Let me show where your tax dollars go. They go directly towards supporting local businesses, and to feeding hungry hungry crews of government employees doing field work. We went shopping this morning for food to feed 10 people for 8 or 9 days. Multiply people-days by a per diem, and we had $2670 to spend. That makes about seven shopping carts, and took about two hours of 6 people circling the grocery store.
Not pictured: the carts containing food for vegetarians,
gatorade and pop, dinner for the crew going up today
Us vegetarians got a lot of nuts for protein and fats. The meat-eating majority got a lot of meat. About $800 worth of meat. We got some portabella mushrooms and corn to grill when they are eating steak and burgers.
However, we’re ending the summer with a bang. Literally.
The purpose of this trip is to remove culverts and bridges from an old logging road, leaving streams and salmon to move freely. This involves dynamite. Lots and lots of dynamite. $10,000 of dynamite, or 18,000 pounds of dynamite–that’s the numbers I’ve heard tossed around.
We’ll be out for 8 days, with 10 people, and remove 50 structures.
I still don’t know exactly what this will be like, but I’ve had discussions with a number of the people who be involved. First, the guy in charge, the main blaster, is a big guy. One of the fish biologists described him to me as someone who could cross the Mississippi in hip boots. Now that I’ve met him, he definitely has a Paul Bunyan thing going on.
One of the main forms of entertainment and bonding here is telling stories about coworkers. The story on Paul Bunyan the Blaster is that he is a meat eater, and really should not be allowed to shop for the food for these trips without supervision. On a previous trip he famously purchased, in addition to meat, one bag of red delicious apples, one head of iceberg lettuce, and a large quantity of Pringles. Varying reports have said that there were enough for each person on the trip to have a can with every meal, that it was 30 cans, that there are still cans of Pringles in the warehouse somewhere. Apparently they were on sale.
My intern and I, both being mostly vegetarian, will be meeting him at the grocery store tomorrow morning to help with the shopping for this trip. As he said to me, if we don’t help him, we’ll probably hate him for what he buys.
In addition, there is another blaster coming in from Canada to help with this project. They refer to him as “Daisy.” I don’t even know what to say at this point. I’ll just have to report back after the trip.
Anyway, I had a conversation with some of the fish techs about this trip–of the ten or so participants, the intern and I will be the only girls–and said that I didn’t know what the stereotypes about blasters were, but I could probably come up with some real quick. Later, I realized that I do actually have an image of a blaster in my mind: Edgar from the Red Green Show. If you’re not familiar with this marvel of Canadian television, you’ve been missing out.
Here’s Edgar. I’ll report back on the trip at the end of the month–I’m sure it’ll be a blast!
This week I spent some more time in the field, this time helping watching some folks put trees, a.k.a. large woody debris, into a stream. This makes for good habitat for baby salmon. Although it involved a lot of tromping around in the rain and a lot of no-see-ums who wanted to chew on me, it was fun because I had the right gear to be waterproof and I got to see what is involved in the restoration process.
All the trees added to the stream were red alders, a quick growing tree that takes advantage of disturbed ground in places where there were logging roads, or river bottoms that large logs were dragged through.
Red alders are tall and have white bark, and if I went by the minimal tree knowledge I had coming into this job with the Forest Service (where I have learned much about salmon, and a little about trees) I would have tried to tell you that they were birch trees.
However, once they cut a few red alders down and dragged them around, scraping off the bark, it became obvious that the inner layer of the bark is the color of a nosebleed, hence the “red” of red alder. And I don’t think you see that in a birch…
I thought it was pretty, so I took a bunch of pictures of it. In fact, I was photographing some scraped bark when they started calling my name, and suggested I leave when everyone else was walking off, so as not to leave me alone in bear country.
For the record, there was a bear spotted, but it ran off the trail before anyone but one guy saw it. I saw the tracks, but they weren’t super big.
Your tax dollars at work at local businesses
Not pictured: the carts containing food for vegetarians,
