Working for the NPS: Week 3

Day 1: Memorial Day. . . a national holiday where I stayed home and chilled with the family, and got paid! Boo-yah!

Day 2: The rest of the crew arrives. We spend most of the day getting them all ironed out straight. Most of the crew, actually all, of the crew are people that I went to high school with. I think I am the oldest. I'm also the only new guy who got hired to a WG 5 position, even some of the returning crew are still at WG 3. That means I have at least a little authority. Whoa!

Day 3: ATV training. I thought this was going to be a joke, but the course was actually pretty intense. I spent most of the day inhaling dust. We were kicking it up so thick that I couldn't see the orange cones 10 feet in front of me. When we were done I had a thick layer of dirt that started below my goggles and circled around down my face, kind of like a goatee. My lips were black. This is the life! We then took the ATV's back to the shop, ran a few errand type activities, and then started a chainsaw training lesson to finish the day.

Day 4: Since we can only work 40 hrs a week, and we are working 10's, and we were credited 10 hrs on Memorial Day, we got Thursday off. We couldn't take Friday off because that was when we were scheduled to do shotgun training. I puttered around the house, began a work project for my dad, cooked hamburger stroganoff for dinner, but was otherwise quite lazy and content.

Day 5: Shotgun training. This time I was much more relaxed, but I was a little worried after I could only see a couple holes in the target (and these were all from the wads) after my first five rounds. Well, upon closer inspection, I had four slugs that went through the required target area grouped so close they overlapped edge to edge, my fifth slug was a stray, about an inch below this group (but just outside the target area). My second round of five was exactly the same and by the time I was done, I had just one big hole in the target about the size of the mouth of a coffee mug (with two stray slugs just outside). All I needed was familiarity with a dad-gum shotgun. Then, just for fun, we did a bear charge simulation drill. We set up three targets (one at 30 yrds, one at 15, and one at 5) and then sprinted about fifty yards towards the firing line where we were handed a gun and were then required to fire three shots in five seconds, one at each target. I fumbled around trying to rack the first shot and undo the safety, but then blasted my three shots with significant time remaining. My first shot was low ( at the feet of the bear target that I posted before), the second was about 3/4 an inch off of dead center, and the third was right through the center of the left lung (and I didn't even aim for that one, I just blasted him). Anyway, good day, and redemption.

Then we finished our chainsaw "training." I felled a couple trees and then sliced them up. No big deal.

The End (of week three).

What Makes a Man?

Our society kills men and thinks that it is doing the world a service. I'm not talking about actually killing men, I'm talking about taking a MAN and turning him into something much less. . . a man. There is something to be said for the stereotypical western gunfighter--as portrayed in writing by people like Louis L'Amour, or in film by John Wayne. These were men who pitted themselves against nature, who didn't back down from a fight, who worked with muscle and sinew, and never cussed in front of the ladies. Our society, where men try to become women, and women try to become men, doesn't even seem to know what a man is. There is a gradual blurring of the lines of the traditional gender roles that is gravitating our society to one gender, neither man nor woman. Our society wants to domesticate men, it kills their adventurous spirit, it expects them to be passive, subservient, even effeminate. It is taking away the claws and teeth of a bear and putting him in a cage. And there is a world of difference between a bear in this state, and a bear in his natural element.


A MAN is meant to be a little rugged. They are built for this purpose so they can do what they are meant to do, work, and fight. But they also have an intense love for nature. Nature, the frontier, or the unexplored, is something that constantly calls to a man. It is a challenge, but a challenge that offers a hint of a reward. So men pit themselves against nature, they ache to cross the mountains that dominate a horizon, the sea is like a temptress which sings an alluring song, and the pursuit of an adventure is always on a man's mind. They do this because of the reward that is offered, beauty. Men love beauty, even though they are always a little at odds with it. Men aren't beautiful themselves, so they seek to experience beauty in any way possible; they immerse themselves in nature, seek the company of women, and even strive to create beauty with their hands, because when a man finds beauty there is something in his soul that resonates with it, and for the moment, he is at peace.

