My Granddaughter in Alligator Nation

I have previously published my granddaughter Erika's letters on this blog because she is such a prolific, humorous, and observing witness to her own considerably exciting life. Late last year, she finished her employment as a firefighter in Zortman, Montana. She then returned to Petoskey, Michigan, for a short stay at her mother's house, and then she undertook a 58-hour bus ride to Salt Lake City to spend Christmas with her brother, her grammas, her grampas, and her cousins. She then rode another 58 hours on the bus back to Michigan, and the very next day after her arrival jumped in her Jeep and drove two days to Frostproof, Florida, to start her next adventure with The Nature Conservancy as a firefighter. It is with pride that I present her latest missive below. Enjoy!


Dear Friends and Family,

Oh yes, it is that time again. I am ready to tell you some things (rubs hands together energetically). I hope you are ready. If you do not have a good chunk of time set aside for this letter, consider stopping now and proceeding later when you do. Plus, there are prerequisites to reading this:
(a) You must be comfortable, for with my writing even Homer would balk at its length.
(b) You must have a cup of something warm while reading. If you skip this step, be careful, for I have asked Karma to police that these rules are followed. So, find your favorite mug and make something warm. Make it before moving onto the next step, please.
(c) You must take 3 deep breaths: slow, relaxed, and focused breaths.

Ok, now you are ready to read. Truly read.

I am sure everyone is familiar with Jeff Foxworthy and his notorious jokes about "You may be a redneck if...." Well, I am going to steal that idea and apply it to riding the Greyhound bus.

You may be on a Greyhound bus too long:
1. If you start to panic that you accidentally got on a bus heading to a plumbers' convention.
2. If a parade of zombies saw you they would mistake you for one of their own.
3. If the passengers decide it is too difficult to locate the light switches, so they just start using their lighters to find things.
4. If you could fry an egg from the grease that is layered on your body, mainly from the windows.
5. If you realize that after sitting so long, your ass has actually fallen off, somewhere. You ask a few of the passengers if they have seen it, and they reply "No" but if you see theirs could you return it to them as soon as possible? After a few hours of searching, you let your limp and atrophied body carcass on without it.
6. If you stop consuming water for fear of having to use the bathroom.
7. If you find that the bathroom has hand sanitizer and your body is suddenly overtaken with a feeling like the one Moses probably felt when he saw the burning bush.
8. If you actually start to hypothesize, experiment, and conclude that sleep is a myth, and this fictitious and blasphemous piece of knowledge should be put to rest immediately.
9. When the sane become the minority, and you’re pretty sure you’re the majority.
1o. When the fuzz on your teeth is mistaken for the ancient and thought-to-be extinct Woolly Mammoth. What really boggles the scientist is how it got on the bus without any trace of breaking and entering!
11. When, after you have switched buses so many times, you have discovered which ones are conducive to oxymoronic fake sleep.
12. When hearing "Aqua" for an ungodly amount of time might be more soothing than the current state you are in. For those of you not from the "Aqua" era, just choose the most annoying and horrendous song you can conjure up.

I would say that this sums up the extent of my experience in a mustard seed. Though, for sure, I was warned. But I have never been one to be told what an experience is like. I choose to decide the horrors and joys on my own. Admonish to the ends of the earth, and I shall still feign deafness.

However, I do not know if I will ever take the Greyhound bus again. It seems it is only an experience to be had, based on the fact that it will glorify every other moment one lives through. And the CIA will eventually be contacting you about becoming an undercover agent who specializes in torture analysis. They may even try to sell you on some form of masochism where you try out your evil ideas, and you would say yes, for you would know you have been through worse. Thank you, Greyhound. Not just a transportation system, but a heartening lesson-giver of insurmountable knowledge.

All right, I will stop making jokes about Greyhound. It’s just too easy; one could go on forever. I already write long enough, so I will endeavor to write about that which everyone is probably curious. Florida!

