The Red River Gorge

The final few weeks of this program have been for me as laid back, simple, and unhurried as the first two months were stressful, hectic, and quick-paced. In contrast to what I melodramatically like to refer to as our corps' proving grounds in Baton Rouge, there isn't an overflow of work or a frenzied urgency pushing us ceaselessly to its completion here in Kentucky. A main difference is the nature of the work. Baton Rouge was - to borrow a military term - boots on the ground just days after a massive disaster large enough to earn a place in the national spotlight for some time, drawing swarms of volunteers and mind-boggling tonnage of donated goods from far and wide all rushing to the aid of a state submerged nearly in its entirety. Here, as our newly formed team of eleven volunteers amble along narrow trails winding their way through the tranquil, primordially beautiful Red River Gorge, the only urgency I feel is the occasional stabbing pain in my Achilles' (a souvenir from New Zealand) and the ever present, undiscerning desire to stuff my face with the nearest available source of calories.

Trail work is important. Maintaining responsible access to the wilderness allows the public to discover for themselves the beauty and serenity of what the world once was, and still could be, if we took better care of it. However, the grasping, viney arms of Rhododendron overgrowing Swift Camp Creek Trail aren't going to die if we don't get to them all today - though after a few hours wielding loppers, Zubats and my trusty serrated pocket knife in the battle to kill or trim half of them anyway, I've caught myself wishing they would and save us the effort.

We're also no longer the fresh faced, green volunteers we were 9 months ago. Everyone is to some degree burnt out. Some have had it with the program's hierarchy and operations, others with their teammates, and just about everyone is sick of communal living. The nature of the work here may not have as much objective urgency, but we've lost much of our own innate enthusiasm too. I can't claim that I don't have my dejected or less-than-inspired days, but I do my best to keep them to myself in relative silence. I have to say it can be difficult to keep up spirits the rest of the time when many people around you loudly and consistently voice their negative opinion of the circumstances. This program is not perfect, the people running it are not perfect, no project and very few days are without flaw and neither is any of us; but the spirit of national service is still something I agree with, find inspiring and believe is worthwhile.

There are few things I detest more than busywork, willful or avoidable incompetence, and wasted time, but I've learned that sometimes we have to look at the big picture of what we're doing and slog through the less-than-well-used hours or days in support of the grander ideal of national service which these losses are unavoidably a part of. And if we can agree to do that and have committed to it, we might as well keep our heads up and enjoy what's around us. Appreciation of the little details, when the middle space between these and the greater ideals we currently serve is unappealing to dwell on at the moment, can go a long way to keeping up one's satisfaction.

Some of those details: we work and live outside now, sometimes hiking as much as ten miles a day on the trails. The temperature generally still ranges from frigid to cool and nearly always damp. This allows us to get fantastically filthy at work, much to the gawking evening curiosity of other camp visitors, but usually not all that sweaty. There is a bath house in the campground that spews water at such indecisively alternating extremes of temperature as to make Shaquille O'Neal ashamed of his one-time endorsement of Icy-Hot cream if he knew about this place. I always used to mock my dad's ridiculously slow process of warming up to the water in pools or the ocean, a fleeting thought I could barely hear over the sound of my own screaming the first time I used that bath house. Some teammates are doing a conservation-minded shower fast for the full five weeks of this project. Even considering the consistently unpleasant experience of showering here I've so far refused to join them for more than four days at a time.

We sleep in tiny but determined single person tents, flimsy green plastic cocoons that have resolutely weathered several driving thunderstorms, dutifully keeping us snugly dry like little grey caterpillars awaiting the first sunny day of Spring in our cocoons (for the first week and a half, it was so cold most of us slept in our uniforms to avoid the chilling shock of changing in the morning). We have a trailer, an old pull-along RV, for cooking, storage, and shelter during the worst of these storms but it is over-taxed and frequently crowded, dirty and loud. It does have electricity but the Gorge is mostly a cellular and internet desert, so my laptop and phone aren't as attractive uses of my time as usual anyway. Simple things like changing, brushing one's teeth, and cooking take much longer or are more difficult in camp. However once one becomes accustomed to a certain level of constant minor misery, these relatively primitive conditions are actually pretty enjoyable. In the absence of much else to do, I find myself outdoors most of the time.

