Posted 4:34 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2022
"My Time in Brooklyn"--Literacy Narrative
Part I-Introduction/Brooklyn
As many did during the summer of 2020, I sought alternative employment. While I do understand that masks were necessary during this time, I felt as if working a “normal” job on a factory floor or behind a counter with the numerous restrictions put in place would negatively affect me mentally and physically. My father had been publishing a newsletter for a conservation organization in the south of Wisconsin, the Friends of the Brooklyn Wildlife Area (BWA for the rest of this writing). When Dan was hiring paid interns for the summer, my father was the first to know, and I shortly after. Brooklyn was big. Over 3,500 acres of nearly untouched or reclaimed land, abandoned as farmers left Wisconsin for greater harvests or valuable beef subsidiaries further south and west. Very hilly, deemed inefficient for farming or housing, and protected by the state, it always needed help. I didn’t quite know with what yet, but I was ecstatic to have an opportunity to find out. To note, this was still before the pandemic. What was a sort of backburner option became my only one as March hit and Dane County locked down hard.
I quickly learned how Dan ran his ship as I signed up for my first volunteer day in the dead of January with Duncan and my father. Frenetic, spindly, with a half-head of white hair, his arms and legs pockmarked by wild parsnip burn and insect bites. A former physics professor at Madison, who took baths in lakes and slept in his cherry red, rusted out Dodge. I quickly learned that simply performing his tasks was not enough. We had to be flawless. In speed, manner, and expertise, you couldn’t lapse for a second, or he’d be on you. My brother Duncan had quite enough of his ways on the first day. Maybe he was smarter than me. Lapses in communication, a fundamental misunderstanding of technology and email, and a cutting, spiteful way of speaking that brought one’s sprits up one moment and made you want to quit the next. Dan was not a good boss. During the summer, I would learn this. At the moment, I thought his manner was mostly because of the poor weather, (it was raining that day, and the snow beneath our feet had turned to sludge) or the poor turnout, (me, my dad, my brother, and one other volunteer) but Dan never changed. Meanwhile, I talked to my best friend, and one of the few who stuck with me through the pandemic, Ryan.
Ryan is another character in this story we’ve got going. A couple inches shorter than me at six foot two, his personality made up for missing height. He’s loud, outspoken, and a captain and starting center in varsity football. Not exactly who you would expect to get along with an oddball like myself. How we became and stayed friends for five years is a story for another day.
We had worked together before, and formed a strong bond, as well as a shared hatred for middle management. Great friends and experienced colleagues, we each knew how the other worked, and were prepared to do it again. He was immediately enthused with the idea of a paid internship, and since the pay was better than what we could get in town, he sent in an application. Since I’d already met Dan, I guided Ryan towards an application that would appeal to him. Ryan already thought he was strange over the phone, and I told him what I knew at that point. Ryan and Dan would butt heads many times over the summer, and our shared vitriol towards Dan became a frequent topic of conversation during our irritable, loud, early-morning carpools as we barreled south towards Brooklyn on highway M for the sixth five-hour shift that week. Ryan’s change over the summer was noticeable, as was mine.
A long, cooped up, wet spring passed, and then summer came, as it tends to do around here, slowly. Before long, rain and mud gave way to blazing sun, and in late May, it was time to enter the jobsite for our first shift. While I will spare you the fine details of our work, our job was to identify, target, and remove invasive plants from the BWA. Dan taught us plants with the efficiency and brutality of a drill sergeant. My brain felt full of information after the first day, and I would need to learn probably 25 more weeds by heart, and 50 more by association. I can still recognize and know removal techniques for most of them. We also learned plants that we needed to save. If we stepped on, lost seeds from, or misidentified and picked these, there would be hell to pay. Kyle helped us learn. He was a college student, although I can’t remember his major. Dan loved him. He had been the only intern from the year before who lasted the whole summer. One girl had been heavily scarred over her face and arms by wild parsnip, an invasive weed, which secretes a dermatoxin that reacts with sunlight and leaves painful blisters and scars. Kyle told this with a shudder. Nearly two years later, I still have scars on my wrists where my work gloves and long-sleeved shirt didn’t cover. In our nature, Ryan and I took this as a challenge. We made an agreement to stay on for the whole summer, no matter what.
Part II-The Hillside
It quickly became clear to me that while this job wasn’t strictly dangerous, it could be. Lapses in attention led me to many spills. Dan would cycle us around work sites, in attempt to alleviate boredom. Never quite remembering or knowing what was ahead, often until the morning of, when Dan would send us a text with an address or location. We had three main sites, sometimes with smaller ones, which were usually one-day affairs. Two of these sites were out of backyards. One of these was at the end of a long gravel drive, which led to a house where a woman lived. We never spoke, and I never learned her name. Wearing our Hi-Vis and gloves, boots and wide brimmed hats, and bandannas as a facsimile for masks, we covered ourselves in bug spray in her front yard before venturing into our most daunting project for the summer, the hillside. Dan would brief us with a whiteboard and markers, and we learned to interpret his scrawl into trails and hills, trees, and dirt. We carried in everything we needed, including food and water. We were split into teams based on capability, sometimes based on our performance during the last shift. Ryan and I were usually together, as I helped keep him up to standard, and we never ran out of things to talk about. In retrospect, we should have named the hillside. It likely played a bigger role in my life that summer than my parents did.
