First week of work

August 31^st, 2007

With orientation over, and Monday morning quickly rolling up, my roommates and I made several emergency trips to REI, Sierra Trading Post, and Wal-Mart to make sure we had everything we needed. I've never been very good at dropping $100, but this job makes that look easy. Hopefully no more stuff needs to be bought. And right now that hope is looking good.

Because of the way that the NCC runs, and the fact that we work for groups such as the Bureau of Land Management and such, not all of our projects go through and sometimes our schedules change overnight. Thus, I left on Monday morning at 5:30 while my roommates (all 3) left on Tuesday. Everyone on a crew has a job within the crew such as, tool manager, kitchen manager, or historian who is basically in charge of their specific goals. I sort of halfway volunteered for kitchen manager and since no one else wanted it, there I was. Now, with this job comes quite a bit of responsibility seeing as how I plan every meal that our crew eats while out on spikes. And let me just say that burritos and pasta get old real fast. So my job was to come up with a decent menu for our first week out that worked with everyone's diet and got us all the calories we need. That's not as easy as it sounds when you have 2 veggies, 1 vegan, and 3 very avid carnivores. The Sunday before we left, my supervisor, Eric and I went to our local version of Costco without the cards and bought literally $199.42 of food. It was intense. Unfortunately for us, before we even got in to the shopping center, we took a look into our bear box to get a feel for any kind of food that we already had that we could use. After going through everything, mostly, Eric stuck his hand in one more time, pulled out a box of pasta and with it a handful of maggots. Needless to say, we were both disgusted (this was not his original bear box) and thus began the clean up process. It was already 8:30. I had to be up at 5:00 to get to school at 6 am the next morning. By the time we finished cleaning up the box as best we could, got a new one, and then went shopping, it was 11pm before I got home. I still had to pack and whatnot, so this was not the best experience. Not going to lie.

Monday morning came upon me, no sun, and plenty still to do. My roommate Graham was feeling really nice and allowed me to drive his car to the school parking lot and then the next day he would ride my bike to the parking lot and pick up his car. I almost cried it was so nice. I'm not sure I could have woken up any earlier in order to walk there. Everyone arrived, we packed up the cars, got briefed on the drive and so forth and then we were on our way. It was an hour and a half drive out to the U.S. Forest Service's offices. There we were to meet Jenn who was in charge of the urban lots that the USFS owns. Urban lots are basically plots of land throughout Lake Tahoe that are not owned but rather maintained by the USFS, and no one can buy them. Originally it was set up so that Lake Tahoe would stop growing so exponentially. My crew helps the USFS maintain these lots. Because of the Angorra Fire that had just ripped through Southern Tahoe (which is in California) we were in a burned zone picking succession plants that were actually invasive species, specifically the bull thistle which looks ridiculously like the Anderson thistle which is not invasive. It wasn't hard work, but for the first day it was perfect because it gave us a chance to talk as a crew, get to know each other a little and still be doing something worthwhile. Overall, between the 10 of us, we picked over 5,000 bull thistles (we had to count as we pulled). Jenn was very proud and much happier then she would have been if she had to do it on her own. That night, we drove back to our campsite that is actually right along two other crews, one trail management crew and a group of sawyers. There was no one there but us, and yet our space that we would set up in was tiny. Basically it was a small tent city and we all cooked there. Nicely enough, there was actually running water and showers if you were into that. It was actually suggested we not shower because it makes you smell less like nature and thus more animals will bother you, especially insects. Instead, most of us went down to the beach on Lake Tahoe and swam instead, after dinner of course. My crew ate chicken with broccoli and cauliflower. The veggies ate pasta with a cooked kale and onion mixture. It was actually pretty good. Overall, it went pretty smoothly considering. By 9 pm everyone was passed out in their tent ready for Tuesday morning.

Tuesday began in one particular lot building a straight fence because a family had built their home so large on their lot that their veranda actually let out right onto USFS property. Thus they had created a trail to their backyard and that is illegal. The lots are open to all people, you can even camp on them and what not, but you may not create trails or use it for your own personal use for storage or whatever else you can think of. So our fence was to recreate an anti-trail with rocks and pine straw and also to let them know that they could not have this trail by putting up this fence. The fence was seriously hard to build. It is an easy design, but because of the rocky ground there was a lot of pick-axeing and rock baring. Rock bars are very heavy, 16 pounds of pure steel love. We would take 4 foot pieces of round wood, and then dig out 2 foot holes and place the wood in. Then 8 feet further down would be another 4 foot pole and a large 8 foot piece of wood would lay across them. It took us all day to do this. I guess we shouldn't have been surprised because it was our first day doing something other then strictly manual labour. Unfortunately we didn't even finish it the first day, so we just worked until it was time to leave and go back to camp. Nothing particularly exciting happened that day other then that we were all getting better about being up so high. That was very nice. Less heavy breathing, less having to stop, etc. That night, when we got back to camp, Eric suggested making food and eating on the beach, so after gathering all of our food supplies, changing into swimming clothes, and other such necessities, we all piled in and headed down to the free beach to cook dinner. It was really nice. Just hot enough, just cool enough, and Lake Tahoe felt amazing. We had hamburgers (or blackbean burgers for the veggies) and spinach salad. Again, relatively simple and enjoyable. When we got back to camp, I started talking to another crew supervisor and leader Roland and Adam. They are the trail management sup's and they are so funny. They are both all about getting to know us, even those not in their crew, and just being overall helpful and funny. That night, several people stayed up a little later then 9 pm, but most of us where in bed before 9:30 because 5:30 seriously rolls around faster then you think it will.