Sadly, in my opinion, I do not live in a rural area though many have been apt to tell me that I do. When there are at least 8 Walmarts within a 50-mile radius, and perhaps more, then you are not allowed to utter, or even think, "rural." I often want to tell the people here about Montana and what rural can truly be like, but then I think perhaps it’s better not to say. I don’t think it’s any secret that Montana is desolate. I just simply don’t even want to say the name for fear that it might plant the seed in their heads that Montana is an option. Perhaps if those of us who know and love Montana could never mention it again, then it would become a forgotten place---
maybe a sanctuary for the hermits of the earth. Forget all those wonderful things I wrote about the most heavenly place I have ever been. Crazy talk, I know, but I think you get the idea.

I am not worried about my happiness or contentment in Florida, for that is something that cannot be taken. Something external could never take that which is internal. I make the best of wherever I am. My major annoyance about Florida, though, is that despite all the edifices and conveniences of man that exist along endless highways is that one is unable to find any decent organic produce. They have pills and more pills, enough to cover all the land masses of the earth. The one thing they don’t have is good-quality produce. If they had that, maybe they wouldn’t need so many pills. Just a theory though. I have decided that it may take some time to figure out Florida because not only is it big, it’s citified. Montana is big, but nothing is out there, so it doesn’t take long to find man's creations. I will find my local produce, dairy, meat, and honey. I am excited that there is local produce about a mile from where I live. Something I can bike to! And I have seen a sign for honey, which I think I will be able to bike to based on the fact Florida is flatter than my ass after a 2-day bus trip.

I actually live in one of the highest points in Florida. I think it’s around 200 ft. I know! Get out those hiking boots and prepare for a serious summit. Ironic that Montana has the land I love, but Florida has the people I love to work with. If only there could be some symbiosis of the two. Oh well! Spend my time yearning for other things or go on merrily with what I have. The people I work with are amazing. They are dream comrades. They are all concerned with conservation and ecology---with fire thrown in as the main attraction. It is wonderful. It feels right. Now if I could only right Florida.

Yesterday at the grocery store, I was literally viewed as a terrorist from the bag man for not wanting a grocery bag. Sometimes when you look in people’s eyes you can literally see them decaying right before yours. You ache to throw light into their darkness. Their bodies look tired. Look ready to lie down and die. And those eyes: numbness oozing from his essence...so empty. Voids. They are like the undead, who you want to put out of their misery. People like that just give you the body shakes to get away from. I am sure everyone knows what I am talking about, though do not let my pessimism in this paragraph throw you into the depths of despair with those people, for there are far more decadently full people in this world than there are empty. It may seem surprising, but I think there truly are.

This weekend shall give me plenty of time to discover more about Florida, since it is a 4-day weekend. Last weekend I spent the whole two days cleaning the kitchen, which wasn’t that bad on the surface but underneath it all was the hidden world of apathy. Needless to say, once I was done, there were some jaws to be dropped at its final state. To quote my engine captain, “This is unprecedented.”

This weekend, I have decided with great angst that there must be no cleaning. There will, however, be biking, hiking, and, yes, kayaking! I can spend the next weekend shut up cleaning my bathroom, the living room, the pantry, the porch, the other porch, and the backyard. Yeah, I think that’s it. Plus, now that the weather has finally warmed to the perfect 70 degrees, I am far more tempted not to be inside.

So what have I been doing the past 2 weeks with The Nature Conservancy? We have been lighting things on fire! Let me put it to you this way. I am more than halfway to surpassing my quota of fires in 2 weeks than in the 6 months I spent in Zortman. We have been lighting on the Tiger Creek Preserve, which is the preserve that I work at, the Kissimmee State Forest, and the Waikia State Forest, which is near Orlando. I have also been getting more time on the saw, mainly because there is no swamping in Florida. We just chop trees down and leave them to be burned as is. Therefore, when we go out to saw, the only thing that needs to be done is sawing itself. I am slowly getting more and more comfortable with the machine that spins irrevocably fast sharp points in ellipses toward all atoms in arm's reach, including my own.

Ultimately, I’m just getting a feel for how things work, where things are, and how TNC runs. The usual perks of a new job. All in all, it’s been quite the adventure thus far. I brim with the excitement of new discoveries to be made, especially in the plant world. New, fresh, clean slate: tabula rasa. I wonder what I shall fill my plate up with now.

OK, if you have made it to this point, I am happy to tell you that you have survived, not that I had any doubts that you wouldn’t, OK? Maybe I did, but I hope to hear from others as per
usual, and I wish everyone all the best in their worlds.

Love,
E or B