When we left the woman’s backyard, we took an abandoned farmers’ road to the trailhead. There was a large deer skull on the road that we waved to each afternoon, probably a casualty of coyotes. Dan and Kyle would later farm tadpoles out of the puddles created by harvester tracks. The trail was nearly overgrown, crisscrossed with tree roots that would grab at your boots like the hungry hands of beggars. We constantly moved at a near-run, so getting poked and prodded with branches and thorns was inevitable. It was nearly a mile of trail to our starting zone, and we moved closer to the road as we went. We knew we had made it by the industrial buckets and tarps that marked our start and resting area for the day.
We didn’t move quickly, and to say we were slow was an understatement. It felt like a description of the Great War, and I was Tolkien amidst the combat. Allegory was necessary in order to make our progress impactful. Five feet in a day is five feet across no-man’s land. Handfuls and bagfuls of weeds were enemies, orcs if you will, to be shown no mercy. Our short break was a cease-fire, where we would scarf down sandwiches and sweet drinks, provisions to make it through the other half of our shift. We were often wet and cold as the morning dew stuck around in the shadow of the hill and trees, as well as to our bodies. Weeks passed, but the hillside, and the plants on it, remained. So, as did we.
Part III-Reverence Before the Woods
We were deep into the hillside, and the end was nearly in sight. We only had to make a short trail run each morning, and spirits were high. The sun began to break upon our backs, a metaphorical reminder of how we had struggled through the dark woods and were nearly done. Dan and Kyle would check in frequently from the top of the hill, where the true objective lay, open prairie. They had cleared it the previous year, and there was a lot riding on our success on the hillside. It was about this time when we began to change. Ryan and I were becoming adults and learning what was important. We still didn’t like Dan, but we understood his fanaticism. Jobs were jobs, and we recognized that our lives might not ever be this simple and pure again: protecting wild spaces for the sake of it, not for a false moral high ground of environmentalism, but because they are beautiful and morally gray. Perhaps it was delirium, a lack of social contact in and outside of work, the close camaraderie of a small crew, but we became superstitious. We needed a sign. The light granted enough solace for the moment, but we needed a sign that we had higher purpose, that the land trusted us with its’ stewardship. Then we found one.
The Wisconsin wild turkey is a strange bird. Mostly flightless, it bolts like a pheasant when threatened by predators, making a frantic flight into the air. A remnant of a pre-human and pre-hunter ecosystem. Late into the clearance of the hillside, we heard and saw them frequently, making mad dashes out as soon as they heard us. One day, one flew out right in front of our faces, and left a gift: three turkey chicks. Not newborn, but young, covered in down, barely able to traverse the hillside without falling. We were warm and bright in color, and they had lost their mother. Peeping and crowing, they made their way into our palms readily, and we had to protect them. What stewards would we be if we squandered the gift we’d been given? I placed my hat on the ground, and gently placed the birds inside. I had to squint in the bright noon sunlight, but I felt as if I had been given a rare and precious opportunity that day. I can’t describe what it was, but it felt like a blessing from the prairie, a test that I had passed.
Part IV-Leopold
I wanted to see if anybody else had felt this blessing. Clearly, I was not alone. Nature writing, a style of descriptive narrative, contained every secret that I had felt. I began to devour descriptions of forestry, reading for hours each day after my shifts. The Sand County Almanac became my favorite book that summer. Leopold’s descriptions and explanations of history gave my brain the stimulus and connection it needed. He felt it too! The magic that led me to deep literacy and a deeper enjoyment of writing.
This led me to struggle. My writing began to strain against the seams of my high school literature classes. I was getting poor grades in English for the first time, feeling the growing pains of developing as a writer. I felt fettered, tied down, and controlled. My allegories and longwinded description had no place in a paper about symbolism in The Scarlet Letter. I don’t think I’m a good writer, I just say what’s in my head. I’ve been influenced by Tolkien and other high fantasy, as well as the dreary description and often horrifying detail of Lovecraft. I have romantic thoughts, and those transfer into romantic words. However, no piece of writing or author or poem has had an impact on me like this internship had. I’d finally gained passion, after years and years of mediocre, form-filling writing. And it’s a tragedy that I lost that because I couldn’t see the beauty of the world around me.
Whether I’m describing the stylized woods in this nonfiction passage, a neon cityscape, or the inside of my mind, I’ve gained purpose. I don’t write so others can read it. I write so I don’t forget. If I’ve forgotten beauty, I have no reason to see. If I’ve forgotten writing, I have no reason to speak. If I forget nature, there’s no point in living. I felt the light granted to me by the woods fade in the time that passed afterwards. It only accelerated when I came to college, being replaced by hate, stress, and self-loathing. As my mind weakens under this weight, I feel the last bit being snuffed out, and it makes me yearn to bathe once again in the delicate glowing pool of the natural world. To bring the light back.