"I was born under a wandering star."

My sister is incredible with anniversaries.  She can remember what she was doing last week, month, year, and so on.  I tease her about it mercilessly.  Secretly though, I'm almost as bad.  Which is why I am announcing that I have been here in the same place, job, and home for six months.  I get the itch to make a change after about four months--the length of a standard college semester.  I guess that isn't bad scar to bear from eight years of college.  Now, if you'll join me in reminiscing, I need to reflect just how I got to this place.

11 years ago, almost to the day, I graduated from high school and began college where I began my now well-honed skill of switching careers.  From dance education I moved to communication and then to sociology.  I spent four happy years in sociology.  Well, most of my time was spent climbing the stairs to and from the Richards Building where my dance classes were, but I graduated in sociology.  To my surprise, I chose to stay and study it for another two years of graduate school.  I finished that a mere five years ago.  After just one year I came happily back to the welcoming arms of academia.  Two years ago I quit my PhD program and came to Yellowstone on a seasonal position.  In one week I went from grading my students finals to receiving minimum wage.  I was so very happy here.  I was also nervous about my future.  "Two years," I told myself.  "Try this for two years and see if you can get a real job in two years."  After spending most of a year in Yellowstone I returned to Salt Lake City where I taught kids for ten months.  Just one year ago I was frantically working, scrimping, and saving to attend certification courses for this field.  Eight months ago I interviewed.  I remember very clearly the warm October day when the position was offered: I had just finished a field trip hike and my phone rang.  I stepped outside of work and sat on the curb unable to really believe that the choice was now mine.  I hung up the phone and turned back towards work.  To my surprise, Adrienne, the woman who opened my eyes to environmental education, sat not far away after a phone call of her own.  We came together and discussed the class that brought her to the garden that day.  Telling Adrienne about the job seemed like I was coming full circle.  In six weeks I was unpacking boxes here in Gardiner.

It's still hard to believe.  Is this what putting roots down feels like?  You stop counting the days and weeks and instead suddenly wakeup and realize months or years have passed?  I ask myself if I have any regrets for choices that I've made--friends or other career opportunities I've left behind.  It's hard to know.  But I don't think so.  I'm too busy admiring the new green carpet covering the foothills after the recent rain.  I can't think about regrets because the birds wake me up in the morning singing outside the window.  And it's difficult to focus on what I'm missing because I am overwhelmed by all that brought me to this time and place.  I can't help but wonder what will happen next?

"If you dance you'll never grow old."

There was a time in my life when the world revolved around dance.  Not because I was particularly good at it.  The technique of dance was anything but natural.  Becoming a part of my university's beginning team took three years of training prior to beginning college, nine college classes in dance, and three auditions.  But the love of moving and music was much, much easier.

Growing up my family owned a cassette tape with the music from Disney's Aladdin.  I would put on the tape and dance to it all around the living room.  In eighth grade I spent an afternoon in a friend's garage where there was space for her to teach me all the leaps and turns she was learning in ballet.  Within a week or two I was enrolled at a local studio.  After a few years of ballet and jazz dance I began looking for a better teacher, but there weren't any in my small town.  At college I spent many more hours dancing than studying.  I became part of the International Folk Dance team and did my best to learn to clog, tap, Irish dance, and every other kind of dance from around the world.  I loved every single moment of it.  Through dance I made some of my closest friends, had most of my romantic relationships, and experienced some of my most bitter disappointments.  The time came when I put my dancing shoes away and pulled my books out as I worked my way through four years of graduate school.  Dance became a social hobby rather than a performance driven pursuit.  Around the same time I experienced a painful injury in my foot from running that has curtailed all activities that involved my feet.  Now, after two and a half years, I am able to again stand on my toes, do turns, and walk.  I find myself bumping into my furniture because I don't have enough room to dance to the music playing in my little house.

There are many things I love about living on the edges of Yellowstone: no stoplights, quiet nights, small towns, good people, a sky as big as the outdoors, and the pine trees that whisper my name when no one is around.  My dance studio is different now.  When no one is looking at work, at home, or when I am alone on a mountainside I find myself reaching for the sky and spinning down the trail.  I dance under the blue sky and I have to be careful that I don't turn an ankle in a ground squirrel hole.  I have no audience and I need none.  This time I dance simply because it expresses so much that I feel and cannot say.

This came to my mind because I recently found the following animation.  It reminded me of all that I have and do love about dancing.

"Oh, Montana, give this child a home."

A few pictures from being out and about walking around town.  

