Dear Family and Friends,  

For those of you who were panicking that you had unwittingly offended me and been dropped from my email list, fear not! My computer is back up and running after an unfortunate hard drive incident, and I am once again able to send novel-length emails detailing the horrors of the Midwest to everyone I know.  

For the past few months, I have been living and working in Westfield, Iowa, a town near the border of South Dakota and Nebraska. In my first email update I foolishly poked fun at Vinton, the location of our central campus, for being folksy and rural; if my time in Westfield has taught me anything, it’s that in Iowa, places like Vinton, with newfangled luxuries like cell phone reception and grocery stores, are considered amenity-rich.  

While in Westfield, my team stayed in a house off a windy gravel road several miles from town in a setting ideal for a horror movie. We were surrounded for acres by nothing but cattle, corn and prairie grass, with no other humans around to hear our screams, (except the occasional flannel-clad bow hunter cutting across our land which only added to the creepy factor), and a fifteen passenger van for an escape vehicle that once tipped off the driveway, prompting a rear door evacuation and three hour strategy session with a puzzled tow truck driver. For all you aspiring film makers and/or mass murderers, there are also three rundown sheds adjacent to the house that would make excellent nests for observation of the house’s inhabitants, homicidal plotting and the preliminary sacrifice of small animals.  

The inside of our house was very nice by AmeriCorps standards, meaning we had cooking appliances and running water that was hot at least through the first two showers, but ghetto by normal standards, meaning the upstairs bathroom was carpeted, the living room was adorned with wood paneling and wallpaper depicting some sort of hideous rainforest scene, and five of us slept in a basement with serious insect infestation problems. Our cots were so stiff that every time one of us shifted slightly in our sleep it sounded like someone was vigorously massaging a balloon with a dishwashing glove, an unpleasant noise that narrowly edged out the chirps of our cricket roommates as the most annoying cause of my sleep deprivation. Those of us in the basement also shared a bathroom that was essentially a moldy cement room with a showerhead that we affectionately called “the trough”. My teammate Sarah described the trough best when she paused in the doorway one day and said dejectedly to no one in particular, “It’s like…the dirtiest gas station restroom you’ve ever seen”.  

Since there is very little in central Westfield besides a handful of houses, the only time we left our home to go into town was to dump our recycling and occasionally visit Hummers, a bar with excellent buffalo wings and an outside patio bordered by the backyards of several Westfield residents. It’s hard to enjoy happy hour when there is a pigtailed child on a Big Wheels peering accusingly at you through the cracks of a chain link fence, so we spent a lot more time in the nearby and slightly larger town of Akron where we could enjoy such amenities as a Laundromat, a public library with internet and a bar called Chuggers where we could have a few drinks without feeling like we were corrupting Iowa’s youth.  

A few times we tried venturing into Sioux City, the closest thing western Iowa has to a bustling metropolis, but there were hints of small town America even in the “big city”. One night we went to a casino on a riverboat and were informed at the bar that we could not purchase a drink more frequently than every fifteen minutes. I know that doesn’t sound like a long wait but if you have a shot, that next fourteen minutes and fifty-nine seconds really drags. Who ever heard of a casino that isn’t trying to get you trashed enough to piss away your entire paycheck on three minutes of Blackjack? Since there were bars on both levels of the riverboat, I had the brilliant idea of ordering a drink at one and then continuously switching floors, thus giving the illusion of only occasionally stopping by the counter between spirited sessions at the slot machine. Unfortunately I did not give the Argosy Casino security staff enough credit for their surveillance capabilities or their apparent boredom, and we were informed by the bartender after maybe our third location change that all he was at liberty to serve us was “coffee, juice or water”. When I tried to lead the way back upstairs, thinking we could make the best of this horrible evening and get one more drink in before the word got out, we were chased down by a frazzled woman in a tuxedo vest who started shouting urgently into a walkie-talkie, “Floor to HQ, she’s headed for the second level!” We were then escorted out of the establishment by a security guard with a CIA-like earpiece who was sweating profusely from the excitement of what I’m sure was his first “big bust”. Only in Iowa can you get ejected from a bar for attempting to be drunk as opposed to actually achieving public intoxication.  

