Ketchup, please

Well I hope everything is well.
I realized that I mentioned squat about what we’d been doing these past days here at Mendocino besides what we do in our spare time. What, AmeriCorps gets things done? Pshaw.
But indeed, we have been doin’ stuff. Our first task upon arrival was to increase visibility along a three-mile stretch of the windy, altitudally schizo bit of road from the camp gate to the main parking lot.
Imagine I have a mobster accent, and thus: “Now, see? All these plants, stickin’ up outta the ground here, they gotsta go, see? I want ‘em gone, and I want ‘em gone good!”
It was supposed to take us a week to do the brush clearance, and we were at the bottom in two days. Now, I think it proooobably should have taken us three days (the bottom mile was skimped when people realized how close they were. I have no guilt, I was still at mile 2 doing “quality control” on the skimping when they hit bottom), but we still got all the overhanging trees, small brush, and obnoxious viney things out in a 5’ corridor.
That was boring, mind-numbing work, lightened only by the fact that our handsaws had belt holsters. Not only could we drop our loppers and wip them out to saw stuff down if we got really bored, but a couple of us spent the walk back to our lunches going “1. 2. 3. DRAW” Good times.
BUT. We did get to burn the 15-or-so large piles of brush we accumulated. Much more stressful and tiring than you would think, seeing as it rains every night here. The fire has to be slowly coaxed up to heat by burning leafy brush stuff in exponentially increasing amounts at the instant the last batch flares up. Add more fuel too early and smothered, too late and the new stuff didn’t catch. However, once the fire was blazing with a great coal base, you could dump anything on it and it was torch instantly. And since we are very responsible fire tenders, we were willing to sit around and watch the fire die before moving on, to make sure none of the forest caught fire.
The rest of our week involved a lot of painting over graffiti in the cabins and buildings (a lot of misspellings, but humorous stuff) and staining the floor of one of the buildings. This week we’ve moved on into odd jobs. We have, thus far, dug a trench for gas lines, half-demolished a small building, deep cleaned our kitchens and the walk-in fridges, and organized the camps food warehouse.
The warehouse was a scary job, primarily because it smelled amazingly strongly of mouse urine and decomposing rodents. At one point, we opened up and plastic tub to see what was inside, and everybody ended up sprinting from the warehouse because the smell from the tub stung your face. It turned out to contain the liquefied corpses of three very unlucky mice. I don’t think we even bothered to clean it; we just dumped it about 100 yards from the work area and had the back loader come pick it up.
Demolishing the building, on the other hand, was a real blast. There was much use of axes to smash holes in things and then yell “HEEEEERE’S JOHNNY!” and many a successful roundhouse kick landed in the sideboards. The only bad part was digging through the wreckage later for our tools and hauling away the debris to a burn pile.
A good week, thus far, and we’re only kind of running out of food! I would like to claim some credit for that status, since I have assumed the position of food nazi. It’s a cold place to be when we’re shopping, but eating is good so it balances out.

I wrote the stuff above a couple days ago, and the generator is on, so booya. In recent news, the camp kitchen has a deep fryer, and my cooking partners and I decided to utilize it this week. So yesterday we did homemade chicken fingers and fries that were finger-lickin good, with one catch. WE HAVE NO KETCHUP. What kind of America-orps do we live in where a boy must use barbeque sauce with his fries? Well, I didn’t, cause those fries were so good and droopy with oil that I just scarfed handfuls plain. Oh, and we made broccoli and a salad. Please, we’re not savages.
I spent 8 hours today stripping the bark from a 20’ section of a redwood by hand. Or pretty much by hand, I had a walloping-looking iron scrape bar. Not easy, I’m certain my palms are permanently bruised.
But how many people can say that they manually stripped a redwood?
The sound you hear is Sam entering the exclusive club of lumberjacky.