Spike 6, Seattle, Spike 7 and Moving On.
Portland, OR
Elevation: 50ft.
There is something to be said about the things we carry. Since Seattle I’ve had this feeling like I’ve been lost in place and I’m not sure what that even means. This chapter of my life started the moment I fired up Rhyhorn in my parent’s garage and backed out down the familiar drive way waving goodbye to my foundation, my base. I suppose this could be just another part of learning to stand on my own, just growing up to put it plainly. I don’t really know but I do know that I already miss the woods, the disconnect. I’ve been feeling very alone lately but alone in the woods is different than alone in the city.
Spike 6 began a little non-traditionally. Instead of leaving from the cabins as a group, Lily, Eleanor and I met up with the crew at Hotelling Campground straight from San Francisco. The team had already done a day in the field when we met up with them and I felt guilty that I was still in shorts and a t-shirt and clean as can be. Alan joined us for this spike which was good. It helped us confirm many of our questions, got him some field time and set us up for a good closure to the season (little did we know that there would actually be enough funding for another full spike afterwards). The crew had done a two-plot day (a new site and a control, which, still takes a good amount of time) and was pretty tired and dirty looking. It was then that I realized how desperate we all must look to everyone we meet.
Having Rhyhorn with me was a real treat. It gave me a chance to practice living out of him some more and saved me a lot of logistic grief having all of my food and clothes in my own place - zero time breaking down camp in the morning means more time to take a shit and make instant noodles. Waking up that first morning I already knew it was gonna be a doozy of a spike. It was a hot week and most of the plots were going to be low elevation sites. Needless to say we all fell asleep in puddles.
The week turned out to be a good one for wildfires I think in the time that we were there at least 3 had started around us. By the third day the valleys were filling up with smoke. As bad as the fires were, it was a welcome relief to the heat. Blocking out the sun with it’s eye stinging mist, the fires became a sort of presence.
Alan kept mentioning that I wouldn’t have anything to blog about since the week was going so smoothly, and he was right. Things went very well despite the additional plots. Having him back as a leader took a load off of the crew. We didn’t need to consult a printout of instructions and any problem we encountered was assessed by him directly right away - we were flexible. I will say that another reason things seemed to be so good - neutral - for me was that I had just started to shut down. Similar to the kind of foggy angst I’m feeling now I had somehow flipped a switch in me that simply turned me off. There were moments that I just felt dead inside. A season like this was abnormally hard physically and mentally on the crew and I just couldn’t handle it. Here’s me with some Poison Oak.
Here’s my worst enemy, Tan Oak.
The rest of the week has really faded in my memory but the pictures I took remind me of the smokey drives and the long long days. Collecting the micromet sensors was an interesting return to the beginning. A few days before meeting the rest of the crew I had gone to the sites with Krista, Alan and Howie to set them up and I knew even then that this was going to be a tough project and that I would be a totally different person come the day that I return to get them - I was right. This job taught me the value of hard work and even more the value of working hard. Sometimes there came endless days filled with hardships and dead ends and giving up was all that we wanted to do but there’s something to be said about gritting your teeth and just jumping in knowing that it’s all just gotta be done.
Spike 6 ended with driving back to Happy Camp a day early. In addition to paying for all of the campsites, Alan treated the whole crew to a pizza dinner! It was more than we could have asked for from a guy working just as hard as we all were. Driving back through the smokey valleys behind the trucks I was reminded just how small we were in the grand scheme of things.
We came back to the cabins to a commiserating email from Rob. Ever concerned and watchful of us, our awesome supervisor showered us with praise and shared with us an old photo of him and his hotshot crew back from a day fighting fires. What. A. Bad. Ass. And of course he got the spot next to the lady - ooh, kill’em.
After a goodnight’s rest, a whole bunch of laundry and part I of packing Lily and I headed north for Portland. The mission this break was to catch up on emails, job applications, weight and to head up to Seattle!
Packed with our things and my new friend (Lily’s friend), Janelle, our trio headed up to the maritime city. Each of us had different people we wanted to meet up with on different days - it was logistically a potential mess but it went through without a hitch cause these girls were super independent and knew how to get around on their own. On the first day we hit up the Pike Place Market area.
It was a nice change of scenery and pace. The climate was mostly a cool, salty breezy 70º and the city was filled with colorful tourists and people. Walking around Pike Place Market I felt giddy to be so close to where REI and Starbucks (kind of) got their starts. My contacts for the break were two old friends from the east coast, Morgan from SCBI and Mark from the third grade. Seeing them both was unbelievably amazing for me. For a moment I snapped out of my tired fog and had a jump in my step again. The first night we met up with Morgan and three or four of the local AmeriCorps teams and house partied! It was refreshing and a little overwhelming to be around so many young people again. Though there wasn’t BP or earsplitting dubstep like the good old Leach House days, there was good conversations and much needed hugs.