The ultimate beauty, so I am told, is a wife and kids.

But society distorts this by promising something different, the idea that men should be beautiful themselves. The result is men becoming women, whether figuratively or literally, which is evidenced in today's society.

A MAN is also meant to be a worker. He is ruggedly built with muscle and bone so he can strive against the elements and provide for his family. "By the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread," God said to Adam, and thus has it been through the course of history. A MAN is meant to sweat. But today, men are becoming lazy, while women are working harder. A true man is happiest after a hard day's work, when he can come home and bask in the beauty of his wife and children.

A MAN is also a warrior. There is something inside, a trigger, that once tripped sets his blood boiling and prompts him to violent physical action. A man is meant to have this type of aggression, it is necessary to defend his family and sometimes even his ideals. But this should also be controlled, which men today can't seem to do very well. Thus, the opposite trend of men becoming effeminate, is those who become brutes. These men are animals, not knowing how to properly channel their aggression they lash out violently at women and children. They destroy whatever beauty they find. Why, I do not know. This is a sickness that kills.

A MAN also respects women. He treats them as if they are divine, because they are. When a woman is present, a true man stands straighter, he talks cleaner, he defends her honor, and he treats her with respect in every way possible. There used to be a time when a fight would start if a man cussed in front of a lady, but now men are just as vulgar in front of women as they are away from their presence (women are also quite vulgar these days, but the destruction and masculinization of women is a completely different, but interconnected topic). Today, women are an entertainment for men, an object, which stems from the idea that a man's pursuit of beauty is somehow connected to lust, which is something entirely different. This skewing of a man's duty around women is a result of this de-genderification that is happening in our society. Why should a man treat a woman with such respect if they are essentially the same?

There are two worlds that are completely different, but our society is trying to make them the same. There is a mistaken idea that a woman can enter the world of a man, and a man can enter a world of a woman, but there are aspects of each world that the opposite gender will never understand. A woman will probably never truly understand a man's need to continually cross over to the next horizon, or use lethal violence to defend his ideals, and likewise, every aspect of a woman's world is completely beyond the comprehension of any man.

Christ was the perfect MAN. He was a carpenter who worked by the sweat of His brow, He defended His ideals with both word an action, and He treated the lowest of women with perfect respect. He was a God, who was compassionate, merciful, and loving without ever being effeminate. And He was bold, strong, rugged, and determined without ever being vulgar. These are the attributes that men (and women) should pursue. Christ shows that it is possible to have character traits that are commonly associated with each sex without adopting that persona. He is who men should emulate.




A strong man need wish for no more than this: a sword in hand, a horse between his knees, and the woman he loves at the battle's end. ~Louis L'Amour

Working for the National Park Service: Week 2

Ahhhhh, another day another dollar. . . or lot's of dollars in this case, hehehe.

Day 1: So my second week began with new employee orientation. I was expecting some sort of hour to two hour little session. You know, "hello, welcome, we are so happy blah, blah, blah." It was that for like the first fifteen minutes, but then it just got to rules and regulations blah, blah, blah for the rest of the morning until lunchtime. . .five hours! After lunch we had a safety lecture then we got trained on how to use fire extinguishers. Boo-yah! Then the day was over.

