family on fire

I love my Fire 6 family. Seriously!! I really can’t believe it only took one month and one project round to come to this place. It really feels like a family… a group of people I am forced to have relationships with, have genuine love for, bicker with, fight with, get in trouble with, and laugh my ass off with. When we got back to Denver and saw everyone else on campus, an overwhelming feeling of pride and relief hit me. I wouldn’t want to be on any other team. My team is the shit.

My team is ridiculous. There are some serious characters. Sometimes I want to kill people, and sometimes I can’t contain my laughter. Our team has really defined its personality over the month in Texas. People are very vocal. People speak right up to put someone in place. Every single person on the team loves to party. It’s beautiful. My team has this weird obsession with thrift stores. Don’t get me wrong, I love goodwill, but I’m not down to go thrifting four times a week.

I’m also feeling pretty accomplished at this point. My team of eleven people removed 33,000 salt cedar plants (from little weeds to tall trees). My arms and legs got jacked, but, I don’t feel like I made any kind of impact on the environment or the fight to eradicate Salt Cedar plants, but I feel like I worked my ass off at a job that had no end in sight. The techs we worked with everyday were very upfront and honest about their feelings toward the work we were all doing. They had been doing salt cedar removal for the past year, and they said it just keeps coming back. At some of the tracts we went to all you could see was salt cedar. It was impossible to feel like our work was meaningful. But I am so impressed that we got in the van everyday at 7:15, cut down hundreds of trees everyday, sweat through our shirts, got cut up on the brush, got ticks, and still managed to joke around during our breaks. I think we all learned a lot about pacing and exploring. It was amazing being out on these tracts. We were working next to the Rio Grande everyday. If we were so focused on the plants, we would have missed so much. Everyday was an adventure… Dealing with border patrol, finding abandoned clothing and living supplies, running into armadillos, and finding out things about each other.

After removing the layer of dust and bugs from my skin, I would sleep so well every night in my trailer (except for the night my bunk bed broke off the wall). The first week we did not do much at all. We came home from work and crashed. We got used to the exhaustion though. I’m really thankful that I have such a rowdy team. We went to a few hockey games, watched football at bars, shopped, ate Mexican too much, and most importantly, became regulars at Sofie’s Saloon. Ok think of the best hole in the wall bar with year round Christmas lights, giant backyard, bbq, shuffleboard table, juke box, indoor smoking, dirty, dirty, dirty, Texan bar… That’s Sofie’s Saloon. It was heaven on earth. We were regulars. My idea of bars are forever changed.

At the end of the four weeks in Texas, we cleaned out our trailers (it was a close call for me and Gina’s trailer), got in the vans, drove through Austin and Amarillo, arrived back at Campus in Denver, went to 4Gs (the Mexican bar across the street), and did a quick one day wrap up of our project. 24 hours after getting back to Denver I was on a plane to Boston. Right now I’m just enjoying my wide open schedule, and relaxing my muscles for the Winter. In January Fire 6 is headed to Arizona for 2 months to do trailer work and park maintenance at 4 state parks… Bring on the camping!