Change of Plans

On Good Friday, a storm rolled through St. Louis that put a wrench into everyone's Easter plans. The storm brought with it a surplus of water and tornadic winds, a potent combination for the northern neighborhoods of St. Louis. The water softened the soil, loosening the grips of even hundred-year old tree roots on their soil. The wind delivered a knockout punch on those trees, pushing them over like dominoes, while cutting a swath of destruction on roofs, limbs, and anything that wasn't tied down. One resident described it as sounding just like they say in the movies, "Like a freight train."

When the storm cleared, it was up to the first-responders to go to work and for our disaster response mode to kick into gear. We immediately began organizing the intake of needs for the 750+ homes affected, raising funds for relief, and beginning the slow but urgent task of patching roofs in preparation for the onslaught of more rain.

For us, this meant forgoing another weekend and working through our fatigue. Many people were coming directly off of projects only to wake up and begin again. For me personally this also meant giving up my plans to go home and see my family for Easter, something that was doubly disappointing since my brother was visiting from California for the first time since August. I worked in the office that day organizing donations and supporting field teams from afar. While I knew what I was doing was important, I had to battle myself to shake off the negativity that came with my ruined family plans.

The day after Easter, I was finally put on a field team responding to the Bellefontaine Neighbors area and that negativity disappeared and was replaced by an urgent need to work. Seeing the destruction first-hand, it was like something out of a dream. Old stately trees had been uprooted and tossed around onto peoples homes in the neighborhood where I worked. Our first house had an old maple snapped in two, leaving us to chop the limbs off of the residents' car and house and to fell the remaining candle-stick of a trunk. Our second house looked like it had been eaten by a fallen oak, as the whole tree had been uprooted and was now leaning upon the roof.

We worked through a light, steady rain that day, trying to remove as much of the weight as possible from the roof before our task of patching any holes. After a few hours of work, we had removed much of the foliage and limbs, leaving only the trunk a few limbs around the power cables. We left those for the more technical sawyers and heavy machinery of one of our other partners.

As we took a break, the rain started to fall more heavily and skies turned more ominous. We took to our vehicle for refuge, but regretted it near the end of our break. The weather only got worse, and we wished we had tarped the few holes while we had a chance. Our team leader proposed mounting one more push before things got worse. We quickly rushed up a ladder, tarp, and some supplies onto the roof, and he stapled on a makeshift tarp barrier to repel the rain. A flash of lightning and a distant peal of thunder appeared on the horizon-- we were too late.

We left a little disappointed that we hadn't been able to patch up the other small hole we had found, but that disappointment shed a light on my previous day's feelings. In the grand scheme of things, my where I am is where I needed to be. While I would have loved a weekend to unwind, my time is much more needed by the little old lady with a tree on her house than by myself. It's good sometimes to have life demand some sacrifices from you: it make you confront yourself on what is truly important and challenges the limits of what you think you are capable of. I ended that first field-work day wet, cold, and tired, but I was happy that I finally understood.

Belated Earth Day Post

Just a disclaimer: I meant to write and post this a week ago, on the actual Earth Day or close to it, but the recent tornadoes rolling through the northern neighborhoods of St. Louis have made my life a bit hectic since Friday.

This past year has been very influential to me in creating a personal appreciation for conservation, not just in gaining knowledge but in creating a new whole worldview. While you may think that this has transpired through my environmental work in AmeriCorps, AmeriCorps was only got the ball rolling. In fact, much of my work directly in nature has left me confused and conflicted (see my blog post, 'Of Furry Rockets' http://strengthenyourcorps.blogspot.com/2011/03/of-furry-rockets.html) as to whether my role was positive or negative.

I've since bought fully into my role as a steward of the land, and can now guilt-free chop down saplings or set fire to large swaths of woodland (in prescribed burns) in the name of the land's ultimate health. What has gotten me there was not just learned in the field but imparted by a hearty dose of self-imposed environmental education (something that I am happy to be able share with others more easily and eloquently than my field experiences).

