taking flight

I want to tell you about my flight in a Cessna at the end of March. Bayou Blue hosted a group from the Presbyterian Hunger Program to talk about some of the environmental and food issues faced by South Louisiana. We had a great visit with some really wonderful national staff of PC(USA). They came to my little bayou church, and then we were off to the local airport in Houma for a tour of the wetlands by air.

I had never been in a small plane before, much less had I taken an air tour of the disappearing wetlands. It was really difficult to see the coast in such rough shape. During Paddle Bayou Lafourche I learned that coastal erosion has slowed down, but only because the easiest land to erode is already gone.


Nature does not make straight lines. Those oil and gas exploration and pipeline canals invite salt water intrusion and quick erosion. Louisiana is terrible at enforcing environmental regulations. The companies are required to fill in or plug those canals when they are done. They don't.


You can see where the pipelines were, and what it did to the landscape. This used to all be wetlands, not open water. This was really hard to see.


We passed over some healthy swamp at the end, which was a little bit encouraging, but also really tough to see the incredible contrast between what is thriving and what is gone.

After we were all back on the ground, we traveled to Pointe-au-Chenes to see some of the problems from the water with my favorite wetlands hosts, Donald and Theresa of the Pointe-au-Chien tribe. We went out on their boat, not even too far from the little strip of town that's left. I've been meaning to share these two images with you for a while--





You can see the same tree from slightly different angles, but about a year and a half of erosion completely removed that tree from being on solid land. That's not high tide in the lower picture. That land is gone. It's open water.

Coastal erosion and wetlands degradation is frightening in South Louisiana. I'm really glad that I can be a small part of continuing to share that story.

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been busy

For weeks now, I've had all sorts of beautiful blog posts in my head about the many wonderful things I've been able to see and enjoy. I guess I got too busy seeing and enjoying to keep up with writing about it.

For Mardi Gras, I enjoyed Endymion with my host family and took my first walk through the amazing City Park; I went to a parade in Houma just to see and got pelted with beads; I took a bike ride at 6AM on Fat Tuesday itself all over New Orleans, at first in search for Mardi Gras Indians but ultimately just to enjoy families out in their yards, wishing us a Happy Mardi Gras as we rode by...

My dear little sister friend Abi visited on Ash Wednesday through the end of the week. We explored the French Quarter, the Lower Ninth Ward and Lakeview. We planted trees in a big freshwater diversion. We enjoyed awesome jazz at Preservation Hall. Perhaps the least expected part was how we spent International Women's Day: celebrating my friend Kalpana at a traditional Indian baby shower, where the women sang and offered blessings and we feasted on seven different kinds of rice. It was so, so beautiful.

I attended a workshop at UNO called Building Resilience the following week, and met a lot of great scientists, public workers, community organizers, and coastal residents. We discussed physical and human resiliency along Louisiana's coast, which is good and all, but the real point was driven home by Cherri Foytlin, a journalist from South Louisiana, who said, "I don't want to be resilient, I want to thrive!"

I visited Isle de Jean Charles for the first time. What a stunning place, and the people there have been totally written off by the government, who won't acknowledge their nation and build a flood protection system that excludes them.


I don't usually dress up for field work. We went straight after church.

I went to VA and DC for Ecumenical Advocacy Days and, well, let's be honest, to visit some people I adore. Reagan Airport is definitely in my top five, for being easy to navigate, Metro accessible, and a very sweet welcoming committee:


(That's Arlo, watching my plane land. I LOVE HIM. And his parents!)

It was a whirlwind, as my visits to DC/VA usually are. I got to enjoy visits with camp friends, college friends, and one of my cousins. The conference was great, offering advocacy training as well as a chance to connect with others working on issues of eco-justice. I spent a day on Capitol Hill visiting my senators' offices. I even got to enjoy a pretty snowfall. I had a wonderful, wonderful visit.

