Jig

Day 6
Back on the lower Lakes Trail today where we started out but this time with more direction from Jen, the park trail boss. She fills us in on park specifications for bridge approaches and the particular requests from Carl, the Head of Trails, who wants things just so. Carl won't allow stone-step approaches, so ramps it is. We get to work digging long, narrow trenches and searching the meadow for the perfect rocks.

With more information I am better prepared to lead and with equal amounts of work on either end of the bridge, Justin leads up one and I take on the other. He humors me with more trail banter than normal, slinging rock talk across the timbers and willingly eyeballing the trenches and our stone contenders with me for the perfect fit. We call them "gargoyles," the big rocks bounding either side of what will become our ramp. It's intricate work, getting the depth and width necessary for stability and finding the rocks with square enough edges and flat enough faces that they'll do the job. With the two of us and Sam, our hardest worker so far, on rock bars and a pulaski, we wrangle a few absolute gems into place. They take the ultimate rock test: if we can dance atop 'em, they're good to go. We're golden this morning as Sam does the rock-top jig and we watch our ramps begin to materialize.

We spend the afternoon rock gathering in the nearby stream, and I’ve never loved and respected my boots more—I wade directly into the water and nearly overtop at the ankles, but when I wade out my feet are still dry. If this is not the magic of science and textile technology, I don’t know what is.

At lunch, Justin gves us some riddles to chew on and I work in a little informal environmental education on erosion control. This is what I'm here for, after all. After lunch we trudge up the trail a bit and clear drains, some of which are still entrenched in snow and ice. SNOW and ICE! Welcome to August at Mount Rainier. Welcome to 6,000 feet.

Hack

Day 5

We spend the day brushing, hiking up and down trails using loppers to clear the brush from either side. This is not exactly a desirable task for a trail crew, but I guess it’s important. The crew groans from beginning to end, and I try to implore them to see the value in what we’re doing: if we make a nice, neat trail, hikers won’t be tempted to hike off trail and create more impact in the wilderness. They get it; they just don’t care. I can’t really blame them either.

First thing this morning we came across a downed tree and Justin trained us all on swinging an axe. Yet another skill I’d never tried, but faked my way through just fine. We all took a turn and as a crew, hacked our way all the way through the tree.

Communication between me and Justin is dwindling further and I am definitely frustrated, unsure about what he’s thinking at any given time and too uncomfortable to ask. I feel like I’m walking a tight wire between doing my job and really pissing him off, but this is all just anyone’s guess. I'm navigating my way around what seems like a fragile ego and a power trip, and I couldn’t be less interested in this kind of thing.

The crew seems to be settling in, loosening up and feeling more comfortable with us and each other. They’re having more fun, joking and laughing more, taking initiative and asking more questions. I think this is good, and I really enjoy being with them. They’re an awesome group of kids.

The weather we’ve had so far has been unexpectedly perfect: blue, sunny skies and temperatures in the 70s. Our last trail of the afternoon was a total gem—the High Lakes Trail with Rainier on one side and the vastness of a valley on the other. Even though the work was slow and uninspiring, the scenery can not be beat.

Crush

Day 4
It’s our first day of work, and after a sluggish breakfast in the morning chill we head out in the van and stop in at the tool cache where we run through safety and vocabulary before heading up the mountain. Justin’s approach is disengaged, and I think about education and learning and all of it makes me cringe. I worry how the crew might react to him but they seem unfazed by us at all, our presence very much secondary to their own. High schoolers, I’m learning, are a very interesting group.

We hike to the work site, the crew tiring easily and me lagging behind with the stragglers. It’s a lot on day one, a steep hike with a fair amount of weight in gear. The site is still a muddy mess just begging for drainage, so we set to work with three crew members making crush, two on rock gathering and the rest on trenches, cribs and the bridge approaches. I fake my way through training them how to use a sledge hammer—do you think they know I’ve never done this before? But I’ve seen it done, and I know the form, and I watch them try what I say and they succeed. Amber takes to making crush immediately and is visibly invigorated by the intensity of the task. It makes her feel tough and strong, and she seems the kind of kid who could use a little more of feeling that way. She makes a badass face as she crushes rocks, and I feel inordinately proud.

