Field Dispatch: MDC STL
Last week, our Outreach Coordinator JP joined a team for a project with the Missouri Department of Conservation focused on glade and woodland restoration. Below are his daily field dispatches giving a snapshot of life on project.
Monday
My morning begins similarly to many other Mondays in ERT: rushing into a Quik Trip for breakfast on the way to HQ, lamenting that I didn’t go to bed earlier, and telling myself I’ll do better next time (I think this every project week). With breakfast tacos secured and only a few minutes to spare, I lug my project bags inside and head to our morning briefing. I join the field teams scattered around our member lounge, clutching coffees and Red Bulls and generally looking as bleary-eyed as me. Folks say their hellos and share their weekend highlights, or show off their new gear— it seems Carhartt overalls have made their annual comeback. Staff give us a quick briefing and winter driving training and we break into our teams.
I join my five other teammates heading to Meramec State Park this week and we divy up tasks for pack out. The shop, locker room, and parking lot hum with activity as 30 of us load our trucks with gear and tools. We’re like a colony of ants, a nest of us dashing about, moving with purpose, bumping into each other in the tight corridors but scarcely reacting. Outside, the morning silence breaks as members rev saws and blowers before they’re ratchet strapped into the truck beds alongside coolers, packs, and tools. Teams stand by to depart and members steal away to say farewell to friends heading elsewhere; some projects are ten days, some are five, and the nature of team scheduling means it could be weeks before people are reunited– the goodbyes carry weight.
Our team mounts up in an old F-250 dubbed “Big Milk” and begins the drive to the Walmart near Meramec where we’ll stock up for the week. From my previous year with ERT, I know the value of a speaker on these long drives– nothing curses the vibe for a project like a silent truck. I clip my JBL to the dash and offer up the aux to the team. Avalon accepts and plays us on our way with a mix of folk and pop, good energy for a Monday morning drive out of the city. We discuss meal plans and snacks on the way to Walmart, making note of our must-haves for breakfast and lunch. The grocery run can be a high-stakes operation: the constraint of the food budget and the whims of individuals tasked with gathering group food can lead to disastrous outcomes. Nadya declares she won’t go another week without fruit, and I dig my heels in on getting us hot sauce. Negotiations can be tense, but the team is easygoing this week and our haul satisfies everyone.
We arrive at Meramec and receive the keys to our housing. The accommodations are plum: seasonal employee housing with individual bedrooms, mattresses, a large living room with a TV, two bathrooms, and excellent water pressure on the showers. Spirits are high and evening plans are drafted to watch the copy of Mean Girls we found next to the TV. We pack in and snack before returning to the truck to go meet our MDC contact. We join David Sheih for a short cedar cutting session near the park, heading back after clearing out the last few trees in the plot.
Our team lead Emily cooks our first dinner, couscous bowls with a slew of toppings available on the side. I bring my speaker to the kitchen and help chop bell peppers and zucchini to a jazz playlist, since jazz makes food taste better. Cade listens in on one of older songs and says it makes him feel like he’s in a silent movie, but we suspect it’s just because he fears jazz and its lack of boundaries. Around the dinner table, we set goals for the week to a backdrop of “inspirational” music that mostly sounds like medieval tavern ballads. Among the members: Cade sets out to not eat all dozen of the mini carrot cakes he bought at Walmart by himself, I hope to get some good video content, and everyone wants to improve their saw skills. We clean up for the night and head to bed early for a 7:30 start the next morning. Cade is upset we don’t watch Mean Girls but we tentatively plan to watch it the following night.
Tuesday
At 6am alarms start echoing throughout housing and I wage the mental battle to get out of my warm sleeping bag, emerging victorious. I skulk toward the kitchen looking for caffeine and make a point to thank Nadya for snagging instant coffee from HQ. My teammates exhibit varying levels of effort in their breakfast prep, but I’ve got time this morning and go all in, frying up two eggs and topping with chipotle Cholula sauce (the gold standard). I join the others at our breakfast table. We recount the weird dreams that people always seem to experience on the first night of project, and debate whether the building is haunted— an enduring ACSTL superstition about Meramec housing. We load work packs, saws, and blowers in the truck and drive off, the speaker blaring frenetic fiddle music from my bluegrass playlist.
We follow David’s truck to another woodland restoration area and hike in alongside a group of MDC employees. I’d spent two projects under David last year and we catch up on the walk. He’s especially interested in whether my roommates and I finished our marathon of the Lord of the Rings extended cuts; I appreciate our partners who remember the little things like that. We’re split up for the day, with ACSTL folks breaking into saw teams and concentrating on the cedars dotting the hillside. Taking trees in the woodland is something of a puzzle game: the cedars have grown such that you must pick your way through to cut easy ones, freeing up ground space and corridors to fell more complex ones. Avalon and I think our way through the tangle, putting eight large trunks on the ground by day’s end. I’m reminded of how quickly you can get to know someone from spending a day sawing with them: you build trust as you drop trees, communicate your concerns and ideas, collaborate as sawyer and swamper on the tasks at hand, and end up learning a lot about one another.
The day wraps up and we depart the project site, driving to Walmart to stock up in case we get snowed in as the forecast (and David) predicts. Nadya buys ingredients to make chocolate chip cookies from scratch, I get some ice cream, and Cade gets a bison meat patty. We’re treated to Nadya’s barbecue tofu over rice and we chow down, checking our radar apps between bites and anticipating a late start the next morning. Much to Cade’s dismay, we are all once again wiped out and the plan to watch Mean Girls falls through again as people split off to their rooms for bed.
