Why I Stopped Swinging a Pulaski

Trail crew was good work and I don’t say that as a setup for a complaint. Six of us most days, sometimes eight, hiking in with crosscut saws and pulaskis and a foreman named Deb who could read a slope better than anyone I’ve worked with since, deciding where a reroute needed to go before the rest of us had even clocked that the old trail was slumping. We cleared blowdown, rebuilt water bars, and in my second season spent most of July rerouting a half mile section that a rockslide had taken out entirely, boulders the size of trucks sitting where the trail used to run, which meant building new tread across a slope that hadn’t asked for a trail and wasn’t especially cooperative about getting one.

That was some of the best physical work I’ve done, honestly. Six of us with hand tools, no machinery allowed that deep in, moving rock and cutting into a hillside for six weeks until there was a trail there that hadn’t existed before. I was proud of that section. I’d hike it again just to see if it held, and as far as I know it has.

What got me out of it wasn’t the work itself, and it wasn’t an injury, though I had the usual collection of trail crew hands, blisters that turned to calluses that split anyway. It was the crew part, specifically, which sounds like the opposite of what you’d expect from someone who then went and signed up for five months alone. Six or eight people camped together for a hitch, ten days on and four off, means you’re never actually alone, not for a meal, not for a hike to the water source, not for the twenty minutes before sleep. I liked the people fine. Deb especially, sharp and funny in a dry way I recognized as similar to something in myself, and I’ve stayed loose touch with a couple of the others over the years, a text here and there in winter. But I noticed by my third season that the part of the day I liked best was the half hour after everyone else had turned in, sitting outside the tent by myself with the fire mostly out, and that struck me as worth paying attention to.

I applied for the lookout job that winter without telling most of the crew, half expecting not to get it, since the waitlist for these positions can run long and I had zero fire finder experience going in. Deb was the one person on the old crew I told before it was official, and she didn’t seem surprised, said something like she’d wondered when I’d figure out I wanted the version of this without the eight person tent city attached. She wasn’t wrong. I think about the crew fondly, and I think about that rockslide section with something close to pride, but I’ve never once, five seasons into this, missed the version of the job that came with seven other people’s schedules built into mine.