Watershed!

See that stream ^^, that is where I work. The forest up here is mind-bogglingly beautiful. Which is not REALLY a word, but you get the idea. I'd say the environment looks very similar from a distance to the area around Shasta, but when you get into the forest it's just filled with ferns, moss, and these babbling streams over volcanic rocks. Our area doesn't get any snow, but snow caps the mountains at the higher elevations. As the director of NSF affairs joked with me, "wow, I think you have chosen the best place ever to HAVE to do your research" I couldn't agree more.

I was thinking yesterday about the crowning achievement idea. I guess somewhere in my heart I wish and have always wished that I had a life-long goal that I took a straight towards. I had a friend who wanted to be a vet since she was 3. And now she is. Or my father, wanting to live in Atlanta, where his mother is... and he does. Or some people ( :) ) who made it to California after working so hard for seven years. It took me a bit of reflection to realize, I am in awe of this kind of dedication, so much that I am almost jealous of it. Okay, maybe I am jealous of it. Which is OK if it spurns me to action, but needs to be acknowledged and controlled. Like anything. I am very stubborn, and I've got to watch myself from being a big asshole, especially after a DMV encounter. I think to myself, if I could dedicate that kind of time to a goal, I would be a successful person. I get angry with myself for not having ever had that dedication, only aimless wanderings. I never said when I was younger, "I want to live in western Oregon." In fact, I think I only really acknowledged the presence of Washington, and I did have a fascination with Puget Sound, but certainly a goal of Oregon was not really in the books.

For me, it's more about remembering a little of the past, I guess. When I was really little, about five or so, we had a house in the Appalachian mountains we used to go to every weekend. We only had it for a few years, but I remember I was really struggling with OCD at the time and therefore having trouble in school with the teacher (it's kindergarten, eh, not that much work). I really had my first distaste for EC then-- at home I could be "smart" and do kitchen top experiments and my father would teach me all about radio waves (to no end did I hear about why AM waves were a poor choice for the mountains)-- but in school I spent a good bit of time in the corner because I couldn't deal with the texture of laying on my kidnapper during naptime. It smelled like hotdogs in there to the point of distraction. At the mountain house, there this wet, mountainy smell everywhere (yes, probably mildew) and I could wake up and go outside and just run through these sumac woods under the pine canopy. There were snails everywhere, and trails, and trees to climb, and just stuff everywhere to explore. I guess an analogy would be that EC would be kind of like milk, and the mountains would be kind of like a fine wine-- complex and biting. In my mind, mountains in general were synonymous with freedom, which is not to say much, since I was 5 and clearly my senses were not refined. Still, it was engrained in me that when the sky is heavy and it smells of firs (all Abies smell the same IMO), the world is sharper and better.

As a "grown up" I say that forest is a pinnacle for me-- since I escaped UGA I have been trying to do anything I could to work in nature. Specifically in the woods. I have expressed that to me even the eastern woods have a complex story to tell; they are not beautiful, but they do spin a great tale! When I left UGA I applied to 147 jobs ( I counted) until I got one of them... my boss had never gone to college... I remember him telling me, "if you do well, one day you could have your own store in a mall and make 40000 a year." Geez. Rog gave me a wake up call and I sat down at the basement counter and I wrote out "Mission Mountain"-- it was 2007 and my goal was to be in the mountains by 2010. I guess it worked out, although in a truly K manner it worked out much more because of fortuitious circumstances than because of hard work. As much as I'd wish I could say, leave it to fortune and let work be damned, the fact is, both are important, and work moreso.

The point of this long ramble is this: in the picture above, there's a beautiful stream! I live there. My job is to go out into the woods and learn more about them-- how they work, what story they tell, how they look, what their jobs are, who do they associate with? In some metonymic way, I see myself in the Appalachian mountains, watching a slug break down a leaf. That's my job-- listen to the story that the mountain forest tells! And that... is just plain awesome.