I spend much of the afternoon trying to set a boulder in a hole that is, in turns, too small, too large, too deep, too square and too full of water. Such is rock work, and I am learning as I go with two crew members who are relying on me for guidance. I become exasperated as they watch, unable to wield the rock bar in such a way that the magic of leverage works to my advantage. I resist asking Justin for help, not wanting to look incompetent or add frustration to his already sour-seeming mood. We call it a day and I am relieved to be done. We return to camp and break out the hacky sack as two crew members cook dinner for the first time. They do a great job and we eat as we’ve never eaten before. As it gets dark, I shake the caked, dried mud from my boots and pants. This is going to be a dirty couple of weeks.

Duty

Day 3
We leave the Park to pick up the crew in Seattle this morning. We meet everyone at the SCA office and run through the requisite gear list so we won’t find we were missing crucial pieces later on. I feel like a broken record: “Boots, work pants, rain gear, sleeping bag, warm layers, gloves, water bottles? Good.”

I try my best to make everyone feel comfortable and put nerves at ease, but Justin is all business as he runs through the day’s schedule and some primary rules. He makes me nervous, and I wonder how the crew will take to him. I'm not taking him well.

We hit the road in our 15-passenger van, a two-ton wreck of metal that sways with more velocity around every turn than I am prepared for. My heart races as Seattle traffic weaves around us and I navigate with sweaty palms all the way back to the mountain. The crew gets oriented and settles into camp, guying their tents with slack lines and collapsing walls. They’ll figure it out when it starts to rain, I figure. We sit around the picnic tables and bang out a crew contract with Justin at the helm, the crew tossing in ideas about respect and fair share, and I struggle to say what I wish I could. There's so much here that reminds me of Rebecca and the desert and makes me wish I was half the leader she is.

Justin and I cook our first crew dinner—mac n’ cheese—and everyone eats hungrily after dousing it with hot sauce. One of our kids stays in her tent through dinner, says she isn’t feeling well and needs to sleep and I am worried. My Wilderness Medicine training runs through my head and fuels imagination of the worst. I crouch outside her tent considering whether it's ludicrous to do a full-body assessment and check her airway for just a headache and some fatigue. I consider that this is technically my duty and exactly what I am certified for, but decide to let it go. I am surprised at how difficult and uncomfortable a decision this is to make. I realize with some reticence the responsibility that comes with knowledge and training, with leadership. I've been entrusted to make decisions that I'm not sure I trust myself to make. We've barely just begun.

Cache

Day 2
We sort and organize the food and store it away in our metal bear box. So much food! Eleven people, fourteen days, but I swear we could feed an army for a year. Justin promises that we’ll eat it all, and he’s probably right. We tour the park in the afternoon and the sun finally appears, burning off some of the fog and revealing in its wake the most striking alpine scenery I have ever seen.
We stop at the Longmire Visitor Center where I learn all kinds of Rainier history—didn’t know there has long been a vibrant ski scene here!—and then hike down to the site of our first work projects, where Justin’s previous crew left off (he’s been here with another group for two weeks already). The spot is a muddy drainage mess in need of a lot of tread, but it looks achievable and has enough variety to keep everyone busy for awhile. We stop by the Park Trails headquarters and check out our gear and tools—more stuff than we could ever need, but great to have such a well-stocked cache. I spend some after dark paging through a Park guide book, trying to learn what I can about the local flora and fauna in this foreign (to me) territory. I need to get on top of this stuff before the crew arrives. They’ll probably end up knowing more than me.

Moss

I promised you ages ago that I'd tell you about my summer, and now I finally can. It was crazy alright, and that crazy lasted right up until just this second. I left Mount Rainier National Park a month ago exactly. I was there for the better part of three weeks with SCA, leading a crew of nine high school kids in trail construction and maintenance and camping inside the park. The posts that will follow are pieces of the journal I kept while I was there, starting from the beginning and ending with the end. Here's Day One. Check back every day for a new installment.


Day 1
We shop for crew food and arrive at the Park to clouds and fog-covered peaks. No visible sign of the actual mountain, but the air is cooler and cleaner here than it felt in the city. I settle into my tent in the campground where we’ll be staying, an old abandoned site with decaying picnic tables from a half-century ago, their cement ballasts covered in moss and lichen and buried in the deep underbrush. The moss hangs in long strands everywhere and everything is green, green, green. This feels like the rain forest alright.

I read the geologic history of Rainier before coming out, and was a little distressed by what it said. An active volcano, it has erupted on average every 3,000 years. There is evidence it blew roughly 6,500 years ago and once more since then. The chances of me outrunning a lava flow are not all that good.

I've been making attempts since I got here on Wednesday to get to know Justin, my co-leader, who is quiet and a bit withdrawn. More time will help I think, but he seems a tough nut to crack.

