Sun. 7.4.10:
The plan was:
Post Bill’s fire trucks online.
Go with Cisco to to the fireworks display at Benbow State Park.
-Neither happened.
What happened:
Sarah ran away.
Wifi fails at the ballfield. Cisco fails to show at the arranged meeting time. Sarah and I sit at the Mateel Center office porch for wifi. There we get into a recurring argument. Many of our online accounts are shared and Sarah regularly forgets the passwords of the ones that she’s in charge of.
We depart the Mateel, not having posted the fire trucks. Sarah walks faster, on ahead in the direction of camp. I stop at the supermarket to purchase ground beef for dinner. Nearing the camp trail, a man named Michael asks that I buy him a sandwich. Return to supermarket then proceed to camp.
-No Sarah
-No Sarah’s purse(she had been carrying it).
-No evidence at all that she had returned.
Darkness falls. Still no Sarah. Eat hamburgers alone.
Mon. 7-5-10:
All throughout the long chilly night she does not return, but not as much as a sleeping bag in her possession. The animals take the opportunity to act very strangely, probably due to all the many distant firework explosions. A never-before-heard call is sounded repeatedly The dreaded skunk invades the hut time and time again, at times entirely careless of my presence. Every few minutes it returns. I shine the flashlight. Like a ferret with a bad aroma it continues its regular business, only scurrying when I make deliberate attempts to scare it.
Knowing Sarah’s last heading was towards Garberville, I walk there this morning. None of the regular street people have seen her. “I saw a nice butt go into the laundromat”, says Kelley, the friendly old homeless bead jewelry maker. Sure enough, there is a nice butt there, but not Sarah’s. Former Mateel chef Scott also hasn’t seen her. He invites me to do paid work with him on a farm today, but considering the situation, I decline. Great timing for this first offer of work in months. Compounding the great timing, Sarah and I were both supposed to be doing paid work today with Cisco on that very same farm!.
I use Scott’s phone to call Sarah’s. No answer. In a stroke of good timing, she calls back just as I’m walking away. “Did you leave town?”, I ask. “No”, she replies after a long pause, “I’m in town…..at least as far as town is considered here. I’m in the woods digging a hole.” Mysterious. We agree to meet at camp later.
I return there and begin packing the black backpack I arrived to California with two months ago. If Sarah is digging a hole in the woods then it can only mean she’s building her own camp.. She is moving out. I decide one of two things will happen:
#1: Sarah needs a break from life in the woods. I will ask if she would like to go stay with me at my brother’s house for a few weeks in Southern California.
#2: If she is not interested in working things out then I will attempt to spend the summer living in the expansive Northern California outback, surviving on the locally-plentiful spring water, river fish and wild plants.
Fully packed. Lounge around the camp for hours. Waiting. Sarah descends the canyon nearly two hours after the sun has ceased shining into it. Her clothing is unfamiliar.
“Why is your bag packed?”, she asks with an expression so sad that I instantly know she hasn’t moved out.
Storming back towards camp last night, shed encountered Cisco and ridden with him to Benbow State Park for the fireworks display. Still not yet ready to face me afterwards, she’d spent the night in Cisco’s van, parked on the rural property of his friends. Today she had stayed on the property assisting Cisco with gardening work. Her unfamiliar clothing was a giveaway from the property owners.
We talked. I unpacked. She’s staying.
Tue. 7-6-10:
Sarah, exhausted from her recent runaway experience, sleeps in late as I go on to volunteer at the Mateel. She appears there to eat lunch then goes on to spend the afternoon writing at the ballfield. Meeting her there later, I utilize the wifi to finally post Bill’s fire trucks on Craiglist and a national free classifieds site.
In case anybody reading this collects old fire trucks, read below.
1944 International Pump Truck:
Runs and drives. First private owner. Large belt-driven Bean pump. Winch. Title and previous bill of sale. Originally owned by the US military. Previously owned by Whale Gulch, CA Fire Department. Nicknamed “Igor”.
$3500.
1966 Unimog Flatbed Fire Truck – Excellent Condition:
Produced by Mercedes Benz. First private owner. New motor with 800 miles. Undercoated. 20,000lb Warren winch. New tires.Complete owner’s manual. Previously purchased from the German military by the Unicasa, CT Fire Department.Remained in service up until the Unicasa FD received a Homeland Security grant, requiring them to sell off older equipment.
No tank or pump included, flatbed only. $9700.
