Current Project!

Transition week in Denver was, well, transition week. Full of silly meetings and obligations. The whole week is either free time or wasted time. But oh well. The best part was that I left on Friday to go to my brother Carl’s graduation in Lafayette, LA. My flight was supposed to leave at about noon to go to Dallas then on to Lafayette. When I got to the airport to check in, the lady asked me what time my flight left. I told her noon, and she said “Well your flight is still showing on time, but every other flight to Dallas before yours has been cancelled. There are bad storms in Dallas.” Awesome. I got to my gate which was super crowded with all those people who were supposed to go to Dallas earlier on cancelled flights. My flight time got pushed back an hour, then another hour, then another hour, then the gate attendants just said that they didn’t even know if it would be able to leave at all that day. Awesome. I waited in the line to talk to a gate person for about an hour. I talked to the people in line around me. It sounded like a lot of people were trying to get to graduations that weekend. By the time I got to the front of the line, my flight from Dallas to Lafayette had been cancelled. Brief tangent: Why are people rude to people who can give them something they want? The poor woman at the desk looked completely frazzled. I even heard people being rude to her when I was nearing the front. That’s usually not a good way to get what you want, people. It’s not her fault that there are storms and the planes can’t fly. Anyway, I was as polite to her as I could be and smiled as much as possible. She booked me on the last seat on the only other flight to Lafayette that day, which left at like 7:30 and printed out a boarding pass for me. She also booked me on a flight from Denver to New Orleans the next morning in case I couldn’t get out of Denver that night. (The plan for graduation was to go to the ceremony in Lafayette on Saturday early afternoon then everyone drive the two hours to New Orleans to celebrate. So I would miss the ceremony but get to meet them in New Orleans for the celebration, which is really the most important part anyway.) Luckily, my flight finally left Denver at about 5:45. I didn’t really know what I would do though, because I wouldn’t land in Dallas until like 8:30, which is obviously too late for that connecting flight to Lafayette. Oh well, I got on the plane anyway. When I landed in Dallas I got myself to the gate listed on my boarding pass as fast as my gimpy foot could take me. (About a week before I left Big Bend, my right foot started hurting. I think it was a stress fracture, even though an X-Ray didn’t show one. They don’t always show up on X-Rays, and I’ve had stress fractures in that foot before. Stupid foot.) When I got to the gate, it was empty. I stood for a second wondering what to do. At the next gate over were a female gate attendant in uniform and a guy wearing jeans and a flannel shirt behind the counter looking intently at the computer. I went and stood patiently at the desk while they determinedly ignored me. The woman left without ever talking to me. The guy told me he didn’t work there, but he could help if I just needed something looked up on the computer. Um. Ok. I showed him my boarding pass and asked if that flight was horribly late like I was hoping for it to be. He looked it up and said it was just about to start boarding like four gates away from where I was right then. Amazing! I called my family, who I had been updating on my transportation issues, on my almost-dead phone and told them I was about to get on a plane and to pick me up at 10:30. It was pretty much a miracle that I got to Lafayette that night. There was someone on that flight who I overheard saying he was glad the flight left because he was going to the UL-Lafayette graduation tomorrow. I turned and said that’s where I was going, and he asked what time mine was. I said noon and he said his was at 3:00. I forgot about big schools and their multiple graduations.

That was a really fun weekend. I was really looking forward to meeting Nikki, Carl’s girlfriend. We didn’t do much after I got there because it was so late, but I’m so glad I got there in time. The ceremony wasn’t as long and boring as graduations usually are. My aunt and cousin from Memphis came to the ceremony as well as Greg, one of Carl’s friends from high school (my parents were there too, obviously). Then I got to see Carl’s apartment and go to my first sushi restaurant. Then I got to drive through the worst rain of my life to New Orleans. We went to the hotel in New Orleans we were all staying at and ordered pizza before heading to the French Quarter. It was pretty nice to be back in New Orleans after spending two months there. Several more of Carl’s friends met up with us there, including Andy, another high school friend. I had a great time with all of them. The next day, most people wanted to go to Café Du Monde. Due to leaving the hotel later than intended, getting a bit lost on the way there, and having to park far away, we didn’t have time to get there in time to enjoy it before someone would have to take me to the airport to go back to Denver. Everyone was hungry so we needed to find somewhere to eat nearby. I am quite proud of the fact that I remembered a quick Mexican place we went to a few times when I was there for my project called Filipe’s that I was pretty sure was only like two blocks from where we were standing. I was right! Everyone loved it. Perfect ending to the weekend.

