Eurekatude

I think the silence is the first thing you'll notice.  Around here, it's all wind through the leaves, echoes of chirping birds, and rumbles of civilization and life in the distance sounding from anywhere rolling around the valleys and bouncing off the hills like a pinball. The silence is an essential part of Eurekatude, the way nothing really matters until it comes your way, be it a buck, the weather, a car, or a friend.  There is no constant hum of man-made life gurgling around you to distract from what is happening right now.  Which is nothing, really, except every gift of nature you can imagine and the peace and time to do whatever you like.

We have a band of filmmakers, musicians, artists, and writers, farmers, brewers, and chefs, firefighters, folks with three jobs, a bunch of guns, and a plethora of those who aren't afraid of mud.  They believe in the value of land and the freedom to do what you like on it, living quietly and joyfully, playing games, bringing their dogs everywhere, playing on lakes, and killing their own meat.  Many come from somewhere else, have lived in big cities, and have  traveled to other countries, but they always return to the collection of homes on the edge of Canada, in a valley shadowed by mountains and nestled within a few national forests.  They are content to have Kalispell be where Costco is, Whitefish be where all the nightlife is, and Missoula be the closest thing we have to a Big City Having It All, because getting to all these places requires a drive of at least an hour and maybe three through unmatched scenery and land unspoiled compared to so much of the world.  It's a fact that Montana is full of best places, maybe hidden treasures, and the Tobacco Valley has secured its place among them.  Having almost turned around halfway through the fifty mile drive the day of my teaching interview, if only because I felt like we were driving from the middle of nowhere into epicenter of nowhere, I know what apprehension feels like in terms of moving to a place even tinier than the tiniest place I ever lived in.

Hidden gems, small victories, enough space to try and fail and work on everything over and over again till you get it right, without the pressure of civilization bearing down on you... I think that's only part of what keeps everyone here and draws the bold few to keep on driving all the way down the road, exploring the backroads all along the way, and having faith that it will all work out.

Forestation

A deer antler shed is a rare find.  Here,
I'm demonstrating proper celebration.

When you live in the middle of the wilderness, the opportunity to venture deeper into the woods meets you every day.  Mountains tower above you or line the horizon upon leaving your driveway, rising around every turn and outside every door.  Tree-lined roads beckon you to turn down them, gravel roads await your dusting, and paths encourage you to stop the car, get out, and explore them. Recently, the opportunity arose to get paid to venture deep, very deep, into them thar woods.  Add one awesome Super Duty Ford and a smattering of young adults, and you get Youth Conservation Corps Summer 2013, of which I was the fortunate leader.

It all began on June 10 when five high schoolers - one recent midwest grad, 3 locals, and half a pair of twins - met in a small white room in the back of Murphy Lake Ranger Station in Fortine, Montana.  And there they waited, for an hour, until their leader waltzed into the room late, ill-prepared in short pants and a shirt with short sleeves, and fairly bewildered by everyone's amazing earliness on this first day.  My supervisor met me, briefed me on my first-day errors as he handed me some pants, introduced me to the crew, then to our white Super Duty truck, and finally told us all to get in and get down the road to spend the day mucking the ice-blue water's edge of nearby Dickey Lake.  Since then, we six have met in this small white room four days every week at 7am (maybe 7:05) to await instructions for the next 10 hours of our lives together.  But we always know where every day will start... Da Rig.

Good ol' FS 5868, aka Super Dooty

Our Super Duty truck has become our daily rig into whose bed we toss toilet paper, rakes, pruners, shovels, garbage bags, sand, igloo coolers, red and green backpacks, bamboo, trash, and a mysterious biodegradable mesh whose nasty name will be mentioned in the next paragraph, and into whose twin cab we sardine one coffee-breathed leader and five teenagers with their mp3 players, all on a journey that only the two boys know anything about since they always have been where we are going.  Frank's Lake?  Or just Frank Lake?  Barnaby.  Bluebird.  Chain of Lakes.  Graves Crick (not Creek).  Weasel?  Big T and Lil' T?  Wolverine. Up Beaver, on the way through Ant Flat.  That one place with the amazing elk hunting.  That road off that other road. "That lake we went to that one time when you almost crashed your car, dummy."  Maps are plentiful in our truck, but seldom used due to the local knowledge crammed into these kids' heads.  There was a moment, after driving along the banks of the lake, where we truly came to understand the power of Super Duty.  The water line across the doors and the bent radio antenna left us all with nodding heads of approval upon arrival back at the station.  With its superior speaker system, V8 engine, comfy cab, and spacious side compartments, the Ford Super Duty is the highest rated truck among teenage seasonal government employees for overall bad-assed-ness.  And whenever you plow through a pothole full of water and the flume spurts above the car window, when a gravel road dives down suddenly into a crevasse-like pothole unavoidable, when a shoulder becomes a cliff edge all too soon but you manage to get back on flat ground, when a washboard in a turn reduces your truck to a one-ton toboggan, one must say "Super Duty" the way Peter Griffin says "Roadhouse" or a surfer says "Kowabunga." 

