One of the things we do at the end of a day of Summer Camp, after the kids go home, is share an Apple and an Onion from our day. An Apple is a moment or happening that was just really sweet. An Onion is something that requires further processing before it’s really palatable.

Today was mostly apple-ful for me. Both the Class Clown and the Instigator Of All Things Inappropriate were gone today, and that made things a lot easier. We took this crazy long hike to see a glacial erratic, got lost, thought we would be late, hiked back like crazy and made it with time to spare, and played a really good game of Firekeeper. It’s really hard to pick one key moment from the day. I keep starting to write one down here, and then I stop and decide that it doesn’t quite capture how good the day was. One of the really sweet moments was when The Runner came up next to me at the end of the day to tell me that today was his favorite day by far. I don’t think 12-year olds give compliments too freely. Another was when the group decided on a team name. I had planted the idea of a team name for them on Monday, but the boys all wanted something like The Constipated Camels while the girls all wanted something like The Wolves, and never the twain would meet. But today as we left the Fantastic Erratic (the map label for the glacial boulder), I told them a story about wolverine energy in order to get them pumped up for this hardcore uphill hike that we needed to finish in half the time it took us to get down the hill. They rocked at the uphill climb, and the wolverine story really seemed to work for them. At one of the water breaks, after we realized that we were making good time, one of the girls suggested that we be The Wolverines. The boys still thought there needed to be a qualifier, and everyone was able to agree that our group name would be The Lost Wolverines. Possibly, this doesn’t seem like a really sweet moment to someone who doesn’t work with kids. But the fact that a story I told resulted in them self-organizing in order to make a decision that the whole group agreed upon without any yelling or namecalling…well, you might have to take my word for it.

The Onion for the day was actually the fact that the Class Clown wasn’t there. Yesterday, he had really really annoyed the rest of the group with a particular annoying behavior. By the time we were having our closing circle, it was really out of hand, with him doing it all the time, and the rest of the kids yelling at him to shut up all the time. So we went ahead and had a talk about it in the circle. He acknowledged that he knew it was annoying to everyone, but "it’s hard for me to not do it, I’ve done it for a long time." I asked him if he wanted to stop doing it, in which case the rest of the group would be happy to support him and help him out, if it was something hard for him to change. He wasn’t sure if he was willing to commit to changing the behavior, and I asked him if he wanted to think about it, and let us know in the morning. He said he would like that, so I planned to have a quick talk about it this morning. However, he didn’t come this morning, or at all today. I don’t think that the 4 minute conversation from yesterday would have kept him from coming back, but there is a little shred of worry that maybe that was too intimidating or something and he was afraid to come back. That would suck.

Tags: kids, summer camp, consensus, group dynamics

Summer Camps have started! It’s the end of my second day, and it’s going okay. Lots of good parts, and lots of things that I need to get better at. I might have sporadic internet access for the next two weeks, which means infrequent blog updates. I will try to write them as I go and then upload them whenever I have access. But by the end of the day, I tend to be pretty beat. A gaggle of ten 11- and 12-year old kids will pretty much run me ragged in 6 hours. I will try to post at least one Vignette per week, the way I have been during the school year.

Blackberry petals
Fall in the wind like dewdrops.
Willow flycatcher

Tags: haiku, blackberry, summer, birds

I so often come across really great posts, that really speak to some expereince that I’m having. And I always bookmark them, and I say to myself, "Self, one day here soon, you will have to write up an insightful and thoughtful piece about how this post applies to your life." And then, of course, my self never gets around to writing the post and I eventually forget about it and go back to posting pictures of my cat.

But today, today it is time for a new approach. I read this post about a phone call to Arnold Newman, and I could so totally relate. I feel like this is what I do all the time at Wilderness Awareness School. I have no idea what sort of crazy blunders I must be making all the time. More than a year later, I am just realizing some of the embarrassing things I did and said in my first weeks of volunteering with the kids programs. And I have no doubt that I continue to make new embarrassing blunders everyday, which I will probably not be aware of for a long time to come.. I’m thankful that everyone at the school handles my lack of knowledge, skills, and tact as gracefully as Arnold Newman did.