What I have to offer for the rest of this post is a short review of what I have been reading and watching and a challenge to read, watch, and share with any and everyone that my audience can. The books and films that have helped me create this worldview for myself were challenging, but also pleasurable, inspiring, and at times pretty hilarious. I hope that anyone who takes my suggestion enjoys them but also feels the need to pass it on to everyone, and most importantly those who would not be the 'preaching to the choir' type of people.

Book 1: A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

This book I found on a lark as I was looking for books to educate me about conservation in the days before I started AmeriCorps. I have been eternally grateful ever since. It was written in 1949 but is still incredibly relevant, even 60 years later. The book is in three parts, the first two giving personal experiences in nature and very poetically tying in their relevance to man's place in that nature. He describes the comings and goings of creatures and plants on his woodlot property in a sandy waste of Wisconsin in a way that one is able to cherish every element one is described as valuable, even the very small and the very 'useless' to mankind's economic wants and needs.

The last part of his book describes the state of the conservation movement and the American thought process-- its follies and its possibilities-- toward the land. This to me was one of the most influential things I have found all year. In it he described the imperative to save as much wilderness as possible: as a laboratory for science, as a piece of the American past that ties us to our history and gives us a common piece of culture, as a place where we can feel free from the technology that keeps us from being as authentically human. Most importantly, he talked about the idea of a 'Land Ethic'. The idea that we owe more to the land than just being the owners of it.

This Land Ethic has struck me pretty potently. One of the main things that I ponder on when I'm feeling philosophical is the idea of 'what is the place of humanity on this Earth?' I've come to some conclusions within the past few years that are hopefully profound, but by no means original. One of those is the human need to be 'good' to each other, as we are programmed to be social and cooperative as few other animals are. This means having the Confucian ethic of 'The Golden Rule' to each other: Do unto others...

What this Land Ethic has done for me is to introduce a new and just as important relation to the mix: man and land. Since we have the power to change our environment like no other species on Earth, we have felt the need to use and abuse that power to horrific ends. Seeing the giant toxic lake/ tourist attraction near Butte, MT this summer has been a big reminder of that. The lake was full of mining waste draining off of the historic copper mines of the area-- it is so acidic that it almost instantly kills any flock of birds with the misfortune of landing on it. The Land Ethic provides an alternative to such short-sighted and one-sided of a relationship with the land. As the land gives, we have the responsibility as the dominant intelligent species to be participants in the cycles of nature, not just outside observers and--at worst-- users.

Corresponding Films: The National Parks: America's Best Idea, by Ken Burns

This is a long one, but very worth it. It goes through the history of the National Parks system from the first park-- Yosemite and its patron saint, John Muir-- to the status of the parks in the 1980's. The film has some pretty breathtaking pictures, some inspiring explanations of American thoughts on conservation, and some heart-wrenching personal accounts. These usually include the stories of how each of the National Parks was founded, and behind each story is a person who found themselves transformed by the land and given an unstoppable quest to protect it. One of my favorites was the story of the Japanese-American painter interned in a camp near the national monuments of Utah. The solace that he found in nature through such hardships speaks stronger in favor of the need of wild areas than a mountain essays on environmental science could. Who would have thought that the science nerd that I am could say that an artist could have that power over me?

Book 2: The Omnivore's Dillema

This one I am still in the process of finishing, but even of the 4/5 that I have read I can tell it is one of the most influential books I have read all year. The book covers a wide span of how people eat, and in turn how we treat the land. This goes into environmental, ethical (both toward the land and the farmers that cultivate it), economic, and historical background of the food we eat. It follows the meal that we may eat back through the factories that manufacture and slaughter, to the feed lots that bulk it up, and the farmers that produce the first element of much of the food we eat: corn. It goes into how modern techniques of growing and fertilizing using fossil fuels has driven corn prices down favoring the food producer, lowering the prices of food, and putting the farmer at a near-constant bankruptcy. This eventually leads up the food chain to the low prices of the meat that we eat, the unsanitary but low-cost conditions of Concentrated Food Lots, and into the lack of nutrition of the food that a majority of Americans eat.

