Emily Neil--The Layers

Hey all, I’m Emily, I’m also going to contribute some thoughts throughout this year as I move to Palma de Mallorca, Spain, to teach English. I don’t leave for another week or so, but I’ve been thinking some about the purpose of writing/blogging in general, and why it can be worthwhile to do it in a more public way. I love to write, and as Jake and Leo have discussed in their original posts, for the first time in my life I will be in a place far away from most of my friends and family, without a clearly defined community. This makes the idea of staying connected in some way with everyone one of the most appealing reasons to write/blog.

But it’s hard to write posts for a general public, rather than solely individual correspondences, without working through the thought process of why it matters, what the point is, why create or write or throw more stuff out there in the teeming Internet universe. For me, that thought process starts with one of my favorite quotes:

"It is so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of the blank canvas."

So said the French painter Paul Cezanne, one of my favorites. The act of marking a page and putting something in space is absolutely terrifying. There is something complete and beautiful about the blank page, or silence, for that matter – it is divine, in a way. It is pure - unmarked and constant. So in that sense creation necessitates an initial imbalance, a rupture of perfection which shatters the flawless nothing before it achieves anything else. Creation at its core is a balance of enduring imperfections.

But that is exactly what makes it so essential, and the opposite of self-indulgent. By writing we confront the fact, the fear, of the blank page. And when we share what we write and what we create, we develop a comfort with this fear and the vulnerability that comes along with the decision to risk that rupture in perfection.

I sit down to write, I have a blank canvas before me - and yet, I'm afraid to mark it. Why? Why are we afraid to create? Because we’re afraid no one will care. That even if they do care about our words, whatever act of creation will fail in its intent. That it is so much striving and building and perfecting for the self alone while the world rages on outside of this blank page, hatred and conflict burning to ashes the blank pages of so many others lives, the ones that they will never be able to mark with their own creations.

But within this - within every reason not to create - exists a window into certain conclusions, certain principles, which provide hope. And hope is the necessary foundation for any act of creation.

I want to create, I want to write and do whatever this year, make some kind of mess on the blank page, because of everything that the poem "The Layers," by Stanley Kunitz, expresses about engaging with memory while at the same time stretching forth from the roots of the past, the roots that can entangle you. These verses are what I'm holding onto right now in a time of personal transition and uncertainty (and have been a great source of comfort/strength to me in the past). I just graduated from college, and I'm going to Spain for a year to teach English - it isn't anything dramatic in the least, but at the individual level it is a breaking out of a mold of being, the mode of being a student, of having lived life in similar settings with the same expectations. I think this poem can speak to anyone, really, at any time in their life, but maybe especially so to those of us who have just graduated, or are experiencing new jobs, places, and whatever other layers to life. For us, assuredly, it's another “chapter in our book of transformations.” Check out the full poem "The Layers," by Stanley Kunitz, below:

The Layers

BY STANLEY KUNITZ

I have walked through many lives,

some of them my own,

and I am not who I was,

though some principle of being

abides, from which I struggle

not to stray.

When I look behind,

as I am compelled to look

before I can gather strength

to proceed on my journey,

I see the milestones dwindling

toward the horizon

and the slow fires trailing

from the abandoned camp-sites,

over which scavenger angels

wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

In a rising wind

the manic dust of my friends,

those who fell along the way,

bitterly stings my face.

Yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

“Live in the layers,

not on the litter.”

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes.

Looking behind, we can feel that we’ve walked through many lives- those of ourselves, as we have grown, those of friends and family. I can't describe the surge of joy I feel, though, when I think that in the midst of change and uncertainty, "some principle of being abides." And it is a struggle not to stray from it, a constant struggle of trying to uncover the simplest truth of the you who is existing, underneath all of the words you say and things you do – the constant river of your essence. But it is there, in the same way that though our tribe of true affections may be scattered - may be constantly scattering as we all branch off and enter into different phases, dispersing throughout the world - the scattering only deepens the layers of memory and being each person contributes to our lives, to our formation of ourselves. Writing can be one part of the struggle not to stray; it is the act of uncovering some thread of truth. Not reaching it, not possessing it, but glimpsing it - holding it if only for a moment. Keeping it within sight.

