Day Off

I’ve been busier than a one-legged woman in a rock-kicking contest.

One morning last week—after army-crawling uphill through ceonethus and alder for five hours the morning before, then driving to within a mile of Montana on dirt roads—I couldn’t get out of bed.

Everything hurt, and I worried that if I moved, something would break.

My boss had sent a group message the day before saying one of the Idaho crew would be done with all their transects by July 1st - the subtext being: What's wrong with the rest of you losers? 

I told my boss I’d be done by the 4th or 5th. If I took a day off, I wouldn’t be done until the 6th. 

The survey I was supposed to be doing that morning had been done the previous year by somebody who, I imagine, was in bad shape too, because they hadn’t had the energy to fill in the Transect Description Sheet.

I was given a blank sheet - except for a hand-drawn map with arrows pointing down the road to Montana, then down a thousand feet perpendicular to the road, across a creek, then up a thousand feet to the survey.

This map gave me a stomach ache.

Whenever I get too worn out, I start thinking about bears. There will probably be bears. It’s fourth of July weekend, the bears would probably love to celebrate by eating a blonde girl.

My stomach growled and I jumped. It was dark and scary outside the car.

Disappointed in myself, and the wasted effort I had made the day before to get myself there, I gave up and went back to sleep. And slept all day. I woke up once when I heard somebody say, “The windows are down, is anybody in there? Probably not.”

I got ready to grab an arm if they reached in for my Garmin sitting on the dashboard. Then I heard another voice say, “Let’s go check out state line!”

I hoisted myself up to see two boys in shorts and t-shirts with fishing poles on the backs of their ATVs speed off.

Then fell back to sleep until four pm. When I woke up, I felt energized. I walked up the nearby hiking trail and discovered that it went within three hundred meters of my first point. No huge scramble or creek crossing necessary.

This has been the only survey all season with a trail - beautiful! 

And I found a woodpecker family.