greenstorm (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
greenstorm) wrote2015-05-18 08:41 pm
greenstorm) wrote2015-05-18 08:41 pm
Week 2
Well.
My language is shifting to match people here. Speech is slowing down, my accent is altering. I'm such a chameleon that way.
Two notable things have happened this week: I've been let out into the bush to work, and Dave came to visit for the long weekend.
I was/am hired to work out in the woods, but in order to do that I need to be trained; I have more-or-less no idea what I'm doing. The work itself is conceptually pretty easy, mostly measuring, a little bit of tree and fungus ID. I could learn that pretty quick. The catch is, I'm doing this in the bush. I could call it trackless wilderness, but that would be misleading; there are plenty of moose tracks, sometimes bear, occasionally wolf. The tracks aren't useful to me, since I need to move in a straight line from one place to another while navigating from random sample plot to random sample plot. Moving through the forest -- heavy with underbrush and blowdown, since it's territory where the pine beetle came through and left dead standing trees 10-15 years ago and half of them fell over and the other half had no canopy so the underbrush wasn't light-limited and came right up, densely in some places -- that's another thing.
Lots of things have thorns in this forest. Roses, gooseberries, other roses, raspberries all have mild scratchy thorns that leave my thighs looking like I washed a cat with them. Devil's club thorns go in and cause infection, they need to be pulled out but they break off pretty easily. Stubs of branches on dead pines aren't meant to be thorns, but they gouge and bruise pretty good when you need to climb over a pile of a couple trunks or more (this happens often in some areas).There are mosquitoes that get at me when I'm counting hair-width tree rings (I'm pretty well covered otherwise). I'm sleeping lots, getting sun, eating well, and pretty happy, so I'm healing really fast, but I sure do look pretty beat up at the end of it all.
I wear caulk boots in the bush, that's logging boots with spikes on the bottom so I can walk on logs without slipping. They're great, but I need to re-map surfaces in my brain: bare logs or bark are stable surfaces on which I can balance amazingly well but dry rocks are slippery. I suspect it wont take me long to be walking along logs high up from the ground; right now a tree lying 3' up is about as high as I can walk along. Walking along logs is great, though, because it's a quick, smooth path across the bush if you can find a tree going the way you want to go, and don't let me get started about swamps.
So the skill I'm learning is walking quickly and safely through the bush. I have been practicing it two days. By the end of each day I feel like I can barely lift my feet on those boots, let alone lift them to climb over the frequent 3' high tree trunks or tangles of tree trunks that block my path. I am so. Slow. It's been a long time since I had to learn a brand-new skill, and it's frustrating. I want to be past this part and actually able to help contribute rather than slowing everything down.
But... I get to be outside. In the woods. I have figured out how to dress comfortably (3L hydration pack in the vest that holds my many lbs of equipment, headscarf down my back under my hard hat for mosquitoes, long light men's dress shirt for mosquitoes and sun, light gloves, I wonder if they have thorn-proof kevlar I can put on the front of my army pants?). I see moose tracks every day. I eat sitting on a log surrounded by only the sounds of the forest. I get to see the understory proceed into spring one day at a time, leaves unfurling out of the litter, flowers starting up on the stems, the way I understand time passing in my bones. I come home smelling like pine and "balsam". I sleep well. I smile often. Walking around the office after work feels good in my legs and my hips.
I am making friends with this place.
And so I was very happy for Dave to come up and see it, for him to visit and learn what kind of place I'm staying. I wanted him to meet the woman I live with, who's lived here all her life and is friendly and independently interdependent and interesting. I wanted him to se my smile when I got off work. I wanted to show him the woods and the lake.
He came up. We slept a lot, went out and bought beef from the ranch up the hill, used the BBQ every night, had a fire and got too tired waiting for the stars to come out so we went to bed by 11pm, had lots of sex, made s'mores, got slightly but not seriously lost in the woods and bitten by mosquitoes, snuggled, fit into the little shower together, tried to make plans with my supervisor/colleague and never succeeded, walked on the beach in the heavy cold wind, and drank a milkshake. It was pretty close to perfect.
I love him a lot.
Then he went home, and I can feel his absence pretty strongly tonight after even just a few nights sleeping together. It's better for me to be here alone right now, it's what I want, but I miss him. I like how the rhythms of our lives intersect and influence each other.
So it's bedtime here anyway, and I don't feel like writing too much about it, so I'll go down to bed now and curl myself around the warmth that he leaves inside me and read wildcrafting books and smell the smoke left in my hair from last night.