And that brings us (finally!) to my current project. It is with the San Luis Valley Public Lands Center in Saguache (pronounced sa-WATCH), CO, which is the valley between the Rockies and the Sangre de Cristo mountains. We’re also working with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the US Forest Service. I’m not sure how all these organizations are connected, but they all seem to be coming from the same office. Saguache has a population of about 500 people. We live in a church. Actually, I think the building where we live used to be the church, but the church is now next door. This building has become more like a house. There’s a big room that used to be the sanctuary (which is where we all sleep on the floor with sleeping pads – yes, the pews have been removed), a pretty decent kitchen, and a little living room with a couch, two loveseats, and a TV complete with a VCR. There’s also a bedroom with two twin beds. At the beginning of the project, we said we would rotate who gets the beds. Tomm and TK took them first, and I think no one really cares enough to get the beds for themselves. It’s really not bad at all. Even the part where we all sleep in the same room isn’t that bad. And the town is so small we can walk everywhere we want to go. The grocery store and the only bar/restaurant are both less than a block away. The movie theater and used bookstore are about three blocks away. The park and the public library (which has the only wireless internet in town that we know of) are six blocks away. The BLM office is only about a mile away, and it has a little workout room we can use. I can’t even tell you how nice it is to be able to walk everywhere. Corps Members aren’t allowed to drive the vans alone, so it’s pretty much impossible to go anywhere by yourself. You have to find at least one other person to ride with you, but usually it’s several people, so you all have to agree on a time to leave, and usually someone isn’t ready when you agreed to be (I’ve been that person myself, but it’s still annoying), and then you have to be at the place until everyone is ready to go, etc. etc. etc. Don’t get me wrong, I got used to all that a long time ago, and it’s really not as big a deal as I just made it sound. But now, for our last project, it’s really nice to have more independence. I can walk to the library when I want. I can walk to the gym when I want. I can walk across the street to the store and just grab a snack if I want. It’s wonderful!

Also, Steve, our sponsor, is the most enthusiastic sponsor ever. He is SO excited to have us here. He keeps offering us things like fishing lessons, extra sleeping pads, air mattresses, coats (we didn’t bring our because you know, it’s summer, but it was colder here than we were expecting), etc. He even offered to let us come to his house to play with his dogs if we wanted. It’s kind of amusing, but he’s really nice.

So now on to the project itself. The BLM (or whatever organization we actually work with) has divided our time so that we’ll be working on a different project with a different supervisor in and around Saguache almost every week. I’ll do my best to catch up with what we’ve already done. (In case you were wondering, the way I was able to write in so much detail about each day of Big Bend is that I was writing in a paper journal while I was there since I couldn’t use a computer much. I haven’t been doing that here so far. Oops.)

Week 1:
Our first project was for the Town of Saguache. The town has recently purchased a large plot of land from a private owner. Their plan is to eventually build like a recreation center kind of place for the local youth. However, the previous owner seems to have used the land as their own personal junk yard. But not just any junk yard. It’s the biggest Crap Pile this side of the Mississippi. The town has already removed tens of thousands of tires, yet there were still at least a few hundred more in the Crap Pile. There were old appliances, toys, tools, books, and unrecognizable broken things. You name it, the Crap Pile has it. I think the Crap Pile was about a square mile or so. At least, that’s about the size of the land we worked on. Our job was to put all the metal in piles to be recycled, put all the wood in piles to be burned, put the trash in the dumpster, and put aside things that could potentially be sold. We did all of this as well as filling a dump truck two or three times after we had filled the dumpster. We did it all with the help of Charles, the 19-year-old BLM summer worker who has an obnoxiously smug expression on his face all the time, is mildly incompetent, and has told us multiple times about his involvement with the Air Force ROTC. This project wasn’t all that terrible, but it was pretty darn boring. And with a Crap Pile that big, it took a while before we really saw any results.

