"What?"
"Move further from the ladder! It'll make it easier to climb!"
I looked down. Sixty feet below, the firefighter shouting instructions to me stood on the top of
the fire engine to which the ladder was mounted. I could see the figures of my classmates far below; I watched a bird soar by below, landing in the top of a pine tree; the ladder rocked very slightly in the wind. I clutched the ladder closer to me. "That's okay!" Wrapping my arm around the next rung, I began to climb higher.I still had another fifty feet to go.
Four months earlier, when we first arrived at Sleeping Bear Dunes, my supervisor, Amanda, had asked each of us if we would be interested in signing up for a wildland fire training course. We all immediately said that we would. For park service employees (as with the forest service, Bureau of Land Management, and other state and federal agencies), it's a common practice for employees to leave their jobs for two to four weeks in the summer to help fight wildfires: they get to travel, get new experiences, and earn massive amounts of hazard and overtime pay, while helping to stop the spread of forest fires. The problem is getting trained. Wildland fire courses aren't offered very often, so you have to jump at them when they come along. So we did.
As time passed, though, it began to look increasingly unlikely that the course would come here. The instructors would have to drive up from Indiana Dunes, near Chicago, to teach the weeklong course, and they were all busy people, with many other jobs to attend to. So, the months went by. We did our plover monitoring for two months, then that finished and we all turned to other jobs. I helped with restoration work, with seed collection, exotic plant management, plant surveys, and a whole host of other odd jobs. The interns, Pat, Paul, Clark, and Rochelle, all left, as did all the student researchers in the park, and one of the park employees. Finally, near the end of August, Amanda announced that she had at long last succeeded in scheduling the fire course, for the middle of September.
And, man, was it ever boring. Eight hours of classes for five days – I really can't recall how I coped with high school. In the breaks, the other park service employees and I all played hangman. And studied, of course. We all managed to get near perfect scores on our tests. Then,
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on the last day, we had our field day. We practiced setting up and using hoses, scraping fire lines, and burning stuff (this was the highlight of the day). Then, after our final exam, by some strange concurrence of events, we finished early. So, the firefighters in the fire department building where we were holding our course gave us a tour. We got to practice using the BIG hoses, saw the water gun (1000 gallons/minute flow) in action, and took a ride in the fire engine. And this bring us to the ladder.I have no excuse other than my own insanity – I'd volunteered for the trial (it had seemed like a good idea at the time). And so I climbed. Below, another park employee made fun of me for going too slowly. He would later get one third of the way up and have to turn back. (Ha ha…) Finally, I made it to the top. I was perched on a ladder, mounted to the top of a large truck, 110 feet above the ground. Glen Arbor township stretched out below me; the afternoon sun reflected off the waters of Lake Michigan.
Dang! - I'd forgotten my camera.
I'm just about finished here in Michigan now. For the first time since graduating from college, I don't have a job lined up for immediately after the end of this one. So, in the grand tradition of the unemployed and desperate, I head now for that fair city of dreamers and poets – Montreal. I'm going to study French for a month there at a language school, living with a French-speaking family. Hopefully by the time I finish, I'll have more concrete plans lined up for the winter season. And, if not, at least I'll be unemployed AND francophonic.
I hope you're all doing well.
Au revoir!
Nathan
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