I know this blog has been something of a flop, at least as frequent or comprehensive posting is concerned, but hopefully it's given you something to read on occasion. This post isn't about something that happened to me, as you'll see-- it's about where I live.

(from the 3/21/07 edition of the Desert Dispatch, the local "newspaper.")

Sheriff shoots at a suspicious substance -- Suspected sodium peroxide taken out of Barstow
By staff writer Aaron Aupperlee

BARSTOW - A detective from the sheriff's bomb and arson squad fired two shots at a possibly explosive substance in an old metal can Tuesday afternoon not knowing what would happen.

"Until they were able to take that sample, twisting the lid could have set it off," said Det. Jim Maham of the bomb and arson squad.

Maham's two shots from a high-powered sniper rifle punctured the container and the substance, preliminarily identified as sodium peroxide, spilled onto the ground in the dirt lot between Hooz on First and Starlight Donuts. A barricade of sandbags protected the surrounding area. Brian Otter, an environmental health specialist with the San Bernardino County Fire Department's Hazardous Materials Division, took a sample of the substance and determined it was safe for transport away from Barstow. Otter said his team would contact the state and arrange for proper disposal.

"All clear," Otter said at around 2 p.m.

That was not the case at around 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning, when someone found the old metal can somewhere in the alley between Second and Third avenues. The Barstow Police Department and Barstow Fire Protection District were called.

Fire Chief Darrell Jauss said the man who found the can did not know what the substance was but claimed to have seen similar substances when he was in Vietnam. Jauss said the military used sodium peroxide in oxygen generators. It can be very volatile and reacts with water and air and is sensitive to shock, Jauss said.

The San Bernardino County Fire Department, the hazardous material team and the bomb and arson squad were called in to assist the fire district and police department. The gathered departments decided to attempt to dispose of the substance on site by forcing it to react with water rather than risk transporting it.

"It's relatively safe, but it is old enough that they don't want to mess with it," Jauss said. "Better to use the materials and skills we have to safely blow it up here than have it go off in the back of a pick-up truck."

However, after shooting the substance and testing it, Otter made the decision to empty the substance from the container and take it away. The test, Otter said, showed that the substance was a strong oxidizer, consistent with sodium peroxide. It would require a large amount of water to create a reaction. Otter said he decided against spraying water on the substance due to the risk of possible contamination.


So, I was out in the field during this weirdness, but nevertheless, it did happen in Barstow. On a main street.


You might also be interested to note that, in the same edition, the largest photo on the front page was of one of my crewmates, Neal Halloran, from when we were all teaching a geology lesson to 4th graders at the Desert Discovery Center. It was accompanied only by a two-sentence caption. I guess they just don't have enough nice pictures to put on the front page? The first edition of this newspaper I ever saw had a picture of a car driving with sand blowing around it, with a caption explaining that it had been a very windy couple of days here in Barstow.

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.

Hey all. Once again, I'm posting on my break... this one is extra-long, so myself and 4 of my crewmates went to Santa Fe to hang out. Kim's parents have a condo here, and she lived here for about 6 months, hence the visit. We- or should I say, the other 4 people, who have licenses, drove around 11 hours from Barstow on Tuesday night, starting at 3:30 in the afternoon and arriving at around 3 in the morning. It was kind of too bad we were driving mostly in the dark, because apparently Arizona is supposed to be beautiful and we just sort of drove through it in the dark. (It was really, really odd when we started seeing signs for the Grand Canyon before we any even for Albuquerque! I think we're going to stop by the Grand Canyon on the way back.) So, you should know that Santa Fe, though in New Mexico, is at around 7000 feet, so it's a lot colder here than in Barstow. However, no one expected it to be SNOWING when we pulled into the parking lot. There were a couple flurries we drove through on the way, once we hit New Mexico, but it was definitely a surprise to get there and step out into 2 or 3 inches of cold, wet snow! Not necessarily a bad surprise, mind you... it's kind of nice to be in a place with real winter, for a change. Barstow, being in the desert, gets pretty damn cold and windy at night, but there's no precipitation whatsoever. Anyway, Santa Fe is nice, lots of galleries and stuff... kind of full of really rich people, which is fine, just a bit odd after Barstow. There are nice coffee shops. We're going gallery-hopping this afternoon, so that should be fun. In the meantime, here's a couple pictures.