Day 2: This is where things got interesting, because Tuesday was still orientation. This time, bright and early, we showed up at the "airport" (Five-ten planes, runway built during WWII) for bear safety training. But the ranger assigned to teach the class didn't know that he was assigned to teach the class and was, therefore, still in bed. So we commenced with shotgun training until he got there. When he did finally get there he rambled on for a while on bears, told a few cool bear stories, showed a can of pepper spray and let a couple volunteers fire it off. The end. Back to shotguns. So, I like guns, but it turns out that I've never used a shotgun before. This was my first time. I should also mention that I haven't actually shot guns enough to become Carlos Hathcock or anything, and I am a bit rusty. The last time I went shooting was before I started going back to BYU, four+ years ago. Anyway, so we got trained on the use of a shotgun for about an hour, which really wasn't that hard. Then we went to the range to get qualified. As a precursor I'll mention a few things: I was kind of nervous, a little tense and all (Why? I guess being judged or something), I was new to the shotgun, and, on top of that, after the hours of yakking I had developed the need to empty my bladder. What this all boils down too is that I missed with my first four practice rounds. . . with a shotgun! I missed the whole dad-gum target. Well, I was embarrassed. It turns out that I had become a bit twitchy. The instructor came over, after sending all the other students away, and told me that I had developed a "shooter's flinch," where you anticipate the kick of the rifle. He "cured" me of it by mixing a live round with dummy rounds. The funny thing, I think I still missed every time the round was real. After that, I think maybe he gave up, and so we had to do our qualifying test. The test was basically to fire five shots, four and then one reload, at a target that was maybe 25 yards away, twice, while getting a score of 7 out of 10. While he was gathering the others, I relaxed. Then once we were all lined up, at the sound of "Bear!" we all started shooting. The range sounded like a war zone, as I pumped off all my rounds to the smell of gun smoke in twenty five seconds. Then we did it again, this time, my final shot jammed, so I never got my tenth round off. Then we went to look at our targets. Well, I had a nice tight group of shots clustered on the lower left side of the target (in the heart/lung-ish area on the target to the left), but three were outside the desired area, so I failed. The instructor however was more impressed, "Wow, for somebody who had shooter's flinch, this is a very nice group," but I didn't get my 7 for 10 (in my mind I got 6 of 9, it's not my fault the gun jammed). Luckily, we got two chances to qualify in a day, so I got to go again. This time my very first shot drilled the target dead center (where all the heart valves and stuff are), but then every shot after that got progressively lower, and wouldn't you know that my gun jammed on my final shot, again! This time I fixed the jam in time, but somehow my last round had lost itself in the depths of my hoodie pocket and I couldn't find it. How frustrating. In the end I got the same score again 6/10 (or 6/9). Failure sucks. The rest of the day was easy, because shotgun training took us up until another 1pm lunch. Am I really getting paid for this?

Day 3: This time another trail crew member, who had arrived on Monday, and I went out to a remote trail that meandered along the Gilahina river, we took a few "before" pictures with a GPS camera, and generally scouted the trail. Then we went back and ate lunch. Then the work began, he cut a few logs out of the way, and I ran a self propelled brush cutter (think of a lawn mower that mows small trees), for the 3/4 mile of trail. The day was warm, there weren't any mosquitoes, so overall it was quite pleasant. At one point I had to stop the brush cutter so a fat little baby rabbit could hop off the path. It took us a couple hours to do this, on the way back, I mowed the other side of the trail while my compadre followed and took the "after" pictures. Then we drove home. Final score? 2 hours work, 2 hours semi work/hiking, 4.5 hours travel time, .5 hours loading/unloading truck. What a day, I don't know if I can handle this. (Wink, wink).

Day 4-5: More hanging around shop doing small odd jobs trying to keep busy. Next week the rest of the trail crew arrives and things will get moving right along.

I think I like my job!

Dance

So, I'm starting to approach the point in time where I consider myself a "dancer." I guess that means that I'm finally starting to feel a little more confident in how I move and stuff like that. In reality though, I'm still quite new to this artform. I've been dancing about three and a half years total, but only over the last year and a half have I become a competitive/serious dancer, though that hasn't been without it's interuptions. The promising thing for me is that I am finally at the stage where I will start to make the most improvement. This video here is the Gold II Rumba from BYU during the winter 2008 semester. I've edited out my teacher making comments because if you've any sort of dancing eye you'll probably notice what he talked about, and he probably wouldn't like to find out that he's on the internet. This was my first semester in the class, so if my partner looks a bit more polished than I that's because she is (she's had the class before), plus, she's just naturally a much better dancer than me anyway. . . she's a lady. We'd probably covered this routine in class for about two weeks by the time we video'd (six hours of class), though I had done my best to learn the routine ahead of time from a video. From my own perspective I need a lot of work. I don't like my arm movement, but I think private lessons would help greatly there. My spins are pathetic, but are also improving. Posture has been a big problem in the past, but it is much better, though there are a few spots where I have relapses in this video. Anyway, for all my rabid fans out there, this is me dancing the rumba, one of my better dances.

