It’s hard to believe that at the end of our term; five months has been both a blink and an eternity. Over the last couple weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about the memories I most want to hang onto from my time here.
I want to remember the first night that I camped by myself out on Bowman Island. I sat in my tent under the hemlocks; it was a cold night in June, but the memory of my campfire was still warm on my skin, and the darkness was so thick that it felt almost tangible, like a blanket wrapped around my shoulders. After five weeks of constant busyness and the near-constant company of my Americorps teammates, I savored the dark and the stillness and the solitude, the chance to just sit and breathe. Later in the summer the lake on a weekend night would be full of human noises: laughter and shouting, boat engines, music from party barges. But that night the only sound was of loons gibbering their wild, eerie cries.
Sunset from Wister Beach
Then there was my first weekend camping at Wister Point. That was a rougher one, overall: it fell just as the weather suddenly remembered it was summer and the temperature spiked. Both I and my crewmate with whom I had been assigned to camp at Wister for the weekend ended up going home sick from heat exhaustion. But the first night we were there, I sat on the beach with my feet in the water and watched the lake turn gold as the sun set. I’ve seen a lot of beautiful sights this summer, and I don’t think I can single any one of them out as the best, but that was definitely right up there.
Hot weather has never been my favorite thing, so this summer had its rough patches for me. Days where we dove to pull invasive milfoil, though, were heaven; air conditioning has nothing on working ten feet underwater. My favorite of our dive sites was down around the coves in the Ashland River, and we spent enough time there that some of the fish started getting used to us; one day while diving I realized I had picked up an entourage of three or four that followed me everywhere and watched my hands intently whenever I reached to pull a plant up by the roots, in case I stirred up something they could eat.
(Our Ashland River dive days had another perk, too: they always ended with Klondike bars, courtesy of a fellow named Joe, living by the river, who kindly made sure we never left the site without a bag of them. One day, the previous day’s dive crew had left without stopping for their Klondike bars. When we arrived, we were met with an instant cry: “You left without your ice cream! What, I guess you don’t want ice cream anymore? That’s fine, that’s fine, I just try to be nice but it’s all right, my feelings aren’t hurt…”
“We had to leave early yesterday,” called back a crewmate, laughing. “It was raining.”
“Oh, of course,” was Joe’s shouted response. “How silly of me. You wouldn’t want to get wet when you’re scuba diving!”)
Colder weather meant an end to diving (almost; let the record show that I *did* get in for about an hour on October 18 to remove the mooring buoys in our cove for the winter, and assess the condition of the chains securing them. It was 52 degrees and rainy, and despite skeptical looks from several people I was still so, so happy to get in once more. I grew up swimming frequently in a very cold pond and an even colder creek in Vermont and I think it might have permanently skewed my temperature sense, but regardless, Tuesday’s dive was lots of fun and the water was genuinely pretty comfortable with my wetsuit on). When we (mostly) finished diving for the season, I might have been the closest I’ve ever been to sorry to bid goodbye to the summer heat. But the cool temperatures and the gorgeous New England fall foliage have made it a much better time to get out on trails than the summer was.
There was a day just a couple weeks ago when I was on the trail maintenance crew after not having hiked much the past few weeks, and we were sent to clear drainages and lop branches on the Algonquin trail, which runs up the side of Black Mountain and then to the summit of Sandwich Dome, up in the White Mountain National Forest. I hadn’t slept well the past few nights, I was wiped before we started, and from the first slope we climbed I was out of breath and rubbery-legged–and Algonquin has several long, steep slopes. None of the three of us on the crew that day had hiked the trail before, and I stopped frequently to glance worriedly at our GPS position on the AllTrails topo map, with a running mental commentary as I tried to talk myself a little further onward: “All right, it looks like we’re almost through the steepest section for now. Oh, except for this next bit. I mean, I say steepest, obviously there are still going to be some pretty steep–oh. Oh, no.”
View from the Algonquin trail, looking down at Black Mt. from up on the rock scrambles
And yet somehow, about two hours in–after getting to the point where I was so frustrated with myself and how impossible the day felt that I was actually in tears about it–I got my second wind, or I guess maybe my first wind, and started feeling better. It was inarguably a perfect fall day for hiking, sunny and crisp and cool. By the time we reached the first of the rock scrambles up the side of Sandwich Dome, which none of us had known to expect and which is more than slightly sketchy-looking when you come up to it without warning, I was almost impatient as my teammates debated the best way forward; it was only then I realized that my mental self-talk had switched from Oh no to C’mon, let me at it already. As we reached outlook after outlook and were treated to views of Black Mountain further and further below us, I found myself beaming, loving every second of it. By the end of the day I was exhausted, but despite my hike’s disastrous start I felt great; I was in the best mood I’d been in for weeks.
There were some beautiful quieter days, too. I spent Indigenous Peoples’ Day trail hosting at the foot of Mt. Morgan. Earlier in the weekend both the Morgan trail and the Old Bridle Path up West Rattlesnake had been packed with people out hiking, but that day morning rain and gray skies appeared to have kept the crowds away (relatively speaking; I still counted 80-plus people hiking the Morgan trail, and there was an hour or two in the morning where the police had to redirect would-be hikers to park at the Percival trailhead down the road because both the Morgan and Rattlesnake lots were full. But for a holiday weekend, it was a quiet day. I set my table and map up under the trees, and read when the rain stopped enough to allow a book. A few passing hikers saw me bundled up in my rain gear, warm gloves, and knit hat, and chuckled: “Not the best day to have that gig, is it?”
I grinned back at them. “I’d rather be here than in an office.” And it was true. Under the gray sky, the autumn leaves glowed brighter than they do in the sun, and the air was full of that crisp, earthen smell that you only get in the woods in fall on a cool rainy day. If I was going to be sitting at a table all day, that was the ideal place to do it.
I’d rather be here than in an office. That was in large part the thought that drove me back to school for conservation work in the first place, and I’m glad that after five months here I’m taking the confirmation of it away with me. I had bad days, don’t get me wrong; not all my days that started out on low notes ended as well as the Algonquin one did. I had other days that were frustratingly tedious, and others where I went home exhausted, body sore from head to toe from harder work than I was used to.
But I’m finding that the occasional bad work day out on a lake or in the woods, with my lungs full of fresh air and sunshine or rain on my skin, can still be preferable even to a lot of the better days I had when I was working a full time desk job. I’m going home for the next few months, and after that I’m not sure where I’ll be heading, but wherever I go I will take my memories of my time on–and under–Squam Lake with me, and treasure them.
Cris has just finished his term with the LRCC, along with the rest of the 2022 cohort. This winter, he’ll be on the job hunt, and spending some time on his novel, a long-time project. Learn more about Cris here!