And now I'm back in Louisiana. I've been focused on this policy brief thing that I'm contributing to, to be presented to the EPA in a week and a half. I was supposed to plant trees in Isle de Jean Charles today with a group of high school students from DC, but instead we had flash flooding and intense thunder and lighting. Slowly catching up as I get ready for a lot more traveling this spring...

Beasts of the Southern Wild

I was feeling a little run down last night, so I decided to curl up in my bed early with my laptop and watch a movie. I had just received a copy of Beasts of the Southern Wild, which I finally ordered last week after hearing about it for the dozenth or so time while working down the bayou. I had only heard criticism from the communities I've been working with, so I watched the movie with a pretty steep bias.

Ok, this is the part where I'm going to start discussing the film with reckless abandon, so if you are highly offended by spoilers and haven't seen it, go away (for now, I hope you'll come back another time to talk about this and other things). If you haven't seen it, I'd be more than happy to lend you my copy. Just send me your address.

Here, I'll stick a map in here so you don't have to see more words if you don't want to:


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So that long, skinny northeast-southwest line is the road to Isle de Jean Charles (the northish-southish oriented thing at the southwestern end of the road), one of the communities I'm working with through the First People's Conservation Council. It has recently been rebuilt, but it's still just a narrow two lane road with no kind of buffer on either side of it to protect it from high or rough water. (In fact, there was a temporary road put on the southern side of it, that is being removed-- why? Why spend the extra time and money to remove something that might potentially help? Sigh, bureaucracy.) And there is definitely plenty of water there, since various levees and flood walls have completely destroyed the wetlands as well as the island itself. Pointe-aux-Chenes, which I've mentioned once or twice, is what the road connects Isle de Jean Charles to. (And Montegut, just north of Pointe-aux-Chenes, is where the movie was filmed.)

Isle de Jean Charles is the place that bayou village Charles Doucet, which its citizens call The Bathtub, is based on. And while I think the movie did an adequate job of capturing the some of the joy and camaraderie that exists in little bayou camps, I could immediately see why the people of these real-life communities take exception to the movie's portrayal of them. The people of The Bathtub live in absolute squalor.

There were a lot of things I liked about the movie. For one, it's just beautifully filmed-- yes, literally filmed in a world where most major movies are made digitally. I like that the actors and actresses were mostly, if not all, from south Louisiana (and for many, this was their first time acting).

There's sort of this whimsical, mystical take on climate change, the melting ice caps, and the destruction of the bayou, and the main character, Hushpuppy, says a lot of things about the interconnectedness of the universe. "The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right."


I liked the honesty of the very sad, difficult, complicated story line of the storm's aftermath: this community trying to fend for itself by building a floating camp and blowing up the levee that was keeping their village under water; the fact that the mandatory evacuation enforced several weeks after the hurricane, with emphasis on the "force" part of "enforced"; the one way bus tickets issued to miscellaneous towns around the US. The storm in question wasn't called Katrina, but certainly carried a lot of her baggage.

I liked the inclusion of salt water intrusion, a subtle nod to the very real environmental problems of this region. "Two weeks later, everything started to die." Here's my picture from September of trees killed off by salt water in that neck of the bayou:


There was a lot about this movie that gave me mixed feelings. Like I said, the film portrays bayou camp dwellers as living in filth. I don't think that was especially true to real life, nor do I think it was relevant to the story. I'm sure there are some people who live in run down places amidst random junk, far beyond the grid, but that's not the norm. I've been in some homes that have an eclectic collection of things, but none of them have been so dirty.

I was also frustrated by the idea of the freedom of poverty. I don't think it was especially realistic. Yes, there is certainly some freedom for a culture that is not bound by bank accounts, but I suspect there are way more challenges than benefits (oh hey, super timely article "It Is Expensive to Be Poor"!). I'm not quite sure how Wink gets to the hospital, and back. And what about food? There are plenty of scenes that involve eating, whole chickens put on grills, plentiful seafood, hot peppers growing on the floating camp... in one scene, Hushpuppy is shown munching on some leaf. What about when the wetlands are killed by pollution or salt water? How did they get fresh water? What about oil? The BP Horizon disaster happened when this movie was being filmed. All kinds of environmental problems contribute to challenging food security. When you don't have a bank account, you can't just go buy what you can't catch.