Some of us have started a “100 push-ups, 100 pages a day” challenge to fill our time. When we're not reading, eating, or doing push-ups, and we haven't had a particularly punishing hike during work hours, we'll spend some time at the lumber gym: a small collection of conveniently dense logs and a long, thin tree we use for lifting - they say Boredom is the mother of creativity, and Necessity of invention. There's something satisfying about doing squats with a thick log across your shoulders rather than a bar of iron. I could almost imagine myself as a lumberjack in the Alaskan wilderness, burly, wooly-bearded and clad in red flannel under suspenders that cost far less than the average modern hipster would be willing to spend. Never mind that I can't grow a beard, I'm wearing filthy khaki cargo pants poorly patched twice at the crotch, and that historical lumberjacks probably didn't waste a moment fiddling with some half rotted log after work because their job was to move heavy things all day long, effectively negating the necessity of modern sedentary humans to dedicate special time to developing muscles. It's fun.

As a whole camp life is fairly simple, as is our actual work. So far we've hiked probably somewhere around 80 miles of trail, cleaning out rainwater drains, picking up a surprisingly small amount of trash, closing off illegal campsites and dispersing fire rings. We've spent a couple days clearing vegetation from the side of a wilderness track, trimming back mostly rhododendron and ripping out baby trees (immediately following two days we spent planting 1500 trees in clearings created by careless campers, a logically understandable but painful lack of psychological distance between the two tasks). The most difficult but interesting day so far began with a two mile hike into the gorge to a creek where we waded perhaps a half mile down stream in either direction from a crossing, clearing out trash and debris. We found a total of six old tires and had to drag them out of the creek, clean the rusty, foul smelling sludge out of them, and haul them back up the trail. I tried to carry one by myself. It was wide with deep, thick treads and an attached metal hub so ridiculously beefy it must've been made in the ecologically ambivalent sixties – but that's probably just my wounded pride talking. After about fifteen minutes a teammate and I wound up carrying it between us on a spit, doggedly marching it up the gorge like a silent, sullenly bound captive destined for our tribal bonfire.

We've had quite a few interesting days on the trail, made so by forced observation to detail and good conversations, two skills I'm always trying to work on. The memory of one in particular I think is worth sharing, in part because it's the only one I recorded in detail. One day this past week, Matt, the ranger for the Stanton district of DBNF, met us at a trailhead along with the backcountry ranger interns. Our task for the morning was to follow him down a ways to a clearing beside a stream that had been trampled by careless campers and replant the area with seedlings.

The morning had begun with rain, the spattering tail end of a massive, bloated cloud that had bombarded our tiny tents all that night and still hung thickly in the sky, emptied but stubborn. By about midmorning the sun had gathered sufficient strength to shine through this insubstantial remnant, creating an effect like an enormous photographer's diffuser. A soft, silvery light spilled into the gorge as we rounded a corner to reveal a steep ridgetop running almost parallel and to the right of our own, following our descent until the two ridges pinched and melded together again at the floor in a shallow ravine. The sky was a solid sheet of white light, concentrated just above the opposite ridgeline and half silhouetting the hemlocks, maples and oaks jutting up into their ethereal backdrop. The narrow gulley was thick with rhododendron glistening from the night's rain, the tops of their bushy, rounded canopies reflecting the light like hundreds of mesmerizing pools of liquid silver.

When we returned about an hour and a half later, our baby trees successfully deposited, the clouds had mostly burned off and the silver was gone, replaced by damp bushes and a fond memory.

Earlier that day I managed to talk to the four forest service interns a little. Of the four, Jay was perhaps the most interesting and I found him a wealth of information. He's about 5' 6” and 120 lbs, sports a furry black beard, round eye gear that can only be properly described as spectacles and an expedition cap I've never seen him without. All the interns look the part in their two-toned green USFS uniforms: the dark and sturdy pressed slacks, the starchy collared shirts; but Jay is the most enthusiastic.

He volunteered at a national park for two years instead of going to college and wound up in the same place as those who had in less time and without the cost. He taught me how to tell a hemlock from a white pine and got me hooked on eating hemlock needles straight off low hanging branches like a billy goat. He claims not only do they taste great, but they make the best pine needle tea. Later he showed me a ground cover plant with little red berries that he claims taste like bubble gum, but I decided not to overextend my trust and stuck to pine needles.

