An Adventurous Year

A pasture in Greenstone Valley, South Island, New Zealand

For the first part of our final round we're back in Louisiana working with Rebuilding Together Acadiana and Habitat for Humanity Lafayette, about an hour from Baton Rouge. It is gloriously warm. While taking a lunchtime nap in a parking lot the other day in sweaty, grimy, perfectly contented delirium I couldn't fathom why anyone would live through the bitter gray cold of a northern winter - until I remembered literally pouring the sweat that my sodden socks could no longer absorb out of my boots, not long ago and not far from here.

So far we've spent a few days bashing our bodies against flooded vinyl tile and carpets at a boys and girls club we're helping renovate. Despite and perhaps partially because of our swollen, bleeding hands and aching bodies I think the team enjoyed a satisfying first week helping transform the kids' after school refuge. We also got to spend a day with our old sponsors again! We helped the ACSDR staff give out flood relief supplies at a mobile unit and caught up quite a bit. Many of them never left Baton Rouge or left only for a short while and returned to help again, spending Christmas and New Years at the warehouse away from their families. We missed them very much and were very happy we got to see them again – even though I swore I'd never touch a palletjack again.

With some of our old sponsors at an ISP last Saturday

We'll be in Lafayette until the first week of March, when the team will move to Tennessee to work on restoring Shiloh National Military Park to its historical condition during the Civil War. It'll be 5 weeks straight of chainsaw work. However I'll only be there for a week before leaving Tennessee to join a composite team in Kentucky. This is a temporary group comprised of applicants from teams out of both River and Delta Units. For the last four weeks of the round we'll be staying in tents at a developed campground and hiking into Daniel Boone National Forest every day for trailbuilding and maintenance work. We all get our own tents, a new top-of-the-line day pack (sadly not ours to keep), and oodles of tools to play with including chainsaws, pulaskis and my personal favorite, the sickle of death – or the j-blade in polite company. It was a hard decision to leave Delta One for the last month of our final deployment, but this is the kind of work I had imagined AmeriCorps was all about. I'm very excited.

This pile of poorly photographed swag is going with us to Kentucky

Those are the main developments that have occurred since my last post. If I'm being honest a great many other things have occurred since then that are deeply meaningful to me because they pertain to places, events, or people that to my understanding remain the same as they once were, but which I approached in a different or entirely new way following the experiences I've had since beginning the AmeriCorps journey. The result were internally thrilling experiences and the realization that the lessons from this program really can be brought home to change my life - but externally it makes for a mundane story. Most of us who went home for Christmas break probably experienced something similar. I hope so!

I've discovered, as I think most of us do eventually, that we often learn much about our stance on things that have happened to us, people who affect us strongly, or emotions we just can't nail down just by sharing a little about these things with other people. In acknowledgment of that lesson, in tribute to the past year and because there wasn't much to report as far as AmeriCorps updates, I thought I'd make most of January's post a collection of thoughts from some of the events of 2016 that had the most impact on me as a person. It's a way to help me remember and process the year, but if any of the stories can entertain a dedicated or just really, really bored reader along the way then I'm happy to share.

2016 was by far the most adventurous year I've ever been blessed with in my admittedly short life. It still seems impossible to me that so much could happen in what simultaneously feels like an eternity and just a short while. As the year came to a close I realized I have a new appreciation for the power of reflection on the events of the recent past; probably because I've never had to process so many journeys, relationships, and lessons of such a personally unprecedented scale, variety, and impact in so short a time.

I rang in the new year loitering on a dirty concrete bridge, watching tiny clusters of fireworks launch out of backyards on a warm, humid Tahitian night. We celebrated the new year's birth a second time a few hours later after the jet plane carrying my friend Joe and I to New Zealand outran the sun and entered Oceania's timezone, still in the year 2015 at that point. We planned and paid for this journey to the far side of the world ourselves and spent three weeks traveling the North and South Island, eating a disgusting amount of fish and chips, meeting incredible people, and exploring some of the most beautifully rugged places in the world.

We spent a total of a week in the backcountry. I acquired some kind of tendonitis in both achilles tendons at quite an unfortunate time and couldn't walk in my boots on the trails, so I wound up hiking a ridiculous number of miles through the mountains in sandals not much thicker than about 20 sheets of paper. I was quite impressed with myself until we met a lovely Swedish girl running barefoot along the same rocky pass we'd just come from on the Routeburn track in the Southern Alps. I was suitably humbled.