This sounds like a lot of philosophizing, but it’s just my basic thought process for why I’m going to try to write/blog some while I’m in Spain, thinking whatever thoughts I end up thinking, doing whatever I end up doing - and why I think it’s great to have this platform in general to share our experiences. We are not done with our changes, and as we record them we can recognize within our words some semblance of guideposts along the way – a few wavering flags to catch at as we stumble on.

Seizing the moment

As is sometimes the case, I have to say that I disagree with Jake about the reason that I haven't written a post since August or so (as a disclaimer, most of it is laziness that I'll try to mask with some esoteric rationalization). The act of writing down one's experiences, with commentary, is self-indulgent and subject to every cliche in the book, and more than anything, is intimidating in every sense. I always feel a sort of high after finally finishing a post, as I did with my columns, because it's always such a weight, for whatever reason—I always feel like I need to be writing down and capturing everything I'm feeling and experiencing (for reasons outlined in my first post ever here I think), and constantly feel guilty when I put it off and put it off (in this case, for about two months. Two months of guilt--should've written this on Yom Kippur, would've been a more apt release). So when I finally write one, it is such a release, especially the longer I've waited (holding back certain jokes because of the readership). It's intimidating because I always feel like there's so much to capture, and so much that I want to write, that the task seems too impossible the longer I wait, and then I put it off longer, and then it gets more impossible—the miserable feedback loop of some kind of writer's block.

And to clarify, as I alluded to before, I don't do these to feel self-important or to compel people to read about my life and what's happening—if anything, it's mostly an exercise for myself. Luckily, with the advent of the internet and blogs and all of that lovely alienation, it's a mostly solitary experience, as I can write whatever I want, put it out there, and not even think about the fact that people are actually reading it (except for from phone calls with my parents). But that adds to another level of intimidation—I know at least a few people are reading it, my personal thoughts, and I want them to count, and if cliched, at least be meaningful in some way (aka not make me sound like a dumbass, which is probably impossible to completely avoid).

Also unfortunate is the moments when I'm truly motivated to write a post, which is usually when I'm on a long bus ride, or taking a long walk back or to something, or in the case of Oregon, at the top of something or in view of something awesome(ful), and in these cases it's actually a good thing I don't have a computer, but a bad thing because by the time I get back to a place with a computer, I usually just want to eat something and have a beer and take a nap. Look at that, three paragraphs about procrastination. That's got to be meta in some way, right Jake? The meandering start to what will inevitably be a very long, very meandering piece to scratch the surface of the past two months.

Hopefully I really will write much more frequently while in Spain, which I actually think will be the case, mostly because I have many more hours of leisure than when I was in Oregon (and much more access to quaint little European cafés with incredible café con leches, how's that for cliché.) If anything, Jake and I meant this blog as a place for our thoughts on being abroad, and while being in Oregon was certainly being abroad in some sense, this is where I envisioned most of my posts coming from. I do still have a lot to write about Oregon, and I think that being here and having some distance will make it much easier. I also hope to finally fulfill my hope that this site will be a place for other people to post, especially people who are also abroad, and that will be starting today when I finally post an incredible piece that Emily wrote a couple weeks ago and I felt too guilty to post because I didn't have anything yet. So here's to another, hopefully not false, start.

I saw Boyhood over the summer with my dad and one of my best friends from home, which is going to be a post on its own, but for now will just serve as the hook of what I want to say. For people who don't know, Boyhood was a movie from one of my favorite directors, Richard Linklater, that was filmed over the course of twelve years and attempts to capture the lives of a family through the adolescence of a boy living in Texas. The movie is hilarious and hard-to-watch at the same time because it hits so close to home, especially with the faux philosophizing that the characters in engage in that sounds exactly how we sounded and still sound like. Watching some of the conversations is almost comedic because it's such a parody of itself, but of course it's so comedic because it's so hyper-realistic, and also completely grounded in truth, no matter how heavy-handed. The best of these conversations was the very last scene of the film, which I unfortunately can't find, so will do my best to summarize. The eponymous boy has just moved in for his freshman year of college, and gone of a nature hike with his new roommate and a couple of girls (under the influence of edibles or shrooms or something of the like). In the last moment of the movie, he's sitting with one of the girls looking over some beautiful vista, and she says that you can't seize the moment, but the moment seizes you. He replies, yeah, it's like, you know man, it's always right now. Sure, they're 18 year olds under the influence of hallucinogens, and sometimes you feel cynical when you hear something like that, and sometimes you laugh, and sometimes it really hits home.