Matt, the Stanton forest ranger and our occasional project lead is everything I expected a forest ranger should be. He has a way of explaining the contents of his office, so to speak, that lays bare the demystified and logical inner workings of nature as though the secrets of ecology were common place while still obviously impressed and quietly wondrous of them himself. He gets appropriately angry at irresponsible weekenders damaging the forest, noticing all the little details of their careless passing. He was quite appreciative, and I was quite proud of myself, after I climbed a precariously leaning tree to cut down a severed end of a rope that'd been pissing him off for a long time. All those pull ups were finally useful for something.

Tall and fit, with close cropped black hair usually kept under a green USFS baseball cap, Matt wears a thick, groomed black goatee that if allowed would flow down his neck to join the undoubtedly equally thick mane beneath his shirt. His irises are so dark as to be nearly black, yet they are paradoxically bright. His upper lip doesn't seem to curl up when he smiles in the stereotypical wide U shape; instead his mouth just opens wider, revealing perfectly straight white teeth descending from his straight upper lip. As our guide he strides through the forest with an air of purposeful, familiar ease, alert and happy to answer my persistent questions but just as happy to amble along in silence tapping trees with the butt end of his axe, pausing from time to time to look at some curious moss or inspect a hemlock for the tell-tale white fungus that betrays the presence of the lethal wooly adelgid beetle. He is used to walking by himself, as evidenced by the occasional lapse of restraint and resulting burst of speed that sends his towering frame bounding lightly up a root-stair accompanied by a thunderous belch. He's purposeful, laid back, and a wealth of information – when we can keep up with him.

He explained many things to me: how to identify several kinds of trees in the gorge, secret spots for an upcoming trip into the wilderness my teammate and I are planning, the process of digging for fishing bait, the best hiking boots and the tender loving care of such, how to tell how long a tree has been down based on the texture of its exposed ends and the growth of moss – the list goes on. One of the natural wonders Matt explained to me on the same day we planted trees at the creek was a natural iron pipe jutting out of a sandstone rock shelter on that trail. It was part of a whole mess, a beautiful array of large waves of iron ore winding through the bluff, partially exposed from the eroded sandstone in flowing rust red ridges. While perfectly cylindrical shapes are not common, the formation of iron in sandstone apparently is. To me, it was a wonder.

Normally such geological curiosities of the gorge occur in its rock-shelters: sedimentary cliffs eroded at varying angles by the elements over millenia, leaving rounded-wedge shaped cavities. These spectacular overhangs come in every size from cavernous cliffs to spaces a squirrel could find cozy. On the interior often form patchwork systems of dripping sandstone, reminiscent of cell structures melting, or fossilized honeycombs of gargantuan proportion.

However a geological oddity among geological oddities appeared in the form of a lone boulder, perhaps ten feet high and thirty feet long which sat in hulking solitude by the trailside, robed in moss and ferny growth, looking for all the world as though it had stood watch there since time immemorial. Along its sides occurred a pattern of ridges that looked like miniature waves of cooled lava; close set symmetrical layers of delicately curved lines with angular kinks in them. It resembled very closely the wispy yet bark-like texture of a north-eastern wasp's nest. Even Matt couldn't explain the formation of this particular wonder. “I wasn't there when it happened,” he says good-naturedly.

We leave the Red River Gorge on April 18^th. There will be a three day backpacking trip into the wilderness area of the gorge before then, leaving only nine work days remaining until departure and graduation soon after. I'm grateful for all the experiences I've had, the places I've seen, the people I've met and everything it's all taught me, but I'll be relieved to be done with it all. I think I'll celebrate my first day back in Jersey with three real, bready, warm poppy bagels for breakfast - one toasted and buttered, one stuffed with eggs, cheese and taylor ham, and one entirely plain. For lunch I'll devour an entire authentic pizza from literally any pizzeria in the state for lunch, and for dinner a thick, juicy, dripping burger from the Homestead Rest. To hell with the fall-out. It'll be worth every minute.

Til next time,

Dan

"I called out to the Lord from my narrow prison and he answered me in the freedom of space."

Psalm 118:5