Nevertheless the experience was at times excruciatingly painful. Joe and I kept up good conversations for much of the trek, but when a lull occurred it was easy to lose myself in the altered state of mind resulting from exhaustion, pain, and the inevitable meditations that only the wilderness can spur. The most memorable of these moments for me was a silent journey through the rocky meadows of Greenstone Valley near the end of a long, long day spent racing down the mountain trying to reach shelter before the approaching deluge caught up with us. Much of that day felt like a walking dream.

As I trudged through the serenely beautiful hell that is Greenstone Valley, my thoughts seemed to stray from the pinions of my mind to meander along their own paths separate from my feet. Flitting between moss covered rocks on the azure backs of butterflies no larger than buttons, I perceived neon beetles marching over grains of multicolored stone scattered beneath soaring forests of grass. Looking up to the storm gathering at my back, a gust of wind swept me suddenly off my feet and carried me, howling in elemental jubilation to its home high above the clouds. There, perched on the very top of the world, at the point where the horizon brings its clouds and the sky fetches stars to dance together around the mountain like the laughing children of giants - here, in serene silence high above myself, the bowl of the valley stretched before me, fringed on the distant horizon by mountains of impossible majesty, ignoring the tempest whipping up the streams below, utterly immovable by all save the very hand of God. Two brightly colored dots in blue and green dipped and bobbed in the sea of grass below, like inseparable specks of dust drifting inexorably through the wilderness - tiny, mute witnesses to the raw, writhing spasm of beauty that seemed in this moment, created just for them.

Suddenly shards of glass exploded from the ground beneath me. I fell from the mountaintop with impossible speed, every fiber of my being taut, wracked by agony. Aware once more of the demons of sloth and despair stabbing at my feet with every step, my thoughts were again corralled within the confines of their earthly cage. I blinked away the red haze of self pity, smiled a prayer of thanks at the darkening sky, and hurried on.

These are great camp sandals, but I can't say I recommend them as hiking shoes. Even with Doctor Scholl's.
We spent 3 weeks in the land down under-er and slightly to the left. For more New Zealand Photos, Joe has a great album up here

The next major event was returning to RIT in January to finish up my junior year. I'd left a year earlier to spend six months as a product design co-op with the games department at Hasbro toys in Rhode Island, and later another six months as a packaging engineering co-op with PCA at home in New Jersey. I'd been away from academia for a year on what to me was essentially paid vacation. I'd learned a lot working in the real world and for better or worse lost the drive to work twenty hour days, six days a week on academic design projects. The corporate world had taught me how to work efficiently, confidently and most importantly collaboratively with others – I ended that semester with a portfolio of my best work yet and many new friends in the Junior class. Life works in strange ways, though. They'll all have graduated before I return from AmeriCorps to finish my degree.

I work hard at school.

Really I do.

I swear!

I take great notes in Entrepreneurship class too.

See. But what's more fun, playing with LEGO clone troopers or doing ergonomics analyses...

This summer I had a couple months between the end of Spring semester and departing for AmeriCorps. One of my summer projects was finishing up the treehouse (it's more like an enormous birdhouse on stilts) that my brother and I designed with my dad's help. I'd questioned the wisdom of the project a number of times during the process, like during the third afternoon Johnny and I spent with our heads down the 3 foot hole we'd jackhammered through the wonderfully placed shale shelf spanning the entirety of our build site. We had to scrape out the shards of pulverized rock at the bottom of the holes with a rusty soup can before we could anchor the tree/stilt-house posts in them. However, the time and money were well spent if for no other reason than that the construction skills I learned on that project were put to good use in AmeriCorps helping people who didn't have a real house to live in, let alone a monstrously large owlbox to play in.

We've added windows, a rope ladder, and a sliding door since this photo was taken.
Shingling this thing was terrifying.

When I wasn't working on the tree house, Johnny and I explored the woods around the farm trying to find the perfect tree for making a bow, went spelunking in a local cave I'd discovered, and took long runs in the summer heat. Our feet took us to neighborhood creeks, abandoned cabins, and through an enormous local pit mine. This last one was questionably legal, but on July 4th I had it all to myself. Running for the sake of fitness is painful tedium, but when it takes you to hidden places and pumps adrenaline through your body and wonder through your senses as the waning afternoon sun bronzes your bare back – Maybe it's just runner's high, or in my case oxygen deprivation, but in those moments running is one of life's great pleasures.

