Meeting the Status Quo

As it nears the beginning of September I find myself increasingly less settled, constantly in anticipation of an event which, this year, will not occur. For the last four years, and for more than a decade before that, the culmination of August and the onset of the ninth month have coincided with the commencement of the school year. The constancy of this episode has become so deeply ingrained in my psyche that I often find my mind straying towards the idea that just another two weeks worth of work will secure my freedom from Newcastle. This autumn, I will have to get by on the hope that next fall will mark my reentry into the academic world. It seems a long way off.

In a strange way, my work has become almost quotidian. I say strange because no two days are ever alike. I'm always traveling to different places, seeing different things... But for some reason just the act of getting up every day and going to the office, driving the Durango somewhere, driving back, entering data... it's all begun to seem mundane. Yet even as I write that, it seems incomplete, inaccurate, because there is another side to my work that is never, can never be, rote.

Once I've driven as far as I can, once I've locked the car and stashed the key and shouldered my pack, the world opens up around me. As soon as I take off walking and drop out of sight of the road and the few, widely-scattered farmhouses, there exists only me and the earth and the sky and the wind and the prairie. I am often alone, or seem to be, until I chance across some denizen of the plains... a group of pronghorn blasting across the sage, a harrier searching for a meal, hundreds of tiny tadpoles in an ephemeral pool, a group of deer, bedding in the long grass alongside a creek, a bull snake, pretending to be a rattlesnake, a rattlesnake, who has no need to pretend.

Often I'll drop down into drainages, the far-reaching fingers of seasonal streams, to find little oases, wet and lush and green in a world baked dry by relentless wind and the strong summer sun. These verdant patches seem almost magical. Cottonwoods tower forty feet above the ground, their bases surrounded by chokecherries, oak, and sumac. Pools of water rest in hollows, extant only as a result of the shade provided by the steep, eroding walls of the drainage. The wind is tempered here, blowing as a cool, gentle breeze. I feel fortunate with each new discovery, and these are often the places raptors choose to build their nests.

Still, there is routine in it all. Drive a two-track, open a gate, close a gate, drive some more, park, walk out to a nest, record data, walk back, drive out, open and close the gate again, drive on to some other nest in some other place. Though I often wish to spend time in the secluded cottonwood groves, I cannot. I quickly found that it takes ten- or eleven-hour days to effectively check nests, all the while going as fast as I can.

So I'm doing my best to meet the status quo. My performance in this internship will be measured by my completion (or not) of a long list of tasks. Every day when I return from the field I check off those things I've accomplished... the nests I've visited, the sites I've sampled, the locations I've placed bat detectors. The list seems impossibly long, but I must do what I can for fear of disappointing, of even underwhelming, my superiors.

Today I was planning on marking off the last two nests in Niobrara county, only to be met this morning with a locked gate on private land and an unresponsive contact. I have one other nest I have not visited, located just south of the Montana/Wyoming state line, far out of the way of my other charges. I told Dwayne when I returned to the office that I'd made it to 35 of 38 nests. (We'd discussed earlier in the week that I should only continue to check nests through today). He seemed pleased, but I have trouble reading him, and I was unsure if he wasn't unhappy that I hadn't made it to them all.

I wonder now just how much I'll be able to accomplish during the remainder of my time here. I have four prairie dog colonies to survey for burrowing owl and mountain plover, 14 locations at which to leave bat detectors overnight, 80 spots scattered far and wide across all three counties in our field office (Crook, Weston, and Niobrara) at which to sample vegetation, and a resource management plan to write for the side-saddle bladderpod (Oooh... so much fun, right?). What will happen if I can't get it all finished? Probably nothing, but if I disappoint Dwayne, or don't meet his expectations, it could set me back if I wish to extend my internship or continue with the BLM at another field office.

I'll do what I can, I suppose.

Things outside of work, however, are looking very promising. Ayme, a 25-year-old substitute teacher from Upton that chaperoned during the BLM/Upton project in July, and I hit it off during the limited time we spent together on Bat Nights and Wildlife Wednesdays. After a few weeks of conflicting plans we've finally worked out a day to get together, and I'm not sure which of us is more excited about the prospects of spending the day with another twenty-something, college-educated, childless person. This Saturday we're headed to Rapid City for farmer's markets, Target, lunch, a movie, and, if I can convince her, a visit to Cold Stone. It will be great to break away from the montony and confines of Newcastle and spend some time in a decent-sized town. The one downside? Rapid City does not have a Chipotle. Sadness. I suppose I can't have everything, though, right? : )