Trainings are complete, we are our own bosses, we need to rely on our own accumulated knowledge, and if we forgot anything then we’ll have to make do. It’s a good feeling to be finally working at what we’ve been preparing for during the past two months.

Still we are hitting our fair share of snafus. It wouldn’t be hitch without some of these, am I right?:

-The reoccurring non-matching rainfly to our tent

-A tempermental stove

-Not having all of the information necessary to start phase two of our project (setting the foundation)

-The struggle of our small minivan being our food storage locker, transportation, gear cache, trailer hauler, and truck bed all in one.
-Red squirrels got into TWO trail mix bags (luckily most of the mix was salvageable) (update: they have gotten into at least 4 bags... these squirrels/ chipmunk are totally habituated to humans and out of control!)

Coming soon: a blog post about an actual work day on site!

Work Skills!

I am sore all over, have blisters on my toes, my feet are drying out after being soggy for hours, I’m quite dirty and stinky, I had dead mosquitoes all over my face, I am constantly ravenous, and I am so exhausted in the evenings that I want to go to sleep at 6:30. Is this hell? No! I’m writing this from Day 3 of works skills trainings and it is AWESOME!

But seriously-- I have learned so so much in that past few days. Our group of 20 Conservation Stewards is divided into four groups and we rotate through four different stations throughout the week, ending at our first station. My group’s order: Rock Work, Tread and Drainage, Native Timber, New Trail Construction. Here we are working hard on the job of bog bridge reconstruction (Native Timber station).

I have learned approximately a kajillion new terms over the past few days, and I shall now list them. 

How many do you know?? This blog post will be interactive.

Terms:

Kerf

Sill

Stringer

Fulcrum

Slough (n)

Hinge (in reference to a trail)

Backslope

Outslope

Downslope

Reinforced Grade Dip

Critical Edge

Crush

Mineral Soil

Organic Soil

Duff

Armory

Gargoyle (Garg)

Corridor

Borrow Pit

Re-veg

TMP (Trail Management Plan)

Tread

Feathering

Notch cut

Rock shopping

Decking

Retaining Wall

Water Bar

Check Steps

Bite

Re-bite

Holding

Bench cut

Some tools we used:

Timber Staple

Cat’s paw

Klinometer

Chainsaw

Chisel 

Single Jack

Double Jack

Sledge

Mallet

Hammer

Nails

Rock bar

Pick mattock

Pulaski

Mcleod

Timber carries

Peavey

Bow saw

Hand saw

Grub hoe

Rouge hoe

Cutter mattock

Drag slings
Chalk line

Carpentry training starts next week, and I will learn so many more things. One last week of training all together and then we will spend the next four months spread out in small groups throughout New Hampshire! It's exciting that the season is starting, for real. Stay tuned for more updates form my next hitch: shelter building at White Lake State Park!

Spring Breeeeeak in short

Spring break just ended, and I’ve had an awesome day back on the job—hauling enormous rocks with people power and rock bars on a trail in Bear Brook. We are building a staircase! But anyway, I’m about to go off to bed before 9 pm because I am so very tired from many nights of sleeping in different places. As I’ve leaned from my years working at camp, your brain does not adjust to a new place on the first night of sleeping there, so it’s often hard to get a full nights sleep. Luckily I was exhausted every day of break and had little problem passing out in my sleeping bag each night, but I didn’t quite have a restful break (I never slept in!) So, here is a list of all of the places I slept over my break of travels. Adventure!

Friday: my car parked in Portland

Saturday morning: the airplane to Atlanta

Saturday: my friend Aly’s tent at Wildrose Campground in Death Valley

Sunday: the ground in the desert at Alabama Hills

Monday: the front seats of our rental truck at the Buckeye Campground

Tuesday: the boy’s tent at Lake Lamarck in the John Muir Wilderness

Wednesday: my hammock at Grandview Campground in the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest

Thursday: my friend Nicole’s futon in Portland

Friday and Saturday: Yuka’s guest bedroom (TWO NIGHTS!!!)

Sunday: my car at the rest area in Kennebunk, Maine.

Now you have a good sense of what I did over break, right?

Team Pink/ Team Go Camp Again

I am back from Spring Hitch, and will post a couple of photos. Our group thought that it would be super funny to pretend that we had a really terrible time on hitch and come back to Bear Brook really happy to be back but act like we were miserable for the past ten days. This failed the moment we got back, because when people ask you how it went and you actually had a really good time, it's hard to lie. We also wanted to show our picture slideshow of only pictures of us looking sad, but we just gave up on that too. The end result in our epic plan of Operation Pretend We Were Miserable is that I have a lot of pictures of our group looking upset on playsets. See here:

We also just look like a weird band.

Everything is terrible, obviously.

 And we had a trailer, which was a huuuge bummer. Especially sitting inside of it was sad.

And just for fun, here is a list of things we wanted to google while out on hitch. Despite having full service, we still wrote things down to pretend that we were in the woods without internet access. I guess we liked to pretend a lot in our group...
Here it is:
Who is cilley? Largest leaf pile ever made? What percentage of the mosquito diet is human blood? -how many calories do they get from human blood vs animal Sugar vs cigarettes How many times does a mosquito feed in its lifetime?