The scene is painfully meta in so many ways, mostly because it's a film that attempts to capture boyhood not through one single narrative but through a series of seemingly disconnected moments that arch together to form a larger, looser narrative than normally showcased in movies. Time is and always will be one of my favorite things to write about because I think the linearity and passage of time (and everything that comes with it--growth, memory, death, etc., etc.) is one of the most insane parts of everyday life that doesn't get constantly talked about. The only thing we have going for us, really, is the very, exact present moment, and the faith that everything we think happened before us actually happened. And that faith is mostly grounded in memory and personal history, which when you think about it, seems like a fluid, connected narrative, but is really just thousands or maybe even millions, depending on how many brain cells you have left, of individual moments that your brain pieces together. When you stop to separate them, what are the memories that piece together your conception of your life? It's certainly not everything--I would say that of every moment I have lived, I probably have retained .00001% of those moments, which are what are strung together to make my own personal narrative of my life.

So what makes up those memories? What does my brain and consciousness choose to retain? Some are hazier, and some are crystal clear—those crystal clear moments, the ones that stand like massive obelisks, are what one lives for (or at least what I live for). The moments that have defined your life, and have changed the way you think and act. The reason I came abroad is that when I'm doing an experience like this one, those moments come with such a higher level of frequency than if I were to, say, be working an office job, it seems crazy that anybody subjects themselves to that life.

My second to last night in Oregon was probably in one of those top ten moments of my life. After spending five or six weeks working in, as one of my co-workers loved to say, a hellacious burned out apocalyptic wasteland, and three weeks working in a much more verdant area, yet not a calendar-worthy spot (and also being camped out at lakes that were so questionable that they were responsible for one staph infection, two eye infections, and two clogged water filters), we finally got to work at one of those sites that make Oregon one of the most beautiful places on Earth for our last week. We'd heard about it all summer--the fabled Table Lake--and after having it dangled in front of us like a carrot for twelve weeks, were finally guaranteed that we would in fact be stationed there for an eight day hitch, albeit with a loopy old man who is the Deschutes National Forest's most dedicated volunteer--an ex-engineer who probably weighs 80 pounds, wears a bandana around his neck like a cravat, and would give us sheets with diagrams and calculations on how to install log checks into trails (which if you know what working on a backcountry trail crew is like, is fucking hilarious because of its egregious unlikelihood of being utilized).

A fairly strenuous ten mile hike to the site, we were packed out by six beautiful horses and their handler, an incredible older woman who shared dinner with us when we finally set up camp at nine that night and told us about the horse rescue shelter she runs and the trailer she lives in because she so fully dedicates her life to the cause. The trek out was initially through one of the worst burns in the area--the 2002 B&B fire—but after about a mile or so started winding through gorgeous forest, finally breaking out after five miles at the impossibly blue Carl Lake, buffeted on the far side by steep cliffs. After I climbed up the cliffs through a series of switchbacks, I broke ahead of the rest of the group, and began what I'm fairly certain was the most incredible hike of my life, and one that I really can't use adjectives or an accurate account to describe, so I'll do it with mostly pictures. I will say that they do not capture the magnificence and awe-inducing nature of the hike, which was created by the sheer wilderness of the location of the trek, the vast unending and massive views on all sides, and other, more personal and emotional factors. After a final climb, we arrived at Table Lake, an eden that once again I will only describe with photos.

Carl Lake as seen from the trail

 Long view of Carl

View of Carl from on top of the switchbacks

Beautiful overlook above Carl

Trail snaking through piles of two different types of rock—volcanic on the left, glacial on the right (both piles are very, very tall)

Mt. Jefferson--10,497 feet and the second tallest in OR--begins to rear its majestic head

 One of my favorite parts of the trail, mostly devoid of trees, with massive piles of volcanic rock on the right and Jeff in the background

Really cool rock formation by the trail

Table Lake from above

Table Lake from ground level

At sunset

One last view from our campsite on a little hill right above--you can see the little stream that feeds the lake where we would get water.

