The orbiting slows to a revolution

I am leaving the 4 days on-3 days off, the predictable sun and heat, the ceonothus and ernu (bobbing like little white ghosts next to my tent in the morning sun). I descended the curvy pothole-riddled roads for the last time, driving past a landscape that was familiar but more brown than in July. Breaking out of the hills and highways into the pastel townhouse-riddled Bay Area. The walks are paved, and that is the strangest part. My cheeks are ruddy and arms are scratched, and it is abundantly clear that I belong back in the mountains.

Becoming Bogans

I think that I finally found my field work nirvana. I live out of my tent, at a research station an hour drive from the nearest town. I am in the middle of the mountains – and BIG ones too. I live at 7,000 feet, which is high enough that I have to adjust my baking for the altitude. I walk to work. My carhartts are tattered from slipping on granite boulders, and prior to being repaired, really just functioned as assless chaps. I go backpacking every weekend, and climb real mountains, trudge through snow fields in my chacos, summit peaks with registers at the top, and come home at the end of the weekend exhausted and happy.

Our field crew is something of an all-star cast. It is one of those rare combinations of personalities that work perfectly for a 10-week intense live-in job. It took us about a week get comfortable enough around each other to do whiskey (or vodka or rum or water) slaps. No one complains about the dishes, and it seems like we all genuinely like each other.

If all field work were in places this beautiful, with minor annoyances (sunburns, rattlesnakes, thorny whitethorn shrubs up to my neck), I would never tire of swinging my DBH (diameter-at-breast-height) tape ‘round trees 47-55 cm in diameter. I could walk from plot to plot, estimating percent cover of plants like whiskerbrush, manzanita, and pennyroyal for eternity. Give me a mechanical pencil, metal clipboard, and some ripped carhartts, and I will be your field monkey FOREVER.

Summers draw to an end, however, and field budgets desiccate, and soon we will all be unemployed and searching for a way to pay the rent. Some of us (the lucky few) will get winter field jobs, but most of us will go back to indoor jobs, where it isn’t acceptable to shower only twice a week and we’ll be required to brush our hair and teeth every goddamn day. Life is so hard.