The end scene with the community walking down the road to The Bathtub, which is the actual road to Isle de Jean Charles, and the waves splashing up across it... eerie. And so real. It doesn't even take a storm, just a stiff wind or a full moon. These are communities just about ready to fall off the earth, and with practically no attention or sympathy. I mean, in the movie, the authorities didn't notice the people still in The Bathtub until after they blew up a levee to let the water out. It took a literal explosion for anyone to check on them. That was probably relatively close to reality, because as it is, there is little to no local, state or federal government assistance for these precious places, or the people in them.

I guess that's where other people step in, take exception to an otherwise beautiful movie, and try their best to raise some awareness and get some help to these communities. There's a lot of good going on down here, but it seems there are infinite challenges for each positive step taken. I know I am barely scratching the surface. But, Hushpuppy said it, late in the film, "I see that I'm a little piece of a big, big universe. And that makes things right."

Grand Bayou

This past Monday, I visited my first water bound community in Louisiana, meaning, there aren't roads or paths between the houses-- just water and trembling prairie. There is one road that ends at one family's house, by the old school house, and that's it. They use boats to get around the neighborhood.


View Larger Map

I was in Grand Bayou for another session with the group I met with in Pointe-aux-Chenes, the Mobile Farm Market. This is one of the kindest communities I've worked with yet. I was welcomed warmly into the home of people I hadn't met before. The chief of Grand Bayou was recovering from a cold, and also doesn't do cold weather, so I didn't see her. She and I have been in contact though, and she has a lot of great conservation ideas for her community that I'm hoping to help with.





The community felt very peaceful despite the frigid, high winds. I'm looking forward to exploring more beyond the end of the road, but it was definitely not a good day for a boat ride.

Aside from the one home, there was an old schoolhouse at the end of the road. It was wrecked by Katrina. It still stands empty.


Another thing I found interesting was these raised garden beds that people were talking about. It turns out, the community couldn't get funding or approval to build up levees, but could get funding AND approval to create raised garden beds. So they have some very tall garden beds that they're trying to figure out what to do with.

Grand Bayou is a quiet, friendly place. I'm really looking forward to working with this community this spring.

What even is my job?!

I arrived back in New Orleans yesterday. Even though I'm still trying to figure out which of the four time zones I've visited in the past week I left my brain in, I was back to work today. I met my supervisor at her house to take a ride down to Pointe-aux-Chenes for an evening meeting with a representative from the Intertribal Agricultural Council and the Mobile Farmers Market.

While she was getting ready to go, she asked about my time home and my travels. Somehow we got to talking about how I would go about answering relatives when they ask what I am doing in South Louisiana.

FUMBLE! (Sorry, watching the Saints game. I am back in South Louisiana.) (But also, that describes how I generally feel when trying to explain to people what my job is.)

Really, it's difficult to describe my work. The day to day is always different. Giving presentations, coordinating conservation efforts, planning and taking part in planting projects, connecting different organizations... some days I'm working from home in my pajamas, some days I'm dressed up and sitting in meetings (and some days I'm dressed down, I love working in natural resources conservation), some days I'm covered in mud. I'll let you guess which days are my favorites.

This meeting tonight was really good. There were about twenty people from the Pointe-aux-Chenes (Point-au-Chenes? Pointe-aux-Chien? I've seen it several different ways. Who knows.) to talk about first people's agricultural products. The Mobile Farmers Market gathers products from around the country-- there was blue corn flour and dried cholla blossoms from the southwest, cranberry syrup and organic corn from Minnesota and Wisconsin, silver and beaded jewlery, wild rice (real wild rice, which is very different from what they call wild rice in the grocery stores), salmon from the Pacific Northwest.

The goals of the program are not just reconnecting tribal trade routes and selling goods, but telling stories. The program has revived food traditions for many tribes, regardless of their federal or state recognition or lack thereof. The IAC works to help tribes gain better access to USDA programs, and seeks market outlets for their goods. Some very cool work going on.

