restlessjourneyor-blog

[restlessjourneyor-blog]

You need a degree to do that??

Whilst enjoying a Sunday morning of playing soccer I begin chatting with a passing partner. Discussing what we study, I stated that I worked as a stream habitat surveyor at which point a middle-aged gentleman butted into the conversation with a scoff followed by the sarcastic question of, “you need a degree to do that?”. Taken aback never had experienced this response before, I came up with some lame response about not needing a master’s degree, but indeed needing a bachelor’s.

Having moved to a new state a mere four months before, I had gotten used to telling the people I meet what I do, or why I moved to Oregon. Until that day, I had only been greeted with responses of interest in my job as a stream habitat surveyor, or expressions of how interesting they thought it was. Occasionally, I was even thanked for doing the work I do. Despite the fact that the man responded to me as though I had just told him I worked at McDonald’s, I think it must be clear he did not offend me with his different opinion. I didn’t give him the power to do such a thing😉 He did however get me thinking…

*Enter stage left my analytical mind asking myself the same question he did, with less sarcasm attached.

I spent 3 years at a university forking over thousands of dollars to obtain a piece of paper that qualified me to be “biologist”, I suppose. However, the truth is, I didn’t really do it for the degree. I did for these three main reasons:

1.      I want to make the world a better place.

2.      I plain and simply love to learn.

3.      I wanted to challenge myself.

Do I truly need a degree to do any of those things? Nope. However, I chose to earn one to use it as a tool in my “world-changing endeavor”. As for stream surveying, I don’t doubt that most hard-working people could mechanically do my job, even without a degree, measuring water depth, observing vegetation cover, etc. doesn’t take a genius.

Having no identifying experience, they probably might struggle telling apart an Oncorhynchus mykiss, from an Oncorhynchus kisutch or a Oncorhynchus clarkii, underwater, or even with knowing what those names refer to. They likely couldn’t explain to me why it might be important to note that cattle were present on the land around the stream, or why I should care that they observed tons of invasive crayfish in a creek. Simple things, that make all of the difference. You see, it takes a “whole picture” education to understand the innerworkings of our ever-changing natural world.

In summary, my answer to the unsolicited input of a my fellow soccer player should have been a simple, “no”, followed by the statement “but my degree makes me a better stream habitat surveyor, and has better equipped me to study OUR natural world, and to work to conserve it for YOU”.

[restlessjourneyor-blog]

Love Like Sorority Girls

During my college career I did a lot of mind blowing things, from research, to backpacking trips, and studying abroad. However, I must admit that one my the most eye opening things I experienced was sorority bid day. Now, I have never been the sorority type. Maybe because I don't have enough dresses or high heels, or because I am too sarcastic, suck at small talk, and occasionally smell like fish. Nevertheless, my close friend and college roommate decided to join a sorority and told me when her "bid day" was. I, clueless to what a bid day entailed, congratulated her and put it out of my mind. However, as I walked out of the science building that evening of bid day, I heard a noise that must have spread across the entire campus penetrating buildings and cars as they drove by. It was the chorus of hundreds of sorority girls screaming. On any other day I would have speedily walked in the other direction of such a sound but as I realized it was this bid day I had heard about, I instead walked towards the giant mass of chanting girls to see if I could find my roommate and show her some support. I stood around the outskirts, clad in a flannel, cargo shorts, and hiking sandals, like a beacon screaming “I don’t belong here!” amongst the brightly colored tank tops, Greek letter-covered, and face-painted sorority girls. The next hour I spent there is one I won't soon forget. In short, deafening screams and chants that drowned out the microphone, elaborate outfits and signs, and finally.....absolute pandemonium. I learned just from observation that "bid day" is when a new sorority member "comes home" meaning to her respective new sisterhood. These sorority newbies are released to their new sisters at a designated time, the end of bid day, and let me tell you it is quite the sight to see. Bid day is truly nothing short of  a sporting event. It is a mix between track, football, dance, and some amount of acrobatics. Girls are flying through the air jumping into perfect strangers arms and hugging them as though they were actual siblings. Huge groups tackled new sisters, and then formed huge circles around them while taking hundreds of photographs while they "throw what they know" for the first time, with tears in their eyes. Pure pandemonium. Despite the chaos, I ended up finding my friend for a brief second to give her a hug and congratulations before she headed back into the sea of people as I continued to observe. 

Side note: As a biologist, I wondered if we could harness the energy of sorority girls on bid day and use it as an alternative energy source...I would imagine it would be pretty powerful. 

As I stood around the living mass of cheering sorority girls I kept revisiting the absurdity of this whole thing. All of these girls were soooo stoked to meet these new people (who for all intents and purposes were strangers) and to welcome them into their group, acting as though they had been there all along, and that they had known them forever. Following bid day, new sorority girls social media accounts were inundated with loving comments filled with adoration for their new sister (I think that this is super awesome). I was slightly perturbed at first, and for a while, about my perceived “fakeness” of it all. How could you pretend to love some random person so much just because you were in the same organization? It was baffling. And I continued to be baffled until a couple years later, when I had a thought....We should all love each other more like sorority girls. 

