The Corps Experience- A series of tales from corps life.
The conservation corps experience its not just about the work. Though that is a sizable part of it, the corps experience cannot be defined as simply work time or off time. There is a melding of the two; corps projects are so in-depth and the crew experience is so all-encompassing, there is hardly a distinction. If you are working on a crew, chances are when you have off time you will be hanging out with your fellow crew members anyway in a land as unfamiliar as the wilderness in which you are working. Themed parties, site-seeing adventures, and deep conversations are every bit as important to the corps experience as building trails and bridges, clearing invasive species, and banding wildlife. I encourage everyone to participate as whole-heartedly in your off time adventures with a crew as you would participate in the work projects. Give it your all, every time, and corps life will be a wonderful experience both professionally and personally.
Here is a tale that melds the professional and the personal during the corps life.
Many of the fondest memories of a conservation corps veteran will be the agonizing hard days in the field; hiking 15 or 20 miles because an imperative piece of equipment was forgotten, working dawn til dusk finishing a new trail on the last day of a project mired by bad weather and cold temperatures. These experiences are sure to pop up from time to time and when they are happening they are the worst. A complete plague-ridden hell-scape of misery that make us curse “I hate this rock, I hate these bugs, Ugh please let it end, what time is it? 9:43? This day is going to suck.” But somehow, afterward, like childbirth, we forget how terrible it was and want to do it again. And in time, it becomes a testament of will and a collective bonding experience.
Disclaimer: This was not necessarily a corps experience. At this time I was working with the Florida Trail Association and US Forest Service as a staff member. This trip was myself, another FTA staff member, a National Park Service Ranger, and a faithful volunteer.
One time in Florida I was on a scouting mission for a big project in the Big Cypress National Preserve (aka, the Everglades). An annual ritual for the Florida Trail Association, for which I was working, was to clear the most remote regions of the entire 1,400 mile trail in the vast swamp wasteland of Big Cypress. I use the term wasteland, endearingly, but essentially it is an endless forest of cypress trees in one to ten feet of black water covered in sawgrass, filled with four venomous snakes, eight foot alligators, black bears, boars, and friggin’ panthers. To move through it you have to wade in thigh deep water (there are occasional dry spots – more on this later), prod through tickets of needle-covered plants as you walk, and dodge any number of obstacles (ready-to-strike water moccasins, smoldering standing trees from the recent controlled burn, neck-deep water, 90 degree heat, alligators, etc.). The going was slow, but at the same time, it was an incredible, interesting and dare I say, awesome, place.
Our mission was to walk the entire section of trail through the preserve, a mere 32 miles, in two days checking the necessities of the trail for our 10-day project next month. I use the term “trail ” very loosely here, really, the only trail is a blaze on a small cypress tree every 100 feet that may or may not even exist anymore- since everything grows so quickly and there is very little dry, solid ground there is no trail corridor or bench cut. There are camps at miles 7, 13, and 17 which mark the rare portions of dry ground. If one leaves from the trailhead at the Oasis Visitor Center they leave from a road literally called alligator alley.
We started wading into black lily pad covered water by the spot tourists photograph leering alligators. Waders would be too slow and largely useless, it has been a wet year and the water is higher than normal, so we sloshed along in water just above our knees for hours at a time. Even for the very experienced hiker, which the 4 of us in the party were, the sustained sloshing used muscles we weren’t used to and brought on fatigue quicker than usual. As indelibly happens, we were late leaving in the morning, so to make up for it we were going to take a quick pace. Hours wore on at a brutal speed in brutal heat. A typical brisk walking pace is about 3 miles per hour, so we guessed our sloshing-encumbered pace to be about 2 miles per hour. This miles-per-hour estimation was necessary, due to the absence of landmarks, which made reading a map nearly impossible. There were almost no signs, and none that indicated distance rather than a foreboding arrow at the beginning claiming Hwy 41 → 32 miles.
We took a late lunch in a cypress dome. This odd ecological phenomena of the cypress sw
amps are staggering. From a distance they resemble a slight hill on the prairie, but as you approach it, the water gets deeper and the weeds get thicker, the opposite of what you would expect (a higher piece of land that might be dry). As the water gets deeper the cypress and mangrove trees are actually able to grow taller than those surrounding the deeper pool. This added biomass serves as the ecological hubs of the entire swamp; the water plants get thicker, birds fly in the trees, insects and frogs buzz or chirp, snakes and alligators sunbathe on fallen logs, panthers sleep in the upper branches. It is the most tropical spot in North America and could be taken right out of a stereotypical jungle in Asia or South America.
