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Life: A sweet fruit

WELL. It has certainly been a week, and what a contrast from the life I was living last year.




Traveling. I live next to California, and (some people would say that I'm risking hyperbole, but such people are shamefully wrong) California is undeniably the best place in the entire world, so I have to go there at every available opportunity.

Look at those mountains! That lake! Which is Mono Lake, by the way, a body of water 350 miles from the The Village of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels of Porciúncula. But 350 miles is not enough miles to stop a gigantic, sickening metropolis from destroying an ecosystem. Back in the '40s, after LA had killed the Owens Valley (another astonishingly spectacular place) and Owens Lake, the greedy beast turned her thirsty gaze Northward and started sipping poor Mono. The city stopped draining the lake about 15 years ago by court order and now it's slowly returning to its old saline self.

Whereas last year I went to Pinnacle Mountain a lot and sometimes to the Ouachitas. Not that those are bad, but California, man. California. The thing is, you're thinking, "hey, so they have beaches, a nice city (SF, obv), some big trees, but they don't have everything." Well, you're wrong. They have EVERYTHING. Everything done well.




The Owens Valley, once a wealthy farming area. See "Chinatown" for the reason that it no longer is.





Whoa buddy. After a long but visually appealing drive on US395 and CA190, one is presented with the option of pulling 1/2 mile off the road to Father (Insert Irish Name Here) Point a few miles after entering Death Valley National Park. I've never seen such an astonishing vista. The view is to 20 miles on the other side of the valley, which drops about 3-4000 feet from where you see the car parked. I wanted to put the car on that little peninsula of road you can see back there but there was a particularly nasty section that I didn't want to risk. That's the Panamint Valley, by the way; Death Valley is on the other side of the mountains in the background.




These are some excellent dunes which killed my camera, but it was pretty much worth it because I got to roll down them and generally experience some dumb glee that I haven't had in a while.

After a full day and a half of exploring Death Valley and environs, I decided to go to LA for no better reason than it was only three hours away. It was a questionable choice, and there were great moments, but it was on the whole not terribly spectacular. On the way back, CALTRANS failed to update their road conditions report, and so I took a long and unnecessary detour because I thought that the Sierras were pretty much impassable, and ended up buying unnecessary snow chains and then, when in Nevada, passed a Sheriff and got pulled over by NHP, who happened to also be there right then, so I got two tickets, and I already got a ticket in October- immediately after getting out of a defensive driving course, too; we're talking 5 or 10 minutes here- and I just got a letter saying that I can't renew my insurance because I didn't tell them I moved to Nevada. Just so you can see that not EVERYTHING is great.

Although I did get that promotion at work. Starting tomorrow I'm going to be in charge of 11 people, all of whom I have been working with since August and most of whom applied for the same promotion. Should be interesting.

Life!

Many things

Keeley, I severely plagiarized an email I sent to you to form the main body of this somewhat unexciting but grossly overdue post. So fucking read it, Benji and Alex.

That's a picture of Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam. The giant bridge being built in front of it to relieve traffic on US 93, which is one of southern Nevada's only links to Arizona and now gets terribly congested because it has to cross the dam. I took this pciture on my 3-day drive back to Oklahoma back in December.

I worked near Lake Mead for the last few weeks until last tour, when I was west of Vegas in the Spring Mountains. The last week we were at Lake Mead was great, though. I thought that we would be on the same boring project that we'd been doing for a while- clearing semi-urban places of tamarisk (saltcedar- which uses up more water than native plants and crowds them out) but instead we worked in Lake Mead National Recreation Area. We were still doing a similar thing, but it was with a different species of tamarisk (athel, or tamarix aphyllus) and it was in a spectacular place, and we were camped in the middle of nowhere. It was great. Of course, I didn't have my camera, since I thought we would be doing the stupid project. I had taken it the previous two times that we went down to the Overton area. (Zoom in- a little over halfway zoomed the satellite photo changes to one more recent, and a huge chunk of the lake vanishes. We worked mostly in the area to the east of Overton where, in the zoomed out photo, you can see a round chunk of lake, now totally dry. )
The work wasn't anything spectacular, just girdling the trees (chipping away the bark in a circle around the tree) and spraying chemicals on them- we didn't even get to use chainsaws, damn it-, but it was nice to walk around all day in a pleasant place, and the weather was great. Most of the time we were working along the former perimeter of Lake Mead; until ten years ago or so, the whole square mile or two we covered was all under 10-20 feet of water. See that picture above? The white is the former water level. So I was walking around in a desert landscape, but the ground was littered with shells and boating detrius (mostly old beer cans, but also an anchor or two and a couple of buoys). You couldn't even see the lake from where we were; it's at less than 49% capacity and Las Vegas will have serious problems by 2010 if it keeps dropping. Luckily they are spending $2-3 billion dollars to build a pipeline from east and central Nevada to steal water from aquifers there. Awesome.