I enjoyed sharing a meal and talking with more members of the community, especially since I've been partnering with the First People's Conservation Council. Tonight I met a man who invited me to work as a deck hand on his shrimping trawler this May. YES PLEASE! I have been able to have the most unique experiences here in South Louisiana. Even as a vegetarian, that sounds awesome. First day back, and I'd say I'm off to a good start!

I'll never be blue, my dreams come true, on Bayou Blue!

Yes, I'm aware that Linda Ronstadt sings Blue Bayou, but I'm working in and around Bayou Blue, LA!

Yesterday was just awesome. The whole house visited my church, a VERY friendly, welcoming, small, rural congregation who worships early and has a brunch feast afterward every Sunday about an hour away from our house in New Orleans. I enjoyed biscuits and grits and fruit salad, and I survived many hugs and lots of hand holding. There's a certain context to a place like this.

I've spoken a little bit about place and placelessness before on here. As we visited Kris and Dick's (the pastors I'm working with on the Wetlands Theological Education Project among other things) house after church yesterday and I explored their expansive library covering wetlands and ecology and spirituality and a whole lot of geography. Oh man, these are my people. Dick and I got to talking about how a lot of the trouble in southern LA is place-space related, meaning, this is currently a PLACE (which has particular, personal meaning and some sort of sentiment, whether good or bad-- the locals certainly have good sentiments about their home here) but is quickly transitioning to a SPACE (which lacks that meaning, either by being wiped out or changed to the point that you can't recognize it for its place, like building the same big box stores in every town, or the landscape being totally destroyed-- it loses its uniqueness).

Now that you've survived the geography lesson du jour (look! I spoke French!), let me tell you what it looks like:

Incredible.





 

(More of my Louisiana photos can be found here!) 

  

So the problem here isn't just that there are a lot of wetlands, absolutely critical ecosystems, eroding away very rapidly-- for example, this tree stump in the middle of the photo was ON LAND six months ago.

The problem is that the people who live here have strong ties to the place they live. For the most part, they are still subsistence fishers, meaning, they really just harvest enough to survive as a community. They really aren't selling this stuff. Without a healthy ecosystem to fish in, or solid ground to live on, what will happen to the community? And what few, small efforts have been made to move these people inland, only intend to move individuals to new communities, not the entire community together. What will they do? How will they survive without each other? Not very well.


These signs and pipelines were everywhere, for petroleum and for natural gas. Our hosts for the day also let us know that they are damaged and leaking all over the place. No one checks up on them. The wetlands are just being polluted.

It can be very overwhelming to think about.

Instead, I'm going to focus on the beautiful hospitality, the incredible community, and the good work being done to protect it all. Tomorrow is my first day of work. I'm just going to meet some of the researchers I'll be working with and come up with a contract, but it's the first step of many toward supporting some really awesome projects.

We were supposed to experience Cajun music and dancing at a place called the Jolly Inn, but the owner closed up shop to go fishing himself, so we've all agreed to make the trip another time!

Arizona, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Arizona, Utah

Brian had a flight out of Vegas on Wednesday (March 13) and the Smithbauers had a flight tour of Lake Powell and Antelope Canyon, so Mike and I drove from Flagstaff, Arizona to Kanab, Utah via Las Vegas, Nevada, which involved a lot of weaving in and out of states on weirdly beautiful highways.

Going from Flag to Vegas was weird, losing the beautiful snow cover as we went down in elevation, back into the juniper-pinyon elevation before the high grasslands and eventually the scrubby desert. It was probably in the teens when we woke up in Flagstaff, and kind of toasty once we got back to the Mohave Valley and Desert on our way up to Vegas. We hit the In-N-Out Burger, whose veggie burger is stupid (a hamburger minus the beef, so a bun, lettuce, tomato and onion) but whose fries and grilled cheese are adequate enough. That was the most local cultural thing we could think of.