Webb Mountain Lookout, with the
butt of our Super Duty truck

After a week of orientations and introductions, our first set of marching orders came from Recreation who had us daily traveling to places to clean them.  Whether finding all the campgrounds in the 800K acres of forest or driving up old logging roads to mountain lookouts, we cleaned them all.  Especially fun was making a 26-point turn-around on exposed rock atop a foggy Webb Mountain.  As the fog burned off on a scorching Montana summer day, our lookout-cleaning and wood-chopping duties were treated to a spectacular view.  Soon after we had become adept at cleaning remote places, we were given a second set of orders, this time from Silviculture, and this is where that word that cannot be mentioned will be mentioned.  Vexar.  There, it is written.

Young larch in vexar

Silviculture is the study, maintenance, and manipulation of forested areas for diverse needs. I believe its true goal is to survey every inch of land in an area and know what all the trees are doing.  Right now, "silv" is all about the white pine and its 80% mortality in Montana from pine beetle infestation and a few other nasty diseases.  So, in our ranger district there exist logged-out areas replanted with white pine saplings in need of protection during their early years when their nitrogen-rich bodies are a tasty treat for animals.  Enter vexar.
It must stand erect on the hillside, must be threaded twice through by a bamboo stake tacked firmly into place (uphill if possible) around the sapling, and should not have any tree needles sticking through its meshiness when you come make your yearly walk-through maintenance treks.  Vexar maintenance is a  pathless, backcountry bushwhack whose results won't be seen for decades.  Upon arriving at one of the plots, you find vexar in a variety of conditions.  Most of the existing vexar is just fine, making the job seem like a walk through a field of upright cocoons.  The occasional sideways vexar always requires restaking and righting, while the more occasional "leaner" is sometimes left to lean one more year at least.  Some saplings have somehow escaped the vexar altogether and need to be re-surrounded.  Some saplings have been exposed to so much lovely sun that their immense prosperity is tinged only by their dried-up vexar cocoons disintegrating upon touch.  Still others have clearly outgrown their vexar and are ready for vexar-removal, the final liberation. Inevitably, if we happened to return the next day to the same field, we would find vexar we just righted to be leaning vexar because the forest animals bumped it overnight, which renders your work somewhat frustratingly useless.  However, the biggest issue with vexar comes from attempting simply to organize humans in lines among random points in an 80+ acre field in order to achieve 100% vexar maintenance.  To explain that I would require a white board and many colored pens, and you would require some caffeine source of your choosing and consumption.

Driving home from these plots of land set deep into hill country and forest land, each of us felt a great sense of relief coupled with a great wonder as to whether any of it truly mattered in the end.  We'll see if we were successful in 30 years, because another aspect of Silviculture is the pruning of 30+ year old growing white pines, aka the whittling away of up to 50% of the lower branches on each new tree to help avoid an environment ripe for diseased fungus.  For a few days, we played white pine barbershop, shorning up to 25-foot tall former vexar protectees on a hillside and bathing their lower trunks in healthy sunlight.  If all goes well, and if the white pines avoid all of the factors contributing to their blight, then our crew will have played a small but ongoing part in the rehabilitation of a beautiful species of tree.

Abandoned duck eggs a-go-go

Amphibian surveys near Bluebird Mtn.

Once Silviculture let us go, we became the daily/weekly grab bag of the ranger station.  One day, Fire sent us trekking in the truck on an all day scavenger hunt for wooden Forest Service signboards, replacing posted fireworks signs with campfire signs and trying to spend ten
hours doing so without stapling ourselves to a tree or to one another. The next day, Recreation sent us back up the lookout mountain to help lay the foundation of the Greatest Toilet Atop a Mountain Ever, hauling gravel all the way up, mixing concrete with sand and lime on-site, and pouring it into a rebar-faceted frame amid biting flies and swallowtail butterflies.  Yet another day, Wildlife took us to help them monitor bird boxes.  Ahhhh, I could check bird boxes all day.  Set around a lake and up trees, 3-4 boxes per lake stood awaiting our eyes, a few with eggs in them, cold and abandoned but blue and lovely, and a few with tiny broken shell fragments signaling a successful hatch.  Bushwhacking through soft grass is a pleasure and makes the sound of tossed eggs splashing into the lake and breaking a much easier reality to accept. We even spent a day with them counting amphibians in lakes, a task in which one diligent 6th grade fisherman from Wyoming actually surpassed us by finding more frogs and salamanders than we Forest Service workers.