Wed. 7-7-10:
Overnight visits from the skunk are becoming increasingly frequent. 5:30AM wake up. Paid work to be done! For the first time since arriving nearly two months ago, there is money to be made.
Walk to Garberville along the mountainside highway overlooking the Eel River as the sun breaks over the ridge. Cross 101 Freeway twice. Descend into the valley towards Tooby Park. Sun obscured by the hills again as we pass through an old growth of redwoods. There it is, the destination, Southern Humboldt Community Park, the entrance right across the road from Tooby Park.
…
The boss, Farmer John, is standing in the driveway with his shaggy dog as the sun breaks over the hills again. He directs us to a barn, located further down the gravel lane past a locked gate, “Feel free to look around, I’ll be up a bit later.”
A veritable city of hay towers in front of the barn, nearly 2000 bales stacked 20 feet high. Following a nearby trail I come upon an overgrown slaughterhouse in the woods. Most of the roof is missing. The only thing left inside is a set of meat hooks attached to a pulley system. Returning the barn, it’s mostly empty except for some piles of neatly stacked wood, a few hundred stalks of garlic hanging in a corner, and an early-1900′s-era automobile. A sign on the old car reads that it was originally used on the farm. “Most people are too fat to even fit in there now”, Sarah observes of the vehicle’s tiny wooden seat.
We climb to the top of the hay city, observing the scene below as a man and two women attempt to load a stubborn donkey onto a livestock trailer. The animal is happy to go any direction but towards the trailer, to which it repeatedly responds with an abrupt stop. The humans patiently coax for 30 minutes, leading the donkey in circles till it finally gives in. “Horses and donkeys don’t want to work harder than they have to. They always take the easier option.”, Farmer John explains of why the running-in-circles system works.
A hay crew of 7 people has arrived by the 9AM starting time, including two familiar faces, Scott and Duke. Scott, former chef from the Mateel lunch, had talked Farmer John into giving us this job. Duke arrives with his new brown puppy, almost perfectly behaved despite its very young age. Never in my life have I seen a homeless person, or any other for that matter, get a puppy to be so compliant. There are few like Duke on the streets.
Hay moving begins. The bales are thrown onto an electric conveyor belt leading to the barn’s second floor. Like something straight out of a horror movie, Farmer John wears a long steel hook on each hand, tossing the bales effortlessly. Most workers of course choose to labor in the shady barn rather than the pounding sun outside. Noticing that the shady crew is constantly ahead of the sunny crew, always waiting for bales, I volunteer to switch.
The air quickly rises to 90 degrees. The conveyor belt’s electric motor exhausts itself repeatedly, overheating in the sun, shutting down automatically. It’s as if the motor is watching out for the workers, requiring a cooling break each time we do. A structure of bales is placed over the motor for shade but it continues to require breaks every 15 minutes or so. Farmer John is the only one to utter a complaint, but even he appears to need the breaks.
Lunch break. Two workers leave for the day. A woman delivers surprisingly delicious veggie burritoes. Sitting around a plastic picnic table in the barn, I chat with Farmer John. He’s “Head Honcho” of this 400+ acre not-for-profit community-owned farm. “Does the farm sustain itself financially or require outside funding?”, I ask. “We’ve been making it on our own, actually”, John replies.
Cyclists, walkers, runners and horse riders pass by on the farm’s public trails. Done. Not done. Done. Not done. “Let’s do one more stack”, Farmer John keeps suggesting. In my extreme exhaustion, concentration is required in order not to throw bales 20 feet down onto the workers below the stacks. Bales lightly roll into Duke and Scott on a couple occasions, but they are apparently too tired to complain.
When working below the stacks, dragging bales towards the conveyor, I discover the beauty of the steel hooks, which make it possible to grab hold of bales much more quickly and comfortably than opposed to carrying them by the strings. The hooks are long enough that I can drag the bales behind me while only bending down slightly. The rest of the crew dragging bales towards the conveyor quickly jump on the hook bandwagon, dragging bales in the same way. From then on, no available hook is left unused.
….
End of the workday. John gives us $130 cash and a ride back to Garberville in the back of his truck.. Duke and Scott, also along for the ride, offer to split the cost of a hotel room with us. Not ready to part with that much of our hard-earned cash, though, we decline. Walking oh-so-slowly along the steamy highway, we make our way back to Redway. At camp, it’s a dinner of Shake-N-Bake breaded chicken washed down with rum-n-coke’s!