It's called Table Lake because of a formation called the Table that stands above the lake--essentially a plateau or mesa that looks like a steep cliff when you're standing at the lake. It's about an 800 foot climb up to the Table that we heard was difficult but possible, and of course rewarding due to the views of Mt. Jefferson and the fact that there's probably a square mile of plateau to explore at the top. This would be my last night with my three person Student Conversation Association trail crew/impossibly dysfunctional family that I had spent almost every moment of the past four months with, so we decided to end the summer with a bang and camp out on top of the Table for the last night. After eating dinner down below, we began the climb up at about 5 pm. It turned out to be one of the more difficult rock scrambles I've done, very difficult, with the face covered with scree and loose rock. There were loosely defined switchbacks created by deer and other creatures which somehow climb the Table of a regular basis (those fuckers have four legs), and we followed those up to the first plateau, the lower Table. From the lower Table, there's probably another 200 foot climb to the upper Table, which we decided to go up to because we heard there was a lake (which had of course dried out by that time of the year.) We found a good spot at the end of the Table, about a half mile away from where we summited, and laid down a tarp and our sleeping bags--no tent, just cowboy camping.

The Table from below--we climbed the saddle right in the middle to the Lower Table, and then climbed up another face to the Upper Table. Doesn't look too steep from this perspective, but it's pretty vertical and filled with scree.

View from atop the Lower Table with Jeff in the background--the flat land you see is at actually the mesa, way above the lake. 

Another view from atop the Lower Table

I'm pretty sure this is the Upper Table

A view with Jeff in the background

Our camp spot with my two compadres and Mt. Jeff to keep us company

We opened some beers and lit up a couple cigars we had hiked up, and enjoyed each other's company for the last time. The sun began to go down and the stars came out, in more stunning clarity than I had seen all summer because of how high up we were, how out in the wilderness we were, and how clear the night was. Unprotected from the wind and high enough up that the temperature was about 10 degrees cooler than at the lake, we wrapped ourselves up and laid down side by side on the tarp, watching the full panorama above us. At about 10 pm, a light as bright as the sun began to glow from the horizon, and I saw my first legitimate moonrise--a moon a day or two removed from full that filled the night sky so fully that the stars were no longer visible.  Slowly conversation stopped, and we were just silent, looking up.

That's one of those moments. How can I describe it, and how can it not seem as comedically cliche and parodic as that last scene in Boyhood. It can't, but that, really, is what made it that moment--it defined so much, and was so massive and all-encompassing, that it can't be described without coming off as a shadow of every other attempt to capture the heights of the human experience, or at least individual human experiences. In that moment  everything came crashing down--graduating from college, spending four months in unspeakable beauty and reflection, and my eminent departure from Spain for a year--the fact of how disparate my life is, how irreconcilable, the idea of being at Columbia, and then the Oregon wilderness, and then Galicia, Spain, in four months, and with it all the people and experiences and moments, all part of one narrative and connected but so insanely different at the same time--all this on the backdrop of unadulterated wilderness, and all the feelings of insignificance and smallness that come with being in such a place and under such a sky.

And here I am, less than three weeks later, in a cafe in Santiago de Compostela, in as different a place as one could possibly be. And the moments just keep coming, at a whole other level, as comes with the nature of living immersed in a different culture with a different language. This is the absurdity of life, and why I decided to do this year, and hope to be able to live even a shadow of this life for the rest of my life. More posts to come.

I think the reason I have been delinquent in my posting is basically this: I don't want to bore anyone with my impressions of a place or trite comments on personal growth, and anything that doesn't fall into that (terrible) category, any objective observations I could make, are either trivially boring or otherwise have been said a thousand times before.

I am not going to be able provide any insights on the German people beyond stereotype, because it is always a fruitless endeavor to attempt to describe a nation. And you have to trust me when I say that trying to scrape together interesting words about Hannover as a city--or, even worse, as a group of people--is an altogether impossible task. I won't try to pass off anecdotes as anthropology. No matter where you go, some people are smart and some people are stupid, some people are good and some people are evil, etc. With the obvious exception of the American South.

What I can offer are a few hackneyed musings (I use the word "musings" because what follows is invariably trite and annoying) that have only recently become apparent to me. The first is that German people really could take a lesson from the French in style. German posture, fashion, music, cuisine, etc. is exactly as the stereotype describes: bad. I hate to say it, but it's true. Obviously Germany produces great people in all these fields, but I think I am working at the epicenter of "Middle Germany" in my off-brand, working class city, and I can attest to how the everyday person carries him or herself. I know this sounds like a 19th century way of describing things, but political correctness doesn't exist here, so I think I'm in the clear.