There are moments when I am overwhelmed by the fact that this is home.

Gardiner with the sun setting on Sepulcher and Electric Peak

The Roosevelt Arch: if you look closely, there is a coyote crossing in front of it

Sunrise on Sepulcher and the Arch (dedicated by Teddy Roosevelt in  1903

A mama bison and her new baby resting in town, safe from predators

Looking back at Gardiner

A bighorn sheep ram not far from town

Investigators at church

Spring in Montana

Who Is My Neighbor?

It is funny the things that make me feel like a grown up.  In the past decade I've graduated from college twice, worked in positions that could have been career choices, lived in four different countries, and all over the United States.  But none of these experiences, including purchasing and paying off a car, made me feel like a bona fide grown up.  This past winter, however, there's been a change.  Nothing makes me feel more adult than a utility bill and a 401k in my name, shoveling my own porch, purchasing non-essential decorative home items, talking about and planning my career path, and going to the dump.  For those of you who live in cities here is some news that make surprise you: in rural America people load up their garbage and take it to the dump.  There is no such thing as curbside pickup.

Growing up in rural Idaho, I remember trips to the dump.  It wasn't that we were rednecks--everyone took their trash to the dump.  "Going to the dump" was fun.  It meant that the kids rode in the back of the pickup (the only time we were allowed to) to keep the cans from falling over on the 1.5 mile drive to the dump.  The dump was on the shores of the Blackfoot River.  While my dad handled the trash I'd watch the canal-like river flow under the bridge.  At some point the big bins near my home were removed and now my parents wheel a large garbage can to the edge of the road once a week.  But here, in Gardiner, Montana, the dump tradition lives on.

Unlike the dump of my childhood, these dumpsters are surrounded by a tall chain link fence.  After 4 pm the main entrance is locked, but there is a small gate I enter on the side.  It is held closed with a few rocks.  I have no difficulty moving those rocks, which is why I think they do little to prevent other guests from doing the same.  The sign hung on the gate reinforces this idea.

It is a little creepy to be there alone.  There are a dozen ravens picking through the trash and at each other.  They perch on the dumpsters and seem confident in their ownership of the place.  The call loudly to each other and bicker over the choicest kitchen scraps.  Usually, I quickly toss my bag and cardboard in the appropriate bins and scurry back to my car before my imagination gets the better of me.

I like ravens, but those at the dump somehow seem very different than their cousins in the park.  Perhaps I am uneasy because this is the place where humans and animals interact.  The dump represents so many of the conflicts that occur as humans and animals meet on the fringes of each groups territory.  I drive home thinking of development, bears looking for food after a long winter of hibernation, mountain lions who need room to roam, and my own desire for a home and land to claim for my own.  In taking my trash to the dump I am acutely aware of my role in these clashes and that I cannot divorce myself completely from being part of the conflicts.  At the dump, I cannot ignore that I have a very real impact on the places and creatures I love--they are my neighbors too.  What I see at the dump is only a very small piece of a much bigger puzzle.

Being all grown up isn't anything like what I imagined it would be.

A Good Samaritan

Saturday I took my first trip to Billings.  Billings is 170 miles away and a three hour drive.  The day was beautiful and I filled it with errands and an Easter service.  As the sun began its journey towards the horizon, I loaded the last of my groceries into my car and turned toward the freeway.  As I turned onto the on ramp I noticed my car wasn't driving right and a strange noise came from underneath.  There was no shoulder until I was fully on the freeway so I kept driving until I could find a place to pull over.  A quick walk around my car revealed a flat tire.

I've never changed a tire.  I can hike with bears, but I've never changed a tire.  But that wasn't the biggest problem: it was 5 pm on the night before Easter and there would be no business open to get a new tire.  I was all dressed up from the Easter service.  I was three hours from home.    As the cars rushed by me at 80 miles an hour, I began to mull over the situation.  A large truck pulled up behind me and a man hopped out.  He wore a grease monkey's uniform with "Sean" stitched across the lapel.  Sean explained he had been headed the other way on the freeway, saw a car pulled over, got off, and came back up my way to see offer his help.  He worked for a local tire shop and was just headed back to the shop to end the day.  He'd been out on a house call that went five hours longer than it should have.  Sean put on my donut and then offered to take a look at the tire at the shop.  I followed him back where he determined the original tire was ruined.  He searched through all the used tires at the back and found one that fit my car.  He checked my rims, put on the new tire, and wished me well on my drive back to Gardiner.

