Pathways Newsletter

At the beginning of the season, before I had even met my crew members, I remember sitting down in the garden outside of the Western Wildlands office and writing out a list of goals that I had for myself and for my crew. It included things like fostering a safe space for personal growth, a mandate for individual and collective accountability, and growing in strength in whatever way that meant for each person. On the last line of my notes, there’s just one word. A question. Play?

Most of the folks that come into this line of work can trace their first connection to the outdoors to the neighborhood stream, to the patch of trees between their house and the neighbors, or to family camping trips when they were little. I remember when I was a kid, we would spend hours in the nearby swamp, clearing muck from the channels and hopping from rock to rock. I remember the smell of the peat, the curls of the youngest plants pushing through the matted leaves. In whatever way this memory shapes itself in individuals, the association is the same; nature with play.

As is the case with most things, time goes on, we grow up, and sometimes we lose those memories. Things get busy, school happens for some, work happens for others, soaked socks dry out and mud disappears from under fingernails. We move on. But then, some of us find our way back. We see an ad online, we sign up for a season on the trails, maybe not knowing exactly what it is we’re getting ourselves into. And we go back to the woods.

This past June, my crew crouched on the banks of the Salmon River, picking through pebbles to find the prettiest ones. The next hitch we sang songs to keep us working in sync to break rocks and dig tread. In the hitches that followed, we sang and danced and waded in mountain lakes and took breaks to explore craggy cliffs and scree fields where thrown rocks sounded like breaking glass. We rolled logs off trails and delighted in their erratic tumbling downhill and learned the names of the trees, grass, and flowers we lived between. We worked long, hard days. But I held onto that question I asked myself at the beginning of the season. A  question that was starting to look more like a directive. Play.

On our last hitch, our instructions from the MCC office were to accomplish what we could, but more importantly, to make our last week in the field whatever it needed to be for our crew. With that in mind, my co-leader and I called off cutting a half hour early one day. We had spotted a waterfall earlier that morning and all wanted to explore it. We cut through the wine-red huckleberries and tawny-colored willows to a stream that fell through potholes and dropped in late-season cascades a thousand feet down to the Selway River. We clambered down between boulders, following the creek down, down down to a place where we could see the cliffs behind us and the valleys in front of us, the Quartzite Ridge of the Gospel Hump Wilderness visible far to the southwest. With the late fall sun on our faces, we hopped from rock to rock and joked around and played in the icy water.

In camp that night, we talked about the things we remembered from growing up, about mud pies and fairy houses and the in-between-woods that felt like the wild.  And about our grown-up Wilderness, now, and the joy found in just being here. The creeks of childhood were now giant rivers, and child-made tools were traded for grown-up versions. When I applied to MCC, I was thinking about bringing back some of those memories for others, to heal something, to grow something else. It’s why I continue to write, advocate, and teach on behalf of wild places. As I write this in a cafe in Missoula, there is dirt embedded in the cracks in my fingers. I’m still a little sunburned, and I have a dozen scratches on my arms that are stiff and scabbed over. And I’m happy. 

To my crew: Thank you for finding joy with me this year. Thank you for bringing the best of yourselves to this job, for working hard, and for finding joy in the sun and the rain and the canyons and the ridges. And in each other. I’m proud of you--all of you. Thank you for playing with me.