The Kindness of Strangers.

Mo Fauvel-- third from the right-- is Nederland's local doctor, and also the head of NedREP, the Nederland Renewable Energy Project which I take minutes for (perpetuating my tendency to hang out with people older than me). He asked when I was headed back home and when I told him I was only in Nederland for another few weeks, he invited me over for ATVing and dirtbiking. We went up to Caribou, the old mining town up the mountain from Nederland. Only two half-buildings remain, some rough fieldstone walls. The other dozens of buildings are completely gone, leaving only a grassy valley behind.

When we got back he showed me the homemade wind turbine he's crafting. He took the generator from the wooden water wheel he built behind his office-- it wasn't working out thanks to friction loss from the series of belts, but he might revisit it with chains next season-- and then assembled a vertical-axis system with airfoils made from reshaped gutters. Amidst the work we shared life stories. He grew up French Catholic not so well off, and he stumbled into medical school after a few years in college and he and his wife paid off his loans by working at a clinic in Alaska for a while (I made a Northern Exposure joke). They settled down here to be near his wife's family and a few years ago started their own private practice. He's been doing medicine for 25 years now and says he's thinking about taking a sabbatical. "This stuff was always my true calling," he said while working on that turbine. He's thinking about taking that up as a new career, and he told me about excelling at those mechanical engineering things in high school and on aptitude tests, but back in his day nobody really did much with the results of those as far as directing students went, so it became a hobby rather than a career. I think it's kind of fascinating.

Just this weekend Mo, his wife, and his three daughters left for Paris. He's thrilled for the two-week vacation, the first he's had in years. He also told me that while he was gone, I could stay in his house whenever I wanted, and even take the ATV for a spin. I was pretty apprehensive, not wanting to infringe, but he offered many times over, and I decided it would be nice to have a day to myself away from my team. When I mentioned the possibility of Kat visiting, he even said she could stay there too while he was away-- but we just couldn't afford it, alas. I told him I'd like to make it up to him and asked if I could make his family dinner sometime. Instead he invited me over for barbecue. When I told him that I enjoyed cooking he said I could man the grill, haha.

So I'm taking Tuesday off and I'm going to go for a run, get some breakfast at the teahouse in Boulder, maybe buy a new book-- I've got my eye on Machiavelli-- do some writing, and take care of yet more college stuff. I'm considering getting a bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream and making some cookies or something too. I've no earthshattering plans, to be sure, but it's still going to be nice and relaxing.

Today I watched some soccer and found it far more exciting than most any other sport I've seen. I think I'm going to start watching more soccer. Football. Whatever.

Looking forward.

Wednesday during our daily briefing outside I asked Coby if I could run down to the bunkhouse to get the number for urgent care-- there's a humming in my ear that won't go away. He said yes, and I was there and back in less than a minute.

In that minute, the fifteen people sitting there left, leaving my backpack, which was promptly run over by a fire truck.

They say it's my fault. "Looks like somebody's got no situational awareness," they say with smirks. I've loathed this term since day one. Like "critical thinking," it's one of those words that unnecessarily vocabularizes a simple concept. In this case, "situational awareness" means "paying attention."

The next day while at the cutting and chipping site two hours away, right near the end of the day we moved on to yet another area. Everyone was tired and frustrated and I was picking up branches to put in the chipper. Someone put in a sizeable branch behind me when I wasn't looking, and when I turned around the branch rocked up and down in the feed wheel-- which they almost always do-- and hit me under the chin. It was the hardest anything's hit me in my life, and it just made this dense thunk sound in my head. I turned to Ned and asked him twice if my teeth were okay. He said yes both times. Then I spat up little bits of tooth. A chunk came out of the side of a back left molar. A bit flaked off the top of one of my lower left teeth, leaving a jagged edge. My top left canine got it the worst-- the entire point came off, the root nearly exposed. It hurt a bit to have cold air pass over it, to eat, to brush my teeth. (Oddly, I didn't spit it up but I didn't swallow it either. No idea where it went.) It didn't hurt, but the shattering of teeth was pretty emotionally jarring-- I sat in the truck and cried for a half-hour or so while the EMT-qualified firefighters took a look at me and asked me some neurological exam questions to make sure my head was on straight, ha.

The following day, Nate drove Sergio and I down into Boulder. My teeth got fixed up (though I might need a root canal in the future, which AmeriCorps wouldn't pay for if it's after I graduate, so I filled out a CA-1 Workman's Comp form and should be set for life). I bought the cheapest, junkiest cell phone AT&T had for $30. Sergio found out he has a sprained rotator cuff and can't lift more than 10 pounds for the next two months (even though he was playing basketball that morning). He's likely going to get transferred to another team, leaving me roommateless. So I guess these catastrophes were rectified acceptably.

Gathering no moss.

In one month I'm done working with the Forest Service. Then a week of debriefs and two weeks of responsibility-free outprocessing and saying goodbye to each other and Colorado. Yesterday our boss realized we were leaving soon and declared that he has to "bleed us for every minute of work I can, because we're paying $4.50 a day for you guys." He cancelled our going to the orientation he said we were going to go to tomorrow (complete with free pizza) in favor of us cutting and chipping yet another campground. It's getting monotonous, but I guess that's what a career is, huh? Shit.