The second part of the book takes on the idea of organic food, an idea that many people who can afford it seem to think will save our collective souls as food consumers. Pollan's review says just the opposite. It tells the history of the Big Organic industry points out many contradictions inherent in it. Much of the industry is moving positively to eliminate fertilizers, pesticides, and antibiotics, but still does so using a huge bulk of fossil fuels and methods that aren't all that dissimilar to some brutal industrial ones. Many of the practices used are just thinly veiled industrial techniques but now made more precarious and expensive due to the fact that, for example, using no antibiotics on any chicken means that they must be shut off from the outside world to avoid contamination.

The book later turns from grizzly muck-raking to a more hopeful discussion on alternatives. One case study he used was Polyface farm of Virginia. The famously outspoken (and a bit eccentric-sounding) Joel Saladin who runs the farm promotes a different idea of farming, one that mimics natural systems and gets its energy and fertility from the sun rather than fossil fuels. He goes into the idea of Management Intensive Grazing, a means of moving around cows or other ruminants that not only gathers energy from the grass but increases its productivity. This method and many of the others talked about mimic natural systems that have been fertilizing the soil for millions of years. Involving food in closed natural system rather than a one-way industrial system has taken Saladin's farmland from a burnt out corn farm that he bought it as with a foot of topsoil to nearly quadruple that in only a generation.

Corresponding Films: Food Inc. and King Corn

These films are a good repeat and an expansion of Michael Pollan's ideas from the book about the nature of the industrial food system. While the book is more in-depth, the power of images really drive this one home. Food Inc. in particular features Pollan and many of his ideas on food as a whole. King Corn takes on the environmental and economic impact of corn as the dominant monoculture that drives much of American farming.

Book 3: Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

This book is really more of an interesting study on human origins, movement of peoples, and technology, but I took a small portion as an important look on the dangers of ignoring the importance of the Land Ethic. It goes into the history and creation of agriculture and how increased food production spurred large population centers, more advanced technology, more potent germs and germ resistance, and ultimately led the peoples of Europe and the Middle East to be the dominant 'conquerors' of the last millennium. The idea that I took from this was spawned from my question, "If the Middle East was the origin of much of the world's agriculture, why are we as a Western Power the dominant military power and not the other way around?"

Diamond's answer was that the Middle East, being the first to have created agriculture were also the first to misuse their land to the point of collapse. No longer were humans a mere hunter of game that held a natural balance with the resources of the area-- they were herder of some very large and hungry groups of animals. Overgrazing led to the lack of fertility of the soil, which created a collapse of population of those grazers and, in turn, of the people who ate those grazers. With the human population drop, they were no longer able to uphold large and complex societies that would innovate their technology quickly and were behind the curve when the guns of the British rolled in to say 'hello'. This is a stark reminder of what happens when we don't pay attention to how we cultivate our food in balance with the land and hopefully not a foreshadowing of what can happen in the US once enough of our fertile heartland is sterilized and eroded by our current practices.

On a side note, this idea that Diamond brought up is probably gone into more in-depth in his book 'Collapse', or so I am told by friends that have read it. But since I haven't done so yet, I can't really promote it yet.

...whew. Okay. I've gotten it all out. I hope it wasn't too much, but if you've read this far I'm sure it shouldn't be too hard to read the actual suggestions. Happy reading, and I hope that you may pay it forward as I have felt the need to. Cheers!

Raw Power

We arrived in the early afternoon, as the heat rose from the high seventies to the low eighties. The day had been warm and windy, but after 2:00 PM the conditions went from interesting to concerning. Wind gusts changed directions on a whim, blowing the warm early spring air from our faces to our back without warning. It was going to be a hell of an evening.