For the most part, my leisure time in Westfield involved a lot of crosswords, DVDs and unfortunately for my ever-growing gut, the consumption of my teammates’ baked goods. There is actually very little downtime in AmeriCorps in general because doing everything with nine other people adds at least an hour to even the most minor of tasks. Getting groceries, doing laundry and checking email was an all day ordeal. If we had to go to town after work to get toilet paper, I knew I’d have to go to bed as soon as we finished dinner. I love my team but their constant presence sometimes makes me feel like I’m in a cult, particularly on days when we are required to be in uniform in a public place that is not a worksite; something about ten young people wearing drab, identical outfits in the lobby of an Applebee’s talking about how lovely it will be to eat a “nice meal” for a change just screams Heaven’s Gate to me. (For all interested parties, my AmeriCorps outfit only grows more hideous with each washing as my pant legs shrink dangerously close to being high waters, but the extra F.U.P.A. fabric and crotch seam mysteriously remain the same length).  

Work took up most of our time which was fortunate for me because I loved our job. We worked with both the Plymouth County Conservation Board and the Iowa chapter of the Nature Conservancy doing prairie restoration. When we were working for the county we used chainsaws, brushcutters and brush mowers (multi-speed lawn mowers that can take out small shrubs and trees) to cut down the invasive plant species encroaching on the native prairie and its inhabitants. We usually worked in pairs on the preserve, with one of us sawing and another person “swamping” or moving fallen trees out of the way of the sawyer as we made our way through the brush. We would start at the bottom of a ridge, cutting a swath about ten feet wide through thick vegetation, often hiking over a hundred yards up steep terrain before reaching the top and then heading back down to start again. Add the twenty pound saw we were hauling around and the frequent trips down to the truck for gas and you can imagine the impressive physical condition I must be in. Wrong. As it turns out, a diet based on a $4.50 per day stipend of Wal-Mart food and a job that involves lugging heavy objects slowly up hills results in what I call the “Plymouth County Body” (PCB): a dark brown neck and forearms and a large belly and muscular shoulders the color of paste. The PCB is named after the five or so identical county conservation employees we worked with who I’m pretty sure hunt for cardio and survive primarily on Mountain Dew and deer jerky.  

Swampers working with me on the preserve had the additional task of gesturing wildly when I was about to cut down a Burr Oak, a state protected tree that I tended to enthusiastically slash down along with the others during my well-meaning, but slightly out of control sawing sprees. I also dropped several good sized trees on my head while restoring the prairie, badly sliced my knuckles tightening a chain, and once slipped and hit my thigh with a moving saw. If not for my chaps, a precious piece of protective apparel I once considered reserved for hairy, bare-assed gentlemen at gay pride parades, I could be writing this as your friend the Special Olympian. I think I was above average when it came to chainsawing, but I was always the kid wearing my protective eyewear on the top of my head or trying to drop kick a tree off its stump when it got snagged on a vine and wouldn’t fall, making my selection as the team’s Safety and Tools Representative an ironic and perhaps regrettable one.  

Our other job with Plymouth County was assisting with controlled burns, another method of wiping out invasive species and helping native prairie species grow back stronger. To participate in burns, we had to take a week of classroom training to become certified in wildland firefighting and pass a “pack test” – walking three miles with a fifty pound pack in less than forty-five minutes – which is more challenging than it sounds. Lighting prescribed fires involves the use of a drip torch which is essentially a tank of fuel with a flame at the nozzle that allows you to leave a line of fire behind you as you walk. I have never experienced anything as empowering as walking down a ridge with a drip torch and then looking behind me to see a wall of flames enveloping acres of prairie grass. We also got to shoot water at the fire, but of course that wasn’t nearly as satisfying. Chainsawing, burning, house gutting…so far AmeriCorps has just been one big orgy of destruction for me. If one of our next projects is tutoring children or helping senior citizens with their taxes, I’m afraid I might accidentally charge one of them with a hammer.  