Hit a small roadblock in my college applications-- had to apply for a term change for GWU and while both that and my application fee waiver were accepted, it seems to have bungled the online application system for me. What's worse, they sprung some kind of form on me that I have to have signed by the dean of students at my old school. Uh? That's going to prove difficult. University of Maryland is tougher to get a reply from; they didn't get my fee waiver but I think my application with them is otherwise done. I'll have to find the time to make more calls and ask for more help, which is always difficult given my lack of reception outside of a 100-square-foot block in Nederland. No word on the Department of State internship I applied for for Spring 2010, but I probably wouldn't hear about that until after July at least, since that's the application deadline.

A string of unrelateds:

• I have a cavity and no dental insurance. Thanks AmeriCorps.
• I went to the doctor for a humming in my left ear after someone used the grinder at work and they told me to use nasal spray to drain my sinuses; as it's failing, I'm now headed to an ear/nose/throat specialist who will hopefully be covered by my insurance.
• I'm tinkering with Rosetta Stone v3, which proves difficult to upgrade to the proper slightly-obsolete-yet-hackable middle version, 3.2.11, that I need. Oh wait I think I just got it. Arabic, Spanish, and Italian v2, here I come.
  
• Sergio is angry at me because three days ago I asked him if I could play video games when he was falling asleep on the couch at 3am after hours of television watching. (He said no, then started swearing when I pointed out why he was being unfair, and then after the swearing and voice-raising said that he was still being polite but wouldn't be for much longer.)
• The oft-unmentioned-by-me third firefighting team leader, Tristan, got kicked out for having alcohol in his fridge in his dorm on campus; he fell prey to random room inspection whilst away.
• On July 24 I return home to Michigan. Matthew and I are going to dress up and smoke cigars (or maybe I'll buy a pipe, I don't know) and drink whiskey. Or is it bourbon? Scotch? What's the difference, anyway? He says he got some pretty classy stuff for my return, and it might be the one thing I'm most looking forward to upon my return. He says he wants to play Risk when I get back, too, which seems somehow a fitting complement.
• My cousin and possibly GI-Kat and I may mount a road trip to New York or beyond shortly after. Kat wants a ride to some socialist convention (tch) on the 30th; I'd like to see New York and visit my unmet friends there.

I've no good way to end this post.

Spelunkadunk.

Mike Fusi (typically referred to as simply "Fusi") is my adventuring buddy. We went hunting with our pocketknives once, trudging uphill through patches of snow and along a trickling stream, following trails of deer poop hoping to find that elusive pooper. We didn't see a single animal the entire time.

A few days ago I pointed out a cave on the way down the canyon from Nederland to Boulder. Alongside the canyon is a... it's too big to be a creek but too small to be a river. It flows from the reservoir dam in Nederland all the way down the 20-mile canyon. About halfway down are the Boulder Falls, off-limits due to falling rock (Fusi and I checked it out anyway, and we weren't the only ones. It's really pleasant down there). Across from the falls is the cave. As soon as I pointed it out Fusi wanted to go, and today we went.

The biggest problem was that the spring snow is melting, and that little river? It's turned into wide whitewater rapids. We scouted up and down the bank looking for a way across, a precarious bridge of rocks to hop along... And eventually we found something. There was a rope stretched over the water, tied between two trees a little way up the canyon. It looked... Intense. There was nothing past it though, so we went back down instead. And found another rope, this one bolted to rocks on either side of the river, and lower to the water too.

Faced with no other alternative, we took hold of it and shimmied across. I pulled myself along the top, balancing as carefully as I could, and it sagged enough in the middle that I got soaked from the waist down. Fusi opted for a monkey-climb, hanging from the bottom of the rope, and at one point he was completely submerged--but we both made it across just fine (even if I was ready to jump in after him if he fell).

Wet, we walked along the bank, on rocks and through brush, to come to the mouth of the cave. The opening was perhaps eight feet tall. The first chamber was roughly circular, and sloped up slightly. It was full of moths and dust, and when we crested that little hill the darkness started to set in. We moved down the slope until we hit water, filled with slippery sticks and swampish murk. The walls were wet and muddy and we clung to them as best we could to not sink to the ankle in that narrow little corridor. The water was deepest where the cave split into three passages, the mouths of the last two dry. The middle passage was short, but had a small hole you could squeeze through into the left passage, past the water. That leftmost passage was the longest, and ended in a small spraypainted message: RANDY WA-- the rest was indiscernable. Was here, perhaps; or maybe a last name.

The rightmost passage had a black arrow spraypainted, beckoning onward, but it was short too. It culminated in a nest of grasses, divoted as though it had been slept in for some time, perhaps by a bear. There were no bones or waste or other signs of habitation, though, and Fusi and I left, content with our explorations. The trip back across the river was a little more successful for the both of us, and we looked a fantastic mess. We both loved it.

Tomorrow we go down to the Boulder Ranger Offices to plant donated trees--a nice change of pace from murdering so many in so many campsites.

