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.

A First Time For Everything...Even Milking A Squirrel.

One of the really great aspects of traveling is that (if you’re doing it right) you try totally new things you never thought you’d do before. You could just scroll back through the last three posts on this blog and learn plenty about the out-of-the-blue experiences I’ve had at Squirrel Camp – climbing trees, milking squirrels, participating in a bike relay…every week seems to bring something completely unprecedented, and this week was no different. I found myself pocketing many more new first times: playing rugby (and actually enjoying it), participating in a parade and – exciting for squirrelers, maybe not so much for the normal populous – climbing my first “sneaker” nest. We call them sneakers because typically they take a few days with several attempts from different teams to find. This is owing to the fact that they are nestled so far at the top of such a tall tree that they are basically invisible from the ground. It takes that one person who is frustrated to the point of such impeccable focus to notice that one tiny blade of grass at the pinnacle of that huge tree to finally locate the thing.

My frustrated and overly-focused teammate and I were just about to dedicate our angry energy to acquire AK-47s and destroy the entire area that the telemetry equipment was CONSTANTLY locating this squirrel to (aside: hopefully killing the squirrel as well and therefore ending our problems – this is a common joke around camp when a squirrel is being frustrating or it’s difficult to find her nest. One can always find optimism in hopefully saying “maybe she’ll just die” or “I hope those babies are dead.” When the babies die, it’s called a lost litter or just “lost lit” because we need to shorten things like straight up Gs. This leads to a lot of joyful fist-pumping and high-fiving about dead babies. Basically I’m glad we work in the middle of nowhere.), when suddenly she said “OH – there’s a nest up there.” At times like these, my immediate thought is “are you fucking kidding me” because it’s so ridiculous. What kind of selection confers an advantage to an animal that nests so high up there must be less oxygen up there?

So then that leads to situations like this photo. Notice that my face was planted nicely into the branches so that I could forget about, well, everything that was happening to me at that moment. I could have been a cool kid and posed, but that ignores the fact that I was too scared to move a muscle. In any case, it was a big accomplishment for me and now hopefully I can do more climbs like that. It’s always disappointing to telem a squirrel to a tree and realize that you aren’t strong enough to climb it, so someone else has to come and do it later.

A few days before that, Squirrel Camp made a float for the Haines Junction Canada Day parade. Of course, when Squirrel Camp makes a float, this means that we appended a lot of cardboard to an F-250 and then went to town with Sharpies. Resources are limiting. At the moment I don’t have a good picture of the entire float, but I do have a photo of Naomi posing with the huge squirrel ears, complete with ear tags, that we made for the truck.

After the parade there was a barbecue, at which I was successfully peer pressured by Alec to play football with a gaggle of twelve-year old boys, one of whom employed the principal strategy of falling limp to the ground at random. Oddly successful, this boy was dubbed with the nickname “Paralyzed.”

Every day is a lot of fun here, whether you plan for it or not. I will be sad to leave but happy to see everyone at home again! Last week also marked the beginning of the summer crew members starting to take vacations, making the end of this whole summer feel ever closer. At the end of July I will be taking off to see my friends and family for a vacation in B.C., which I absolutely cannot wait for. ‘Til next time!

-Sarah, AKA ALAAASKAAAA!

(when you buy a mug that says Alaska on it and you repeatedly lose that mug around camp, you start to heroically yell Alaska in your desperate attempts to find it. Or maybe I just do that.)