On Tuesday nights I often went country line dancing with my mother. We'd taken lessons last winter when I was home doing my co-op. Looking back I probably spent more effort on flirting with the instructor than absorbing the lessons, but at the end we'd learned enough to have fun and made a lot of friends among the regulars at the dance hall.

A little while before I left for AmeriCorps, my family went for our first ever family camping trip to Harriman State Park, where my father used to camp with his friends in high school. There were surprisingly few excerpts from “Dad's big book of pathetic childhood memories” (haha, I hope you're reading this Pops), and we all had fun. Soon afterward I packed my bags, wrapped some wire (the poor man's ratchet clamp) around the bunsmobile's rattling muffler and drove off for Vicksburg. I couldn't have asked for a better send off. It was an idyllic summer.

At Harriman State Park this Summer.

Probably 50% of our photos come out like this. I think there's something wrong with Dad's camera.

The final stop before Vicksburg was a 4 day trip through the Smokies near Gatlinburg Tennessee.

I'd never been backpacking by myself before, and though I didn't want to admit it I'd become somewhat infatuated with stories like Into the Wild, Walden, and a multitude of other works that glorify the idea of the lone wanderer striking out into the unknown – whether the territory is unknown to the world or only to the wanderer.

The reality of my own adventure was a lot less visceral, but impactful nonetheless. After camping a night at the trailhead, I set out into the backcountry 600 miles from home, alone, pitifully frightened and certain I'd be bear-ed to death by nightfall. Three days later I walked out unscathed, unwashed, and with new friends, new skills and a healthy respect for the wild in place of my irrational fear. I hadn't seen a single bear.

After getting over the initial period of terror on the first day, I was able to relax enough to appreciate the beauty of the mountains. I hiked all day in silent solitude, ambling up the steep, narrow trail cut through the thick underbrush. As I climbed, the air became thicker and cooler, until wisps of cloud began to float through the trees. A storm was coming. Sometime in the early afternoon, the trees gave way to a bald on a narrow ridge. The wisps had thickened to an all-encompassing fog that seeped through the waist-high underbrush and stretched away from the ridge into what was surely infinity as I suddenly realized how the Great Smoky Mountains got their name.

As I waited for the sheets of rain I could hear approaching through the mist, I stood enraptured, enveloped by the fog that forms only there on the top of the world, on the arching spines of God's monumental roosts. As the skies opened up, I stood in the downpour, watching singular drops of sweet alpine rain roll off the leaves of the wild blueberry bush at my side. Words cannot describe the serenity of the mountains in moments like those.

That night two of the most rugged women I've ever met, from Kentucky as I later learned, arrived at the campsite. After an initial awkward period before I realized I probably looked like a creepily silent, brooding teenager all alone in the woods with a 7 inch blade still strapped to his waist, I started a conversation, tried to prove the knife was just for stripping bark off wet firewood (not for mortal combat with bloodthirsty bears of course) and helped them gather wood for a campfire. The next morning they asked if I'd like to join them. Overjoyed to be rescued from my solitude after only one day, I did.

My intrepid Kentucky friends

We traveled through the woods together for the next two days swapping stories. They taught me a ton of backcountry tricks and tips I'd never seen before, including how to build a fire with sopping wet wood. Most importantly I think, I learned the value of sharing life's most beautiful experiences. I'll never give up moments alone like I had in the rain on that ridge, and I'll definitely go backpacking by myself again for just that reason. But as with Joe in New Zealand, with my brothers in the Catskills and with friends in Vermont and New York, so it was with new friends in the Smokies. The world was made to be shared, and so is made more beautiful in the sharing.

Thanks for following along. Until next time!

-Danny

P.S. Gatlinburg, often called the gateway to the Smokies, is just a few miles from where I hiked in July. The city burned to the ground in November during a historic, human-caused wildfire. AmeriCorps sent two special teams of volunteers there over Christmas break to help with the immediate relief efforts, my teammate Carlos among those who volunteered to go. The wealth of many people in the mountains is based mainly in the value of their generational homes, which means they lost their nest eggs when the fire destroyed those homes. Left with literally nothing, many people are relying on the waning influx of aid from outside sources to start rebuilding their lives. I encourage anyone who can to help out!

http://www.mountaintough.org/i-want-to-help/