And, just FYI, I don't usually dance with gum.

Furthermore, after all the work I put into writing this post, I'm getting some sort of error message when I try to upload the video, so, I guess you can use this link to youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6Hy4HWPEHA

James Bond is my Hero

I love the latest James Bond movie, Casino Royale. I know that it is old news to most people right now, but this movie is the best of the James Bond movies. The reason for this is the uncharacteristic exposition of Bond's character and the added element of a love story.

What can I say, I guess I'm a sap. But there it is, the destruction of James Bond's walls by Vesper Lynd is, to me, a touching story, and it hurts when he loses her. But deep down inside I envy Bond for finding what I am seeking, even if it cuts him to the heart.

Working for the National Park Service: Week 1

Well, my first week of working for the U.S. Government is now at an end. I must say that it turned out rather different than I expected.

I work as a trail "Maintenance Worker" for the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. Basically, my job entails grooming and maintaining the few trails and "airports" (where the trees don't grow) that do exist in this pristine wilderness. However, when I showed up on Monday, my supervisor had not been told that I was coming. I soon found out that a flight was scheduled to go fix up the "runway" at Horsefeld so I got pretty excited. I have been looking forward, with great anticipation, for flying in a small bush plane for the first time. I was pretty bummed when I discovered that I had not been included in this trip.

Day 1: I showed up bright and early Monday morning at 8am. The weather was cool but not cold. I was met by my boss who directed me to my supervisor. The rest of the day was to be spent with him getting organizational things out of the way. One of the first things that we did was head over to the park headquarters to do some paperwork. It was all rather mundane and boring until I was enlisted to haul a box of envelopes down into the basement. My supervisor was with me, and a worker from the visitors center. Instead of taking the stairs, somebody suggested that we take the elevator. Bad idea. As we stepped in the elevator, my supervisor commented that it would be nice to kill two hours in there. At that comment the other employee commented on being stuck in an elevator one time. As soon as she finished speaking, the lights went out, the emergency light came on, and the elevator stopped. Thus began a very entertaining 45 minutes--on government wages mind you--until we were rescued. It turns out that the power had gone out, which is quite common in Alaska.

After lunch I got fingerprinted, and I was also trained in using a $1000 GPS digital camera, which is pretty sweet. And that was all. It was a good day.

Day 2: I showed up bright and early at 7am. My compadres and I (there were four of us) got in three different rigs--two end-dumps, and a pickup hauling a skid-steer on a trailer--and traveled for around three hours to a gravel pit just across the Kuskulana River. About an hour of the drive was spent on a nasy little stretch of asphalt thut bucked and pitched like a roller coaster. Another hour was spent on a gravel road that was actually better than the aformentioned road. Once we arrived at our destination we filled the two end-dumps with gravel (with the skid-steer) and traveled six miles back down the road and turned off on a one lane track through the woods. It was such a tight fit, that branches and trees were constantly smacking our rigs. It would be an understatement to say that the drive through this bit was rough, but considering that it took us an hour to drive four miles of this "road" sort of suggests something to this effect. The culminating point was driving through a creek and powering (barely) out of the steep incline on the other side. We did this eight times, and it took us all day. It was pretty brutal, those eight trips, I felt like a rag doll in the washing machine. Towards the end of the day, two other guys left early and I stayed so that I could drive the truck hauling the skid-steer home. The day ended with that three hour drive--my first time hauling a trailer, and I'm doing it with 4 tons of machinery, heheh, I love this job already. 13 hours, most of it riding shotgun. What a day.

Day 3-5: Not much to report here. My crew flew out to Solo Creek (Horsefeld was too windy) and I stayed with the Maintenance shop crew and we all tried to look busy. It's a bit early in the season right now. Things will pick up later. Other than that, it was a great week.