Wednesday morning was bright and early, and apparently the night before we had some black bears having fun around our campsite. Eric, my sup saw them and had to shoo them away. Then after breakfast and lunch was made, we hopped in the trucks and went back to the USFS offices to meet Jenn and get the supplies for the day. We were going to finish our straight fence and possibly start a worm fence that afternoon. We had to pick up 50 logs for the worm fence and that took quite some time. Around 10 we were finally ready to go and we had to get the truck and trailer out of a tiny, tiny space. I managed to find myself close to the truck when they were doing this, so I became the person helping back the driver up and out. Eric, the sup, was driving, and honestly, we both kind of knew it was going to be impossible to get him out. The trailer kept jack knifing because of the way the trees and building are set up and no matter where he tried to go he would be hitting something. It was already 10 in the morning, and we hadn't even started. That was killer. Finally we figured out a way to get him out, and it involved undoing the trailer and reattaching it when he was turned around and able to go the easy way out of the backyard of the USFS offices. On the road toward Incline Village, back to the original fence to finish, we got to see some more of the gorgeousness of Lake Tahoe. Once we got there, it was time to drill through the 8 foot poles. I got the awesome job of doing the drilling. It was like having a half-assed version of a chainsaw. It was enough for me, for now. Of course, the moment I get a power tool in my hands it is ill-prepared to do the job that I need it to do. The drill was dull. Very dull. So, while Jenn and one of the crew members found a hardware store to buy a new one, we all helped reestablish the anti-trail and move rocks and such. When Jenn got back the new drill cut through that wood like butter. It was amazing. 15 minutes later, all 14 holes had been drilled and the 8 foot poles had been chainsawed to work on top of the 4 foot poles to create one pimpin' fence. Well, because of the drill hold up it was already 12:30 by the time we were done. Because of that there was no way we could finish an entire 100 foot worm fence by the end of the day. Thus we took on other jobs like unloading the trailers full of wood for the worm fence at the site, and then off to 4 other sites to clean up trash and make sure that a paintball field had been unestablished. This ended our 3^rd day of work, and it was back home to eat dinner and have some fun. On the way home, Eric decided that it would be a great idea (because of where we were) to finish going around the lake instead of going the way we came. Great idea, because that meant that we have gotten to see the entirety of the lake in one day, on the first week of work. Completely worthwhile. We passed Emerald Bay, which is most definitely the prettiest part of the lake by far, and there is a ridge on which you drive and that is the only road that passes around it. It's tiny, and scary, and fabulous. Back at camp we cooked our last dinner, which happened to be burritos. They were good, but the yellow jackets were intense and covered our meat. Of course they had to go for the meat, they couldn't go for the onions or something. After dinner it was down to Lake Tahoe for a swim and some frisbee, which I've always enjoyed but have become quite attached to since orientation. Once again, to bed before 9:30, this time though I tried to read a bit, a book called “Basin and Range” by John McPhee. He wrote a book I had to ready for my ecology class with Dr. White, and it was amazing, so when Graham, my roommate, suggested this one I jumped headfirst. Not even a chapter in, I feel asleep and decided it was time to just go to sleep.

5:30 on a Thursday morning and I was ready to keel over. I literally couldn't pull myself out of bed until 6 and we not only had to make breakfast and lunch, we also had to break camp and be ready to go at 7. Needless to say I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to get everything done. I got everything done, but it was intense. We hopped in the truck, and headed to the USFS offices one more time to get a few more supplies and then off to our site to build one more fence. We had one day, and it had to get done. Talk about pressure. We got there, and we got started. Now, the way you normally make a worm fence is by taking 11 foot logs, drill holes in both sides and leave them aside for the moment. Then you dig 6 inches out of the ground in the size of a cement block, and place it in. Problem numero uno has just occurred. You dig 6 inches when you know that a round piece of steel called rebar will go into the ground at least 2 and a half feet. The problem here is, the ground is ridiculously rocky, and we couldn't promise that the rebar would go in. Thus, we had to dig 2 and a half feet deep holes. In rocky ground. Before lunch. 15 of them. That's a lot. The End. So the problem had been fixed by lunch. There were 15 holes dug two and a half feet deep and we were ready to begin placing the cement blocks in, and pounding rebar after we place the logs where we want them on the cement blocks. It's like a puzzle though because after you place one log down, you have to go down two cement blocks to place another log so that you can place a log between the two of those. It's hard to explain, but it's really cool to watch it go up and when I get my camera, I will make sure there are pictures involved with all of these posts. It's amazing to see how after 3 hours of digging holes, in less then 2 hours we had an entire fence built. We all worked very hard, and our supervisor was very proud. It was a good feeling. On the drive back to Reno, we turned on the air conditioning, but I think it might have been nicer to have the windows down in retrospect. Then it started to rain as we were passing Southern Reno coming up towards the school. It had been over 50 days with no rain in Reno, and we came home in it. Hardcore. Come to find out, my roommates, who left on Tuesday and thus came home on Friday, actually had to chainsaw in the rain and it was so nice that they didn't even bother with rain gear and just went with the flow. I'm glad we didn't have to work in the rain, I hate humidity. But humidity we had and it was ok.

That concludes this weeks installment of my semi-detailed report of what happens to NCC'ers in the Americorps. If you'd like to see a video of orientation, and actually a weekly following of the Las Vegas crew in video then head on over to www.youtube.com/lasvegascrew7 and enjoy.