Weeks 6 and 7

Week 6:
That week was kind of strange. We were working with Lisa on a barbed wire fence up near Stone Cellar again. The first plan was to come back to town at like noon on Wednesday because we had a short project here we could work on. We would then drive back up Thursday morning to ride horses (a “service learning day,” but really it was just for fun because the BLM people are nice to us). It was nice to be back at the cabin. It’s so pretty up there. So we made the 1.5-hour drive up there on Monday with both our van and cargo truck. As soon as we unloaded the truck, Becky and Michala drove it back down because they both had doctor appointments. Becky has had a cough for a while and unbeknownst to me, Michala’s tailbone had been hurting pretty bad for like two weeks even though she hadn’t fallen down or anything. They didn’t get back to the cabin until that evening. Becky had gotten an inhaler and Michala had found out some news. She had a cyst on her tailbone that has been there since birth, but all the bouncy car rides we’ve been doing made it inflamed or something. Apparently this happens to soldiers a lot when they ride around in Jeeps all the time. So she had an appointment on Wednesday to get it drained and they said she’d probably have surgery to have it removed on Friday. Eek. Christina drove her back down to our house that night since she couldn’t do the work at the cabin and wanted her to work in the BLM office on Tuesday. We found out Christina’s plan on Tuesday. She found out when she was in town that our Wednesday afternoon project was cancelled so there was no reason for everyone to go back to town before Thursday and riding horses. TK and Heather were both taking a day off on Wednesday to watch the USA/Ghana World Cup game. Tuesday after work, TK, Heather, and I would drive down to Saguache. On Wednesday, they would watch the game and I would take Michala to the doctor in Salida in Christina’s car. After the game, TK and Heather would drive back up to the cabin bringing with them all the food needed for those extra days at the cabin and things needed to ride horses since everyone expected to be back in town before that. I would stay at the church with Michala Wednesday and Thursday. Whew. So confusing. Michala’s doctor appointment was fairly traumatic because the local anesthesia shot they had given her didn’t work. She also found out that she can wait another month until she’s back home after AmeriCorps is over to have the removal surgery. She also found out that she needed to get one of those donut-shaped pillows to sit on until she has the surgery. So we went to the medical supply stores and started looking around. We couldn’t find the pillows so we found a person. Michala said “Do you have any of those donut-shaped pillows?” and the lady said “Sure! Do you want chocolate or glazed?” Gotta love a medical supply lady with a sense of humor. She showed us the options, which were not what we expected. We expected like a clear plastic inflatable thing. What they had were fabric-covered foam things in either red plaid or navy blue. We both agreed that she should get the plaid because it was so silly looking and it’s silly enough to need a butt pillow anyway. We laughed about it for the rest of the day. It looks like a Scottish dog bed. It looks especially silly on our couches, which are kind pastel and floral. When the others came home and saw it, Becky immediately decided it needed a Scottish name and called it MacDougall. So that’s how MacDougall the Butt Pillow came into our lives. Luckily Michala had already decided to laugh about it instead of being embarrassed by it.

I’m going out of order here. Monday of that week while Becky and Michala were gone, the rest of us built a new barbed wire fence about a 20 minute drive up a terrifying rocky mountain from the cabin. Building a new wire fence is WAY easier than repairing an old one. Only the middle two wires needed to be barbed. The top and bottom wires could be smooth. My favorite part was pounding in the metal posts. Post pounders are fun. They’re kind of like a metal tube that is closed on one end with handles on the sides. You put the open end of the tube over the post and pound away so the top of the post hits the closed end of the tube until the post is in the ground enough. We finished that fence on Tuesday. I’m not entirely sure what everyone else did Wednesday while I was with Michala. They rode horses on Thursday. (I didn’t mind missing out to stay with Michala because while I’m much more comfortable being near horses after that training we had, being on a horse still makes me nervous. And they were going to be riding like five miles.)

That Friday night most of us went to see Robin Hood at the two-block-away movie theater. They’re only open Friday through Sunday and show one movie per weekend. We were not impressed with it as a Robin Hood story, but it was pretty good as a Medieval action movie.

On Saturday, the five girls on the team all went to Salida. We had a delicious dinner at the Boathouse Cantina, went to one other bar, then came home pretty early. AmeriCorps has turned us all into old people.