Another thing that probably doesn't matter to anyone except me but which I will mention anyway because that is what self-indulgent blogs are for is how much this has affirmed my desire to die somewhere cosmopolitan. I really really have proven to myself that I am just the kind of person who has to spend his final years in New York where I don't have to take a high speed train to find a Thai Restaurant. What makes New York great (and I can say this now that I have actually taught the place to eighth-graders) is that it belongs to the world instead of to a couple of inbred, jingoistic inhabitants. Even the immigrant community here is one-dimensional. Of course all of this is not to say that it's not a valuable experience, I just miss hearing more than one language being spoken on any given street and going to museums that actually have willing visitors.

One of the things that makes it obvious that you have crossed from Denmark into Germany is the comparative paucity of flags on the German side. Danes do have a gentle--and tolerably justifiable--smugness for representing the pinnacle of peaceful and civilized society, and they express this with their red and white nordic crosses. Germany's history is a little more dubious, and it takes a toll on the nationalism.

When I arrived in Hamburg, after being told by no fewer than three conductors that I'm a delinquent for having only an electronic copy of my ticket, I was excited to find out that I wouldn't have a seat on the hour-and-a-half transfer to Hannover, and would have to stand with the other "unreserved" in the cattle car of a cabin. (Forgive me for my anxiety in the matter, but Jews don't have the best track record when it comes to entering the Fatherland by overcrowded train.)

Hannover, like almost all German cities I've been to, is half beautiful and half 1970s dingy à la Kraftwerk and sandals over socks. It's a medium-sized city but noticeably provincial. It is the capital of more or less a backwater region, and Bremen, which is the nicest city around, is cut out of Niedersachsen by a cookie cutter like Berlin from Brandenburg. So it's kind of the biggest fish in a small, cultureless pond. But maybe I'm not giving it enough credit: there are some beautiful buildings from the 17th century, and the city center is clean and new. Charm, if Hannover has some, can be found in the many gorgeous parks that make the city feel weave pretty fluidly from urban center to nature reserve. I live on the outskirts of town, if anyone cares. A block towards the centers and there are nice restaurants and shops. A block in the other direction and it's pretty industrial.

I can say with certainty that it is impossible to feel like a tourist here, since nobody would visit Hannover just for fun and because nobody would ever come far enough from the center to stumble upon my dwelling place. But I do feel supremely like an outsider (since I realized that I really can't speak German), and I hope that will change sooner rather than later.

Day 7: Found Tabs the farm cat, dead.

"Cela est bien dit, répondit Candide, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin."

Dear both of our readers,

Now that you are enlightened but also likely exhausted by my penetratingly French quotation and by Leo "Smokey-the-bear" Schwartz's comprehensive description of the Politics of Wildfires (to be published in a three volume set by the Harvard University Press), I will actually take a break from my usual tone of complaint to celebrate, for a brief moment, the quiet pleasure of farm life.

After one post, I was a blogger, so I guess one day of work makes me a farmer.

Deep in the deciduous forests of Denmark, about a half-hour from Copenhagen by train, sits quiet Stengården, an organic farm that cultivates vegetables, egg-laying hens, cattle for slaughter, and friendly, socialist virtues. The farm is absolutely stunning, and the family that runs it has that standard Scandinavian awkward kindness which I've always tried to simulate but have only ever achieved the awkward part. We work five hours a day, five days a week in exchange for room and board.

Room: all of the unpaid workers or "WWOOFers" (you may know them by their historical name, "slaves"), share a gorgeous apartment with tons of light that pours in from huge skylights. Beautiful common room, scandinavian design, etc. If this apartment were in Manhattan, Anderson Cooper would scrimp and save to cough up the down payment. And it has a fucking washing machine!

But really the board is what has made this so cool. Stengården has the largest organic supermarket in Denmark (and the owners joke the most expensive, too), and we are free to waltz in at will and take anything, save alcohol of course. Every time I get groceries I feel kind of like a criminal. For breakfast we can have yogurt, muesli, eggs, avocado, etc. Then we work for two hours until "coffee break," when we are given lekker breads, cheeses, juices, etc. Then we work for another couple of hours and it's lunchtime: meats, herring, vegetables, potatoes, you get it. By this time it is 1 P.M. and we have the rest of the day off to grab whatever we can from the shop with whatever of our hands hasn't been thistled and nettled away from weeding.

