Beaverton, Oregon - January 27, 2008

Well, I’m still here.

I arrived back in Beaverton, weary from my travels, having just completed a whirlwind tour of Ohio, Illinois, and California, studied French in Montreal, gone on a three-week research cruise near San Diego, and bounced between three National Park Service jobs in a year and a half, with very little respite in between. I was ready for a break.

Of, two weeks, say. Or three. Maybe even four.

Not thirteen.

Oh, well - these things happen. The last couple of months haven’t been a total waste of time. I did a lot of yard work and house repairs for a guy who goes to our church. I visited my Grandma in Florida with my parents, which was nice, since I hadn’t seen her in a couple of years. I was the foreman of a grand jury for eight hours a day, two days a week, for five weeks (minus vacations and holidays). I looked for our lost cat. I watched a bunch of movies, read a number of books, and am currently on episode 50 of an anime about a board game (I’ve got a lot of time on my hands).

Mostly, though, I looked for work. I ended out applying for around 40 different jobs. I checked job boards, sent off cover letters, filled out applications, wrote essays about my job experiences, and had a handful of phone interviews. Of those, there were a couple in late December that had seemed very promising – both of which I came in a close second for – but I ended out having to go back to the drawing board in January, and lowering my standards (as in, looking for low-wage internship work once again). In the end, though, I got a job! With a paycheck!

I’m going to be working with the Nature Conservancy in Missouri, starting on February 19, based out of either Van Buren or El Dorado Springs, as part of a burn crew. I’ll be setting up prescribed burns, plus doing miscellaneous reserve management (fencing, brush cutting, etc.) for eight weeks. It’s mostly just physical labor, but the fire experience should look good on my resume for any National Park or Forest Service jobs I apply for. Plus it’ll keep me busy until the summer, by which point I should (hopefully) have another job lined up. And now, back to the job sites…

The grand jury was an interesting experience. Unlike standard juries, that meet for a few days to work on a single trial, grand juries filter the cases that actually go to trial. So, the seven grand jurors sit in a room in the courthouse basement with the prosecutor and each of the prosecutor’s witnesses, and, after being presented with the case, we try to decide whether, in the absence of any contradicting evidence, the prosecutors have enough evidence to justify taking the case to trial. Because we’re only hearing the prosecution’s side of the story, and never hearing the defendants and their witnesses and attorneys, the vast majority of cases go through with a ‘true bill’ (at least five votes out of seven for sending the case to trial). Besides just being a rubber-stamp apparatus, though, the grand jury serves several important functions: a) on a few occasions we dismissed a case, or some of the charges, b) half the time the attorneys would change their mind about which charges they wanted to bring to trial, or about some of the details of the charges, or just about how to present the case, by doing a trial dress-rehearsal with the grand jury in advance, or c) by voting 5-2 on a charge, we could decide to send it to trial, while also signaling to the attorneys that their case had some holes in it, or that their witnesses needed to get their stories straight.

Most of our cases involved either domestic violence, drugs (usually meth), rape or child sex abuse, burglary, or identity theft (or often some combination of these), with some random assaults, robberies, various minor charges, and a gang shooting thrown in as well. We generally had from six to ten cases in a day, with between one and around twenty charges each. Of those, I only went against the prevailing vote on a half-dozen occasions (at least three quarters of our cases got a 7-0 true bill). I learned far more about the justice system than I’d ever learned before, as well as some really clever methods of ID theft. I learned that almost all the cases have a ‘rest of the story’ that we only get to hear about after we vote ("okay, the rest of the story is that both the defendant and the victim are on trial for robbing a liquor store a few days earlier, and the incident in question occurred when they were on their way to an unrelated trial for DCS meth, and that all the witnesses you heard are part of the identity theft ring whose case you heard yesterday afternoon…"). I learned that there are a surprising number of interconnections between different cases that we hear. And, I also learned that, in addition to the $10-25/day salary + transportation costs, the court provides free hot chocolate to their jurors.

Our cat, Manjari, disappeared on January 8th. She’s an indoor cat, but when we were off on vacation, she ran out when our petsitter opened the door. We looked around the neighborhood, put up lost cat posters, and had given her up for raccoon-food when – two and a half weeks later – she showed up again, in our neighbors yard. She’s almost a pound lighter, several shades darker (because of the cold – she’s part Siamese), and a little shaken, but other than that she seems unhurt. She’s been purring like crazy ever since she got back. Neither of our other cats recognize her anymore.

The only other news is that – as a result of my copious free time this month – I now have a blog. I've uploaded all my old mass e-mails, with pictures, plus a map of where all I've been. I hope you like it. I'll post future updates on this site – let me know if you'd like to continue receiving e-mail updates as well.

I hope you're all doing well,
Nathan

P.S. Thanks to Nathan L. for his advice on creating maps and backdating posts for this blog.