What we endure to get by

Sitting on my front porch with a pint of Raspberry Brown from Lost Coast Brewery, I consider the lives of the van Goethem girls in the book I just finished. Their father dead and their mother lost at the bottom of a bottle of absynthe, the three sisters struggle through life to pay the rent and put food on the table by dancing in the opera, working in a laundry house or working as a prostitute. It's a harsher side of life than the one myself and my family live in, but it makes me think about the things we do to get by.

My forearms are covered in scratches from hauling brush and trees away from the fire side of a razor-back ridge. During a swing shift of 10am to 2am I attempted to rescue an unresponsive tree from the fate of smoke inhalation. Gagging and choking on hot smoke, I pulled embers out of the "green" and tossed them into the black to prevent spot fires from flaring up. My eyes burned and my nose ran snot into the back of my stinging throat. Through the smoke I got a glimpse of a silhouette of one of my crewmembers, hunched over, frozen by the thick astringent blanket of smoke.

"Hey! Are you alright?!" I shouted. There was no response. I felt the other crewmembers around me grow silent. The figure didn't move, didn't respond. I had to get him out of this smoke! I blinked my tears away and lunged toward him.

"Hey!" I shouted as I reached my hand out to grab his shoulder. My hand went straight through a tangle of branches. What the hell?

I stepped forward and parted the branches. It was the tree we just cut down that had caught fire on the wrong side of the line. There was no person there. I knew my crewmembers were somewhere in the smoke, awaiting word on the crewmember in trouble.

"I'm talking to a tree!" I said, loud enough so everyone could hear.

"Carrie, get out of the smoke!"

I laughed and stumbled out to cleaner air.

Days of disjointed swing shift up a steep mountain, taping the wounds on my feet with duct tape as it is the only thing that can withstand the rigors of steep terrain and 16 hour days of hot sweaty boots. I think of the back pain, the bug bites and the scratches on my arms that will take another week to heal. Then I consider the letters to all the professors, praising their work and asking to join their research team and I wonder who I'm selling my soul to this time.