Harvest Salsa

It's hard to write about much besides food lately with the harvest in the peak of its brilliance, so I hope you'll excuse another recipe and photo of the delicious things I'm eating these days.

My buddy Meg stopped by my house on her way home from working at the farm last week and left me with ten pounds of tomatoes, five tomatillos, a half dozen beets, green beans, mint, salad greens and a loaf of cinnamon raisin bread. This was the least she'd let me take and was a mere fraction of the share she was taking home. After she left, I stood gaping at the pile of produce on my counter and was overtaken by a totally irrational panic that I needed to use it, cook it, store it, seal it, LOVE it immediately before it all rotted away and left me with a stinking mess and a heap of food guilt. I was simultaneously aware of what a ridiculous and lovely crisis this was to have.

I remembered the bowl of salsa fresca accompanying Smitten Kitchen's huevos rancheros and knew I'd found a way to make at least a dent in the pile. After a late-night grocery run I made a royal mess of my kitchen, substituting red onions for white and adding tomatillos, a bunch more lime juice and a few more hot peppers. The result was a delicious vat of fresh salsa, most of which I poured into ice cube trays to be enjoyed on some dark and frigid February day when a little reminder of Baja will be just what the doctor ordered.

Baja California, Mexico
October 2005

Happy Song of the Week

Compliments to Glik for spinning this one on the juke box last night. I really dig it.


Jason Mraz, "I'm Yours"

Almost Autumn

I went running in the graveyard tonight after a heavy rain, and everything felt like Autumn. The sky hung in shades of gray and in comparison, the grass looked so alive. The leaves haven't turned yet or started to fall, but I could feel it coming. I could feel the change around the bend.

School has started and every morning, two boys stand on the corner outside my house waiting for the bus. I see people in sweaters when it's just barely cold enough, on mornings when the street lamps are shrouded in a layer of dew and water droplets glint on car windows as they speed past in the rising morning sun.

It's darker now, and earlier too when night falls and temperatures drop so fast. I'm trying to catch the change, to watch it as it comes. I'm ready for summer to end.

Literary Love

I'm immersed right now in Jonathan Safan Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; it's what motivates me to get my work done before it's late so I can read a bunch before bed. I wiki'd him just now and was bowled over to find out that he's married to Nicole Krauss, who wrote another of my favorite books. When I think about it now, it seems obvious. Their writing styles are totally smitten with each other.

So Much Goodness

In case you, like me, have weak knees for chocolate chip cookies, here's a little something to sweeten your week.

I've been having the urge to bake something for days and, honestly, I tried valiantly to resist. But a trip to Brattleboro Co-Op's bulk bins and a fantastic recipe (scroll down for the cookies) later and here I am with cookie crumbs on my fingers and something to share with you. I'd say we both win.

When I'd decided to make chocolate chip cookies I remembered that back in high school, I'd heard the story of the "secret" Neiman-Marcus chocolate chip recipe worth $250 being circulated around the dark and delicious corners of the infant internet. I don't know what made me think of it today, but I Googled that secret recipe and found this. Myth: busted. Apparently the story isn't exactly true, and while the recipe looks enticing it does call for two full cups of butter and a grated Hershey bar. Ugh. Who has time for clogged arteries and fussy recipes? Not this girl.

So I checked in on two of my trusted food bloggers, searched their archives and came up with pure gold, as expected. While Smitten Kitchen's recipe looked great I didn't have any nuts in the house (except for just this one...heh heh?), so I went for Orangette's recipe instead. And even though my vanilla extract is not "best-quality" nor my baking sheet lined with parchment paper, the cookies came out looking, smelling and tasting divine.

In the spirit of neighborly love I tried giving some away to Barbara, my new next-door neighbor, but at 8pm her apartment was dark and the TV was on, two tell-tale signs of a sleeping retiree. Maybe tomorrow. And in the meantime maybe you'll try this recipe too, or at least ogle the picture above and decide you can't resist any longer, either.

Stuff I'm Psyched About

My new apartment
All the windows
3.5 miles in 30 minutes
Garbanzo beans
Target
Seeing friends again
Having my stuff in one place
Bob Seger
Hopscotch
My bike
Picking berries at Emily and Jared's
The way the smell of laundromats always reminds me of New Mexico

And the lowlights...
How everyone can see in my naked windows
The way I messed up hanging that curtain rod
EE articles that spend forever splitting hairs over word definitions
Furniture that's too big to fit in my car

Pretty good, I'd say. How are you?