On the first big Red-flag warning day of the spring, we were called to respond to a small roadside fire outside of Eminence, MO. We never received official notice, but word on the street was that it was set by a group of teenagers tossing flamables out of their car and into the woods. It was well under way when we arrived, and we were immediately sent in with rakes and a chainsaw as hand crew to secure some buildings on the farm property.

After dropping some jackpots and raking around a wood shed, we took to the dozer line to patrol the recently fired back-lighting operation. We moved up the flank going uphill with the fire on our left. The flaming front had been focused on the top of the hill, and our back light was making quick headway upward toward the main fire. I was the last in line and thing seemed under control as I rounded the corner and up the steep slope to approach the flaming front.

Soon after we back-lit to cut off the flaming front, the unexpected happened. Winds shifted, and what was once our helpful back-light at the bottom of the hill turned into the source of embers shooting across our line and into the flashy slope of dry grass and small shrubs. It took off in a big way and roared up the adjacent hillside.

After re-evaluating with our dozer driver and incident commander, we started a new line up the hill to cut off the slop-over. Unfortunately with the wind gusts, steep topography, and dry mixed fuels, the fire beat us to the top before we had a chance to cut it off. We spent much of the rest of the afternoon working down the hill and cutting it off side-slope, all the while choking on smoke and stamping out spot-overs.

Finally evening rolled around and we had encircled the fire at the bottom of the hill. The main fire had slowed on the wet northern aspect was forced to creep downhill as the evening RH rose. As the sun was setting, we made our patrol out to a green field which looked up on the hill on which we had expended so much energy that afternoon. The sight was awe-inspiring. We could see the shadow of the trees through the burning snags and smoldering jackpots. The horizon had an eerie orangish glow, every so often brightened to a yellow by the candle of a torching cedar.

With all of the day’s events-- a ~90 acre wildfire with 2 slop-overs, constantly shifting winds, huge flame heights, and many trees that were dry enough to torch-- it was easy to be impressed by the raw power of nature. When all these factors come together, people seem to shrink in consequence. Who are we compared to wind, slope, fuel, and fire? Our place as participants and not conquerors of nature is never more deeply felt than while one the year’s first wildfire.

Of Furry rockets

Today I witnessed one of the more comic and tragic moments of the year, thus far... a squirrel flung into the air like a furry rocket.

To give a bit of background, I've been at Peck Ranch in southern Missouri in the foothills of the Ozarks. The area is owned by the Missouri Department of Conservation and run as a wildlife preserve. We help out with different tasks since their staff is so small: invasive removal, felling Red Cedar, burning brush piles, etc.

Most recently we've been working on a few fire lines in preparation for this year's fast-approaching fire season. This involves bucking logs (cutting into manageable pieces), breaking up jackpots (putting fallen trees onto the ground and separating large fuel piles), and moving all fuel 75 feet from the control line. The other main task is to fell snags (standing dead trees) that are close enough to the control line.

Snags, being dead wood, have a greater tendency to catch fire than their green counterparts and can torch the fire into the treetops. This could lead to crowning, but more often it leads to shooting sparks beyond the control line and starting spot fires. During fires, one of the main tasks for mop-up is to get rid of any burning snags by putting them on the ground via chainsaw or dozer.

Another element of snags, besides a fire and falling hazard, is their positive role as habitat trees. The dead wood harbors a lot of woodland creatures and supports the environment as a source for food and shelter. That is, grubs and other insects eat the wood, woodpeckers bore into the wood to eat the grubs, and birds or squirrels will use those holes as a den.

This brings us to today's moment. My job for the day was to swamp (move logs and sticks), which is very repetitive and easy to get distracted from. In one of my moments of distraction, I looked up at a snag that one of my teammates was in the last moments of felling. The tree began to lean, the holding wood popped, and the tree began its descent. I'll never forget the scene next.

