Fired up!

Hello Everyone!

So it's been a couple of weeks since I left Toronto for the cooler, quieter lands of New Brunswick. Life here is very different, and I am sure that I will write about the daily grind at the centre here in more detail later. But first, a story from last weekend.

In Ontario, we have a day off on the first Monday of August, with the super-lame name of the 'civic holiday' or something. Brief aside: I'm pretty sure that it is actually called Simcoe Day, but due to the fact that no-one remembers who Simcoe was anymore, we opted for a neutral name rather than admit our ignorance (for the record, John Graves Simcoe was the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and the founder of what would become Toronto). I was pleased to find out that this tradition exists in New Brunswick as well, although by the name of "New Brunswick Day."

As it happened, some people in the area who used to work with Falls Brook Centre (the NGO I’m working with) were offering a two-day bushcraft course – topics included fire-building, shelter, and general survival/craft skills that could be used in the bush. While there was a bit of a price tag attached to the offer, I and two other interns decided that we couldn’t pass it up. Most of our colleagues opted inexplicably for a long weekend full of partying and fun. What fools! Clearly they were unaware that the best parties involve starting fires with flint and steel, or sleeping in lean-tos.

Growing up, I had always heard my father’s stories about going to wilderness camp, something that was never much of an option for us, since these camps are now few and far between, and exponentially more expensive. However, I had always felt that a certain amount of traipsing through the woods was missing from my life. The weekend provided an ideal opportunity. We began by talking about firecraft, starting with practical things like gathering and lighting bunches of tinder and kindling, and lighting twig bundles. Then things got interesting. While our instructor freely admitted that we would almost certainly start every fire we ever made with matches or a lighter, he wanted to show us some ways of making fire that predated matches (which, incidentally, have only been in common use for just over a hundred years! Weird, eh?). We started by looking for hoof fungus and chugga fungus, which grow on white and yellow birch, respectively. Both contain a kind of corky tissue that lights very easily, and quickly turns into an ember once a spark has been cast onto it. To cast sparks, we used our knives and a ‘metal match’, a long piece of flint. We also spent a few hours learning how to search for materials and construct a bow drill, a tool that creates an ember by drilling into a dry piece of wood, which creates friction.

The most curious moment of the weekend happened after dinner on the first day. We had already explored some fairly outlandish ways of starting fires, culminating in a small flame that we got from casting sparks onto chunks of hoof fungus and putting the lit mushrooms into a nest of kindling. However, even this was outdone by a challenge that was put to us in the evening. We were provided with an old pair of blue jeans, several hacksaw blades and an encyclopedia. We were then directed to search through the gravel road for bits of quartz. All of these ingredients would, it was said, make fire. I was somewhat skeptical. This is it, I thought, as I went through the roadside looking for quartz rocks, this is some kind of bizarre New-Brunswickian sacrifice ritual and I have minutes to live. I contemplated fleeing, but I was really curious to see how it would turn out.

Those of you with more wilderness training (or logical minds) than me may have already figured it out. The blue jeans were torn into the strips, and the strips were allowed to catch fire. Before they had burned completely, they were extinguished by dropping them on an open page of the encyclopedia, which was then shut, This ruined the page of the encyclopedia in question, which is why we used one of the index volumes that no-one really ever opens (side note, does anyone even remember how to use encyclopedias anymore? I remember when they were all the rage in grade four). The result is a piece of cloth that is charred all the way through. This is the tinder cloth that will catch a spark and start to form an ember that can grow into a fire. The sparks are cast, then, with the quartz and hacksaw blade, by striking the blade against a jagged edge of quartz. These edges tend to get worn out rather quickly, however, so the process requires a constant smashing of quartz so that new edges can be created.

The rest of the weekend was great – we learned to make a basic shelter the next day using a frame of willow and alder stakes, and covered with an old parachute. We made a bed inside using spruce and fir boughs as well – we put down two body-length logs, then some larger branches for bedsprings, and then a layer of branch tips for bedding, with clumps around the head and hips for comfort. It ended up being one of the most comfortable beds I’ve had.

Thanks, as well, to our hosts' generosity, we were also able to attend free of charge by showing up on Monday (New Brunswick Day, if you were paying attention) and doing a day of farm chores. Finally, my fascination with shovels and pitchforks is paying off!

Pining Away

In my last post, I may have indicated some degree of uncertainty of what, exactly, is going to happen on the internship I will be leaving on. This is normal -- the details of most, if not all, international placements are only really worked after you get there. As a result, most inquiries about what exactly I will be doing have been met with a vague answer about "forest conservation", followed by assurances that I can indeed speak a little Spanish, followed by intense interest in the weather (some heat we've been having, eh?)

Anyway, while I have been pining away for my internship to begin, I have been having some adventures of my own, right here in Toronto! Read on for the details, and to discover why the title of this post is a really clever pun (if I do say so myself).

First, a note: I, along with several of my distinguished (and remarkably attractive) colleagues graduated last month. Yay! Accomplishments! The problem with graduating is that the celebrations are quickly ruined by the long, hard job hunt or, in some cases, a crippling case of the quarter-life crisis -- about which, my friend Conor has written an excellent piece.

Another of the problems with graduating, especially from an institution like the University of Toronto, is that one quickly notices one's lack of, shall we say, experience. We've been learning about these lofty concepts and exciting events in the safety of our classrooms, blissfully unaware that what the outside world valued was not our ability to write essays about things, but our ability to do those things.

This realization hit home in my last semester, when I started to apply for jobs and realized that everything in the environmental field that interested me required that I have gone out into the environment and studied it. Awkward.

Luckily, the past few months have given me the chance to get into environments near and far. For a while in May and June, I volunteered on a forestry project, doing baseline studies of a forest on the Petawawa Canadian Forces Base. The idea was to get an idea of what the forest was like before they cut it all down and tried to regenerate it. As a twist, there were going to be two harvest types -- one normal, in which the saleable logs were taken and everything else was left behind. In the other part of the forest, all of the large trees were taken, and whatever was not sold was made into woodchips and burned to generate electricity. If it could be shown that this kind of harvesting could be done in such a way that the forest regenerated and the loggers made a profit, it could pave the way for a new source of green energy -- potentially creating low-cost, low-emissions electricity for Ontario and jobs for the ailing forestry sector.

Another project I was involved with was a biodiversity survey along the Bruce Trail, on the Niagara Escarpment. This is an ecologically unique part of the province, and has been designated a World Biosphere Reserve. In the 1970s, much of it was surveyed by biologists who recorded the species present at sites throughout the escarpment. In repeating this work four decades later, we were getting an idea of how, or if, the environment had changed significantly over that time.

All of this sounds sexy, doesn't it? Well, I learned something else: science is boring. No matter how interesting the original question is, the analysis required to answer it will numb even the most inquisitive minds. I mean, I speak as someone who really, really likes science, and learning about the environment. But my brain may have turned to mush after spending three days counting twigs (which we did in order to determine the nutrient load on the forest floor).


Or, as xkcd says:

Which I took as a kind of warning: if you're going to do science, you have to be committed enough to the process to spend much of your time on things like sifting through soil samples or counting leaf hairs (something that my mother, apparently, had to do for her PhD thesis).

Anyway, that was my summer! I didn't spend the entire time pining away for my trip to New Brunswick, I also looked at some actual pines in the forest, and...

Okay, sorry.

'til next time!