In the middle of that week, we were invited to a sloppy joe dinner at the Baptist church in town. We all went because we wanted to meet people. They were all really nice, as could be expected.

Matt, a guy working with the BLM through AmeriCorps VISTA, worked with us one day. That weekend, Matt invited us to his house (conveniently right down the street from our house) for a party. There were several other BLM people there. It was a little awkward, but it was nice to meet a few other people in town so soon after getting there.

That first weekend we also went to the Great Sand Dunes National Park which is about an hour and a half away. I didn’t even know about it until I found out I was coming here for my next project and someone told me, but there are huge sand dunes in the middle of Colorado. It has something to do with all the mountains everywhere and the stream that runs through it, but I don’t remember the details. The day we went, the weather forecast was calling for (unbeknownst to us) winds of 50 mph with gusts up to 70 mph. Oh my goodness, it was windy. The dunes were really cool, and the ranger leading the tour we went on was really good, but it’s really hard to pay attention to much when sand is hitting your entire body like thousands of tiny knives. It was pretty painful for most of the time we were there. It was also pretty chilly, especially with that strong wind. Luckily I had a sweatshirt on which protected my arms, kept my hair from getting blown around with the hood up, and kept sand from getting in my ears like it did to everyone else. Unluckily, I was wearing shorts. Thousands of tiny knives. After the tour, we started to climb the dunes, but it was so cold and so painful that most of us didn’t make it to the top. Despite the thousands of tiny knives, I’m glad I got to see the dunes.

Week 2:
The second week we were working with Mark. Not only does he work with the BLM, he is also the pastor of the Baptist church where we went to that dinner last week. We were working in Saguache Park, which is like an hour and a half from Saguache. (Gold star to whoever can figure that one out.) Since it’s so far, they arranged for us to stay at Stone Cellar, a cabin in Saguache Park. I think the cabin is owned by the BLM (or one of those other organizations) for its employees to stay at when they have to work up there. The cabin had only a pump leading to a well in the backyard for water. There was a modern outhouse for a bathroom. There was no electricity in the cabin. There was a propane stove and a few weak propane lights. The elevation of Saguache is about 7,700 feet (yep, this is a valley and it’s that high up) but Saguache Park is closer to 10,000 feet. Our job was to repair a whole bunch of barbed wire fencing. Mark, who has been dealing with barbed wire for a few decades, said it’s way easier to just build a new fence than to repair an old one. Woo hoo. I’ll never look at a barbed (or barbless) wire fence the same way again. The next time you see one, you’ll notice that there will be wood or metal posts fairly close together along the fence, but then every once in a while you’ll see bigger wood posts in a sort of H configuration with wire going in an X across it. This is appropriately called an H-brace. It is used to pull the wire from to make it tight. Our fences used metal posts, not wood ones. The metal posts have little protuberances (yes, I’m pleased with myself for the use of that word) that the wire can sit on. You then take a piece of regular wire and wrap it around your barbed wire on either side of the metal post to hold it onto the protuberance. To do this, you use fencing pliers. Fencing pliers are supposed to be able to do everything you need to do on a wire fence. There’s the part with the pliers, of course. There’s also a nook on the side where you can cut wire. There’s also a blunt side you can use as a hammer (when you use wood posts, you use metal staples to hold the wire onto it that need to be hammered in). There’s a pointy side opposite the hammer part that you can use to remove those staples from the wood posts. It’s supposed to be the miracle all-in-one fencing tool. Since I'm in a coffee shop in Hippietown (AKA Salida) right now, not the Saguache Public Library which seems to hate pictures, I've taken the liberty of Google Imaging a picture of this so-called miracle tool:
In reality, it’s the most useless tool I’ve ever used in my life. Most regular pliers are kind of curved so it’s easier to grasp curved objects, right? Fencing pliers have a curved part, but it forms a circle that is bigger than the wire. Thus, when you try to grab some wire, you have to grab it at an angle or else the wire will just slip right through that hold. The “hammer” part is pretty wimpy. You can’t actually hammer in one of these giant staples with that silly thing. You still need a regular hammer. The wire cutter part is ok I guess, but the times I cut wire with it, it was really difficult. Pretty much the only good part of that awful tool is the pointy end. If you need to take out one of those giant staples, the best way is to put the pointy end under the staple and hammer the point farther under with a regular hammer. I consider myself fairly good at using tools and doing things with my hands, but I would get so frustrated trying to wrap the regular wire around the barbed wire to clip it to the post. There was even a time when I was working alongside Rob putting those clips on. We were just going along the fence together, passing each other when we finished one. At one point, he finished FOUR posts in the time it took me to do ONE. And this was at the end of the week after I had gotten a bit better at it. Most of you know how frustrated I get when there’s something I can’t do. Urg.