The drive continued on through ALL of Clark County, Nevada, which is way bigger than I thought (Nevada, which is more than 12.5 times the size of New Jersey, has only 16 counties, while NJ has 21). It is all desert and passes through some wide open empty reservation land (Moapa).

Back into Arizona, I-15 passes through the Virgin River Gorge and over the Virgin River seven times. It was stunning. There is little in the way of geologic lead-up to the gorge, nor did I have any idea it was coming despite my frequent staring at maps, so I was in absolutely awe when we got there. For an interstate highway, it sure has views. We drove through more reservation land (Kaibab-Paiute) and saw a few gas stations and rest stops but little else.

Then Utah (the first time!). More little gas stations and rest stops till we got to Washington, then Hurricane (why is it even called that?!), before hooking a right and heading back into Arizona, through Navajo land before heading back into Utah.

We stayed in Kanab, which seemed like a sleepy little tourist stop (in the middle of the Golden Circle of national parks, including Grand Canyon, Bryce and Zion). Most of the main roads were under construction, but we had a great meal at a Mexican restaurant across the street from our hotel. Even in town, we had a nice view of the beautiful mountains, which would only get better as we carried on to more national parks for the rest of the week...

the pinyons up north

Today: field work at 5800+ feet at 19°.

I really, really, really love volunteering with NRCS (I think I'd love working for them more, but I'll take what I can get for now). Today's field work took us up to the Hualapai Reservation to Peach Springs, Arizona, which I visited in August. After a soil and water conservation district meeting, we drove up into the open rangeland north of town to spot check some conservation procedures. Apparently juniper is invasive here, so the object of this practice was to cut down/remove all junipers under 16 inches dbh (diameter at breast height, a common forestry measurement). The dbh limitation was because there were apparently some complaints about removing old growth (aka big trees).

So our job was to drive around the plot in question and spot check if there were any small junipers left. Even though it was open rangeland as far as the eye could see, it was kind of challenging, because juniper and pinyon look roughly the same from a distance in the bright, bright sun. We ended up getting out a few times to measure out 1/10 acre and count the species of trees. It was really cold and windy! Overall though, success. There were just a few small junipers that needed to be taken care of still.

Driving to and from Hualapai from and to Kingman was pretty incredible. I just can't get over the enormous vistas here. Unfortunately, they make me kind of dizzy*, but it's pretty beautiful. I also saw my first instance of "blowing dust" today, from a ranch that NRCS is working with because it is like the Dustbowl there. Seriously, the fences get so clogged with tumbleweed and blowing dust that the cattle can just climb over it. So that's not good, but it was still really interesting to see.

No antelope, no burro, so that was disappointing, but I've only been here ten days, with more fieldwork and adventures ahead--
Tomorrow: field work in Wikieup, and driving a government vehicle for the first time!
This weekend: Petrified Forest, Painted Desert, Meteor Crater and Flagstaff

*So it turns out that carsickness is a type of vertigo, which is exacerbated at high elevations. Fun!

first week rundown

This is my seventh day in Arizona. So far I have:

• gotten my brain into this time zone
• begun Arboriculture and Urban Forestry online (the irony of taking those in the desert)
• signed up for two Coursera classes
• learned how to operate a French press
• cold brewed coffee (this was entirely too strong, but the right flavor, so I'll keep working on it)
• gone for long walks every morning
• completed two of three days of week 1 of the Couch to 5k program with Mike (on a scale from couch to 5k, I am probably somewhere in the middle, although the hills and altitude may have set me back a bit)
• did a soil texture analysis (Carrizo-Riverwash complex: loamy sand! Let me know if you want to see my lab report.)
• caught up on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and Prairie Home Companion
• applied to over 800 jobs (this is not an exaggeration, but this includes 702 openings around the country within the same announcement and four other announcements with over a dozen openings-- I guess it makes more sense to tell you I applied to 14 jobs this week)
• spent a lot of time on facebook and Google Reader
• Skyped with Mom and Dad
• read half of the 12th book in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series (love love love these books)
• spent yesterday morning with NRCS on Mojave Nation land checking out cropland deficiencies (mostly due to irrigation systems that were inundated with sand)
• Yes, it turns out there is cropland in the desert. Alfalfa mostly, and some cotton. They have sheep grazing nearby here. They do floodgate irrigation by the Colorado River. It's kind of bizarre to see a swath of green in the desert. 