On the top fork of the tree was a knot hole, and as the trunk popped askew a furry woodland creature popped its head out as if to say, "Oh, Expletive!" As the tree barreled sideways, the squirrel shot out of the hole like a cannonball. To give a little scope, this was far up. Maybe 50+ feet. This was also in the middle of a glade, so there was nothing but ground to welcom it. It was the squirrel equivalent of base jumping but without a parachute. I couldn't help but blurt out an amazed chortle at the ridiculous sight. When the tree hit the ground, it did as all trees do-- with a mighty 'thud.' The sound drove home the gravity of the situation: that there might very well be a squirrel-shaped splatter somewhere on the ground nearby.

In curiosity or concern, I decided to investigate. I scanned the wreckage of the tree for where the poor wretch would have come down, but found no trace of it. Lucky for it, the surface-to-mass ratio for squirrels is pretty favorable for a fall like that. It turned a funny-situation-turned-grizzly back into a funny one.

Unfortunately a minor tragedy replaced that momentary comedy. I kept investigating where it's home used to be and found two infant squirrels not long for this world. So much for ending on a high note.

This whole scene made an impression on my most of the morning that I didn't know what to make out of. It seems like a trifle, the life of a few small mammals, but if anyone has ever heard the *thump, thump* of their first roadkill you know it is a jarring moment. Years ago when my brother was a pizza delivery driver, he came home shaken and recontemplating his whole job decision after making shreds out of a poor sparrow with his car.

What thoughts did come to me were perhaps the idea of the jumping squirrel as a metaphor for my life right now. I'm just getting to the point where I'm being forced to take a leap into the unknown without much of a safety net. Right now I know that grad school is a complete no-go for this year, and I've made the goal to move out to Colorado to do work at CSU as a research assistant as soon as my AmeriTerm is up. The key will be finding a research job, an apartment, and a social circle once I'm there.

The other idea the scene left me with was a concrete example of a lot of the things about conservation that have been bothering me for a while. There are some inherent contradictions that I haven't been able to iron out yet. My preconceptions of my work would be doing something nurturing and restorative to the land. Really, I'll I've been doing is killing. I've been ripping out, cutting, and poisoning invasive plants. I've been knocking down habitat trees to make fire management easier. I've been putting scars in the earth so that people can more easily walk into the woods and possibly do damage to it. It sometimes seems that what I do is either futile or counter-productive.

Really, the long-sighted view of things is that all this destruction is a net positive. Killing some plants allows a greater diversity of native species to grow. Those habitat trees could have torched in a fire and created greater damage. Trails do cause erosion, but getting people into the woods in order to educate them and make them appreciate nature is also important to the woods' survival.

I guess I'm glad that I'm still thinking about these things and feeling some guilt in 'playing God' with the environment. It means that I'm not blindly having pride in my work without understanding it or-- even worse-- feeling like some conqueror there to do mankind's will on the land.

The most important thing to take away is that nature probably doesn't need me to restore it. It can do that itself. What it needs me to do is to take responsibility for the mistakes that people have made in the past and be a steward to allow it to do what it should be doing.

Hope

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to be part of one of my first disaster relief experiences. While the conservation element of ERT has it's upsides-- being outdoors, felling trees, communing with nature-- I was ready to get on a project that connected me more with people than with trees.

That opportunity came in the form of a house burnout on the outskirts of St. Louis. Apparently, an electrical fire had started in the basement of an elderly lady's house one night. In slippers and a night-gown, she and the other residents escaped safely and soon had the response of the local fire department. With luck and the skill of the fire department, the structure was saved, but most of the possessions in the house were permanently damaged by smoke.

Our team came into the picture about a month afterward. The daughter of the owner had gotten in touch with us through the Red Cross, one of our regular partners. We had helped her organize a dumpster to be delivered to her house, and a pair of storage pods were donated through the generosity of her church group. On the day we showed up, it was the first time that she had entered the house since the fire, and it was a bit of an emotional moment.

As we sifted through the salvageable belongings and those that the daughter decided to throw away, I was incredibly impressed by her character. She was surprisingly upbeat doing a task that tugged on anyone's heartstrings, even us as outside observers. Putting old pictures, shoes, and books into boxes and others into garbage bags made me think of how much of the things that seem to make up life actually are 'things'. Not that the most valuable things are material, but many of our important memories are held in conjunction with the 'things' that went along with them.