Don't wake me, I plan on sleeping in

Every time we return to Denver there's a community meeting where all 250 to 200 of us (the number shrinks each time we return and see that new people have been kicked out or left) get together for a fairly unnecessary proclamation from the lady who runs our campus. One person from each of the four units is also declared Corps Member of the Round, a pretty informal title given to someone who went above and beyond during the last project. I won it for earth unit.

When the four Corps Members of the Round were asked to stand, only three people stood up. It was the first meeting of any sort I've missed yet. I slept through it. Fortunately, my absence was mistaken for modesty.

At the career fair yesterday the CIA did not show up, but the FBI and the Department of State did. So I talked to them about domestic security jobs and foreign ambassador jobs.

Beyond that, I've been thoroughly proofreading my brother's book. When I finish I'm going to resume my studies in Italian via Rosetta Stone, see if I can't get the Arabic one to work, read Blood Meridian and The Catcher in the Rye, read some nonfiction (a book on oil and a CIA agent's memoirs), read Bone (Coby has the entire comic series, about 1300 pages, in one volume), and finish applying for colleges so I'm doing something fairly soon after I get back.

Oh well, whatever, nevermind.

It's been nearly three weeks.

I've been using my precious internet time to apply desperately to universities across the nation. Wandering and wasteful, it's becoming clear to me that I'm the prodigal son.

Mom and Adam came to visit over Easter, whilst Matthew babysat my house and my mom's dog. Mom spent an awful lot of money on awfully delicious food-- Whole Foods, which I had forgotten had a huge array of dining and eating-in things; Cheesecake Factory, which offers enormous portions and where mom couldn't stand the custardy French toast; the gorgeous Dushanbe Boulder Teahouse, the only one of its kind outside of Tajikistan, where I just had brunch again today; and the Chautauqua Dining Hall for Easter brunch, which was a great buffet with homemade granola, whipped cream, and other decadent treats. I'm a foodie, so shoot me. (My waitress today forgot to tell me about the teahouse's French toast of the day-- Strawberry rhubarb French toast. Why oh why did she forget. If only they prepared it on some sort of schedule. Alas; I will try again next weekend.)

I've been applying to universities like mad-- or at least trying to. I've called several admissions offices. My highest hope right now is George Washington University, for this fall if I'm lucky and this spring if I'm not. Well, that's not true-- my highest hope is Harvard for fall 2010, the applications for which start in September. When I told Joseph I was going to apply he laughed. I'm not entirely sure what kind of laughter it was. University of Maryland in College Park is my third choice right now (coincidentally, a teammate of mine was going there); University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for fall 2010 is a distant fourth.

It's been an incredibly slow week. I spent six hours in one day shoveling snow. Others sanded tool handles. The seasonal firefighters have arrived and the paperwork associated has bogged down our supervisors. Plus, the addition of several new hands means that there's even less work to be done by each person. They refuse to ever send us home early, though; instead we have to sit in the work center and do nothing for hours, looking busy when we definitely are not. This is why I loathe the notion of a 9-to-5 job.

Okay. Done. Had ideas; now lost.

We worked this weekend.

Yesterday an astrologer told me that my domains include scholarly pursuits and foreign countries.

Today a half-burned mouse ran out of a bonfire I'd lit as part of a controlled burn. It squeaked terribly and I think his eyes were burned shut. He laid there panting in the snow, moving slowly, and when I moved a branch near him he ran blindly back into it. I ran into the fire after him to grab him and pull him out. I felt awful.

Ned mixes weak Jack & Cokes. I'm used to Jim's.

Saturday we worked on Scott Harrison's carousel. Sort of. The roofing panels needed moving from the community center to the carousel site across town. About sixty panels, 18' by 6' by 1' and about 400 or 500 pounds apiece-- a big block of foam sandwiched between two pieces of particle board.

Mr. Harrison was out of town for his grandmother's memorial service, but his son Max came from Denver to supervise. Max is 26 and pretty cool. He dresses in that kind of UFC style with the baseball cap and sagging pants and tribal-tattoo shirt. Speaking of, he's been a firefighter and an EMT and he's got each crest tattooed on either arm, surrounded by some sweeping tribal curves. They look neater than they sound, but then, the Rod of Asclepius wins me over pretty easily.

Max pulled up in his dad's beat-up pickup with a low-riding and shoddy-looking car trailer dragging behind it. We loaded these panels seven high and then hopped in the back of the truck while Max drove us to the carousel building, bottoming out the trailer on nearly every hill and turn. When the load was empty he tore through the town and around the roundabout and gave us an awesome ride back. Laying back and staring up at moving clouds, or staring out at mountains while Liam and Ned stared off into the distance.

Ned, Lauren and I were the only ones who'd went at first, and we were two-manning these big panels until Liam showed up a half-hour later, back from a morning hiking excursion. We worked for five hours. On one ride back he pulled into the gas station and said, "What color Gatorade do you like?" He came out with an armful and a case of beer. Lauren was in the front seat and he had her mixing liquor into a bottle of club soda or ginger ale or something for him. After a few hours he insisted we take a break and have a beer. "Come on, it's one beer, it's not going to get you drunk," he laughed. And then he gave us another just before we started the last load, too.