It's "chilly" here this morning. Yesterday's weather:

 

Blowing dust?! This apparently brought some kind of "cold front". I'm excited to do field work with NRCS at much higher elevations next week, where the high is expected to be well below freezing. Arizona?!

THREE corners

Yesterday, Mike took a half day from school to get his Arizona driver's license and plates. Obviously other adventures ensued...

After 2.5 hours at the Motor Vehicle Department, we set off to find the Three Corners. That's right, three. It's not really a thing, I just wanted to find the spot where California, Nevada and Arizona came together at the Colorado River. The earth view on Google Maps suggested that there would be agriculture on the Arizona side, desert in Nevada, and a small access road in California.


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Leaving Arizona, we drove into the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation, which I learned from NRCS this week is actually kind of checkerboarded with BLM (Bureau of Land Management) lands and privately owned lands. It was amazing to smell the greenness (I'm serious, it smells way different than the desert) of the alfalfa and cotton along the river.

The road that I saw on Google Maps turned out to be a dirt road, which we didn't feel super comfortable going down 1. without four wheel drive (the sand is pretty soft in places) and 2. not knowing whose land it was. We were just about in three states at once when we crossed the bridge though--


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So instead we went back into Arizona to drive down to Needles, California because I wanted to visit California on this trip. There is pretty much nothing in needles though, but we did find a riverfront marina park, and I got to put my feet in the Colorado River. It was cool water, but very refreshing.

We had dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Fort Mohave on our way back to Bullhead City. Upon getting home, Mike changed his license plates over, and we washed the New Jersey plates and hung them on the wall.

We've planned a trip to the Grand Canyon this weekend before I fly out of Vegas. It will be the first time for either of us to visit there. Pretty excited!

AZ hot as I thought...

So, I'm in Arizona. That makes 15 states and 4 provinces since June, 4 states and 3 provinces of which were new for me. And I thought I wouldn't get to travel much this year...

This is my first time to the southwest. I've had a layover in Las Vegas before, but that only counts so far as running through the slot machines at the terminals to make my next flight and seeing nothing but darkness surrounding all of the lights of Vegas as we landed and took off.

I landed around 10:30 PM local Friday/1:30 AM EDT Saturday after spending a sweet day in Philadelphia with a few friends. Mike kindly watched my flight status and was there waiting for me at baggage, even though I was half an hour early. We left the airport for our hour and a half drive back to where he's now living in Bullhead City, AZ, and I swear I felt like I was on the moon (a little bit tired, but really the landscape with nothing but headlights on it looks like the moon, hilly and rocky and sandy).

Mike had a blood-borne pathogens test to take at his school on Saturday morning, so I got to see his classroom and his school (there is NOTHING around it but desert and some far-off looking mountains) and met a few of his fellow faculty members. Other than that, I admittedly spent most of the weekend napping. I find it remarkable how much I love traveling, given the fact that I am terrible at time zone changes (not to mention excessive car sickness, which thankfully hasn't been an issue so far this trip). We did have dinner with a woman he teaches with and her husband, who live at the edge of a country club-- it's very weird seeing grass, but there are quite a few golf courses here in the desert (Mohave County at least borders the Colorado River, so they aren't pumping water too terribly far...)

While Mike goes to school, I've mostly sat around working on my Soil Science course online, or my syllabi for the three courses I'm teaching at William Paterson and Rutgers this fall. I have spent two days this week volunteering with the local NRCS office, which has allowed me to get out and adventure a little bit. I've mentioned once or twice on here that I've been volunteering with them since April, and I LOVE IT. Seriously. I just adore the things I've been able to see and learn about in the name of conservation all over New Jersey, and now in a small part of Arizona.

