It Ain't Tree-sy. Ha.

Today’s stories are not one of regal squirrely accomplishment, but rather of the silly failures that a squirreler encounters. Sometimes, the nest of the squirrel you are looking for is a couple centimetres out of reach from standing on the ground, but is also located in a skinny, short tree with no branches. This results in you having to “firepole” up the tree, which is physically exhausting and causes you to grunt and sweat and struggle, but you need to cover such a miniscule vertical distance that your fellow squirreler dies laughing at the spectacle. Sometimes you leave the door of the data hut open and later find that the “camp squirrel” has entered and appears to be sabotaging the files on the head technician’s desk. Sometimes you lose your handling bag (intuitively, these are used to handle the squirrels we trap) on grid, come back to camp to get a new handling bag, rush back out into the forest so you don’t get behind on your traps, and find that you’ve lost your second handling bag already.

Of all these stories, the worst and best incident happened this week. The crew was doing a peanut butter add/remove day rather than trapping, meaning that we were adding peanut butter to buckets strung up on the middens of lactating female squirrels and removing peanut butter from the buckets of all the other squirrels. ‘Cause if you don’t got babies, you don’t get PB. That is the way of squirrel camp. So anyways, we were taking care of all those buttery peanuts, when something tragic happened. One of the ropes holding a bucket up broke. Who would handle this insurmountable difficulty? Who would be the one to step up and rise to the challenge? Who in this whole wide world would have the gumption and audacity?! None but I. So I am scampering up that tree like an adept young black bear, like a skilled lumberjack, like Spiderman. As I crest the top of the tree, the crowd below gasps in awe. They turn to one another, jaws dropped, I-can’t-even hand gestures abound. I do a cartwheel IN the tree. Just for yuks. Then I tie the ropes together in a double-hitch-back-whatchamacallit knot, knot for the faint of heart in the knot-tying world, let me tell you. Just as it seems things can’t get any more exciting, I am headed back down the tree.

All eyes are trained on me.

Down I come, like a smooth waterfall running down into only the locations of the least resistance, flowing down the tree.

I am within the last foot of the return downwards, and I am ready to triumphantly land on the ground in a perfect triple backflip, at which point the crowd will climax into applause. As I prepare my dismount, I realize that there is one minor inconvenience preventing me from executing my planned acrobatics: my pant leg is hooked over a mildly intrusive nub on the tree trunk. I attempt to dislodge. There are no branches beneath my feet, I am hugging the trunk like a koala, except a koala that is bizarrely cemented in place with only a foot of vertical distance from the ground. What are you doing koala? How does this benefit you? Time passes. The crowd falters. I attempt to dislodge.

“Why aren’t you coming down?”

A small pause as I try to assemble the words to explain my predicament. And then, I begin to laugh and bumble through the words “I’m stuck” laughterlaughterlaughter “on my right pant leg” gigglegigglegiggle “I can’t get down”

The crowd (which incidentally turns out to be two coworkers who were occupied with a different task as I was climbing and likely did not notice my ascent) begins to laugh as well, and one girl, Gaelle (better known by me using the nickname Kyle), begins to circle me looking for where I’m stuck. The more sarcastic one, Alec, instead of trying to help, begins a diatribe: “Why aren’t you coming down Sarah? It’s one foot off the ground, really, we need to get going. Just come down, jeez louise,” etc, etc, until I am laughing so hard I can barely manage to continue to hold onto the tree, nevermind explain where my leg is caught. All I can say is “no, no” in response because I can’t just come down, and Kyle thinks I mean no not the right pant leg so she is searching on my left side and I repeat “THE RIGHT PANT LEG” and she is dying laughing and finally finds where I’m caught and removes the several wrinkles of pant that were securely tucked inside that goddamn nub and finally I fall to the ground and I am FREE. With an enormous hole in my pants.

And these are the circumstances that lead to shameful patchworking in the evening time at Squirrel Camp.

This smiling and grimacing experience brought to you by:

Sarah “Klondike Kate” Nason