When we'd completed it he gave us double the hours we'd worked, justifying it by saying it was really hard work-- which, to be honest, it was-- And taking us to the smokehouse for dinner. His girlfriend met us there and she bartends in Breckenridge, a ski town about an hour and a half away, and she needed a ride. Max is well-known in this town and got us a table on the patio even though they were closing it, and ordered us wings and a pitcher of beer. He told us in May he throws a huge party and calls a bunch of bands he knows and gets them to play. "I've got about ten lined up for this next one. You guys are definitely all invited, I'll get you all VIP passes," he said.

"We've got to go really soon," he insisted, "So order whatever you guys like and enjoy your dinner. We're going to scarf down as many of these wings as we can in the next ten minutes and then take off."

He filled out our ISP form and left a long and appreciative note and to top it off, his dad sent me an appreciative email the next day saying how amazed he was that we'd gotten the work done in one day with only five people.

We came home and the rest of the team had bought beer and relaxed on the porch, played horseshoes, and then came in and set up Monopoly on the table. "Monopoly ruins friendships," Nate said, sitting down at the table nonetheless. Coby and I set up Risk next to them but didn't remember all the rules, having only an FAQ sheet but no actual rulebook available to us, so we winged it on the ones we were unsure of. As the night went on the Monopolists grew more belligerently drunk and Nate yelled, "OKAY. We're done! I told you! This game ruins friendships!" He started disassembling the board. I didn't catch the details, but the overall impression was a vastly amusing spectacle. Coby and I played a far-calmer game of Risk, very straightforward, that I ended up winning. I've just downloaded the rules so we can play for real next time.

I spent the rest of the night, all the way through to Sunday evening, playing Bioshock nonstop. I got pretty far and realized that the game has a ton of Ayn Rand references I'd missed for an embarassingly long time. The bad guy's an angry capitalist named "Andrew Ryan," anagramesque of Ayn Rand. The guy who leads you around by radio is named Atlas. The game's neat; it has this retro-steampunk vibe, and you give yourself injections that give you new superpowers. I'd called Grosse Ile Kat just before bed to see how her thesis paper was going, only to discover it had been completed on Wednesday. She told me she'd write me a letter and that I needed to write her a comic book script for her to paint, since I'd bought her bristol boards for it ages ago. A little sixteen-page number is in the works as we speak.

I've been kind of exhausted lately even though realistically work hasn't been that busy. We tried an experimental technique to prevent pine trees from being killed by beetles today: Kill the perfectly healthy trees and sell them as firewood before the beetles can kill them. I fail to see the logic.

Dull update.

So one of Carmella's team members, Glenn, got the boot from wildfire for being ineffectual, while another, Beth, resigned from Americorps. They replaced them with Will and Aaron, who had been on Carmella's team in the first place but had gotten kicked off for drinking. They accepted, and then Aaron changed his mind and quit the program. The other alternate So they're taking fun-loving light-hearted Cristian off of our team and putting him there instead. Carmella's team is at eight, ours is at nine, and I think Tristan's team is at nine as well. My roommate Dave, also wildfire, wanted to join a regular Americorps team. The unit leader told him the only way off wildfire is to quit the program. That's not what they has said to us in the beginning of the year when we'd decided to join wildfire in the first place. I do believe our class has set a record for most resignations.

This all came to us whilst staying in Denver. In more joyful news, it's been an otherwise delightful transition week, a practical vacation since we've finished all our paperwork obligations prior to our return. To top it off, Dave and some others discreetly shuffled rooms so that they can stay with their girlfriends; I've somehow ended up roommate-less and blissful. We've had some "life after Americorps" seminars, including an informative bit on planning a financial future and a fairly useless alcohol awareness discussion done privately in small randomly-assigned groups. We also had a list of choices of facilities to tour and I went to the National Renewable Energy Lab.

They had some neat displays and a knowledgable elderly tour guide who used an amusing voice whose tones are typically levelled at elementary school students. The real star of the show, though, was an enormous globe in the first room, perhaps ten feet in diameter. Four projectors mounted in the corners of the room synchronously played high-resolution videos upon the surface of the globe, so that when we first saw it it showed a flashing, moving, rotating sun. As he went through a discussion it switched to a globe of Earth, showing sunlight exposure throughout the year, wind exposure, energy production, energy consumption, oil production, population density, and even that gorgeous picture of Earth from space at night, indistinct continents alight with electricity. I'd seen it panoramically before but never as a moving image projected upon a globe, and I'm sure that the installation would be a stoner's dream.

I've completed my eighty hours of independent service but I love doing it so I'm going to keep at it; my private self-imposed goal is 200 hours. I'm volunteering a few hours every Friday at the movie theatre, and hopefully I can rally the team on Saturdays to help with the carousel. In April we're to help with a 24-hour race and we've got a few other events coming up as well. I'm going to volunteer eight hours each this Saturday and Sunday at the Children's Museum again, and Sunday night I'm going to play trampoline dodgeball with the local guys-- Nick, Dan, and Paul-- again too. All work and no play makes Robbie a dull boy. I just want to play somewhere besides the bar; I'm getting sick of spending thirty bucks a month on a few drinks.