Week 7:
Week 7 started with my two least favorite days of my entire AmeriCorps experience thus far. We were scheduled to be surveying baby trees all week. We had been told something about how we’d have to use maps and a GPS to find these trees and document them or something. It sounded like it might be kind of cool. Oh how wrong we were. On Monday we were missing Michala (who would be working in the office all week to avoid bumpy car rides), Becky (who had been randomly selected for a drug test), and Christina (who had to take Becky for the test). The rest of us were sent to work with Sarah and Kevin. We drove out to the woods and were put into two groups. I was with Tomm and Alex, led by Kevin. Oh my goodness, the work was boring. You have to use the GPS to find a set of coordinates that were already programmed in. Then one person holds the end of a tape measure on that spot while another person pulls the tape out to 11.8 feet. That person then circles the spot while still holding the tape and counts all the baby trees in the circle. Someone else documents the findings. We developed a system. I would find the spot with the GPS (which I got pretty good at by the end of the day). Tomm and Alex would come do the circling and counting while I took off to find the next spot. Kevin documented. I feel bad saying this because he seems like a nice enough guy, but Kevin is possibly the dullest person I’ve ever met. I tried to make conversation and be cheerful but it just didn’t work. A bad omen for the day: When the groups first separated and we were walking down the road to our first spot, I realized I didn’t know Kevin’s name. I asked and he said Kevin. I said “Oh, I’m Courtney. Nice to meet you.” He said nothing. He didn’t say it was nice to meet me. He didn’t ask Tomm or Alex’s names. Nothing. Every time I tried to ask conversation-starting questions, he would just answer the question and that was the end of it. Very frustrating. With boring work like that, you need to make it interesting somehow. It just didn’t happen for us that day. And it wasn’t just a horrible job because it was boring. I’ve had boring jobs before. It was also physically pretty hard. The reason the baby trees needed to be counted was that they were in areas of prescribed burns. So everywhere we had to walk was literally covered in dead tree trunks and branches. Sometimes when you step on them they would be sunk into the ground and stay still and sometimes they would roll out from under you. You never know which it will be. The area was also really hilly. There was little shade and it was pretty warm that day. If something is hard, it’s usually also interesting. If something is boring, it’s usually also easy. Nope, neither of these were true for that day. Adding to the misery of the day was the fact that we HAD to wear pants, long sleeves, and hard hats. To count baby trees. I would have wanted to wear pants anyway because we had to walk through a lot of brush but I don’t think anything touched my arms all day. And hard hats? Seriously? What do our heads need to be protected from? Partially due to my compulsion to ask WHY for everything we do here and partially in an attempt to make conversation and get Kevin to talk, I asked a few different times why we had to wear these things. I did not get an acceptable answer. The long sleeves were apparently to protect our arms from getting scratched by branches. Heat stroke and overheating sound less safe to me than a few scratches on my arms (which, PS, I’ve had many of already). One time, after asking about the hard hats yet again, Kevin said he’s been hit in the head with branches a few times. (He’s been doing this for several years.) I said but I’m not that tall. (He’s tall.) He said no, from stuff falling out of trees onto his head. I would rather face the highly unlikely possibility of something falling out of a tree onto my head than be awkwardly top-heavy all day and have my scalp covered in sweat. By the end of the day I was just carrying my stupid hard hat around most of the time.

Heather, Rob, Jess, and TK, who were with Sarah for the day, didn’t mind it much at all. They loved chatty outgoing Sarah and even invited her to the barbecue we’re having on Friday to celebrate the Fourth of July. Blah blah blah.

On Tuesday morning before work, the only thing keeping me going was the thought that surely we would switch up the groups and I would not be with Kevin again. Also because the plan was that since we all knew how to do it now, we could go out in pairs with each other, not groups with Sarah or Kevin. Unfortunately this was not the case. The only people from the team who would be out there that day were Heather, Rob, Tomm, Jess, and I. When we met at the BLM office in the morning like always, Sarah came out and said that Heather and Rob would be with her and Tomm, Jess, and I would be with Kevin. I immediately feared for my sanity. I think Tuesday was even worse. It began with the crushing blow of not switching groups. We were also in a different area that day which was much hillier, making the hiking much harder. I was doing the GPS part again for most of the day. It was much harder to navigate there because there were a lot more adult trees that I would have to go around which made it way harder to keep a straight course to the next point. Ug. At least it’s over now. Kevin told us that day that he heard we would be working on a fence somewhere Wednesday and Thursday (that was the previous Wednesday afternoon’s cancelled project). Thank goodness.