Tags: Arnold Newman, humility, mistakes

Last weekend, Preston and I went to the coast. We drove over to Long Beach Peninsula, having heard that there was surfing possibilities there, and we wanted to check out a new part of the country. On the way there, we stopped to get gas in Raymond, and Preston shot a couple quick shots of an interesting coastal road block. Here is the truck, and presumably the driver of the truck having a little chat with an officer.

If you look closely at the top of the truck, you will see…

…why yes, those appear to be fish parts. And there seems to be a tarp missing from over the top of the fish parts. Which meant that when the driver of the truck had to apply brakes suddenly at the intersection, a big ol’ glop of fish parts went belching out over the road. Traffic was backed up while the tractor came and scooped all the fish parts off the road. Here, a deer sculpture oversees the process (which occurred in the "Raymond Metal Sculpture Corridor").

Fortunately, we were headed the other direction, and bypassed the resulting traffic jam at the intersection of Hwy 101 and Hwy 6. Unfortunately, we seem to have heard wrong about surfing on Long Beach Peninsula. All the beaches were posted with big red "Dangerous currents! Do Not Swim!" signs, and all the locals scoffed at the idea of surfing there. It was a cute little tourist trap, but not what we were looking for. But we were hungry, so we stopped at the Pilot House Restaurant and Lounge in the town of Ocean Park. At first, we almost didn’t go in, it looked so small and, you know, diner-ish. But we decided to brave it. There was one other customer in there, having coffee, and one waitress on duty. We asked the customer if he knew when the little festival downtown would be ending, and that was all the encouragement he needed to tell us stories for the rest of the meal. He was from Hawaii originally, so he joined everyone else we had talked to in his scoff at the idea of surfing there. But he and Preston quickly discovered their mutual dirtbike history. John was the guy’s name, and he used to race endurance motocross, sponsored by Ducati, back when Ducati used to make dirtbikes (which, according to Preston, was a VERY long time ago). "I wasn’t really that fast," he said. "It’s just that no one else would ride the Ducatis, so they let me do it."

On our way out, I asked if I could take their picture. They acted appropriately shy at first, but then the waitress came over and sat on John’s lap. "I’m going to sit here and get you in trouble," she teased. Here they are. Their names are John and Sheryl.

Finally, we gave up on the Peninsula and headed for Westport. By the time we got there, the sun was setting. It was a beautiful day, and the surf looked fine to me, but all the surfers were hanging out on shore. Not even one of them was out in the water. Preston walked out on the jetty a ways to scope out the situation, while I entertained myself taking pictures of these pirate ships staging a mock battle in the bay. They were firing cannons and everything.

And I took a quick shot of these tracks in the sand. Can you guess what made them? You can click on the picture for a bigger version.

And at some point on the trip, we stopped at a cool little campground, where I took this self-portrait.

So, the two things that I would get from the WAS Residential Program (hereafter known as WARP):
*a built-in community
*knowledge, including Kamana 2 and 3
*the expertise of the instructors

I’ve just about finished Kamana 2. I just have a few more Field Inventories to do, which I’ll finish up in my few weeks off this summer. It will cost me less than $500 to get all the resources I need for Kamana 3. That program is expected to last 5 to 10 months, so about the length of a school year, give or take. If I finished it in 5 months, it would cost me about $400 to move on to Kamana 4, which should take 8 to 16 months.
So, I don’t need WARP in order to get that knowledge.