It's not all a walk in the park, though. Some of the "trendy" flavors are a little unorthodox by American standards:

Call me old-fashioned, but the thought of chomping on my own offspring doesn't appeal to me; I'm not a goddamned beta fish. But I guess "when in Rome..."

More later--have to go for a leisurely stroll.

xoxo, gossip girl

I'm on Fire

Whoops.

Round 1 Results: We fail. It's been a busy month though--I've starting doing Monday through Thursday camping hitches for work (although I have no excuses for the weekends, which are largely spent lounging around, except for one eventful weekend spent in Portland that I'll hopefully work up the motivation to write about soon), and Jake has been busy bumming around New York or whatever. But we'll do better, especially because Jake has actually starting traveling/working at a farm in Denmark picking tulips or something. Let's pretend the past month of non-productivity didn't happen though and start fresh.

In response to the last post from a little less than a month ago, one of my favorite Jake being a terrible tourist moments was when five of us went up to the Northeast Kingdom in Vermont (which averages roughly .6 people per square mile) for fall break. We went to the town’s grocery store/gun store/outfitter/jail to check it out, where he immediately yelled, in front of the very nice, albeit slightly "provincial" storekeeper, "Ooooo, we can buy so many souvenirs here!!!" Moral of the story, Jake is an uncouth, unfiltered New Yorker with an irreverent sense of humor, and for anyone who read the previous post thinking "Jesus, how could a kid go to one of the most beautiful places on Earth and have that reaction," it's at least 50% meant to be taken tongue-in-cheek. The other 50% can be accounted for the fact that he's spent most of his life in Scarsdale and the Upper West Side.

Moving on to my experience in a place where Jake would almost certainly offend everyone, here's a topic that I think is worth writing about for my second real post: forest fires. Forest fires dominate the culture here, and are as much of a way of life as complaining about tourists are in New York (actually, Central Oregonians complain about Californians as much if not more than New Yorkers complain about tourists.)

Forest fires, for whatever reason, aren't really a thing out in the East Coast, and although I've heard about them in the news every year--mostly in the context of all of Colorado seemingly burning down every year--I've never really had a context for understanding what they actually are, in any sense. To start off, I really have no idea why forest fires happen so frequently out here and not on the East Coast, or even the Midwest--I think it has something to do with the type of trees (mostly conifers) and brush, and mostly to do with the lack of rain in most of the region. Most of  Oregon, contrary to popular belief, is incredibly dry, with only the area west of the Cascades being really wet. Central Oregon, where I am, is classified as a high desert, and although there are frequent thunderstorms, they're usually dry, with very little rain, but tons of lightning, which set trees on fire, and spread like wildfire (hah, sorry) through the insanely dry forests.

This week we were out camping for work from Monday through Thursday, and thunderstorms rolled in on Tuesday and Wednesday night. We could see them forming over the Three Sisters around 2 or three, slowly creeping across the sky and building until they blanketed the sky by 6 or so. These thunder cells, mostly dry, come with these insane lighting strikes unlike anything I've ever seen that just fill the sky. We have a forest service walkie talkie that we use to call in and out of service every day, set to the Central Oregon dispatch channel that the local fire lookouts use to call smoke reports. On nights like the ones we had this week, there will be dozens of smoke reports, constantly calling in. Apparently on Tuesday alone there were around 700 strikes that caused over 40 fires.

During the summer, most of the forest service is fire-related, which is a massive operation between lookouts, hot shot crews that build fire lines to contain the blazes, helicopters that suck up water from lakes and dump it on the fires, pump operators, dispatches, and dozens of other roles. You need what's called a red card to fight fires, but there's been a couple fires this summer that have been so bad that we've been close to getting recruited to help out. Most of the other trail crew members, who are actually employed by the Forest, forsake their trail crew duties to go help out when the fires get really bad (they're also paid much more for fire duty, because it's largely overtime).

It's crazy to see the forest go into action when a fire actually gets out of control, like two weeks ago, when two forest fires joined to become what's called a complex (this one was the Bridge 99 Complex, they all have names, like Hurricanes, after where they started)--the local middle school turned into a fire center, where hotshot crews were called in from Idaho, Montana, California, and Washington, along with all over Oregon, to put all hands on deck. Even then, the fire just kept spreading, due to unfavorable winds and heat, and at some point you just have to let it burn.