We spent a few days in Fort Collins for a class on pumps and hoses, including a day of running hose up a hill to see how far we could pump water. We hadn't brought enough food and had to eat out a few times. Big City Burrito in Fort Collins is really tasty and looks very hole-in-the-wall. Cheba Hut's a small chain with pot-themed subs and treats.

I was depressed all weekend, collapsing into bed immediately after work to stare at my telephone. The only people I talk to with regularity anymore are my mother and my brother. Desperate to talk to old friends and familiar people. I'm hitting that point again where I've no idea what I'm going to do with my life; Americorps is going to end and I'm going to be back where I started, no idea of where I want to go, what I want to do, or how I'm going to pay for it. As it stands now the options are University of Michigan, University of Maryland, and firefighting.

At least we're back in Denver this upcoming week. Transition week with an emphasis on careers and life after Americorps. A job fair, among other things. Everyone else thinks it's a joke and I'm absolutely rabid about the opportunity to figure my life out.

I want to be a professional languisher, book-reader, sleeper.

Lakeside, Wisconsin

After last weekend walking about exploring, I've kind of fallen in love with Nederland a little.

I woke up and went for a 4.5 mile run and stopped at the community center and talked to Dawn, the chick who runs it. She gave me a half-dozen volunteer opportunities around town: trail-building, the skate park, summerizing the ice rink into tennis courts, painting the movie theatre, oiling and rearranging the weight machines... And one that really stood out.

Scott Harrison is a Vietnam vet who ran Amnesty International's urgent action network and has spent 20 years hand-carving and hand-painting animals for a carousel. It sounds like a fantastic project, the Carousel of Happiness, and I'm trying to get the team excited about it.

I had lunch at Kathmandu, the Nepalese restaurant in town that'd I'd heard of, and heard of even more from Kayla, who we volunteered with at the movie theatre. They have an all-you-can-eat lunch buffet every day for ten dollars that changes every day-- a creamed spinach paste, stewed sweet potatoes, a kind of potato dumpling, and two chicken dishes. Faaantastic. I got a cookie at the New Moon Bakery-- an enormous oatmeal orange-coconut-pecan cookie for $1.50.

I walked into the gemstones, fossils and geodes store and saw this article framed on the wall, and as I read it the lady behind the counter called out "Scott?" to the man watering plants. "Yeah?" he replied. I walked up. "Scott Harrison?" Small world; he was, and I told him about what we are and what we do and how we'd like to help him with the carousel on weekends. He wants us to help him put in roof panels for the building the carousel's going to be put in. It's thrilling to think we're going to help this man finish his 20-year-old dream. One of the animals is an anthropomorphic moose created by George, cartoonist for Nederland's paper. "If you see George," one of the store clerks told me, "Wish him happy birthday. Everyone does it every day."

I found a farming co-op-- a little supermarket, three aisles, where the local farmers sell their fresh organic vegetables. Membership is $24 a year and if you volunteer there four hours a week then you get 20% off all your groceries. I talked to the stoneresque manager, a late-20s girl, who was pretty interested in our program and very flexible about letting us buy our groceries there and rotating clerk duties.

At night I went to see Revolutionary Road (really depressing Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio movie, about the stagnancy of a couple living in the suburbs) for free at the movie theatre and told Kayla about our wanting to help her paint. She gave me coupons for a dollar off anything at the previously-mentioned bakery. An elder man walked into the theatre and from across it a younger girl yelled "Happy birthday George!" "Hey, thanks!" The elderly man yelled back.

Nederland seems almost too nice, and I was waiting for the dark secret: the murderer they're hiding, or whatever. About as close as it comes is this festival... This weekend is a festival honoring a Norwegian who brought his Grandfather's body overseas to Nederland work on cryogenics and then was deported. They left behind the Grandpa and started a festival devoted to him.

Frozen Dead Guy Days

Deadly Bookish.

I'd forgotten!

I went down to Boulder this weekend to spend some hard-earned money. Ned drove, since he wanted a nerd's weekend out as well. We went to the comic store, where I bought Neil Gaiman's first of two issues on Batman, "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?"-- They killed Bruce Wayne, because Grant Morrison is a terrible writer. I bought a one-shot of the new Marvel event, because Marvel just wants to string together event after event after event now, without any break to allow people to adjust. You can't shatter the world ten times in a row, guys, or it's never going to heal. House of M, Civil War, World War Hulk, The Initiative, Secret Invasion, and now Dark Reign-- Norman Osborne, the Green Goblin, is now a famed savior for shooting the queen of the alien-invader body-snatchers, and now he runs the Marvel universe and not Tony Stark, so he's setting it up so the bad guys have all the perks. I only bought the issue I bought because it was written by Bendis and drawn by Maleev, and I liked their run on Daredevil quite a bit. Ned and I went to a Gamestop and a small movie shop, too-- I bought two games I'd had my eye on, Final Fantasy Tactics A2 and The World Ends With You. The movie shop was a bit overpriced, but had a few neat sections, some thoroughly packed: award nominees, grindhouse, and a well-stocked foreign films shelf.