The next day I met up with my old friend and the Obi Wan to my Anakin (he taught me how to break dance back in middle school), Mark Nufable. He took me on a tour of the other side of Seattle and showed me parks, amazing food, comic book shops, the most amazing card game shop I’ve ever seen, REI SEATTLE!!! and the wicked awesome EMP Museum.
(Yes those did belong to Gimli, Strider and Frodo)
(Made me miss my brother)
(Shout out to my NEON family!)
After the museum we crossed the water and headed towards Ballard and quite possibly one of the biggest moments for me on the west coast so far - the Conor Byrne Pub!!! Aside from it being extremely old and historic, the interior was open and comfortable, the crowd was mellow and musical, the tap was rich in craft brews and whiskey and IT’S WHERE THE HEAD AND THE HEART MET!
My life felt more complete than ever. THATH has been the closest band I’ve ever held onto and has been a driving force for a lot of my life decisions for the past 3 years. Not a long time, but I’ve gotten so much done in that time and I really do owe it to them. Lily met up with us and surprised us, and the entire bar, by signing up for the open mic night and playing the Mbira. I’ve never met such an earnestly positive and fearless person in my life and am very very grateful and proud to call her my friend. At 22 she has already travelled much of the world and has touched many lives, and is a bad ass Mbira player.
The trip came to an end and we headed back to Portland. Learning that there was enough funding for a full 7th spike was bittersweet. I had already begun to miss the team and the mountains but god the work was tough. But, as I began to really truly understand, nothing in life is, why cry about it?
Spike 7 started without a hitch. I felt we were all kind of worried about the spike since two of our teammates were heading out halfway and since most of the plots we had been assigned were revisits of old ones where Alan wanted us to haul out a number of large trees - no exception. It seemed like the fates had mercy on us because our first plot was super flat and super open as well as a easy hike down from the road - it was a gracious warm up.
(A Costco pie never tasted so good)
The plots were as hard as we had expected. Processing and hauling out trees as big as Alan wanted us to turned out to be not just a full days work but a long full days work, even with a team of 6. It made me think about how this was essentially him making us correct our misunderstandings of his instructions and how it just didn’t seem realistic that a three man crew would have been able to do this and still finish each day at a reasonable time. It just didn’t add up. Perhaps we could have had each three man crew take two days per plot, one day to do the protocols and another to get the stems but then there was no way we would have hit the 60 plots we needed. Looking around at the whole team working till it began to get dark I just didn’t get it. But, then again, that’s not a call us field techs can make.
It was a smokey week. Fires were still burning and new ones had started. There had been, by this time, 3 hotshot fatalities. Wildfires just are a part of life here and the firefighters that fight them are truly heroes. I felt fortunate to grow up on the wast coast where all we worry about is heavy rain and snow not closing schools down. A cool thing about the smoke is the spectacular sunsets it creates.
With our current work rate in mind we decided to focus on revisits while we still had Charles and Kim and to attack the plots as a full team. The hope was that we could hit enough big ones that we weren’t just destroyed when it became just Eleanor, Matt, Lily and I.
Though, as bad as I make the job seem, it was filled with rewards. As all hardships are I suppose. There is a good side. We all became tougher and closer. By Spike 7 we could have easily been hired on as a ultra-low budget logging crew. Nothing automated just dull hand saws and muscle. Looking back on the work I really hated it but being back in the city I miss the simplicity of it all. Waking up I didn’t have emails or texts or appointments or errands or, fuck, exercise to worry about. It was get up, break down the tent, get your dirty clothes on and hit the road. In a way my angst could be attributed to me just not acclimating easily back to the developed life. After Charles and Kim left we had our asses kicked by a revisit and didn’t get out of the field till past 2200 hours but it was that kind of asinine ass kicking that makes the good times great.
The last leg of our Spike was characterized by a hodge podge of driving and confusion and, suprisingly, the coast. Tired and broken from the 2200 plot we drove long and high to a very remote new plot. Once we got there we realized that the path down into it was overgrown and such thick brush that we could barely make out the sheer drop it hid. Tired and broken to the bones the last thing we all wanted was another late night - it was a full stem analysis plot and we still needed to head to Brookings, OR by the end of the day, a 5 or so hour drive. We chalked it up to field karma and decided to treat ourselves better today and made our way to the coast. We used the daylight to resupply ice and fuel and to contact the local ranger to let them know we were in the area and, of course, a Morality Fund fueled pizza dinner!