It's a great place though. The last day we worked we didn't have all that much work to do, so we just walked around and explored. I climbed a plateau and found sherds of Anasazi pottery, which we GPS'd and reported to the NPS. It's of a very specific type that was made in the Moapa Valley about 1000 years ago. It was pretty incredible. I'll try to get a picture of them from someone who did bring their camera. Yeah, I sure did lament that decision to not bring it.

Anyway, it was a great tour, and helped by the fact that I am feeling pretty well again after being assaulted by a severe cold/sinus infection that began on December 30th when I had to drive across the Rockies in a horrible snowstorm and ended up in the coldest, most trashy motel in Helper, Utah (also famous for being the only motel in Helper, Utah). Anyway, the only bad part about that work week was a windstorm that blew in our last night there and blew everyone's tent down when they were still in them. But my old Eureka was the last tent down. I found out that I was the only one whose tent lasted until 630. I was laying awake (far too noisy to sleep) when I heard a rip, and the rain fly came loose; before long, the entire tent was on top of me and nearly blowing away with me in it. It was hard to get dressed that morning, and even harder to pack, as you might imagine. But I just checked the tent and it's fine, so, perfect. And last week we had an easy project- mostly just brushing and limbing to reduce wildfire fuels, and we got to stay in a boy scout camp with running water and bunk beds and a kitchen. For the next few weeks we're working near Reno, which means I can come home every night, which will be insane.

I tried to pick up refurbished bike from the bike collective here- you pick out a beat-up old thing, and they fix it up all nice for you- and it was supposed to be done a week ago, but they are continually finding problems with it. A couple of my friends here got nice bikes from them and I'm a little jealous because I keep waiting for a god damn nice bike. I tried, but they are hard to get in contact with and I saw an ad on Craigslist that was posted when I was away last week and I'm pretty sure that they sold my bike to someone else without telling me about it.

I had an interview for a promotion at work a couple of weeks ago and it went well. The only thing is, if I'm promoted, I'm in charge of people I've been equals with since August. Apparently someone was told that I was probably going to get the promotion, so I'm excited, but I haven't actually been told that by anyone in charge of anything. I get to wear a blue helmet and boss people* around!

Kind of a weird thing, but I have already taken on responsibility on my crew so I think I'm fairly respected. And I went to San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, which was a wonderful little break from Reno, though a bizarre contrast. California is just gigantic; the entire two-hour drive from Sacramento to SF is all developed and crammed full of people. The state is spectacular, though; I don't think I would mind living there. SF is kind of a rich ghetto, but man, rich ghettos are kinda nice.

I'm still trying to work out what I'm doing after August. I'm really considering staying here for another six months or so and then either applying for jobs with the Park Service or Forest Service- this work is perfect training for a lot of positions. I think I might consider the Peace Corps, too; I just found out that one of my bosses served with them in Ecuador, so he would be a good reference. I've considered Spain, too, but I just think it seems like a lot of commitment for something that's not going to be all that helpful. I don't know why I'm not that interested in it- an easy job, in a foreign country, with all sorts of great places to explore- but I keep vacillating so much. I'd get to go to Valencia, though, and that city really seems to know how to kick some ass. It would be nice to live in a place with civic institutions and cultural events that didn't revolve around machines with large engines (Reno's Hot August Nights [Motorcycles], Reno Air Races [obv], some sort of Rally race around downtown that necessitates the dumping of several tons of dirt on downtown streets, chainsaw competitions). I miss Spanish, too, and if I were in Valencia I could learn Valenciano- which is really just Catalan but they don't like to admit it.

Tomorrow I'm off to Death Valley for a few days. That's the good thing** about living in Reno- there are so many semi-mythical seeming places within an easy drive.

*Take into account that if you were to make a Vinn diagram of my friends and my coworkers here in Nevada it would be just a big purple dot: so much potential for disaster !

**Yeah, THE good thing. Fucking cesspool, this place. A fucking cesspool with a good climate and great views and pretty, clean little river and a couple of decent coffeeshops and a totally kick-ass Indian Buffet (Star of India can eat a dick) and a good Ethiopian restaurant. But trust me: Little Rock is far more pleasant.