When we weren’t working for the county we were with the Nature Conservancy building a fence for a herd of bison being transported to the preserve from South Dakota. The basic fence building process involves digging a hole with a tractor, using clam shells to deepen the hole enough to sink a ten inch diameter post, and then tamping dirt around the post with sticks until it’s sturdy. Once the posts were sunk, we hammered woven wire to them with staples. This process could be monotonous and exhausting, especially when we started hitting slate rock or water, but I really enjoyed it because it allowed me to play the most tools and machines, most notably ATVs and tractors. I have always longed to be a handy dyke, but the only stereotypical lesbian abilities I’ve managed to master so far have involved sports and purchasing sensible button-ups. Useless! Which brings me to my Westfield revelations:  

1) If nothing else, hopefully my time in AmeriCorps will equip me with skills that will make me more attractive to the ladies. Considering my general lack of affinity for anything mechanical, my current plan is to photograph myself holding tools and driving trucks as much as possible, and then perhaps get them printed on business cards that I can casually pass out at bars.

2) Even if it isn’t necessarily my strong suit, I love working outdoors, and I love working with my hands. When you work with your hands, you are rewarded with tangible evidence of your efforts. I didn’t mind working in an office, but you can easily spend a hectic eight hours behind a desk and at the end of the day wonder exactly what you accomplished. On the preserve, we would have frustrating, exhausting days, but when we went home at five there was a fence standing in what used to be an empty patch of grass. There is nothing more rewarding than sawing in a wooded enclosure for an hour and then falling that one tree that lets the sunlight spill in, or walking over black ash that used to be thick vegetation on the way back to the engine after a burn. I’m not any closer to fulfilling my AmeriCorps goal of knowing exactly what I want to do with my life when this experience is over, but I feel like each project is going to offer a clue. Westfield’s clue: Marea, you like working with tools, and not just because you think it makes you hotter.

3) No matter how handy and outdoorsy I become, I will never be totally okay with shitting behind a tree with no toilet paper. I will continue to hold it to the point of extreme discomfort rather than dropping trow’ in brush crawling with poison oak, tics and chiggers.  

Our project ended on October 3 and we headed back to Vinton for a week of debriefing and meetings. Our sponsors in Westfield were so impressed with us that they requested that our stay be extended for a month to put some finishing touches on the bison fence and to help with some burns they need done before winter. Unfortunately, one of the AmeriCorps team leaders managed to suck so much that eight members of his team resigned, leaving us with fourteen projects lined up for the next round and only thirteen teams. The solution from the higher-ups was to split my team into two five person squads, with our current team leader Violet taking a group to our new project site and yours truly heading up the crew that goes back to Westfield. I have been told by no less than five AmeriCorps staff members with strained, stressed out smiles about what a “unique opportunity” this is for me to grow as a leader. I don’t have the heart to tell them that I have worked in the corporate world and there is actually nothing unique about getting a promotion with additional responsibilities and not receiving a pay raise.  

I am currently back in Westfield enjoying the quiet of a smaller team. One of the perks of coming back is that we were here when the bison arrived so we got to see our fence put to use. We’ve also gotten to participate in two additional burns so far and have a huge fire scheduled for next week that should take out a couple hundred acres. On October 31 we head back to Vinton for the weekend before moving to Jones County, Iowa (not far from Vinton) to do two weeks of burning with their parks department. We will then reunite with the rest of our team and begin work at Camp Courageous, a facility for children with mental and physical disabilities, until our winter break. We will have some interaction with the campers, but we will primarily be assisting with the remodeling and maintenance of the property.  

I know you are all busy people, so thank you if you toughed it out to the end of this email. And for those of you who appreciate the fact that this just killed about three hours of your workday (you know who you are), you’re welcome. Thanks again for being so good about keeping in touch! I miss you all so much.  

Love,  

Marea