The little cherubs of YCC
Murphy Lake and Eureka
Ranger Stations frolicking
among the cedars

After two weeks of glorious wedding time off, I returned to guide YCC's final two weeks, all with the much celebrated Trails crew.  Armed with axes, trowels, rock bars, pruners, chainsaws and gas, we joined the mountain goat-like, 3-person crew in the molding of paths previously alder-filled, brush-obscured, or otherwise non-existent.  We brushed over a mile of the Pacific Northwest Trail in one day under thundering skies and literally carved a half mile of a dirt bike path from scratch over two days, pulling up kinick kinick, rolling away rocks, and flattening the natural landscape in a four-foot long swath up, around, and down a few rolling hills.  On our last day, the Trails crew brought a dirt bike up that hill and let us each try out our new course, with the caveat that as much fun as riding DOWN the slope would be, you had to ride that puppy back UP for the next person.  Yeah.  Nearly toppling head over heels riding down the path and hitting rocks I had personally left in the path for 'texture', the entire experience reconfirmed for me that dirt bike trail riders are pretty awesomely crazy.
Add a pair of rewarding free days at the end, including treks into a several-hundred-year-old cedar grove and along slightly younger Kootenai Indian trails, and you have a perfect ending to a fairly luxurious and productive 10-week stint of outdoor government work.  For me, I found a myriad of exploratory avenues into our new home, nooks and crannies worth exploring, and a new found desire to turn off the pavement and onto gravel, to venture deeper into the world surrounding our next year of life in Eureka.  I was also left with a great appreciation of the skills, strength, and natural wisdom of these teenagers.  School smarts are one aspect of intelligence, but I learned so much from them this summer that I enter this next school year with a valuable respect for what all of their young minds may be capable of achieving.  So, sorry Eureka, my expectations have been raised and my plans have altered.  It's going to be one awesome school year.

Incidentally but not to be overlooked, our work this summer was unofficially subsidized by Spitz dill flavored sunflower seeds and lemon-lime Gatorade, and we also were a running advertisement for Ford's Super Duty ability to glide through five-foot mud puddles and up 45-degree rocky slopes with the greatest of ease.  But we really should have looked for sponsorship from a major sunblock/bug repellent company, a foot massage clinic, and various country and pop music artists whose tunes (specifically and repeatedly including "Truck Yeah", "something about Moving On", "a Minaj song where each line ended in "UUUH!(thanks Garrett)", "The Thunder Ro-o-olls", and  a very mellow version of "I Would Walk Five Hundred Miles") were the major soundtrack of a ten hour day, unless I managed to sneak in some Japanese folk music, Schoolhouse Rock, Mozart, Prokofiev, Yonder Mountain String Band, Martha Scanlan, or Beatles.  Nice.
  

Thanks for a great summer 'Kenzie, Garrett, Mikal, Louisa, and Ashlen.  

A Post About My Roadhuggers

Having had only a pair of cars, I'm naturally quite fond of each of them.  And now, on the eve of my last week as a bachelor, one Chevy Lumina decided I would enter married life without it.  So with all the sentimentality found in other blog posts focused on my graying hair and lost articles of childhood, for example, this is a blog about the Olds and the Chevy, a pair of white road beasts I pampered as I drove them into the ground.

I owe it all to my dad, who treated his cars with great respect and passed them on to me to do the same.