For a more pedantic than plebian spin on literature, I went to a used bookstore. It's such a charming store, shelves packed tight with books, peculiarly organized by subject, books overflowing in huge piles on the floor. The shopkeeper is fantastically eloquent, too, a middle-aged guy who looks a little gruff and gave me a small tour of the packed store.

"Where are the classics?" I asked.
"Classics like, Greeks and Romans...?"
"Sure. Or more contemporary stuff too. Both."
"So more like... Flaubert?" I agreed, only recognizing the name thanks to Franny and Zooey. He started talking.
"Classics begin here and move along this shelf, into the next alcove here... Then they make a bit of a serpentine loop back to this shelf standing here, to finish on the other side of it." I was instantly entertained. He went on to point out the comic books (he recently bought up the stock of a street vendor who closed up, and has a ton of Sandman and all of Promethea at half-off, among other gems and some garbage), war, philosophy, mythology, religion ("And cookbooks, too. ...Don't ask."), psychology, and sci-fi/fantasy. I pestered him with various questions about where I might find certain books or authors, and was a on occasion disappointed by the absence of one book or another: Herodotus's Histories and Blood Meridian by Cormac McArthy, particularly. I went to the shop a few doors down afterwards but it was closed-- Just as well, the guy who ran that one, who I met last week when I bought Dune, was obnoxious, and the store was maddeningly claustrophobic. (Did I already say that in a prior entry?)

Sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks are in a little room on the back, each wall a shelf with a shelf in the middle too. It spills out into the main room, and I picked a copy of War of the Worlds, and the complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy hardcover for nine dollars. In classics, I picked up Catcher in the Rye. In the poetry at the front of the store I found a copy of Paradise Lost. My prized find, though, is a thick beautiful paperback copy of the Inferno: original Italian on the left-hand page, translated English on the right-hand page, and annotations at the end of each canto. When I finish these all in like, three months, I'll go back and drop another 40 dollars, I'm sure, and probably twenty more shipping all these books home at the end of AmeriCorps.

Comedy; No Drama, No Tragedy.

This one is partially dedicated towards my cinematically-poised cohort, Matthew.

I've spent the last two weeks arranging some independent service opportunities around Nederland. We've got a community center here. I'd volunteered at a community center in New Orleans with Carmella's team and it was... Ramshackle. Two bookshelves with an array of battered books, a few old computers where a bunch of gangsta kids were huddled, checking myspace, and about a dozen circular tables where people come for meals. We cooked terrible food in a cluttered kitchen-- soggy rice, beef chunks with gravy, and a brownie cake with cherries and a glaze made of confectioner's sugar. Sorry-looking people filed in to eat. Some wouldn't even make eye contact; others were pretty upbeat, with an "at least it's not worse" attitude. It was an interesting blend of heartwrenching and uplifting.

Nederland's community center is so far removed from that. It's a refurbished elementary school, three floors. They have a yoga room, an art room, a gymnasium where people play basketball whose balcony has a long line of cardio machines looking down on it. It's got a weight room. The auditorium was converted into a movie theatre. I was expecting them to pop in whatever DVDs they had laying around, but no-- The lady who runs the non-profit theatre, Kayla, has some broker she's worked with for years, and she gets movies only two or three weeks behind most theatres. It's an honest-to-god, one-screen theatre. I saw Doubt two weeks ago. Valkyrie was this weekend. Next is Inkheart, then Revolutionary Road, Slumdog Millionaire, Gran Turino, and Milk. They sell candy and soda for seventy-five cents and a dollar. A small, medium, and large popcorn are one, two, and three dollars, respectively. A movie ticket is six dollars. When you buy a ticket, they're these raffle tickets from Office Depot, two stubs with matching numbers, so they raffle off candy before the movies. Your chances are always pretty good-- they raffle off five or ten things, and no more than 150 people show up to this thing each week, it seems. When I'd gone, they raffled off two free movie tickets amongst the candy.

So we went to volunteer, working for two hours. She joked with us and swore up a storm. She gave us soda and candy while we worked. She let us pick over her stash of dozens of old movie posters for all the movies they'd played here in the past several years. And insisted that any time we wanted to see a movie, come in and say hi to her and since she runs the show, so to speak, we could always get in for free. She wanted to take us out for pizza, too, but we turned her down, telling her she'd already given us way more than we'd deserved, and that we'd love to work with her again. So on the weekends we can volunteer to work in the theatre, work concessions, sweep up afterwards. The people in the community typically get into the movies for free for this, but-- we Americorps, we get in for free anyway.

Living in a small town is neat-- When people know you're volunteers, when you're doing work like firefighting, they treat you so fantastically. Everyone knows who we are and they'd bend over so far backwards for us that we feel kind of guilty. But it's still fantastic, knowing there are people like that still in the world.

"You don't have to do all this for us, you know," I'd said to her.
"I know I don't," she replied, "But it's the nice thing to do.

