Tour De Camp

Normally I like to tell a genuinely amusing story or otherwise over-embellish a mundane event on this blog, but this week I find myself at a loss for a good tale. I’m sure something did happen, but the truth is that this week was mostly just drudging through some pretty grueling work since two of our technicians left on vacation at the same time that our squirrels decided it would be fun to explode babies everywhere. So rather than complain about the tribulations of the week, I am going to take a big ol’ step back and instead show you what the camp looks like. A little tour de camp, if you know what I mean. (No, this is not lazy filler material. Nope.)

First and most importantly, of course, MY HUT. Although it looks delightfully quaint and comfy, I assure you, this hut has a dark side. Early in the season I had problems with a squirrel living underneath it. My friends and I took the obvious approach to enact a quick and simple fix: jam sticks all around the bottom of the hut to prevent anything alive from entering. Since then the sticks have slowly fallen out or been displaced (probably by some living thing) and I have instead learned to ignore the sounds of something desperately scraping at the plywood in the night. What was initially totally fucking creepy is now just background noise. As my friend Allison would say, Personal Growth. More recently, some wasps have decided to set up camp nearby. These wasps have the most bizarrely counterproductive mindset, putting all their determination and will into entering my hut one by one and then immediately regretting this decision and attempting to exit. Of course, wasps do not have the excellent internal map of their superior bee friends and this means they spend the entire night buzzing like motherfuckers against the plastic of my hut. When I can’t handle it anymore, I grab some blunt object and whack the shit out of them from the outside of my hut. This is extremely effective but requires the motivation to become vertical.

Anyways. That was a lot of ranting about my hut. Apparently I have a lot to say about an 8 x 10 plywood structure. And lo and behold, another plywood structure! (Spoiler alert: EVERYTHING IS PLYWOOD) This is the cook shack. The hoppin’est place at Squirrel Camp, this is where a lot of the magic happens. Not the productive, work-related magic, but the nooks and crannies of activity that occur between work and sleep. It’s a mutual relaxation zone, and although it’s where I feel I spend 99% of my non-working time, I can’t think of anything very special to say about it. There you go cook shack, you’re a place. (aside: Naomi and I went into Whitehorse a few weeks ago, where we found a postcard for sale that featured a very lackluster photo of the city from afar. Since Whitehorse isn’t really that picturesque, and it was just a day of mild, somewhat sunny weather on the day the photo was taken – no northern lights, no beautiful night sky, no great clouds over the mountains – it really just looks like a parking lot. We decided the caption should be “Whitehorse: It’s a Place.”)

Next, another mutual zone: the data hut. It’s colder than the cook shack and all we do is work in there. Really not my favourite place. It often forces you to be in isolation because everyone prefers to be in the cook shack since it is warmer and reeks less of frustration, so people only trudge themselves over to the data hut (that whole 5 meters) if they really need a computer. At the beginning of the season it was fun to explore the data hut though because it has all of our equipment in it, like all of the telemetry and radio collar supplies. And it’s true that I’ve had some hilariously overtired times doing data entry with other exhausted squirrelers in the data hut. Many nonsensical songs have been sung within those hallowed plywood sheets.

I hope you feel closer to the Land of Acorns now. It is a magical place where birds flutter down onto your shoulder when you sing to them and truly you are One With Nature. More accurately, when we sing the birds all fly away in fear. Even the ravens that sound like they’re choking on their own anger when they sing. Wow, ever seen a ramble? ‘Cause there it is. Ok, gonna peace it.

-       SARS

Thank you for the tasteless nickname, Alec.