Bears and Bear Tales

My sister wrote an excellent story on her blog about being hunted by wolves (http://www.shadowsnatcher.blogspot.com/), which inspired me to write about my first bear encounter.

When I was about eleven or twelve I was somehow exposed to the book Alaskan Bear Tales by Larry Kaniut (an excellent but at times rather morbid book). I was fascinated by this book and could not put it down. Unfortunately, by the time that I was finished, my head was full of "and the bear's teeth grated against my skull like chalk against slate," which kind of starts to run away in the mind of an eleven year old boy.

So, it shouldn't have been any surprise that soon after I finished the book I had a very eerie dream. I was walking in the woods near where my family burned our garbage (you can do that in Alaska, there's no trash services around). The ground was mossy, and beams of sunlight filtered through the countless skeletal branches of spruce to light a small clearing in the trees. There in the center of the clearing was a cinnamon colored black bear. It was lying in the moss, watching me. And that is all I remember.

Two or three days later, I saw that bear in real life.

It was my job in the family--being the eldest and strongest son at home--to empty and burn the garbage. The problem began when I took the garbage out the previous evening, and for some reason (wind, wet, lazy), I didn't actually burn it. My family was--and still is--building a large house which at the time was just four concrete walls that we had poured for the basement. Surrounding our "construction site" were piles of various lumber, plywood, and insulation. The day after I had neglected my duty as a "garbage man," my father and I were engaged in some sort of productive activity around the house when my dad asked me to go get an item. As I made my way towards the pile of stuff--I think it was insulation--I heard a thrashing of branches from behind a deadfall near the garbage area. I stopped short. My dad noticed and called over to me and asked what I saw. I wasn't sure, I had just seen a flash of brown before the thing disappeared. I told him it was a "moose, or deer, or something," (deer don't live in Alaska by the way). About the time that I finished my sentence, it appeared hesitantly from behind the deadfall. It was a bear. At the time, I didn't notice that the bear was remarkably similar to the bear that had seen in my dream--my train of thought was more along the line of a female park ranger who had her arms gnawed off--but it was. A small cinnamon colored black bear was trying to get into the garbage that I had neglected the previous evening, and I had startled it. My exit strategy was to back away slowly before I sought the "safety" of four concrete walls with holes for windows and doors. My dad tends to tell people that I ran like a "scalded cat." Whatever.

By the time I felt safe (on top of a pile of plywood with my head poking over the wall), the bear had meandered nearer to the garbage and was eyeing it speculatively. My dad had ambled a little closer to get a good look. There was a moment of uncertainty on both sides before the bear changed its mind and wandered back into the forest. I exited the house and joined my dad as we paralleled the bear's path through the woods. The shocking thing was that even though we could see the bear in and out of the trees, the bear made no sound. It was like a ghost drifting through the forest, a dry and brittle forest which makes squirrels and rabbits sound like demons. But the large, heavy bear was deadly quiet. Soon after, it disappeared.

This was the first of my bear encounters, and it instilled in me a respect for a (sometimes) deadly animal that is large and powerful, but silent in its element. However, over time, my unfounded and childish fear of bears faded and was replaced by a certain. . . affinity for them. I view bears (and a certain falcon) as my "nature guardian" if that makes any sense.

On Facial Hair

So, it was my grand plan to return to Alaska and revert to my old mountain man ways. The first order of business, of course, was to grow a magnificent beard, reminiscent of the mountian men and prophets of old. Well, I must say that after a little over a week I had to give up. The reason for this is mainly because of coloring. My facial hair tends to be light colored, like the hair on my head, which actually doesn't look too good in the beginning stages of beard growth. Basically, it didn't look good; scruffy and ill kempt, like a mangy dog. On top of that, facial hair just feels kind of annoying. Maybe I didn't wait long enough, and maybe I got cold feet. Whatever. It might help if I had some sort of beard trimming and grooming apparatus that would help my facial hair growth look more presentable. Perhaps, after I obtain such a device, I shall again attempt to grow myself a respectable crop of mountain man facial hair, but until then I shall remain beardless.