Growing branches.

I've finished the book my family got me for Christmas, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. It was long, but well worth the read. There are some very cool descriptive passages, plenty of English humour, good characterization, fun wordiness-- Kat's sort of, with her own wordiness, compelled me to begin looking up new and strange words in a dictionary--, and an ending that Delivers, which seems a bit less common than I'd like in literature I read these days. I'm rereading Franny and Zooey and loving the little intricacies of language and depth of character far more this time around. It's a cute book, and certain bits strike me just so. Then I move on to Dune-- I picked it up at a claustrophobic little used bookstore in lovely Boulder. I'm glad I was only in there a few minutes; something about the dust and the tight shelves and the nonstop talking of the shopkeeper to an employee and his girlfriend was making me crazier by the minute. If I was in there any longer I might have started thrashing. The closed-looking-but-not-really bookstore two doors down was far more welcoming.

I've been busylike. One of our controlled burns wasn't so much, and we had a small half-acre fire to contain. Did I say that already? Not long after we went to Fort Collins for a 25-acre meadow fire in the mountains. Grey Rock Meadow. The meadow itself was burned out long before we got there-- grass burns quick. It hit the trees and slowed down, creeping and smoldering. We dug lines in the dirt to contain it and then put out what we could. It was like a scavenger hunt: take your gloves off and rummage around in ash until you burn yourself. Then you take your shovel and throw snow on it, chop it up and mix it in to cool it off. I've got pictures of this fire floating around on my camera, but I keep forgetting to upload them. Soon.

We used the wood chipper today. It is quite literally an engine of destruction, as big as a truck. You can throw an entire tree into this thing and it turns it into mulch. There's a solid metal drum of blades in there that weighs so much that it takes ten minutes to coast to a stop once it gets going. It is one of the more frightening devices on the job. It looks very easy to fall in, or to turn into a tank-like weapon.

Spring break is a Friday and a Monday off in April, and Mom and Adam are visiting. I'd love to have other company sometime in my stay here-- I'd like to get Kat out here at one point, it'd be nice to see Joseph and Amanda. (Everyone should see these mountains.) When this program ends I'd like to go to Florida and see Noel and John. Or maybe over to Oregon to see Bonnie, this cool chick I'd met in this program who quit last time we'd all gotten together. She's very friendly-likeable, a very honest person. This whole program opened a door to me, and it must have been a car door, because I love traveling and seeing new places.

I'm writing letters, reading, calling people to set up opportunities for us to advertise to future generations of wee Americorps lads and lasses at high schools and colleges as per part of our suggested, yet unenforced, diplomatic whateverthehelltermtheyuse. I'm thinking of applying to colleges soon-- U of M and MSU are both on my list. I still know so little about other schools in the nation, who would want me, scholarship opportunities... I almost certainly want to go abroad a semester if I get the opportunity. I've never been overseas. For certain particular reasons, Venice has an appeal, would be worth investigating. But then, I've also put thought into staying here a few extra months as a seasonal firefighter, saving up before drifting off.

Liam is studying for the GRE, Lauren's applying to law schools like mad. The forest service keeps hinting at Coby that he should start applying to places nearby. Nate's got it easy: he's got a degree in natural resource management, with a focus in forestry. This work is exactly what he wants to do. His foot is so far in the door, he'll be through it and a professional firefighter, doing what he wants to do, the moment this program ends.

Pictures again!

I'm growing a goofy beard. I can't seem to take a decent picture of me these days.

This is work. Every day I'm on the job I'm in the mountains, burning bonfires or checking on yesterday's bonfires to make sure they haven't gotten a bit too spunky.

In the mildly-subpar Japanese restaurant there was an adorable baby. We made faces at her and she was very happy for it. I'd ordered a one-dollar sake that was quite watered down-- I finished all 3 ounces of it and felt nothing. I made up for it at the bar right now, though. There's some reaaally tasty peppermint liquor here. Nate says it's called... Rumblemintz? He spelled it wrong. Rumple Minze. German, apparently.


Downtown Denver. I actually missed this place, after being stuck in Nederland a while.


Cristian (a.k.a. Cali, as in California) took a picture of me in my work get-up. I have fun here.

Another small town.

Just this week the Forest Service installed two very art deco wind turbines next to their facilities, in the 100 yards or so between our bunkhouse and their workhouse. They look different from most wind turbines-- They're forest green and they rotate on a vertical, not a horizontal, axis. "These things are part of the efforts we're making to be greener," said Dave Buchanan, our boss, who looks like a burly Stephen King and acts like one of Stephen King's more... rural characters. "Once they get going, we'll be supplying ourselves with all our own power." He took a long pause, as he is often prone to do. "And we'll actually be selling extra power back to the city."

Last night, without disturbing anyone, one of them was knocked from its high post by one of the frequent powerful gusts of wind characteristic of Nederland. After some dumbfoundedness the next morning we went to work as normal-- checking prescribed burns from the day before, mopping up the ones that got a little out of hand. Sometimes stump roots will catch on fire and burn slowly, snaking heat into the ground and springing up elsewhere, somewhere unexpected. We dig up smoldering roots.