Tuesday night we watched another gem from one of Tomm’s horror movie four-packs. The cover said it was called The Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep. When TK put the DVD in his laptop, he clicked on the thing that said The Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep. When the movie started and it showed the title screen, the title was Deadly Waters. We were confused. A little ways into the movie we realized that the description on the back of the DVD case for The Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep matched the movie we were watching. The star was Charlie O’Connell, Jerry O’Connell’s brother. He had three different faces that I could tell: there was angry face, happy face, and flirting-with-the-blonde-main-character face. The plot wasn’t quite as awful as Raging Sharks but the acting was worse. It was pretty ridiculous. I’m starting to forget what a good movie looks like. It’s been a while since I’ve seen one.

(I wasn’t feeling well on Wednesday so I didn’t go to work. The rest of the team did indeed build a fence with Dwight. It was a log fence, which we haven’t done before. I don’t know much about that day though.)

On Thursday, we were with Dwight again. Our task was to put in the wood corner posts for a soon-to-be-built barbed wire fence. He didn’t even bring any wire because the only goal was to put in the H-braces that would go on each corner of the square fenced-in area. We set off to the far away location of this future fence. First Dwight and Dave (who I later learned is an actual shaman, but I did not get to talk to him at all that day) in the BLM truck, then Alex and TK in our truck, then the rest of us in the van, driven by me. We drove down the highway as usual then turned off onto a dirt road, also as usual. The dirt road turned into gravel, which then turned into rocks. The rocks got bigger and bigger. Soon we were bouncing along so violently that we wondered if the van would actually fall apart on us this time. As has been happening more and more frequently during ridiculous situations on this project, I got a laughing fit. The road was just SO BUMPY and there was nothing I could do about it. It didn’t help that I could see the rest of the team bouncing up and down in the rearview mirror. Also, as the road got bumpier, it also got narrower. This meant that I couldn’t avoid scraping past tree branches every few seconds. I had tears running down my face I was laughing so hard. Then it got worse. We got to a part of the road that went fairly steeply upward and was covered in mud. The BLM truck made it up ok, but our truck couldn’t. If our truck couldn’t, there’s no way Gertrude could make it. Alex and TK made several tries up in the truck, even trying going off the road into the grass a bit after Dwight and Dave had cut down trees to make room. It just wouldn’t happen. We were told that the worksite was only about a half-mile from where we were and we could just walk, but for some reason we decided not to do that. The whole team got out of the van and helped clear brush next to the road. Dwight got out his chainsaw and cut up the huge fallen trees in the way. That’s right, we were rerouting the road. I think we would have just walked the rest of the way but Dwight and Dave were worried about other people getting stuck there. Then we backed up our vehicles to go on our new road. The truck almost got stuck again trying to get up onto the grass, but I learned from their mistake. Apparently you just have to go fast. I was randomly chuckling for the rest of the day just thinking about how silly the drive to work was.

Once we finally got there, we began The Day That Stole Our Souls. We were in groups of two or three on each corner on the future fence. Becky, Tomm, and I were a group. There were two unclaimed corners. We started at one but discovered it was really rocky. Since we didn’t have a rock bar at the time we decided to go to the other one which was down a little hill and nearer a creek. Big mistake. We started digging our hole and ran into a huge rock about eight inches down. We knew we couldn’t get past it so we just moved over and started a new hole. Same thing happened. So we moved over again. Turns out the third time is indeed a charm. We managed to dig our 30-inch deep post hole in our third location and finished right before lunch. After lunch, since three wood posts would need to go there eventually, we each carried an eight-foot, six-inch diameter wood post the long-enough distance from the truck. We got that first post in without much problem. We then moved in to our next post hole. About ten inches in, we hit another rock. It was jutting out from the edge of the hole and went about halfway across it. We couldn’t just start a new hole like we did before because this one had to be a certain distance from the first, otherwise the cross piece for the H-brace wouldn’t fit. We thought since we could expose one side of the rock, surely we could get it out. We then spent the next two and a half hours or so having our souls sucked out by this rock. Imagine the frustration. We tried just slamming it with a rock bar (which we had gotten by this point) to break it up. We tried widening the hole to find the other side of the rock. We tried prying it up. Nothing worked. Luckily everyone else finished early-ish and we got to leave at about 4:00. Also luckily, my soul was mostly restored as I laughed my way down the bouncy road back to the highway.