Wednesday
I wake up around 9 from the light trickling in through the blinds and thumb them apart to look outside. Four to five inches of perfect snow blanket the ground, and Nadya has already raised an oddly lanky snowman beside the truck. I walk into the kitchen, just catching a shorts-and-t-shirt-clad Avalon about to go on a run. Clearly some of the team is more energized by the snow than I am. Emily gathers us after breakfast and lays out a plan for the day: we’ll do saw maintenance on a tarp in the living room until lunch and then see if David has something in mind for us. We clean cedar gunk from our bars and sharpen an extra chain each, enjoying the easy morning. In due time we’re told the roads have thawed and to don our Nomex for some burn piles near the park. We use one of our blowers to clear the snow and ice off the truck and set off to go play with fire.
David briefs us next to a glade easily accessed from a gravel road and has us clear woody shrubs and cedar from it. The cuttings stack up and Nadya, Lane, and Cade light their first burn piles to reduce the debris. They start small, but before long we’ve piled them high and you can scarcely linger by them before you begin sweating through your layers. We treat the stumps with herbicide as we cut and create a sizable clearing, but the snow soaks through my boots and after a few hours I’m happy to head out. Cade concurs, he’s looking forward to his bison burger.
Tonight is my turn to cook and I’m pulling out all the stops. I begin prepping my ratatouille as soon as we make it back to housing, dicing an endless series of zucchini, tomato, squash, and eggplant. I cook the vegetables in batches, roast two pans of chickpeas, and crumble a block of feta, creating a mountain of dishes as my teammates filter in and out of the kitchen to grab snacks or ask when we’re eating (my secret to cooking good project food is making people wait— starvation is the best seasoning). At last, I present my spread to the group and play the Ratatouille movie soundtrack over the speaker as we destroy the eightish servings set out in front of us. The mark of a good meal? Tiny leftovers. But my culinary contribution was mere prelude for the main event: Nadya’s homemade cookies, which we dig into with comparable zeal. I end the night standing in the kitchen with Nadya and Emily, honoring the longstanding ERT tradition of the bedtime tea party.
Thursday
We rose early again, scrounged our breakfasts and lunches together, and headed to meet David and his seasonals for another day of glade restoration. Upon reaching the MDC shop, David gives us a quick brief and then drops a box of devilishly good cronuts (croissant donuts) in our lap, a gift to the team in lieu of burn pile hot dogs. We trail him down a ridgetop road in the Pea Ridge Conservation Area where we would continue on UTV and foot. As we hike in under the barely-risen sun through the still-frosted landscape, we remark that people plan vacations around little moments like these— minus having to ruck in a saw— and this is just our work week.
One of my teams last year was on this exact glade with David, but aside from the lone cedar left standing at a seasonal’s request, it's scarcely recognizable covered in snow. We split into two teams: Cade and Lane join the MDC cadre opening up a pocket in the glade, while Emily, Avalon, Nadya, and I are left to start our own burn pile at its edge. The cedars I fell are feeding a healthy fire within the hour, but David’s pile is already as tall as our shoulders (he likes to describe his burn pile philosophy as the “Golden Corral” method, or quantity over quality). We marvel at his skills on the saw as well. I get a bar pinched by a tree with weird lean and David cuts me out of it and fells the tree in less than ten seconds, walking away without a glance or a word back to us. It’s the conservation equivalent of “cool guys don’t look at explosions.” Cade likens him to a samurai, but I think it’s more like watching Michaelangelo paint.
We take lunch around David’s smoldering mega pile and the topic turns to ERT’s summer Montana trip. The MDC folks are amused at last year’s “mullet Montana” movement within the corps, and around the fire we suggest ways to top it: mustache Montana, shaved head Montana, frosted tips Montana. The jury was still out by lunch’s end. We keep cutting, bucking, burning throughout the afternoon, bathing in the smoke and unfortunately getting some hair singed along the way. All the same, we hike out happy and even manage to get a ride on David’s UTV back to the truck. Inside the cab, the cronuts call out to us and at least two members fall into a sugar coma after eating a whole specimen in one sitting. Avalon makes spaghetti for dinner and the group finally gathers to watch Mean Girls with Cade. I sleep soundly my last night at Meramec but look forward to falling asleep in my own bed the following night.
Friday
The usual morning bustle is diverted to cleaning out our housing as we prepare for our last day. We finish our pack out with ten minutes to spare and head down to the park office, where we’ll meet the DNR contact to whom we were lent in exchange for housing us the past four nights. Brian, a bearded, enthusiastic park employee, welcomes us in and briefs us on the morning’s project. We’re hiking into a massive tangle of autumn olive, where we’ll cut and treat the stumps to open up the area for prescribed burns. Brian gives us an ecology lesson on the way in, describing how to determine where historic terrestrial communities are now overrun by invasive flora and what can be done to restore them.
Autumn olive is an especially aggressive invader, as we soon find first-hand as we duck and crawl to get around in the patch we’re clearing. Older, larger ones restrict movement while a flurry of younger sprouts serve as a harbinger of where the area could head without us. Brian encourages us to “move like toads” as we cut every sprout we see and spray them down with herbicide. The task is tedious and working in the shade keeps us chilled, but it’s necessary work and the team powers through. At noon we gather our things and prepare to head out, Brian sending us on our way with a hearty thank you. We make the all-important Casey’s stop on the way back to St. Louis and feast on our pizza slices in the parking lot; the week finally catches up to me and I snooze in the backseat until we’re back at HQ. The other teams are on 10 day projects and pack in is missing the usual woops and hollers of reunion. All the same, the group is upbeat and we discuss weekend plans between our AAR and debrief. Prevailing consensus? Eat a bunch and sleep in. I depart HQ and drive home to some twangy country, excited to rest but already looking forward to my next stay in the field.