Spring Hitch

Greetings from the frigid McDonald's outside of Laconia, NH! We are lurking here getting internet on our day off, so I am attempting to blog post from my phone. We are currently on Spring Hitch-- 10 days camping and working in various state parks to help the park campgrounds and day use sites get open for the summer. Mostly we have been raking a LOT of leaves. My leaf raking abilities have improved dramatically, lemme tell ya. And I have yet to get blisters, which is a miracle. Tomorrow we start raking again, but this time on the windy shores of Lake Winnipesaukee (biggest lake in the state)! We have a prime beachfront campsite and we went swimming yesterday. It was chilly but hey, we are stinky and we'll get in any body of water.
It's currently raining sideways so we are probably going to continue to lurk and avoid our cold campsite. Last week we were camping in this gorgeous private campsite in Patuckaway State Park. It was sunny and rocky and buggy. The crazy part was that we could set up our kitchen in a large pavilion with LIGHTs and OUTLETs! Fancy camping, we didn't even have to set up a kitchen tarp! In other news, I've been setting some daily goals for myself. We work a 7-4 schedule so we have a lot of time in the evenings to play bananagrams and hang out. I've been trying to do a headstand, jog or journal (very different I know), sew a patch onto my pack, and write a couple of postcards every evening. Goals for next hitch: floss every night! Step by step...

Community Meeting

We are in the middle of transition time, full of trainings and less full of children. Education season ended three weeks ago, and we had our very last Community Meeting. Here is a list of things we discussed at community meetings throughout the winter, because when you write it all out it’s quite hilarious. This may not make any sense to you, dear reader, but I hope you at least appreciate the wide variety of topics.

Here we go:

Should we buy a drum set?

If we buy a drum set, who will chip in to pay for it?

Ok we are buying a drum set.

Can we order the drum set to our P.O. box?

When are we allowed to use the drum set?

Let’s do secret Valentines!

How?

Ok first let’s vote on if we should do secret valentines.

Ok that passed, now let’s vote on if you have to tell the person you had them.

Should we have a reveal party?

But what if we don’t want to reveal ourselves?

Should we do it on Valentines Day or the week after?

It will be cheaper after Valentines Day.

Whoever has Rachel don’t give her Snickers.

Ok let’s revisit this because we still have a whole month until Valentine’s Day.

We have a drum set!

Can Hilary hear the drums from her cabin?

Let’s get Bryan to play to drum set right now.

Which words aren’t allowed to be used in our community?

Let’s kill the porcupines and eat them!

We need a rice cooker. No one knows how to cook rice.

Where are things in the tool cache?

We need to be more professional—find a better place to hang our laundry.

Who wants to go to Montreal?

Y’all need to pay up for Montreal.

Should we do Secret Easter Bunny? Egg hunt?

How?

We could make a map and label each section and then you can only look in your section.

We could label eggs with numbers and you only find your number and that way we don’t lose any eggs.

We could combine both ideas.

How?

Seriously, pay up for Montreal.

Let’s talk about food waste. We are a Conservation Corps.

Well, we do have to throw things out sometimes. It’s Ok. (Throw that shit out it’s moldy ain’t no one gonna eat it-Annie)

Where should we put half-used vegetables?

Who wants to learn how to make some whistles?

People need to be better at committing to things they say they are going to do.

We are doing Secret Aprils Fools. Put your name in the hat.

We have a rice cooker!

Y’all want to work on a farm? And get paid in cheese?

We reorganized the Tupperware. Keep it that way.

What songs are inappropriate to listen to in this community?

Clean your shit up before ream.

Should we have dinner at 6:30?

How is the 6:30 dinner time change going?

Let’s make a Bucket List of things for our time here. In a bucket.

All in favor of the bucket give a thumbs up.

We are going to build a greenhouse! Everyone needs to help!

Are y’all still excited about the greenhouse?

Clean your shit up off the porch.

We drink too much coffee.

Should we get worse coffee or should you drink less coffee?

Let’s get worse coffee.

Maybe the coffee will taste better if we get rid of the Bunn and use an electric percolator.

Maybe we should clean the percolators.

Like seriously, clean the percolators when you finish the pot.

Maybe we’ll add that to ream.

We reorganized the Tupperware again. It’s really organized this time.

Should we invite the City Years over?

Who wants to drive across the country with Darren?

The ticks are coming. Take every precaution.

Stop giving advice about ticks because the tick guy is coming in a couple of weeks.

Does anyone want to order some boots? No? K.

Where are we now allowed to drink alcohol now that it is nicer out?

Wait, you can’t have a fire at Spruce Pond.

We need a crew to take care of the fire ring dispersal at Spruce Pond.

Ok just remember no drinking in the cabins, it’s a safe space.

I finished reading The Martian.

Let’s be aware of… just everything. And be mindful. As long as you’re aware and mindful everything should be good.

Future predicted meeting topics:

Nobody plays the drum set…

We reorganized the Tupperware again.

Who wants to go to Mexico?

Just a quick reminder to stay positive.