Was the weekend after that Memorial Day weekend? It might have been. I’m too lazy right now to get up and look at a calendar. Let’s just pretend that it was, shall we? Memorial Day weekend was really fun. On Friday (we don’t work Fridays because we work ten hour days Monday through Thursday) there were auditions for a children’s play that the San Luis Theatre Company is putting on. Heather, Becky, Jess, and I all went. We all actually really wanted to audition (the add in the newspaper for the audition said it was open to children ages 9-90) but the performance isn’t until August, so AmeriCorps will be over by then and we’ll all be at home. But we decided to go to the audition anyway just to meet the director and whoever else and see if we could help with the set or anything. There were only a few kids there, so the director (a really friendly woman named Virginia) said we could stay and play if we want. Um, of course we want. The audition only consisted of all of us sitting in a circle with scripts. Virginia randomly assigned parts to everyone and we just read through parts of the script. It was fun. The play seems pretty cute. It’s called Doc Doc Goose. It’s about Dr. Goose (as opposed to Mother Goose) who runs a clinic in Nurseryland. A bunch of different nursery rhyme characters come in to get treated for various physical ailments, like Jack B. Nimble coming in to get treated for burns he got jumping over a candle while practicing to be a stunt man. That sort of thing. The play seems pretty cute and we’re all sad we can’t be there for the performance. Oh well.

On Saturday, there was a Blow Out Book Sale to benefit the public library. It started at 9am. Books were $0.25 each or a grocery bag full for $3.00. One time earlier in the week when I had been in the library, I overheard a rather incriminating conversation. One of the librarians asked the other who was working the book sale for the first shift. When Librarian #2 told her who, Librarian #1 said "Oh, good, so she'll be there early. I'll get there a little before 9 to try to find something good." You think you can play that game and get away with it, do you Librarian #1? I immediately resolved to get there a little before 9 as well. As it turned out, I only found 6 books that I had even the slightest bit of interest reading, but I still felt triumphant in not letting the librarian beat me.

After that, Heather, Becky, Tomm, Michala, and I went to the Saguache Memorial Day parade. It was, well, pretty sad. Especially since Alton’s parades are always such a production, and that’s the only M. Day parade I’ve ever been to. There weren’t many floats and there wasn’t any music whatsoever. It was the quietest parade ever. We still had fun though. We had long ago realized that we are far more enthusiastic about Saguache events than people who actually live here are.

After the parade we went to the fair at the park. There was some pretty decent live music and vendors set up. It was fun. We mostly just sat around in the park and listened to music. Later that afternoon was a Vaudeville variety show featuring all local talent. Some of the talent was more talented than others, but that’s to be expected. We all had a great time. I think the best one was The Amazing Greg, who was listed as doing a magic routine. It turned out to be him doing ridiculously fake magic tricks but it was hilarious.

Sunday was the annual grand opening of the Saguache Museum. No, I don’t know why it closes every year. It probably just closes in the winter when there aren’t that many people around. Pretty much all they had at the outdoor part of the grand opening (which was the only part you could get to without paying admission) was a barbeque, some homemade ice cream, and a woman demonstrating making soap the old fashioned way. The soap part was fairly interesting but that’s about all it had going for it. No one minded that the afternoon was kind of lame because that night was the main event. It was a performance by the Salida Starlettes. (Salida is one of the nearest “big” towns, about an hour away from Saguache.) Who would have thought that Salida would have a Burlesque troupe? Not me. Most of us went to the show and it was really good. Some of those women were really talented. What a weekend. I don’t think any of us expected Saguache to have so much to offer.