Be well.
My language is shifting to match people here. Speech is slowing down, my accent is altering. I'm such a chameleon that way.
Two notable things have happened this week: I've been let out into the bush to work, and Dave came to visit for the long weekend.
I was/am hired to work out in the woods, but in order to do that I need to be trained; I have more-or-less no idea what I'm doing. The work itself is conceptually pretty easy, mostly measuring, a little bit of tree and fungus ID. I could learn that pretty quick. The catch is, I'm doing this in the bush. I could call it trackless wilderness, but that would be misleading; there are plenty of moose tracks, sometimes bear, occasionally wolf. The tracks aren't useful to me, since I need to move in a straight line from one place to another while navigating from random sample plot to random sample plot. Moving through the forest -- heavy with underbrush and blowdown, since it's territory where the pine beetle came through and left dead standing trees 10-15 years ago and half of them fell over and the other half had no canopy so the underbrush wasn't light-limited and came right up, densely in some places -- that's another thing.
Lots of things have thorns in this forest. Roses, gooseberries, other roses, raspberries all have mild scratchy thorns that leave my thighs looking like I washed a cat with them. Devil's club thorns go in and cause infection, they need to be pulled out but they break off pretty easily. Stubs of branches on dead pines aren't meant to be thorns, but they gouge and bruise pretty good when you need to climb over a pile of a couple trunks or more (this happens often in some areas).There are mosquitoes that get at me when I'm counting hair-width tree rings (I'm pretty well covered otherwise). I'm sleeping lots, getting sun, eating well, and pretty happy, so I'm healing really fast, but I sure do look pretty beat up at the end of it all.
I wear caulk boots in the bush, that's logging boots with spikes on the bottom so I can walk on logs without slipping. They're great, but I need to re-map surfaces in my brain: bare logs or bark are stable surfaces on which I can balance amazingly well but dry rocks are slippery. I suspect it wont take me long to be walking along logs high up from the ground; right now a tree lying 3' up is about as high as I can walk along. Walking along logs is great, though, because it's a quick, smooth path across the bush if you can find a tree going the way you want to go, and don't let me get started about swamps.
So the skill I'm learning is walking quickly and safely through the bush. I have been practicing it two days. By the end of each day I feel like I can barely lift my feet on those boots, let alone lift them to climb over the frequent 3' high tree trunks or tangles of tree trunks that block my path. I am so. Slow. It's been a long time since I had to learn a brand-new skill, and it's frustrating. I want to be past this part and actually able to help contribute rather than slowing everything down.
But... I get to be outside. In the woods. I have figured out how to dress comfortably (3L hydration pack in the vest that holds my many lbs of equipment, headscarf down my back under my hard hat for mosquitoes, long light men's dress shirt for mosquitoes and sun, light gloves, I wonder if they have thorn-proof kevlar I can put on the front of my army pants?). I see moose tracks every day. I eat sitting on a log surrounded by only the sounds of the forest. I get to see the understory proceed into spring one day at a time, leaves unfurling out of the litter, flowers starting up on the stems, the way I understand time passing in my bones. I come home smelling like pine and "balsam". I sleep well. I smile often. Walking around the office after work feels good in my legs and my hips.
I am making friends with this place.
And so I was very happy for Dave to come up and see it, for him to visit and learn what kind of place I'm staying. I wanted him to meet the woman I live with, who's lived here all her life and is friendly and independently interdependent and interesting. I wanted him to se my smile when I got off work. I wanted to show him the woods and the lake.
He came up. We slept a lot, went out and bought beef from the ranch up the hill, used the BBQ every night, had a fire and got too tired waiting for the stars to come out so we went to bed by 11pm, had lots of sex, made s'mores, got slightly but not seriously lost in the woods and bitten by mosquitoes, snuggled, fit into the little shower together, tried to make plans with my supervisor/colleague and never succeeded, walked on the beach in the heavy cold wind, and drank a milkshake. It was pretty close to perfect.
I love him a lot.
Then he went home, and I can feel his absence pretty strongly tonight after even just a few nights sleeping together. It's better for me to be here alone right now, it's what I want, but I miss him. I like how the rhythms of our lives intersect and influence each other.
So it's bedtime here anyway, and I don't feel like writing too much about it, so I'll go down to bed now and curl myself around the warmth that he leaves inside me and read wildcrafting books and smell the smoke left in my hair from last night.
Be well.