Olds at Field's Point Landing, waiting for hippies, c. 2000

The Olds rolled me to college and waited patiently every day in parking lots during the seven years I chose to take to graduate, upon which it merrily pranced north into the Cascade mountains and life at Holden Village. It gained freckles of oxidization from sun exposure, its blue interior reverse-tanning.  Olds rested on the banks of Lake Chelan, absorbing snow piles on its vinyl cover and taking on its first real winters, waiting for passengers.  When they arrived on the boat, they were lovely dirty new friends who borrowed it to drive the heck out of it on logging roads, bringing dirt and mountain funk to Olds' floorboards and seats.  Olds and me saw our first Big Wu show together, then our first Phish show together.  It carried around my first girlfriends and parked in many romantic spots along the West Coast.  The Olds ran across the country at least a half dozen times, including hauling family to Montana for the first time.  When I decided to move to Germany, and when my sister's family's "Suburban"  turned into a "Subground-level" it moved down to Fresno.  After that, it seemed to breathe its last, having up to then survived all those drives but suddenly (of course because of my absence) gave up on all its parts. Without an Advanced Directive, 300,000 miles after it was born, it apparently broke down, and then was broken into while abandoned, then hauled away to the car morgue to be cremated.  Gone but with a very present spirit, that Olds is still running up and down Highway 101 and across 90, looking very unlike your typical "Father's Oldsmobile."  

Chevy's dimple, with cover-ups,
minus outdated Hillary sticker, since she lost.
The sticker's subtitle stated: "Democrats put
on rear bumper, Republicans put on front!"
I put it on the side 'cause I voted for Obama.
Ok, this is a long caption.

Meanwhile, my parents' Chevy Lumina had become older than they liked and they purchased an Impala (not an Ibex), and after I returned from writing my Bavarian story, I inherited Chevy and its dimple. The dimple came courtesy of some aggressive punk who kicked the front in when he thought my dad had followed him too closely on one of San Francisco's slopes. Upon receiving Chevy, I immediately started courting my fiance who promptly bought me a political bumper sticker ('Run, Hillary, Run') to cover the dimple, to which I later added a Northern Exposure sticker of Fleishman's office and a GNP (Glacier National Park) sticker.  The political sticker plus the GNP sticker prompted someone to honestly ask if it stood for Gay National Party.  

The Chevy took me to Kelli's side and our first meeting at the Sequoia National Park where I accidentally left the keys in the car, prompting me to mangle the driver window parts as well as the passenger door lock, breaking them for the rest of Chevy's life (this would be very ironic because I wouldn't be able to open the door for my new woman again nor be able to roll down my window to order her Taco Bell meals...classy). Chevy carried me up and down California to woo her, and finally led/trailed her red Ford Ranger as we trekked north to start a life together in Seattle. After living in the Chevy a few weeks, I found a home and then a job hauling lovely dirty Democrat activists around Seattle knocking on doors during the 2008 political season.  Chevy brought home two crazy feral cats and a warm new bassador who have become our most precious resources. It then hauled a flour child back and forth from Grand Central Bakery to graduate school. Chevy signaled the presence of a new teaching intern to an urban middle school and trekked across the country several times to catch glimpses of its future Montanan home.

Not one of Chevy's greatest moments, but it was totally not
its fault!  (somewhere along the Seeley/Swan, c. 2011

After experiencing a few cold but snowless winters, Chevy began to show its signature: the Big Peel. It began at the dimple, then on the hood, a likely place given all the frontal driving hits it took for a few years.  But soon it spread conspicuously to the doors and to the roof, an illogical pattern. I chalked it up to rain frozen by Seattle gray weather, which blistered the paint and caused it to break off.  Flying down Seattle highways, large chunks of Chevy skin would flake off and flutter behind like snow, in July.  A significant amount of door paint had peeled to resemble a SHERIFF or POLICE decal, providing me and Chevy with ample respect from other cars that would suddenly brake when seeing us.  By the time we moved to Montana, Chevy acquired a gray bald spot and became more recognizable than me among my students, several of whom daily ran up to me and said "Were you at _______?  Cuz I saw your car and I was all HEY MR. A!"  It also became a conversation piece among my students who used it to bond with me after I reprimanded them. They would saunter up to me later and after a minute of awkward silence and almost like an apology, say "You sure have a cool car, Mr. A."  I'd say thanks, and all would be normal again.  And that's how I like it.  I am my cars.  

"Coexist my ass!" - some guy outside
a  gas station in Montana...

Chevy, at 260,000 miles old and balder than its owner, saw me safely through bachelorhood, picking up where Olds left off.  Chevy cranked its last in Polson, Montana, two weeks before my wedding.  Its final successful start came after my thwarted attempt to find the Glacier Brewing Company on a hot day.  Chevy kicked butt in everything it did despite all its problems, just like its bachelor owner.  It will donate its organs to other deserving Chevies and live on.  We'll say goodbye to each other on Monday July 23, with my parents and my fiancee in attendance.  We'll hug one more time, and no doubt a large swath of paint will peel off as we part.  Thanks, Chevy.  You done real good.