A forest fire makes a mushroom cloud in the sky. The first time I saw one was the first week I was here. We were driving back from work one day and saw this huge cloud in the sky, that looked like an atomic bomb had hit Bend. We found out later it was the Two Bulls Fire, torching about 7,000 acres, including the outskirts of Bend (a city of 100,000).

We were out camping when the Bridge 99 Complex started, and saw a similar cloud in the horizon as we began to hear about chatter about it on the radio. Our co-worker/supervisor came out to work with us for a day--our site was about an hour drive from Bend, and then a 5 mile hike in, so he didn't meet up with us until about 11. By the time he showed up, he was already called in to go work on the fire, so he helped us put in a couple log checks, ate lunch, and then headed back out. For a fire like the Bridge 99 Complex (which was especially threatening because it was encroaching on the Metolious River, which is a popular recreation and residential spot), all hands go on deck. He worked as a pump operator, and would mostly sit around all day as trucks came up to re-supply. 

By nighttime, we could see the flames creeping up on the ridges surrounding us. Our real supervisor guaranteed us that because we were working in area that had already been burned out about 10 years before, there was no way they fire would spread to us (plus we were camped out on a wilderness lake, which he half-jokingly claimed we could always swim out to the middle of if it got really bad, although we were pretty skeptical), but going to bed with a pillar of red rising on the horizon is just a little unsettling. 

At some point in the summer, campfires are banned in wilderness areas, although that hasn't happened yet. That was our first camping trip for work, and that night was the last one of the hitch, so we decided to have a little campfire to celebrate (as a disclaimer, campfires are required to be 100 feet from a trail and 100 feet from any water, and we were questionably 100 feet from both the trail and the lake, although I'm almost positive we were fine). Our fire had been burning for about an hour--and these fires burn big because the wood around here is so dry--when we heard a whirring in the sky. Fire helicopters had been passing over all day, but this was much louder than anything we'd heard. Before we could react, one flew right over our campsite, which is a pretty surreal sight, as we were out in a completely desolate wilderness area where there's nothing even slightly related to civilization for miles and miles. Then it circled back, and began to fly back to us. We started freaking out, only a little, pretty positive that it was going to dump 1,000 gallons of water on our little campfire, or something like that. 

Confirming our worst suspicions, it flew right back to our campsite, and hovered right over us, probably 100 feet above, for about 15 seconds. At that point were were fully freaking out, and we could see the people in the helicopter, although they didn't say anything to us. Finally, it began to move, and went to hover over the lake we were next to, with its hose dangling down. We were pretty positive it was going to suck up water, but it just flew away. We ran to get our radio to try and hear any activity about what it was up to, but we were too late. I also unfortunately didn't have my phone on me so I couldn't take any pictures, so you'll have to use your imagination. Just try to picture being surrounded by thousands of acres of wilderness for a couple days and then having a helicopter, most likely coming to check out your possibly illegal fire, hovering hovering 100 feet above you. 

So what do forest fires look like. That, unfortunately or fortunately, I can't tell you or show you, because I haven't seen one up close. I can show you what a forest fire does, though. Because we're the lackeys of the trail crew, and because burned out areas need the most trail work, we've been working almost exclusively in burned out areas this year--two in particular, the Pole Creek Fire of 2012, which burned about 25,000 acres, and the B&B Fire of 2003, which burned over 90,000 acres. On one hand, working in burned areas is the worst, because the soil is shit, and everything is fucking burned, so there's absolutely no shade. At around 2 pm, with the sun beating down, no clouds, and 95 degree heat, wearing long pants and long sleeves and gloves and wool socks and a hard hat and digging trenches and crosscutting trees, let me tell you, is not fun. On the other hand, working in burned out areas has its perks. First off, because everything is burned, it opens up the surrounding areas, giving the most beautiful views of the landscape. Second off, working in these two different fires, it's pretty cool seeing how a forest recovers from a fire. In the Pole Creek area from two years ago, everything is just completely nuked--it looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland. There's no green whatsoever, the soil has been turned to sand by the blaze, and the trees are still black poles sticking in the sky. In the B&B area from ten years ago, though, the trees have turned white, looking up close like petrified wood, and from far away like a forest blanketed by snow. The ground is covered in green from the first pioneers, largely snowbrush (which blankets the area) and manzanita. 