The day done, we went back the bunkhouse... And were told that we had to pack our stuff in fifteen minutes and go. An evacuation, in case the second turbine blew down and landed on our house, crushing us to death while we were eating, watching television, sleeping. The first one didn't make it very far at all, but they didn't want to chance it. So here I am, suitcase packed yet again for impromptu travel, in a Forest Service bunkhouse right off the expresssway in Idaho Springs. There's a McDonald's, a Starbucks, a Subway, a few gas stations and diners. Supposedly there's a proper town within driving distance; we'll see tomorrow when we hunt for independent service projects.

I'm about a third of the way through the massive British historical fantasy novel my family got me for Christmas, Johnathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. It's lengthy, written in a Victorian voice, bears copious footnotes, and has many characters. I'm of mixed opinion: some of it is very neat, the magic is innovative and unexpected, some of the settings are very well-described... And sometimes it just seems to ramble on. The odd thing is, much like The Stand, I can't really straightforwardly say, "I feel this part is unnecessary." I'm plowing through it at a solid and steady pace, having typically an hour and a half of travelling mountains by truck each day to nap or read.

I'm back to counting calories, and keeping my numbers more modest, after two or three days (not in a row, thank god) where I'd consumed over 3000. If only I knew how many I burned in a typical workday.

See the world, they said.

I am in a near-complete stranger's house. I don't even remember-- wait, it's Tony.

Nate, one of the new teammates, went to college in Fort Collins, Colorado. We'd spent a few days in Fort Collins taking chainsaw classes and then Nate asked if anyone wanted to stay the weekend with his friends. And so, here some of us are.

We played a most sinister drinking game, whereupon I yet again reaffirmed that I, unlike many of my peers, have a pretty good idea of when to call it quits. Like, say, before you start demanding your head be shaved into a mohawk by a fellow drunkard. Nate now has a very sloppy mohawk that's kind of an off-center wedge that looks nothing like the Chuck Liddell mohawk he demanded. I socialized a little before talking to Kat, using the internet, and falling asleep on the couch with the laptop on my chest.

On my last team Americorps did not feel like living life. I was in New Orleans, for God's sake, and I felt stagnant. It was suffocatingly controlled, mechanized, automated. Funny how just a change of leaders can make it so much better. Garrett and Chris were sad to see me go, and ever since they've said that they miss me, but that they're also jealous I got out when I did-- Carmella's stricter than ever, they say, and some of their new members to replace the ones who were booted off are a little infuriating. My new team leader, Coby, is the most laid-back guy around; when I told him I scraped the truck on a rock he just gave an amused half-smile and said "You'll probably lose your driving priveleges but that's all. It's no big deal. Don't worry about it."

But here, we live in a firefighting bunkhouse. We hike through the mountains and light bonfires and cut and stack brush and logs for a living. At the end of a workday, we look out over peaks bristling with pine trees, dusted in snow; sometimes fog rolls in over the tops of the peaks and the peaks turn indefinite. Opportunities are afforded that I would not otherwise have. Staying with new friends in their friends' houses, doors opened to us, partying at night.

I'm eating pancakes and sipping on a White Russian.

It's been a good month.

Survivor: Boulder

The team has 315 dollars per week for food. This amounts to $4.50 per person per day. Some members of the team (Liam) eat more than others and aren't really aware of HOW much they eat. This is more amusing than infuriating, to be honest; we manage just fine.

However, today Liam declared that we should split the budget into $31.50 per person per week and each take care of our own food. The more it was talked about the more people liked it. They were sold when I made a joke about people making secret food alliances (though this has been deemed against the rules).

So, no pre-existing food and no outside money is permitted. This is strictly on Americorps's dollar. I find the idea hilarious, because I think I'm going to be fine. Ned intends to eat a crate of ramen noodles.

My plan thus far includes oatmeal, bananas, eggs, tuna, bread, chicken breasts, rice, pasta, broccoli, sweet potatoes.

Vanity items include skim milk, spinach... This is going to be hilarious. I don' think Liam realizes how much peanut butter costs and he sincerely thinks he's going to be able to eat three PB&J's a day for lunch. I want to see who's going to pass out first.

Upsy-downsy

Today my team and I shoveled snow for a few hours at a ski resort that has a non-profit which helps physically- and mentally-handicapped people ski. When we finished, we all got free passes and ski rentals-- a one hundred dollar value, yours for just a few meager hours of work-- and spent the rest of the afternoon skiing. It's more terrifying than I remember; I took several falls but still had a fantastic day.

I will never forget the look on Joseph's face when he first stepped onto the ice to ice skate at my cousin Abby's birthday party: his eyes were wide and he had a disbelieving smile stretched across his face. The whole of his expression wordlessly said, "Are you fucking kidding me!?"

I think if Joseph were on skis, his head would spin three hundred and sixty degrees.

To top the night off I designated drove some of the team to the bar and when I missed it and turned around in the bank parking lot I scraped it on a ridiculously-placed rock. So that's great too

I cut my hair off.

That silly part is a little more manageable now.