Git On Board Lil' Chil'ren, There's Room for Many'a More

Deep in the recesses of my lexicon, I seem to stumble spelling words like recesses and lexicon.  Since when did being an English teacher mean I spend less time than ever writing?  How on Earth can life in a trailer be so full (and full of what?) that there's no time for practicing music?  These and other questions abound as we step on board the Gospel train, it's rollin' down the track and it's time to testify.  Enough of the silence, the train is full of steam and needs to sound its barbaric, leaden YAWP.

On the face of it, being a teacher is a rewarding and privileged job.  Like a very natural-looking ordinary rock or stump, when you pull back  the face of it you find that the real business going on underneath is cacophonous, murky, endlessly absorbing, and too alive for comfort most of the time.  So, it's best to replace it and get back to admiring the face of it.  Well, in the Treehouse, faces last only so long.  

My first year of teaching has been akin to walking into my classroom, ramming my head into a brick wall repeatedly for seven hours, driving home, nursing my bloody head, and falling asleep afraid of the next day's beating. So, why do I do this?  Well, there are the callouses.  They deaden the pain with repetition.  Perhaps I hope to see the callouses through the wounds, but I'm not quite there yet.  Certain shocking realizations about students' learning habits and abilities become norms you face each day, which may sound like a recipe for lowering one's expectations, but really it's about adjusting your internal compass to match your point on Earth on a daily basis, which I think tends to keep the brain pliant yet exhausted.  As for the wall, teaching so far has been all about adjusting how you actually hit the wall, learning to ricochet, to absorb a hit, to find the most forgiving spot, and then over time to finally realize that the only wall is the one you yourself have been putting up between you and your students.  Duh, you might say.  Indeed, I say.  

In education school, you learn about all types of sorcery and you practice them on your fellow masters' degree students.  Yeah.  They don't tell you that you need to first know alchemy to be a successful sorcerer.  More importantly, your students must come with the same raw materials readily available and the motivation to help you make the magic happen.  The magic tricks themselves are predicated on the fact that those students actually have been trained to know the same basics you expected them to have and, most importantly, they must have a desire to achieve what you want to achieve with those basics.  In the end, compliance or motivation?  What are you going to teach for?  (and does it still matter whether or not you end a sentence with a preposition?  Does the word 'preposition' even matter now?)??  So many question marks.  

I guess that's the sign I'm in the right profession. All those question marks keep coming. When you are sitting in the muck, or the wall rubble, or deep in the pit with no escape route... are your gears still turning?  I think back on when I was working at Munich International School, surrounded by International Baccalaureate whiz kids with three languages under their belts and dreams of not just university but the Oxfords and Princetons and Stanfords, who conducted themselves like the budding and critically-thinking adults we want all our students to be, but who could and would still screw up like any kid.  That was about the time I knew I wanted to teach, to be a part of that level of thinking and that culture, though I hadn't stepped foot into any one of their classrooms to see how or what they were being taught.  I counted all their teachers as my friends and role models of wisdom and still do.  I sat in steam baths and saunas and biergartens with them, through four hour dinners and episodes of Lost and on long train rides across borders with them; but I never really dallied into their pedagogy or the theory behind how or what they were teaching.  Now, I feel this great disconnect between that community and my present.  Even after I went through my education program and ran off with my masters, I hadn't really stepped into a classroom.  Now, I think I'm living more of the reality and that Munich was the dream.  The struggles are the norm, and we have to be prepared for the non-idealized, value-scattered, social media-mimicking microcosm to be the standard, all without lowering our high expectations and not getting in the way of those bound for greatness because, really, there are far more paths to a good life than the few I've known in my life.  

Perhaps I'm too idealistic to be theorizing, too young a teacher to be trying to put it all together into a neat idea, too hard on myself to recognize my strengths and my successes, too hyper-analytical to be musing in public and airing my laundry for all to see (then again, this is my treehouse).  But I will end with this:  I have mentioned all of this, all that I've bared to you here, to my students at some point.  When things are mucked up, I stop and have them weigh-in on the good, the bad, and the ugly of their first-year teacher's role in their education.  Thankfully, they are very forgiving, receptive to honesty, and are fully capable of discussing some of the systemic problems than we may give them credit for.  That gives me hope.  My deep desire is that they take a role in crafting their education and learn to have some significant responsibility for themselves and for each other.  Even deeper, I hope I never forget to listen, to always keep my gears turning, and to encourage and help others do the same.  

Meanwhile, I could really use a sauna and a four-hour dinner and a chinwag with some colleagues, like, on a daily basis.