Kamana doesn’t come with a built in in-person community. It does come with an active online community, and Student Services, which gives me access to a real live person that I can call to discuss experiences and problems with the program. That would cover some parts of the instructor expertise issue. I have certainly learned this year as an Apprentice that a long-distance community is not the same thing as an in-person community. It’s hard to be a full member of an orally-based tradition when you’re not within hollering distance. However! There are people who live near me. Yes, that’s right. I might live in the middle of nowhere, but there are a surprising number of other folks who live out here in the middle of nowhere also. I’d wager that a few of them are into naturalist studies. I know for sure that there are a lot of hunters out here. I bet a few of them wouldn’t mind getting together once a month or so to sharpen up those tracking skills. This would not be as good as having a community that shares a bigger picture perspective on the world, but it would be better than nothing, and it would be a way to have in-person feedback about the things I’m learning. And it’s always possible that I would meet some like-minded souls out here in the sticks. Also, there is an active homeschool community out here in Onalaska. I could easily leave up some flyers or something at the local Homeschool Store.

So, here’s what I’m saying. I could pay $10,000 for WARP. Or I could pay between $500 and $900 for a do-it-yourself WARP where I would get to stay on our fabulous property, live with the person I most want to live with in the whole world, and figure out how to make money in my non-study time. Hmmm. I think it might be worth it to me to save $9500 (you say that, NINE THOUSAND AND FIVE HUNDRED! dollars), and put in a little extra work to create myself a community of sorts.

 Tags: Kamana, Wilderness Awareness School, community, school, homeschool

Well, I didn’t get the Youth Instructor position. I’m not surprised, but I am a little sad. I was hoping to get that position in order to have a plan for where I’ll be going and what I’ll be doing at the end of the summer. So this leaves me feeling a little bit adrift. Do I want to figure out how to come up with the money for the Residential Program? I would really love to take the Residential Program, but would I like to do it more than I would like to buy a piece of property? The Res program will run me almost 10,000 buckaroos. That’s more than a quarter of the money that this house would cost us. Like, total.

So, ya. When I put it like that. I’d really like to own a house. And besides all that, there’s just no way that I can come up with $10,000 for school OR a house this year.

And I’m still torn, because owning a house would be totally kick-ass, but doesn’t really get me any closer to satisfying work. The Res program would give me the connections and experience to do what I want to do for the next long while.

I don’t need to decide anything for a couple months. The deadline for the Res program is the beginning of August, so I can see how the summer camps are going by then. It’s possible that I won’t even want to work with kids by then. But THEN what the hell would I do? Too bad it’s not easier to get blogs to pay…

Tags: school, property, money, life goals

Yes, indeed. It’s going to be a great summer, and it’s going to be a hard summer. Today was the first day of training. We didn’t even have any kids there and I’m totally worn out. Although, now that I think about it, my sleepiness could have something to do with the beer (Shakespeare Stout…mmmm) at the Rogue Brewery in Issaquah with some of the staff. Yes, that’s right. I had a beer in the afternoon! With WAS staff! Because I’m staff at WAS now!

Wow.

Me: None of the scripts were working on my blog page, so after like 4 hours of trying to get it to work, I decided, Fuck it and just took all the ads off. I’ll put them back on later.

Preston: Did you just say "Fuck it"?

Me: Yes, I did.

Preston: You’ve been reading too many of them crazy troublemaker women books.

Tags: dialogue, women

So it seems that what I have planted is not so much a garden as a deer feeding station. I have seen their tracks, and of course, the missing tops of any growing thing in the garden a lot. I had already pretty much resolved myself to not having a garden this year, since I won’t be around enough to implement the extreme measures it would take to keep the deer out of the garden. The other day, Preston tipped me off that there was one in the back yard; he had seen it head up the hill while he was standing on the back porch. I managed to sneak out to the back yard, but alarmed a towhee on the way, so only managed a picture of the deer politely leaving the premises.

Then yesterday, I just had to laugh when I took some compost out in the morning, and saw this in the garden.

You can click on it for a bigger version. And here’s a more straight-on angle, which you can also click on for a bigger version.

The bed measured approx 27 inches in length. According to Elbroch, deer beds measure from 25 to 42 inches in length. Can you tell which way it was laying?

Tags: deer, garden, deer bed, identification, pictures