Can you imagine a world where regardless of how well you know a person you express this outpouring of love and affection for them? Recognizing a common bond shared (in this case it's a college group, but on the world scale we all share the bond of being humans) and embracing it by loving the other people involved. Imagine that! Hugging strangers like old friends and being beyond excited to meet them, commenting kind things on random people's social media accounts, and so on. We could kiss racism and oppression goodbye as love would permeate the world like the sorority girls' screams did my eardrums on that bid day. What I find most fascinating is that as the years go on the sorority girls stay friends, and a lot of them get very close to each other. What started out as a random meeting of strangers joining an organization, turned into meaningful friendships. And it's all because they met each other and connected on one simple similarity; they joined a sorority. So simple. Being human connects us all on a much deeper level then a college organization. So maybe we could try loving each other like sorority girls love their new sisters on bid day: Rather blindly and definitely fully, and maybe with a little less screaming. 

[restlessjourneyor-blog]

Bumper Stickers

I find myself perturbed, on a rather regular basis, by the repetitive sight of a sticker-cluttered bumper as I look through my windshield. As an avid fan of expressing your beliefs and interests to all of the world, there is something about bumper stickers that is bothersome to my analytical brain for a few different reasons..

The sheer quantity of some bumper stickers on the back of cars is rather perplexing to me. If it is to the point where from the back of your car I cannot tell what color it is, you have too many stickers. There are people who have layers of bumper stickers on their cars inch thick! It’s like they are saying “must keep buying bumpers stickers….can’t forgo telling the world to… ‘Coexsist’.” It is truly a crazy phenomenon, bumper sticker hysteria, and it’s is so ubiquitous. It doesn’t really matter what state, city you are in, or what road you are on. Bumper stickers are everywhere.

Why are you forcing your opinions and interests about EVERYTHING to me and all other fellow drivers? And not only are you expressing these opinions CONSTANTLY, but you are expressing them to an audience of hundreds of people who did not even ask for them. I am just there driving along, and you feel it necessary to convey to me, through your stick figure family, that you have seven kids and dog (whom all love Disney I’m assuming, since you have Mickey Mouse ears on your stick figures…even the dog) and you want “Hillary for Prison”.

It is my stance, that the purpose of expressing your opinion is to evoke a discussion with another party (one who may or may not possess your same views). Buttt, bumper sticker ROB us from the opportunity to discuss (unless of course you happen to be getting into your car in the Walmart parking lot just as I am getting out of my car, and I have the opportunity to ask you what your ‘Friends of Coal’ bumper sticker means). Otherwise, the sole purpose of these elaborately adorned bumpers is to offer me a Googling pastime while I ride shotgun on a long road trip, and of course to wonder who feels comfortable enough to proclaim “Save the Tatas” to all of their fellow drivers.

Now, this is not to say that I don’t agree with some bumper stickers, and that the ideas expressed are not useful or important. I mean, I am all about “Saving the Trees” or visiting a sweet national park, however, more often than not I find myself rolling my eyes when another car passes me, with a sicker-laden bumper.

Never afraid to admit my own hypocrisy, I will say that I do have one magnet on my bumper, and one small sticker on my back window. I have my 13.1 magnet (those are the number of miles in a half marathon in case you don’t know) and a small fish sticker with the letters BSU AFS inside it.

Before you go jumping to conclusions that I put the 13.1 sticker to gloat everyone “look what I did!”, that’s not it all. I have that magnet on my car to remind me of what my mom achieved. Never having run more than 4 miles at once, she ran an entire half marathon, without stopping. So, selfishly, I use that magnet as a constant source of encouragement that nothing is impossible if not succeeding, is not an option. Do I need it on my car to remind me of the memory? Certainly not, but the magnet was a gift from my mom, and it would just be rude for it go unused.

As for the fish, my good friend and I designed the sticker to further promote the organization that helped make me the person I am today, and introduced me to some of the people I love the most in the world. To most people, the letters inside the fish mean nothing, and it just looks like a fish sticker (which is fine, because fish are freaking awesome anyways), but to me it means so much more.

So, as I write these last paragraphs, I realize that I could venture to guess that a lot of people have similar stories to mine that go along with each of their bumper stickers. Never having feared self-transformation or a change of opinion, maybe now I have decided to be less perturbed by bumpers speckled with stickers, and instead understand that the stickers, in whatever quantity, must have a meaning to the driver who decided to put them on there.

[restlessjourneyor-blog]

A PCT through-hiker, a hippie family, and fellow a Hoosier

After I dropped Mom off at the Medford airport at the conclusion of our 4-day road trip Oregon-bound, I came to realization that for all intents and purposes, I was slightly, kinda sorta…. homeless. My future field partner and I had been looking for places to live in Medford, Central Point, and Talent, in hopes of finding a month-to-month place to live for the 4-month duration of our job. I quickly learned that finding housing, at least in southern Oregon, was HARD. Fresh out of college, where you walk down the street and see almost every house/apartment for rent, this was a wake-up call.

