Week 2 Hullabaloo

Greetings, civilized world! I come to you from the land of WiFi, aka the KCC. Dave and I came back here after a somewhat rocky but overall successful week at Noble View.

It started off last Sunday with Dave and I on our porches awaiting our crew. We're officially "on" an hour before they're scheduled to arrive, and we saw a van pull up a half hour before that. Our group was from an environmentally based charter school and was being dropped off together. We already knew that our original group of 9 had been cut down to 6, but only 3 hopped out of the van. "I think half of our crew might be here", Dave said. Turned out to be our whole crew.

Week 2 Crew

Crews get cancelled if less than four participants sign up, so technically our crew shouldn't have even gone out. One had a family emergency and two were no-shows the morning of, but the people on our end didn't know. That meant we had food for double the amount of people dropped off on Sunday. It also meant we had to figure out what work we could do with a group that size. We decided that closing trail would be best since it doesn't take a lot of people, and we are closing a ton of intersections. So, Monday was spent on the northernmost section of trails closing 8 intersections. The next day we started our first re-route on the same section. A phone call and miscommunication left us thinking that we weren't supposed to be closing or re-rerouting any trail, and that the past day and a half of work was rendered useless. We had to immediately switch gears and decide how to handle the situation. 'Hey, thanks for you hard work! Undo it all!'. We decided to go to another potential worksite that I had scouted out on my own the weekend prior and deliver the bad news in the best way possible. We didn't undo any work, and thankfully so, since it turns out what we did was perfectly fine. It wasn't until the end of the week that we were able to figure it out, so it set up a week of confusion and frustration on my end.

Thankfully, the project that we switched to had

Working on the tread and side ditch

lots of work to do. There were several "waterbars" that badly needed maintenance, and a large section of tread that had a whole slew of drainage problems. Over 200 feet of trail was set into a U-shaped hillside, meaning the water had nowhere to drain off trail. We had to dig a 220 foot side ditch to give the water a pathway down and off the trail. This rendered the 4 "waterbars" useless. I use quotes around the word waterbar because really only 1 out of 4 was actually set, the other 3 were basically just a pile of rocks that someone put there (at least that's what it looked like). We removed 2 smaller ones and saved/improved 2 bigger ones. We also had to set gargoyles on one of the bigger waterbars to deter people from thinking the side ditch was their walking path. Finally, we re-cut about 200 feet of tread to make the path obvious.

Dave left on Wednesday afternoon, as he had to leave early to go home for a family emergency. Katie came in and replaced him Thursday and Friday morning, but we still had a teeny tiny crew. Thankfully they were really hard workers and were all friends, so we were still able to get a lot done. Still, I was happy to say goodbye to that week. Working with a group that small is sometimes great and sometimes crappy. We had such a long worksite that we were oftentimes working far apart, which really kills motivation. If one person in a group of 10 is tired it's not a big deal, but if one person in a group of 4 is tired it's much harder to combat.

We came to the KCC for a BBQ and a change of scenery. Honestly, it was a little overwhelming to see so many people that knew me. We've been living in a little pod for the past two weeks. It doesn't seem like long, but it's a long time to not interact with many people. After the BBQ we went out to the Gypsy Joynt, a Great Barrington favorite, for dinner, drinks, and live music. It was so awesome to go out and feel like a real live 24-year-old, doing 24-year-old things like hanging out with people and drinking a beer and wearing a dress. Today we went out to the local farmer's market, where I got a really awesome handmade and dyed leather bracelet. It was the first one the woman ever sold in that new design and dye, and she was really amped to talk my ear off about it. I happily listened.

I'm a little bummed to go back to the Noble View and leave my dirtbag friends (except Dave, he has to live with me). It's nice to be a bit secluded at Noble View, but I feel like we miss out on a lot of fun on the weekends at the KCC. I think we'll end up coming back here more often now.

Well, off to do REAL laundry (not bucket laundry) and head back to get ready for another week!