Like all jobs, forestry has its bad days, and plenty of bad moments.
8 août 2016 15:49 Laisser vos pensées
Like all jobs, forestry has its bad days, and plenty of bad moments. Anyone in forestry can most likely think of countless situations that can make these days painful; being stuck in bad weather, quads/argos breaking down, technology not working correctly, endless beaver floods. I personally (if you haven’t noticed by now) absolutely hate having to cross beaver dams. Climbing over rotten logs at the bottom of a valley is also disheartening. So is climbing up and down very steep hills trying to get to or through a block.
It was on one of these painstaking days recently that I found something that always, without fail, brightens my day, even just for a short while.
I was busy GPSing a beaver dam area that (having crossed it earlier on this particular day) would later turn into a small permanent stream. To start with there was nothing to complain about it. It was, as far as beaver dams go, nice to walk along the edge of. That quickly changed. It turned a corner and started down a small valley. One side of this valley was quite steep, and so trees had fallen down into the center of the valley. The beaver area was old: it was all over grown, there had been no beavers actively there for quite some time. But of course there had been beavers there, and they had done their damage. They had also chewed down trees that now lay strewn all across the bottom of this valley.
Climbing over fallen trees (when you have short legs like mine) is hard enough. It’s a lot worse at the bottom of a valley, made more difficult when attempting to GPS a high water mark. Lots of these trees had been there a long time. They were all very rotten. I found myself scrambling on my hands a knees trying to get over 5 or so of these trees, that were all stacked upon each other, and crumbling because they were so rotten. My only thought for a long time during this was “Please don’t break under my weight, please don’t break under my weight” over and over. I found myself in for a small, but pleasant surpris, that made climbing over each log a little sweeter. Though late in the season, I happened to spot just a few strawberries from the top of a log. I quickly found that there were several all scattered along the edge of this water course. Every berry was perfectly ripe and helped me regain a much better mood. It definitely became an “enjoy the fruits of your labour” situation, in just about every sense. Enjoy the little things.