The daughter was able to see the flip side of that coin. Rather than focus on the loss of the old things, she saw the positive of the situation. It was an opportunity to make a new start-- save what important and to get rid of what wasn't. Instead of focusing on the heartbreak she focused on the hope of the situation. She was filled with gratitude for our help and the help of her church. She knew that life wasn't going to be easy, but she and her family would get through it. Her strength was an inspiration that will stick with me this year and beyond.

Wherever you find yourself can be where you are supposed to be

So I've had another big 'milestone' today, if you can call it that. For the second year, I've had the school that I was banking on attending tell me that they aren't pursuing me as a student. This time around it was Colorado State University of Fort Collins. This is particularly like rubbing salt in the wound because I've been doting on them for almost a year now. Besides the romantic flair I have for wanting to live in the scenic state of Colorado, CSU had the very best program for tuberculosis research-- something that it's taken me years to find I want to pursue. Where this is and what I would be doing seem like such a good fit for me, that it's like being sucker-punched not to be able to go there.

In situations like this there is the silly but inevitable result of a lot of self-doubt. Is there something wrong with me? Have I been doing the right things and making the right decisions? Is this what I want, if they don't want me? Ultimately, I know these are silly questions: no, there's nothing wrong with me; yes, I've been doing what I can to make myself a better person and to help people which are, in the end, the right decisions; and yes, this is what I want-- to study infectious disease and pursue my Ph. D. It's hard, though, not for these questions not to keep popping back into my head.

One of the most frustrating things is that I really don't know what I can do to prove to an applications committee how good of a candidate I am. I know just how charged I am to be back doing science, and I thought I got that across in my statement of purpose. I just wish there was something more I can do to convince them, but sadly I'm at a loss. I'm just a pen without a poet, or a saw without a sawyer. I'm ready to be used, and I want to be doing something good and meaningful. I just can't do it unless the right person sees that and lets me meet my potential.

The other great frustration is this, to me, seems like the continuation of a long line of ambitions that I have set for myself that have absolutely never worked out. Every time I set out to do something responsible that would better myself, I seem to be told that I am not responsible enough. In college I thought it would be good for me to be part of my fraternity cabinet and help out my house-- nope, not voted in. I later thought it would be good for me to be an RA and help out freshmen-- nope, denied at my interview. In NCCC I thought I could be a responsible team leader-- nope, didn't get past the interviews there either. Shortly thereafter, another AmeriCorps position opened up as an environmental education and research in Portland-- nope, though I was in the top 3. Most recently it has been my application to grad schools, round one-- nope, UNC, UW-Madison, Vandy, and UVA had many qualified applicants...blah,blah,blah.

In almost all of those cases, I was perhaps better off for the denial. Cabinet and RA positions are very time consuming and hard to balance with schoolwork. Not being an NCCC TL or Portland AmeriCorps volunteer allowed me to do Bike and Build and St. Louis ERT. Not getting into my first round of grad schools allowed me to focus on the particular subset of study I wanted (infectious disease) and look for the best schools for those. For most of these roadblocks I've found an alternate path and made something good out of it. I'm just really tired of hearing 'nope'. Especially since I think I'm finally where I need to be.

One thing that stuck with me in a conversation with one of my dearest friends this evening is that he said, "Jesse, wherever you find yourself is where you are supposed to be." I found this statement very problematic, and it's something I hear it very often from a lot of my friends and family. While I'm thankful at their reassurance and that they care, the fact that it's the only response I get is very unsatisfying. I don't particularly believe in fate or that there is a plan for me (I don't disbelieve it, it's just one of those gray areas that can go either way). As a result, I get pretty anxious and feel like I'm wasting my time if I'm not in the thick of doing some good new thing. Anyway, as we were talking we came up with a more satisfying rendition of the phrase. Instead it was, "Wherever you find yourself can be where you are supposed to be." That is, in every situation this are a lot of ways you can continue to better yourself and live life well and fully (whether it was what you had hoped or not).

