Solid Green Light

Oh hello world, I almost didn't see you there. What are you having tonight? Bartender, I'll have one as well. You look fabulous, really.

In 31 days I'll graduate from AmeriCorps and then the fun begins. For the month after that I'll be all over the place, if you want to catch me shoot me an email.
Nashville, TN: May 1st late, find me at five points
Saint Simon, GA: May 2nd-5th
Richmond, VA: May 6th-7th
Washington D.C: May 8th-9th
From here we get a little blurry... Boston? New York City? I'll definitely be at Nana's for at least a week. I'll be back in Nashville for a few days and then I'm out with the family. Denver? Orlando? By June I'll be here again, for good.

I'm setting up base at Dwight's in Mt Juliet to get settled into a new life of being my own boss. By Christmas I may have my own place downtown, not that I'm going to rush out of here. I'd like to live without a car for a while. Dunno what all this is, I'm just thinking out loud.

So, the woods.
Since I was little I imagined living out in the wild just by myself, as a side note Tarzan was the first film my family owned on DVD, "look how clear the picture is!" In all my dreams I never imagined trailblazing with 10 others on my wilderness retreat, but dreams are modified.

Living 5 days a week in the woods is fucking hard. Everything we need for the week we carry in on Monday, we live with the sun, we conserve our water, we sweat it all out. After this project I'll be as lean as I will ever be. Here's how I do it:

Energy bar: Cliff bars (Chocolate Brownie)
Snack: Trail mix, dried apricots
Meals: Carb-loaded Mac & Cheese with canned chicken
Drink: water
Books: Ishmael, A Game of Thrones, Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs
Music: Kings of Leon
Hobby: Minute Mysteries and disappearing

On Mondays we camp in to our site and have an educational day, learning maps and compasses, doing wildflower walks, knots and other survival skills. Mondays are the best. The rest of the week we hike to our work site where we construct anywhere from 300-400 feet of trail a day. My longest week so far was 67 hours, shortest 55.

The trail is marked by yellow flags for our downslope and our outslope. The downslope is the top of the trail, cut into the side of the hill and the outslope is on the bottom with enough of a grade to let the water run off. The trail cuts back and forth going up hills so that water doesn't run down the trail. If that happens, it can erode down causing gullies and wet spots where a trail once was. After the trail is marked, a pulaski tears up the dirt in flag-to-flag sections. a McCloud comes through and pulls away the dirt making it smooth. The march of shovels comes next, throwing the dirt as far off the trail as possible, thus clearing the outslope. More McClouds come through with shovels helping to cut out the outslope. A finisher comes through with whatever sharp tool (Jamie! MAAAAH!) is available to pull up the last roots and make that trail pretty.
I'm a shoveler, a pulaski, and an axe. Most days I'm just throwing dirt, but when a tree is in the way of the trail I get to be on the axe team. We take turns beating wood with blunt tools, I love it.

The work kills me, every day I feel dead when I get back to camp. And it's good. I fight to stay awake till 10 reading and journalling and talking with Jamie and Anna. We've been on a religion kick recently, probably since Jamie has been reading Living a Year BIblically. That's why I love this program: By this point nobody else really wants to be there either, so you hold each other up on the tired backs of your new family who will live all over the US in just a month. Every day you live and work with these people, it's almost like going to a religious retreat where they get you tired to make you susceptible to the message, I don't remember who I was before this anymore. It's turned me into someone goal driven and independent, and at the same time completely dependent on my core group of friends. It's a strange lifestyle, one I've heard described as a "way to get rich kids to understand indentured servitude." I appreciate my freedom outside this thing many times over, and now that I've had a taste, I want more.