On Tuesday, I drove from Bullhead City through Union and Coyote Passes (~3500 and 3700 feet, respectively), through the Golden Valley and into Kingman to meet up with Erin, a rangeland specialist with NRCS. She took me to Peach Springs, in Hualapai Territory, via Old Route 66 for a meeting with some producers and conservationists about concerns and conservation practices in the area.


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It was a long day, but I got to see a lot of upper desert, into the mountains and across a plateau. I asked poor Erin about a million questions about Arizona vegetation, landforms and conservation, but she didn't seem to mind (she chose this as her career, after all). It has rained a little bit recently, so there are a lot of new grasses popping up all over the place, making the desert a lot greener than I expected.

Yesterday, I got to help Erin with a Natural Resource Inventory, which is basically taking note of every soil, rock and plant (and animals, which there weren't really any where we were) in a circle 150 feet in diameter. It took us about five hours, and we finished measuring and sampling just before noon. I was very grateful that there were some clouds and it was cooler at the higher elevation in the Kingman area, but it was a very cool experience getting to know the ecosystem pretty closely. Hopefully my Soil Science course will land me a job with these people in the future.

In the meantime, having a wonderful stay in Arizona!

multiple trips, part 1

This was totally crazy, but I did two mission trips back to back this year.

This all started because Katie, Mike and I were thinking about going to where the Sr. Highs would be and camping for a few days, visiting them on their half day off, because those all used to be our Jr. Highs and they asked us about a million times if we were going with them. If we went with them, who would go with the Jr. Highs? Well, it so happened that the organization we go on mission trips with needed volunteers for the Walpole Island, ON trip that our Sr. Highs were going on. Specifically, worship leader... and after a lot of thought, I auditioned. And got it. And talked them into taking on a few extra site coaches so I could drag my friends into this with me...

Week one: Jr. High trip to Irwin, PA. The Pennsylvania Turnpike was basically the same as always, and Irwin is a typical rust belt kind of town, just a little outside of Pittsburgh. My assignment for the week was to paint a shed and repair some porch steps and paint a porch and its ceiling for a very sweet elderly woman. My crew was super awesome and hard working, so we finished that project early and were able to talk the organization into letting us stain the neighbor's deck.

It was a good week. Our middle school group is a bunch of really good, hilarious kids. They attempted at one point to create some drama for themselves, but quit as soon as the adults called them on it. We had a lot of fun together. Our leadership team was pretty stellar, four men and then my dear friend Katie and me for the girls.

Week two: Sr. High trip to Walpole Island, Ontario. We had managed to keep it a secret from the high school group that we would be there, and really the only chance we had left of them finding out before their arrival was if their younger siblings on the Jr. High trip called/ sent a text when they got home. As the Jr. Highs prepared to depart on the bus, Katie and Mike and I did not board, explaining that Katie and I get too carsick to handle the bus, so would be riding with Mike. Didn't lie, just didn't tell the whole truth.

In fact, when they were dragging their feet getting packed up and on the bus, we started joking with them that they were being SO ridiculous, we should just drive to Canada instead. None of them noticed our jokes. It was 6 AM.

So to Canada we went. We drove through northern Ohio, stopping at a bird reserve and the Toledo Botanical Gardens, as well as a Waffle House (probably the best stop we made). Walpole Island is a First Nation Reservation just across the river from Algonac, Michigan, just a little north of Detroit. We took a short ferry ride to get there, across some very blue water.

I unfortunately didn't get out and about as much as I'd have liked, but did get to see a bit of the island and meet some of the residents. Interesting people, and a good range of people who were happy to welcome visitors and share their culture and history, and people who think that all people who are different from them are only on this planet to screw them over. It was very sad to talk to them. One of my favorite people I met was a woman who wanted to tell me about her trees. She was very proud of the Crimson King she had planted on the property before she could even afford to build a house there. Crimson Kings have very dense foliage and make wonderful shade trees. It was pretty glorious. Tree of the day, for sure.