So, I know many of you reading this blog have a fairly good idea of what it is I do... but some of you may not, and so here I am posting the essay that I wrote describing "my activities during my year away from school" for Reed College. You can read it if you'd like, or just ignore this post. The next one will be a lot less formal.

During my year off, I am in a program that less resembles an office job than manual labor. From the start, I intended to do something service-related, but I also needed to be able to make my student contribution to Reed in the fall, so I began by looking at internship postings through AmeriCorps, attracted by the AmeriCorps Education Grant. Initially, I applied to a variety of year-long internships, most of which revolved around education. This was not by design, though I am a firm believer in the necessity of education as a basis for a functioning society; I was unaware that AmeriCorps places such a strong focus on education. One of the internships I was most interested in is called Public Allies, which apprentices a few young people with socially beneficial nonprofits in each of _ cities on a full-time basis each year. It was promising—the work would have been challenging, the support provided by Public Allies invaluable for a first-job situation—but that’s exactly what it was: a first job. Out of the nine finalists in my city, there was one other person who had just graduated from high school; the rest were college graduates looking to break into non-profit work. I was interested in helping to provide the services each of the prospective non-profits offered, and even in learning how nonprofits work, but I realized that I did not want to take on the burden of a nine-to-five, office-type job at this point in my life. I also realized that one of my priorities was to be in a group of people my age. Though I was fairly certain I did not want to do Public Allies, I kept my options open at first. I reconsidered what types of programs I was applying to—up to that point, mostly internships for one person in a larger organization—and began looking specifically at positions with groups of interns.
I had learned of City Year from a family friend at a young age, when my mother, the friend, and I attended one of their closing ceremonies. It had seemed very exciting and energetic, and though at the time I thought of the City Year graduating class as “old,” all City Year programs are made up entirely of recent high-school graduates. I applied to the City Year program in San José, California. Though I was accepted into the program after a brief waiting period, I was still having second thoughts. As I mulled over the options, I realized that though being in a group of young people was a high priority to me, I was feeling hesitant about Public Allies not because of the ages of my fellow finalists, but because of the different life-stages we were in; doubtful about City Year because of its rigorous, pseudo-militaristic structure; and shy of both programs because they were so education-centered. Education is an integral component of any effort for change, but at that point in my life, I felt less like taking the time to educate and more like getting out there and working on something concrete. I most wanted to work on an environmental issue, but I didn’t particularly want to do canvassing work, though there are many environmental organizations that employ young people for that purpose.
After an intensive research session, I found the Student Conservation Association, an organization begun in 1957 by Elizabeth Titus Cushman with the aim of involving students in the conservation of federal and state lands. Today, the SCA has expanded its mission to include restoration. While conservation is focused on the maintenance of trails, parks, and the like, restoration’s key component is assisting the ecosystems of damaged, over- or improperly-used areas in ecological recovery.
The program that I settled on is called the Desert Restoration Corps, or DRC, based out of southern California’s Mojave and Sonoran Deserts. It’s one of several corps programs run by the SCA. In the case of the DRC, each corps group (called a crew) is contracted out to the Bureau of Land Management office responsible for a particular tract of damaged desert. My crew works in the Ord Mountain Limited Use Area, under the Barstow Field Office of the Bureau of Land Management. We camp in the area of desert that we are working in, sleeping in tents or under the stars, and bringing the tools we need to work and the food we will need to cook with for the next eight or nine days.
The DRC exists primarily because large sections of the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts have been damaged in recent years by the explosive growth in popularity of off-highway vehicle (OHV) usage. This is because off-road vehicle riding, by definition, takes place off of paved surfaces, and experienced riders often seek out the most challenging terrain. “Challenging terrain” can easily translate into “least road-like conditions” – or open, untouched land. Parts of the desert my crew works in, the Mojave, are ideal from an OHV-rider’s point of view: there are mountainous, rocky regions for a challenge and expanses of “empty,” sandy land for getting up speed. Though OHV riders have been active in the area since the 1970s, increasingly widespread family usage of OHVs has raised some public concern over the related environmental issues and prompted the Bureau of Land Management to initiate restoration projects in its “limited-use” lands. Limited-use lands are those in which the Bureau of Land Management has designated certain routes as legal; all other routes, i.e. those created over time by OHV riders going off-trail, are restored or otherwise obstructed.
It is my opinion that most instances of OHV riders going off-trail are a result of ignorance, rather than malice; but malicious or not, the damage caused by a single instance of riding off-trail is devastating. By running over a piece of desert just once, the dormant seeds just below the surface of the soil will be killed. Those seeds are responsible for the sudden bursting forth of life in the spring; without them, a critical food-source and habitat are gone. Desert ecosystems are typically extremely fragile; and, as with all ecosystems, interdependent, so that the lack of spring-blooming plants affects animals such as the desert tortoise almost as much as having the sheltering creosote bushes destroyed, or their burrows directly run over. Though many people seem to think that the desert is “empty,” the Mojave Desert is far from empty. This impression is probably a result of seeing a lot of pictures of the Sahara Desert’s sand dunes, or perhaps because many of the animals that live in the desert spend a lot of time underground. Burrowing is, for creatures such as kangaroo rats, lizards, and certain owls, a means of regulating body temperature in a place that goes from over 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the day in the summer to the low 20s at night in the winter, with additional wind-chill.
The crew I work on tries to alleviate and prevent the kind of careless destruction perpetrated by off-trail riders, with both tools and outreach. The major methods of actual restoration include using rakes and other tools to erase the marks vehicles make, collecting dead branches and entire dead plants from the surrounding area and ‘planting’ them in the illegal trails and roads, generally continuing the natural visual lines of the area—with similar rocks, plants, and grading; and, one of the key defining features of restoration, using seeds collected from local bushes and plants in many seed pits sheltered under the branches of each dead bush. The rationales behind all of these are really quite simple: first, to prevent further destruction and trespasses by making the trail or road disappear as completely as possible into the surrounding landscape, and second, to assist the ecosystem as far as possible in recovering from the damage.
We work as a team at all times, but during each hitch (what we call each period of time that we work in the field) there is a designated Hitch Leader, who organizes the hitch, from food purchasing to the exact roads we will be working off of. Each member of the crew has a partner and a specific set of duties for each hitch, going by the headings of Water, Vehicles, & Technology; Food & Kitchen; or Gear & Tools. These designations rotate hitch to hitch, allowing everyone to become proficient in all aspects of the work we do. The most specialized designation is Technology, the pair that use a handheld GPS unit to collect data about all of the incursions we restore, taking ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs each time and monitoring the number of dead plants used, the amount of seeds used, the length and width of the incursion, and the landform of the area, among other data.
The work that we do can be satisfying and frustrating by turns; some days, we get a lot done, while others, we may see a group of off-road vehicle riders plunge carelessly through restoration we have just finished. In the end, though, I’m very glad to be doing this work. I am learning so much: about the desert ecosystem, about how to lead a small group of my peers, and about what I can do to maintain a positive outlook despite setbacks. I am experiencing the beauty and silence of the vast desert, in the company of a small band of my fellow human beings—I could not ask more of my time away from civilization.