We planned to drive as close as possible to the plot and dispersal camp setting us up for an early attack on the plot. Following the GPS and Alan’s instructions we carefully made our way east into the mountains but inevitably hit a road we couldn’t drive. Even in 4 low ‘OSU 1′ simply couldn’t climb the steep, washed out fire road. We were over 2 kilometers from the plot and in backing up the truck got it stuck against the brushy, sandy side of the road. I had never seen the axels on these trucks flex so much as they straddled and slide into the deep washed out ruts over and over again.
Upon freeing the truck we had to figure out logistics. Admittedly it did cross our minds to just camp on the beach, forge a plot and head back to the cabins - but that wouldn’t have been right. Looking at the maps we found a round about way to put us close to two of the plots - it would mean arriving in the dark again.
The next morning we tackled REP02, the 1999 Repeater Fire. The plot proved to be your classic dense Tan Oak plot on a east facing slope so we suffocated and burned for 12 hours and hiked out.
The next day was REP01 and even denser plot filled with Tan Oak and Madrone aka the clothes ripper. Madrone branches are smooth, hard and brittle and will snap into sharp points easily. They tear at your skin and clothes and usually make for a bad time. The plot was filled with so many large conifers and blowdowns that it would make both the protocols and stem analysis take longer - fitting for our last plot of the season.
But turning off the negativity, closing my mouth and jumping in I went through the motions until even this passed. Hiking out we felt like a load had been taken of of us, like we had been freed…Starting up the truck there was one thing on all of our minds - ice cream.
Back at the cabins we rested, we sawed, we cleaned, we packed. And then when all the dust fell we said our goodbyes. It was hard but not as hard as in past jobs. I would be seeing most of them again shortly either in Portland or in the short HJ Andrews soil and veg stints we had all been transitioned into. But another part of it, I think, was simply me growing up. Pulling out of that cabin gravel road for the last time I turned onto 96 and headed west towards Seiad Valley. It was emotional but not as emotional as I thought it would be. It’s the nature of the job to make strong but short connections to the people and places you worked with and then to move forward into the next chapter. Folks with more seasons under their belts do this better but I think I am getting there. “No old friends”.
Almost there.
The mission after leaving the State of Jefferson was to visit Mrs. Doris Templeman in Medford. Mrs. Templeman and her late husband sponsored my mother and her family from Cambodia to the states as they were fleeing the Pol Pot Regime. Meeting up with her was on my list of things to do for a long long time and I don’t think I could have anticipated exactly how wonderful it was going to be. Right off the bat she welcomed me with open arms and gave me a warm shower and a soft bed to sleep in. She fed me lavishly with fresh fruit, stir friend noodles, cookies and all the iced tea you can drink (made right, she was born and raised on a farm in the midwest)! From the moment I got there till the I left after breakfast the next morning we talked. We talked about my mother and her family and their first days here in the U.S., we talked about her and her husband’s life together and their adventurous days travelling with their kids job hopping all over the states, we talked about doing what your heart tells you to do and that positivity and faith can take you a long long way and we talked about loss, mortality and being good and strong. I had never sat and talked to her before though we had run into each other a fair amount of times during my teenage years. It was fascinating and touching to learn so much about such an important person to my family, we talked like we were old friends. Shoot we even talked about wildfires, ecology, climate change and the importance of conservation. Probably the most touching things we talked about was when she spoke about my mom and her siblings. Looking through old albums she told me how she first met them when they were all very sick and scared and desperate and how they all worked so hard to excel in school and to learn english - how nothing she gave them no matter how small was so incredibly appreciated. It was an experience to hear someone talk about my aunts and uncles like they were kids. These were people I grew up looking up to for guidance, people I always thought had it figured out. Looking through their photos I watched them grow up into teenagers and then into adults and then into parents. I left Virginia feeling a stronger connection to my family than I ever had, a connection like we were all earnest friends and no longer just relatives. After talking to Mrs. Templeman and hearing how emotionally she told stories about them and my grandparents I had never appreciated or missed them more. I am so grateful and proud to come from two extremely strong families. I come from a family tree rooted in war and loss and supported by hard work and love. It made me miss all of my not-so-little cousins and my dear brother. It wiped away all the sadness and loneliness the field season had dredged up from the back of my mind and simply made me grateful. Before I left I facetimed my mom and aunt at work knowing just how much Mrs. Templeman and them would appreciate it. She’s been a part of our family since my mom was 10 and has watched her grow up and is now watching me grow up and seeing them talk and laugh warmed my heart beyond compare.
All in all it has all come to a close. I’m sorry for such a large, rambling post I really put too much off for too long. The next steps for me are uncertain. For the next 5 weeks or so I have secured some work at OSU’s HJ Andrews Experimental Forest doing some soil science work as well as some vegetation work. It will give me something to do, get me paid and get me into another opportunity to network. There ain’t no rest for the wicked and I need to keep climbing as long as these hands and legs can climb. Until next time all of my dear friends and family - I’ll see you in the woods.
Chris