In Luke chapter 10 Christ tells the parable of "The Good Samaritan" in response to the lawyer's question, "And who is my neighbor?"  I felt like the man in the story who was on a long journey and injured on the side of the road, unable to continue.  An unlikely man, a Samaritan, came to his rescue and took care of the injured stranger.  As I drove home I thought of the Savior's words to the lawyer as he closed his lesson, "Go, and do thou likewise."

"I Wanna Check You For Ticks"

No one likes mosquitoes.  I've seen people curse, swat, spray, itch, and find cover.  But ticks are much, much worse.  There is something absolutely creepy about a bug that buries its head in your flesh for an extended period of time to suck your blood.  And ticks don't tend to go for arms and legs.  No, adding insult to injury, ticks go for personal, private places and carry nasty diseases.  Here's a pretty basic description of ticks, courtesy of an entomologist at UC Davis, "Ticks are blood feeding external parasites of mammals, birds, and reptiles, throughout the world."  Just reading it makes the hair on the back of my neck prickle.

Ticks, like other bugs, go through several changes as they grow from larvae, to nymphs, to adults.  At each stage in the life cycle a tick feeds once on one host.  With each change they choose a progressively bigger host to feed on (lucky you and I). An adult female, after her final feeding, will then lay thousands of eggs.  More goosebumps prickling on my skin.  Ticks stand around on bushes and the tips of grass hanging on with two of their eight legs and waving the remaining six in the air so that they can easily grab onto a passing animal.  It might take them two years to complete a life cycle--only three meals in two years.  They can wait in the right place for months for an unlucky host to walk by.

This week I got up close and personal with a few ticks.  It began as just a normal office day.  Just after I arrived a friend rushed in and I confirmed for her there was a tick buried in the back of her neck, just below her hair.  A slow, steady pull with tweezers removed him and I took him outside to give him a chance to say his last words.  I didn't give him long to think of some.  A few minutes later she found a second tick buried in her hair with his head in her scalp.  Another slow pull with the tweezers and another trip to the guillotine outside.  I wish I had a great, happy ending for this story.  Yes, ticks are a marvel of natural adaptation and survival, but I still get the shivers when I think of little heads buried in sucking blood.  I was going to post a picture, but just seeing them magnified a hundred times gives me the creeps.  It's high season for ticks until at least June.



Sources: http://entomology.ucdavis.edu/faculty/rbkimsey/tickbio.html, www.theticknipper.com/howticksfeed.html

A Voice

I heard it!  Walking out of work I heard the raucous trill of a red-winged blackbird.  These shiny birds, the males with their fiery red mantle, are possibly the most abundant native bird in the United States.  In Yellowstone, and many other places, they are the herald of spring.  Until my late teen years I thought red-winged blackbirds were birds of myth and legend.  The kind of bird that heroes went in search of to pull the magic red feather from the wing and take back to a witch or healer.  Do you remember the last time that a the unbelievable became possible for you?  I remember noticing this glossy bird in the backyard, looking it up in a book, and being delighted to learn that there really are red-winged blackbirds.  They still seem like a magical bird to me.  Their call isn't particularly beautiful, but it is unique to them.  It is beautiful because it is theirs, it cries of marshes and cattails, it announces a coming spring, and speaks of fulfilling a difficult quest.

This week I'm teaching a course certifying others to be guides.  It is incredibly rewarding to offer another person new tools, perspectives, and confidence.  Today we discussed the the importance of creativity and self-exploration.  At age eight each of us felt that we could run, dance, sing, and paint pretty well.  We were funny, smart, and good storytellers.  I asked a room of successful adults who could do these things today and I received only silence and lowered eyes.  What changes from eight to twenty-eight to fifty-eight?  Too often we come to believe that if our paintings aren't the most beautiful they are not good.  In a similar vein, if we are not the fastest runner, highest score in the class, or have the most beautiful voice we should be silent.  What a tragic loss!  Each voice matters because it is yours and what you have to say, sing, write--what you create--could only come from you.  That makes it beautiful.  I remember a quote that hung on a teacher's reading, "Use the talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best."  

It was snowing here in Gardiner this morning, but I don't mind.  Yesterday I heard the call that only a red-winged blackbird can make and his song is beautiful to me.  No one can speak of spring like a blackbird.

Sources: http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Red-winged_Blackbird/, http://djbsphotoadventures.blogspot.com/2009/04/crazy-weather-with-some-moisture.html, http://www.flickr.com/photos/dbaron/519203903/