At around five in the afternoon, having hiked strenuously for close to six hours, we came upon 13 mile camp utterly exhausted and mentally irritable. A tense discussion ensued and collectively we decided to continue at our grueling pace to 17 mile camp. This would ensure the next day would be slightly less horrible since we would have to walk 15 miles instead of 19. Little did we realize, we were not passing 13 mile camp at all, we were instead passing 7 mile camp- we were simply going at a slower pace than we thought. Originally, we assumed we had missed 7 mile camp as we trudged on in our bitter daydreams since it was off the trail and no one had ever actually been there before. We overestimated our pace, not truly understanding how slow wading in water was making us. Therefore, after another two hours heading for what we though was 17 mile camp which we believed to be 4 miles away but in actuality was 13 mile camp which was 6 miles away, darkness fell quicker than we anticipated.
Daniel Boone was once asked if he had ever been lost the in the wilderness to which he responded, “no, but I was bewildered once for three days”. At some point between 7 and 8 in the evening, the light became so dim we reached a spot hit by a recent fire, making blazes nearly nonexistent with trees being burned completely or covered with ash so thick the blazes became obscured. Our band of impossibly fatigued and irritable hikers made the same mistake that so many people who are fatigued and irritable make and continued on in a bull-headed attempt to reach our destination which must be just around the corner. The
n somewhere along the way in this fire-scorched portion we realized we had not seen a blaze in quite a while. Someone noted this fact the rest of the group. “Hey, has anyone seen a blaze in a while?” To which we responded, “I thought so, but maybe that was a while ago”. We backtracked collectively, the darkness made our own path hard to follow, and failed to find a blaze. We split up, walked concentric circles within earshot of one another, but still found nothing. It was at this moment we learned that we were bewildered.
There is a muted sense of panic when one realizes they are lost, this is negated somewhat by training and experience. I drew from my experiences being bewildered in the wilderness before, but this one was a little more serious. Luckily, everyone kept their head.
Then comes the inevitable collective experience and bonding. Someone gets upset, another person cracks a tense joke, and then people laugh nervously and accept the situation. The legendary Spider Barlow was enough to make this a fond memory for me. Since Spider was only along as a volunteer on this mission, Spider did what Spider always did; crack inappropriate jokes, work harder than anyone at whatever task he was assigned, and tell tales of his youth as a hoodlum on the streets of Portsmouth, NH (six months before, Spider was like 22). Whether Spider knew the severity of our predicament or not, his general oh well, we will find the trail tomorrow, here is a damp spot to set up the tent, lets eat a cold hot dog, attitude was enough to keep us all sane during an incredibly tough night of uncertainty.
The next morning, we dragged ourselves out of bed very early to get an early start on what was sure to be an incomprehensibly bad day. The standard cold oatmeal was more unpalatable than usual. Things looked grim. The best case scenario for the day ahead was for it to be utterly awful, the worst case scenario was for it to be the worst day of our lives and potentially life-threatening. Then someone, let’s say Spider for continuity sake, pointed at a spot across the forest of sparse 5- foot trees to a clear spot, what’s that? We ventured lazily over and find it to be 13 mile camp, complete with fire ring, copious dry camping spots, logs carved as make-shift chairs, and of course, the trail, all within 100 feet of where we camped in what was basically standing water, hopelessly lost. This was all hilarious and a tremendous relief, both for the fact that we wouldn’t be lost in a wasteland for who-knows-how-long and for the fact that we wouldn’t be subjected to endless embarrassment for being cocky experts needing rescuing in the field. Our cold oatmeal tasted like chocolate cake.
It was still a 19 mile walk out through what turned out to be even deeper water, but it sure beat the feeling of impending doom when lost in the stuff. We passed 17 mile camp mid-morning, finally answering the question of how we were so disoriented and again filling us with dread knowing we had another 15 miles to go. By the later part of the day, mile 26 and beyond, we were entering I hate that rock, I hate that tree, I hate everything morale-mode, every time we turned a corner without seeing our vehicle in the parking area was a cause for weeping. Evening approached again, somewhere around mile 30, at which point the water level began to recede to about ankle deep, we were practically running in our unfathomably wet, blister-covered feet. You will never forget that feeling on a conservation crew when you suddenly round the bend and there is a truck sitting at the other end of a field. You know the truck means the work project is (nearly) over. When it happened this time, I got what I like to call a fourth wind. A fourth wind is similar to a second wind, except you’ve been burning the candle at both ends for so long you’ve used up your second and third winds already. We stumbled to the car in a daze, leaned against the muddy tires for a bit and started to laugh. What’s was so funny? Who knows why, but everything at that moment is hysterical. Then we were so hungry, then we were so sleepy.
This day was the worst. I still remember the feeling of doom and dread, but whenever I think of this experience in retrospect it is one of my favorite memories. I feel pride, humor, relief, and ultimately nostalgia. During the midst of the terrible; I gained new skills in surviving (and hopefully avoiding) getting lost, I learned how to keep my cool in stressful situations and the price of hubris, I got closer with some old friends and made some new ones, but most of all I felt the accomplishment of doing something extremely hard and perhaps a little fool-hardy.
Thus, even the worst times can be grow to be some of the best memories in corps life. Not that they are mutually exclusive- those times when things were super easy and everything worked out great are good memories too. I’ll write about one of those another time.
-Sean