Snow falling in the parking lot as we arrived!
Ted came outside barefoot to retrieve his sleeping bag as I was taking pictures...
The next day, we walked around the center of town, and saw this excellent graffiti.

I'll post some pictures from hitch tomorrow.

I cut my hair.

Before:

During:

After:


So there you have it. Over and out- going to the desert- see you all in a few days. Oh, and have a good Thanksgiving.

So. I really don't like mass emails, but I would like to let everyone who's interested know what I'm doing for these 8 months of my life-- thus the blog. I know it's been a while, about a month and a half at this point, since I moved here, and longer since I've talked to some of you, but I thought that sending this out late would be better than not doing it at all.

I'm going to start by bringing this up to date, but since it's been so long, I'm going to post a series of entries, to keep them short enough to read! There will be pictures, too.

...moving on to the actual updating...

I don't know how much you know about how I got to where I am today and what I'm doing these 8 months, but I'll give you the basic outline just in case:

When we graduated this past spring, I knew I wanted to take a year off from school, but I also wanted to know where I would go in the fall of 2007. I ended up deferring from Reed College. When school ended, I didn't know what I'd be doing for my year; I'd applied to a bunch of programs through AmeriCorps, a public service organization sort of like the Peace Corps but only within the States, but hadn't heard back from them yet.

(If you're wondering why I only applied to things in the U.S., the truth is this: I would have liked to be doing something of service in a different country, but I read a lot about it, and it seems to me that a lot of young people in America who want to do some good in a gap year go somewhere else to help, when there is so much that needs doing here; it's kind of hypocritical to not do anything about the problems of your own country while you go off somewhere else and try to help with theirs. The problem is also that a lot of people think they're helping so much when they go to a Third World country and help out, but in fact a lot of programs are very much ways for well-off individuals to see "exotic" locales while feeling good and charitable, and not very effective. The few I did see that looked and sounded like they were really there for doing good work actually cost money-- the communities those programs worked in could not afford to support themselves, much less an extra person used to a much higher standard of living. I need to make money, not spend it, so that I can contribute to my own tuition at college. For all those reasons, I didn't even apply to any overseas programs or jobs.)

I worked for a time for the Choate Alumni Association, calling alumni and asking them for money. It was, needless to say, not the greatest job ever. I'd looked for others, but I didn't find anything I could do for just a month or so. The reason I needed a place to work for that short a time was that Chloë and I were going to Tokyo for a month in July, an utterly AMAZING gift from Chloë's parents. My mom said I could go so long as I found a year-off job to pay for my student contribution to Reed before I left. While I was working for Choate, I applied to a second round of AmeriCorps internships, ones more focused on the environment, as well as City Year in San José, California, and did some interviews. One of the ones I found about two and a half weeks before I left for Japan was a program called th Desert Restoration Corps, which was described as several crews of about 8 people each whose job was to help the desert recover from being regularly run over by people on OHVs (Off-Highway Vehicles, also known as All-Terrain Vehicles/ATVs-- stuff like dirtbikes and four-wheelers). After I applied, I was sent a link to a bunch of photos from the program. People looked happy, and the landscape was not only beautiful, it was totally unfamiliar. The whole atmosphere put off by the pictures was really relaxed and great, and the work would be manual labor, not teaching (most AmeriCorps positions are for teachers in some way). They finally contacted me about having an interview about a week before I was supposed to leave for Japan, and scheduled a time on the day before I was supposed to leave. I did a phone interview with them in the morning, and that afternoon got in the car and drove up to Chloë's house. As I was in the car, stopped for gas along the way, I get a phone call from Cody, the person who'd interviewed me. He offered me the job, and I went from totally exhausted and anxious (from preparing for the trip) to ecstatic! A great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I went to Japan feeling awesome- I knew what I'd be coming back to do!

Here are a couple pictures from that trip:

Me in Harajuku, a section of Tokyo that we spent a lot of time in.

Chloë's and my host mother, Tomoko, and I, on a trip to the mountains.

Chloë's and my host father, known to us as "Otousan" ("Father").

Chloë and I in our yukata! We went to see Kabuki in them, and all the old ladies thought it was really cute.

Our feet, in a park where we later saw a band called Merry. Don't our feet look happy? :-)

That's all I can handle typing for now, but later today I'll try to actually get to pictures of what I'm doing now up.