Finally, burned out areas are unlike anything I've ever seen--eerily, surreally, hauntingly beautiful. For all those who have read this far (or if you're just skipping down), I'll reward you with lots of pictures. This is the Pole Creek region, on the Park Meadow trail, which is about six miles of burn before you come out to these gorgeous alpine meadows at the base of North Sister and Broken Top which I unfortunately didn't have the chance to take any pictures of. I've got lots of pictures of the burn though:

As you can see, absolutely no green, and the soil is sand. We actually would mountain bike to work every day, which was pretty difficult because a) I have virtually no mountain biking experience b) the soil is sand and incredibly hard to steer through c) it's all single track, as you can see from that last picture, so very little room to maneuver and d) it's all uphill and downhill, which the pictures don't really show. Pretty fun though. You can also see the incredible views that the burn opens up. Not necessarily worth it on 95 degree days. The trail looks like that for virtually the entire six miles or so until Park Meadow.

Here's the area we've been working in a lot recently, all hit by the B&B Fire from ten years ago. A pretty stark difference. We've been camping out at this little wilderness lake called Booth Lake, which is in some of the pictures. 

This is Three Fingered Jack, apparently named when a group of pioneers came through, and said to their three fingered friend named Jack (an ex-train robber who had lost his fingers presumedly during such escapades), "Hey, that looks like you!" 

My campsite for three weeks, not bad. For the most part, we were the only ones, although one night I was woken up to people showing up at 11:30 to set up camp, although I thought they were going to sacrifice us all in some weird Satanic ritual--seriously, who sets up camp at 11:30 at night. 

A different lake called Square Lake about two miles from Booth. Two miles away from Square Lake is Round Lake. Both Square Lake and Round Lake are round. Not the most imaginative names. 

So that's forest fires for you. Last thing I want to very briefly talk about is the politics of forest fires, which I've saved for last because I figure most people won't care, even though I think it's really fascinating. One hears forest fires and thinks, those are bad, pretty naturally. They burn down homes, they destroy forests, they occasionally kill people. Not good. A good amount of people I've talked to in the forest fire have pretty differing views. First, a pretty common belief is that there's a reason forest fires have been so bad in the past thirty years or so, and that's because we've been stopping them. In ecosystems like this one, forest fires are part of the life cycle. Fires start naturally from the lightning strikes in the summer, and if healthy, will burn away all the brush and smaller trees. The larger and more established trees can pretty easily survive these fires, and the fires, if anything, revitalize the area, ensuring that overpopulation of vegetation doesn't happen. In the past fifty years or so, and possibly before that, we've been actively fighting forest fires, which means that forests are becoming overpopulated by brush and smaller trees that normally would be burned by the natural fires. When a fire happens, there's much more fuel , and the fires are bigger and bigger, causing these massive ones like the B&B and Pole Creek Fires that burn even the old growth trees, which otherwise would be able to survive the blazes. 

The reason we still fight the fires, of course, is political pressure--we build our homes and communities near where fires happen, and if the fires get too close to homes, they have to be stopped. If it wasn't for that, the forest service would most likely let them burn, because it's actually better for the life cycle of the forest. Recently, controlled and prescribed burns have become more common--the forest service will actually look at historic photos of what the forests used to look like (aka the amount of trees, roughly, per acre) and set a blaze in an area to try and get rid of the brush and smaller trees, to both reduce fuel and restore the forest to how it's supposed to look--literally using fire to fight fire. The work behind a prescribed fire is immense--the conditions have to be perfect (wind, temperature, weather, etc.), and even then, they can get out of control. 

The forest service is also advocating for more logging in a lot of circumstances, to reduce to amount of trees in a given area, and reduce the likelihood of a super-blaze. This is creating controversy with conservation types, especially with the spotted owl lobby. Just goes to show there's no black and white in these situations, and the forest service can never please everyone, which is why they're so controversial in this area. 

Anyway, that's about it. I promise the next post will be written in less than a month. Burn baby burn. 

By the way, the title is a reference to the Shakey Graves cover of the Bruce Springsteen classic--he's an awesome folk artist out of Austin (who played a bit role in the TV show Friday Night Lights as the greasy Swede, for any fans), who will be playing at the Sisters Folk Festival (the third biggest event in Sisters after the Rodeo and Quilt Fest) in a month. Would highly recommend checking him out.