How that will embody itself in the coming days, I don't know. While I don't have a lot of faith left in me getting into grad school this year (I still have a shot with Pitt), I do have faith that good things will happen and that life will present new bits of wisdom and richness.

My best guess is that it may allow me to pursue a plan of biking a 350 mile loop around Montana late this summer [PS, if any friends are interested in joining me, say so]. It may also give me the time next summer to pursue a leadership role for another Bike and Build route, who knows?

Character Development

*This is from another of my 'Great Stories' submissions...

In the last weekend, I went through a hearty round of character development. That is, during my week as the graveyard shift leader at the warming shelter I met a ton of characters and have struggled to log all of the fun details ever since. Here is my best attempt...

St. Louis has at least two resident psychics, and they don't like each other very much. Our psychics, Ryan and Stu, both got in an argument Monday night. Most of my service time was spent talking down Ryan and convincing him to go to bed or else killing time with Stu as he sobered up and avoided bothering other people.

Ryan had an interesting philosophy in that the world revolved around two opposing forces of "3-C's". On one side was the survival-of-the-fittest "C's": corruption, competition, and killing. On the other were the more humane "C's": compassion, courtesy, and caring. His life, and everyone's, is a battle between the two as we strive to be more humane. It was a nice sentiment and was made legitimate when he offered Stu a cigarillo as a gesture of good faith. Unfortunately Stu was still on the surly side and refused.

The rest of my night I spent listening to Stu's monologues of poems, bible passages, and sermons. Stu was really took the prize for biggest character that night. He calls himself 'Minister Stu' and prides himself on being the best at quoting scripture in all of St. Louis. This unfortunately comes off as a holier-than-though outlook-- he is judgmental of many of his fellow guests and blind to his own faults. His constant complaint is the noise of other people, whether during movies or quiet hours. However because of his inability to keep quiet that night, his talking went so far as to drive out one other guest at four in the morning.

What made Stu interesting and also tragic was his weird mix of opposites in his personality. He extolled morals, but was a jerk to his neighbors. He said that while he had a lot of Faith, he had very little Hope. His faith bolstered the idea that he was here for a reason (to do good), but he was currently in a ‘rut’. He talked about his dependence on alcohol, though he would never admit to being an 'alcoholic' because of some biblical passage. In the past he had tried AA, but thought of the fellow members as weak for relying on each other for support and not on God. Telling us his story, preached that he was reliant on God but was unable to ask God to take him out of his pit of alcohol. It was heartbreaking to hear that his faith, which could be his biggest ally-- a reason to continue good work in the world, was what he used to justify his continuing dependence issues.

Late in the morning, Stu’s story took a turn from the tragic to the weird. He had been having a long conversation with Dan, a guest that was having trouble getting back to sleep. Dan was also a Christian (a much more model Christian, in my opinion) and very good at remembering scripture, so Stu was really enjoying it thoroughly. Dan, at some point, brought up science fiction as a topic that he was interested in and was going to use for a talk in his lay-ministry. He mentioned UFO’s and that he didn’t think they were real, but he was going to use them as a metaphor. Out of nowhere, Stu went off on him about the truth of UFO’s. To Stu, there were millions of universes out there and UFO’s were totally real. How did he know? Because he was a psychic. He challenged any of us to have a reading where he would hold our hand and tell us about ourselves. Intrigued, I gave him my hand and he told me that I was having housing issues and that I had a relationship that I couldn’t let go of in my past. One of the other volunteers had something about a family or friend and troubles with a child. Another had a relationship with a man that was going to go sour (which was great, since she was a lesbian).

It’s been hard for me to make two-cents out of some of the experiences I had at the shelter, and I think that night was a model for it. The stories I heard were at the same time profound, tragic, and off-the-wall. It has been an experience, though at times frustrating, will stick with me for-better-or-for-worse.