Stacking Sticks

Halfway to work today, I considered calling in sick. I’ve been feeling burned out lately, and now suddenly I felt like I was coming down with a cold. Plus it was cold outside. Just what I needed. Not to mention I was running late.
Today we were building burn piles, or “stacking sticks”. Unfortunately, stacking sticks involved digging around in poison oak vines. I was thrilled to say the least. We’d gather branches and logs and place them in a pile over a thick sheet of brown paper to help it burn. Then we would scrape line around it, down to mineral soil, to keep the burning piles from spreading to the rest of the forest.
Lunchtime came around soon enough, and we were allowed an hour. Meaning a half hour to eat and a half hour to nap. I slept sitting up in the back seat of our pick-up truck. I kept waking myself up with my own snoring. It was miserable. Then we were up and moving again. It reminded me of days out on fires where we would work for hours on end, then lay down in the dirt for a quick nap. Getting up and straight into working again is always the hardest part. My mind is always still in a fog and my body stays asleep for the next 5 minutes, screaming at me to stop moving. Sleep inertia I think it’s called. The body is not meant to accelerate from sleep to hiking up the side of the mountain with 25lbs of gear and a tool, chasing after a fire or a bunch of sticks.
What’s even better is getting home and having to take care of my oak-infested body and clothes. I strip off the worst of it and lay it in the middle of my bedroom floor to be dealt with later. I have to take a shower in cold water with special poison oak soap. The cold water is to keep my pores from opening and absorbing the oils in places that haven’t come into contact with it yet. After a couple scrubs like that, I get to heat up the water a little. After getting fully scrubbed down, I deal with my clothes. Gloves on, I take everything out of my pockets and throw them into the washing machine. My boots get scrubbed with saddle soap and re-oiled. My watch either gets hand-washed or thrown in the washing machine. After touching everything again, I have to wash my hands and arms all over again. The clothes get run through the washer twice, then when they’re transferred to the dryer, the washing machine gets another wash run through, without any clothes in it in order to keep the next set of clothes from getting the oak oils on them. The process is repeated whenever I get any significant contact with poison oak.
I’m absolutely exhausted and it’s only 7:40pm. I think bedtime is in 20 minutes. That may be the longest I can last.