I knew of hostels in Ashland, another nearby city in my area. I fortunately scored a bed for two nights in the Ashland Commons, a SWEET, tidy, mural dotted hostel located in the heart of Ashland. After exploring downtown Ashland for a bit, stopping by a farmer’s market to stock some fresh strawberries in my cooler (my only food supply) I parked in the hostel parking lot for some reorganization time. My car was a mess after having lived out of it for 4 days…

At the conclusion of “gear Tetris” in the Hyundai, I chilled on the top bunk, decompressing after hours of traveling. I meandered out into the kitchen after I heard the tell-tale clanking of dishes and thud of footsteps.

**I should take this moment to point out the fact that I am a hopeless romantic (I place 90% of the blame of Nicholas Sparks, whose books I read as though they were the only form of writing that existed back in the early 2000s). So, when I decided to stay in a hostel I had written my love story in my mind, one involving mysterious (and attractive, of course) world traveler who was also stopping by that hostel for a night’s stay, whom with I would then fall madly in love and the rest of days would be spent traveling the world together. Needless to say, my life is NOT a Nicholas Sparks novel, so instead of meeting my soulmate, I met Rambler.

A PCT through-hiker, Rambler was a wealth of knowledge about the dos and don’ts of the trail, as well as the gear that was the best. He was also full of stories woven by threads of humor, heartbreak, and advice (if one chose to see it that way). From Rambler, I learned (or was reminded) that life is hard, and Nature offers a unique comfort to sadness in a its vast forests and miles and miles of trails. He was on his 2nd time through the PCT, driven to the outdoors by divorce, as he searched for an outlet for his pain. He also taught me that $1.50 mosquito nets from Walmart are just as good as $30 mosquito nets from a name brand, and that the plastic used for window covering in house projects, works as a perfect mat to protect your tent or sleeping bag. I find that most things in fact, are this way: less complicated and not as they seem.

As a PCT trail hiker, minimal is maximal. Meaning, the less the better. Rambler was too the point of cutting tags out of his clothes just to save that extra 0.05 ounce, because it all adds up and it’s useless anyways, right? The duct tape trick involves putting pieces of duct tape on all of your pieces of gear, only to be removed when the gear was used. What a simple lesson to remind us to get rid of the duct taped things in our real lives (90% of my taped items would be clothes).

If I ever find myself near the Bishop Hostel in California, I know to forego the high-class dinner (or in my case McDonald’s) and head to the bowling alley instead for a lobster dinner…who would have thought?

I dropped Rambler off at one of the PCT trailheads outside of Ashland (saved him a 14-mile walk). It was great to get to know him, and I wish him the best of luck on what I have learned to be a rather treacherous PCT this year.

                                                       ----

As I was chatting with Rambler another hostel inhabitant entered the conversation. Seemingly in an unspoken competition for the most interesting “divorce stories” I learned more about these people than I asked to. And I have found that to be a common theme among the people I speak to. I, myself, am the opposite. More often than not, I avoid any “self-topics”, or personal professions that clue the fellow conversationalist into how I think, or what has happened to me during my life.

Yet, there I was, sitting at the kitchen table, more or less an observer of these people’s seemingly tragic life stories. The other hotel inhabitant was one of three guests in the same family. She, her son, and her boyfriend (the boy’s father). The mother was the sweetest women. One of those types of people who wears the smile of someone enjoying life every second of everyday. Aside from divorce stories, she also bent my ear with tales of the adventures she had been on, and the places she had lived. Her boyfriend (a spitting image of one of the contestants on Survivor from this past season), had one of the most piercing gazes I have ever experienced. On a side note, I felt as though he was analyzing your soul instead of just listening to the words I spoke. I never saw the man wear shoes. In a traditional hippie fashion, he was shoe-less 24/7. These people were the salt of the earth, and I was sad to s e them go. They left me with a pleasant hostel experience and the recipe for the best almond pudding.

                                                       ----

Upon returning to the hostel on my first night I met the new guest, with whom I also happened to be sharing a room. She was only staying in the hostel for a couple of nights as she had decided to keep her belongings in a storage unit and to camp instead of spending money on other housing (super badass). Weirdest part…. she was from Indiana. She went to IU and had spent most of her life in the Midwest (seriously, what are the odds). However, she had called the west her home for the past couple years, working seasonal environmental science positions. We chatted science and biology, as we strolled through the famed Lithia Park. Forestry her specialty, she pointed out trees and plants for me to learn.

We chatted about traveling, and the places we had been. As we swapped mountain backpacking stories we pondered what it would be like to overcome the ‘veil of disbelief’ that is traditionally our involuntary response to seeing a sight that takes your breath away, and renders you unable to  cannot fully comprehend its reality. I spoke of standing at the edge of Black Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park, in disbelief, as we overlooked the “photoshopped” snow-covered mountains, plunging gorges, and pine forests, as the strength of wind held my body up. My inability to completely fathom what I was seeing almost inhibited my ability to enjoy it, or to even convey it to those who were not there in the moment. She surmised that if we were ever able to “overcome the veil of disbelief” it would be an otherworldly experience. I fear that we might never be able to achieve this feat. Good food for thought…I might argue that any attempt to achieve this goal of overcoming the veil might be futile, as the more we see, the more we wouldn’t be able to believe that is was possible for all of this to exist.