Goodbye Maine... Hello Pennsylvania

Another season of work is over and here I am already a week into my next.  Things have been moving quickly.  Job to job to job.  State to state to state.  Maine was lovely.  Mostly in that I got to work with one of the trail greats, "THE Lester Kenway" "The man who eats bowls of barbed wire for breakfast"  (or Kix cereal or blueberry muffin tops depending on the day.)  Lester is the man and am honored by the fact that he wrote "is good company" on my final evaluation.  He also wrote other nice things but that most tugged my heart strings.  I went to Maine in order to increase my technical skills, to learn how to use a griphoist, to have Lester as a reference and what I received was all of those things as well as Lester becoming my mentor for the summer imparting his encyclopedic knowledge upon me at every piece of flagging we placed.  There was a lesson to be taught and learned in everything we did.  There is a better way to tie flagging, a better way to line out project notes, and of course a million and one ways to use a griphoist.  Lester's scientific teaching is something I will never achieve or really even understand, (The exact physics/angles/torques etc of a rock on a highline is beyond me.  I am what Lester calls intuitive rather than scientific.) but golly do I think it is cool.  His way of teaching has given me a push to expand my own ways of teaching and explanation in a slightly more scientific direction even though I am unable (and have no desire to learn how) to calculate the velocity of the water as it turned off trail by my waterbar. 
Maine, although lovely, in general was lack luster for me.  For what ever reason, the state did not pull me in.  Maybe I went with too high of expectations.  Maybe I just had too much on my mind to appreciate the landscape.  My spring season with SCC was trying, maybe it took the summer to recuperate.  Maybe I didn't get out on my own enough.  Either way it is one more place explored with a million lessons learned about myself, my profession, and my world.
Now here I am in Pennsylvania with a big bowl of fruit and yogurt and granola.  One week in.  Tools cleaned and sharpened, project sites visited, work for the season lined out, gear situated.  Volunteers arrive tomorrow night for dinner and orientation and we hit the ground running.  I've got a few odds and ends to tie up before tomorrow night but all in all am ready for another go round with another organization and another group of folks.  
This area has at once hit me as strikingly beautiful and inclusive of everything that is wrong with the United States.  I was surprised by how beautiful I find Pennsylvania to be.  But then again I had no expectations and there is just something about rolling hills of farmland with old barns that makes my heart go pitter patter.  As I drive down the 5 lane "turnpike" lined by car dealerships, walmarts, electronics stores, above ground electric wires, vast parking lots the Kunstler in me cringes.  I just want to live in a well planned pretty community/city and work in the most desolate reaches of the wilderness.  But alas my urban planning ideals seem to be the minority.  The East in general has reminded me that I am the minority.  Good for you food is disgusting, the car is king, TV is THE entertainment, big box stores, camping is done in an open field in tents that look like houses with boom boxes blaring...
I know I sound like an old curmudgeon but sometimes it is easy for me to forget that I live outside the social norm and when I am brought back reality I find it disheartening and must remind myself that what works in life for me works for me and what works in life for others works for others.  Who am I to tell them they are wrong?  Even if I do think they are killing themselves and the planet.  They think I am a crazy curmudgeon tree hugger weirdo.

"If can't have fun or a sense of humor about trail work, you shouldn't be doing it." - THE Lester Kenway

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Safe and sound in Pennsylvania. So much to say. So little ability to say it.

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I have accepted a position with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy leading their Mid-Atlantic Trail Crew based out of Harrisburg, PA.