Thur. July 8, 2010:
Sarah chooses not to volunteer at the Mateel today. I arrive at the usual time but Chef Babette is nowhere to be found, the building still locked up. “I’ll be there at 10“, she says in a phone call. Waiting, I stroll across the street and discover Sarah at the laundromat, washing her own clothes but not mine. Also there is Elk Woman, an elderly fellow Mateel volunteer. I purchase doughnuts and juice for the three of us then return to the Mateel.
Still no Babette. The building’s alarm screams as I’m waiting on the patio, accidentally activated by the new office intern, a pretty young girl of apparent high-school age who probably weighs about as much as a case of oranges. I enter the kitchen alone once the alarm has silenced, but with the pantry door locked, not much can be accomplished. I turn on the lights, put down the mats, heat the ovens and coffee machine.
Another volunteer arrives, an older man with a hood and dark glasses who offers to start setting up tables. Elk Woman arrives, making her first task of the day to scold the hooded man for entering the kitchen. Not wanting to loose the only useful volunteer of the day so far, I inform Elk Woman that the man is indeed a volunteer who has been working. Elk Woman responds with a startled look and an “Oh”, then turns back on the hooded man with a vengeance. “He(Garth) shouldn’t be correcting me and you need to wash your hands if you’re going to be in the kitchen.” The man retorts calmly, “I just need some creamer in my coffee.”
Only so much longer can I keep justifying my presence here with, ‘but homeless people get to eat the food I make for free’. The insanity, absurdity and disorganization is wearing beyond thin.
Babette calls again. She’s at the community farm picking up produce. She requests that we begin preparing some foods that are available in the cooler. Utilizing a few pans left out of the locked pantry, we boil a few dozen eggs and bake some Jenno-O turkey packages. Babette arrives at 11:30, just 30 minutes before the lunch is scheduled to be served. Mateel center manager April walks around with an angry face, knowing the late start will mean she goes home late.
Noticing the lateness, more people than usual offer to volunteer. In the haste to cook fast, Babette accidentally runs one of them off with a blunt comment. Serving time 1PM. Sarah arrives to assist with clean up. We drink bagged Pabst Blue Ribbons in the laundromat while my clothes wash. The hooded Mateel volunteer sits in the abandoned lot next door, who speaks to us in great factual detail about biblical human history in a voice so soft that I must tilt my head to understand.
Fri. July 9, 2010:
I awaken to the skunk sitting on my legs. It slowly waddles off when I raise my head. Was the skunk just sniffing around for food or has it worked up the courage to try and sleep with us?
With four more hours of hay moving scheduled at the Southern Humboldt Community Park, we arrive at 9AM to begin. Finding nobody there, we extend extension cords to the barn, switch on the conveyor belt and begin stacking bales on the second floor as previously instructed. Duke arrives a few minutes later, saying Farmer John doesn’t want us to move any more bales into the barn. Upon arrival of the farmer, he is not concerned though, simply requesting that we stack the rest of the bales outside the barn next to another stack of bales there. That other stack is nearly 20 feet high, and the entire mound of hay must be covered with a massive tarp.
This work is for Sarah and I alone, with everyone else working on other parts of the farm. The sun beats down, quickly sending the temperature into the mid-90‘s. I get so hot that I feel chilly, a warning sign of heat stroke that sends me into the shade sipping water for some time. Sarah works just as hard. We complete the hay stacking and cover the stack with the tarp while taking a series of short but frequent water breaks.
Cleanup. John gives us his truck to move the loose hay and broken bale segments. In 5 or 6 truckloads, we neatly stack the broken segments into a livestock shed and pile the loose hay in two piles near a chicken shed. A sign on the chicken shed reads, “Warning: Mean Rooster”. Farmer John pays us $40 cash each and drops us off in downtown Garberville.
….
Much needed clothes and a coffee pot purchased from the thrift shop. Nearly every pair of socks I own has a hole. Supermarket, purchase two bottles of $3.33 wine and enough food to last the weekend. These things were important considering we would be spending the weekend in the mountains with Amy, our fellow volunteer friend from the Mateel.
Although Amy has no mobile phone, we find her just where she said she’d be, at the library. We drive in her little aging station wagon to her friends’ house in Redway, where she’d said we could take a shower before going on out into the mountains. While Amy does have a house in the mountains, the house has no shower or internal running water whatsoever. As we are learning about this area, a lack of such common comforts is not uncommon.
We immediately get a uncertain vibe from Amy’s friends’ house. A sign on the front of the house comments about witches. The interior is filled with cat propaganda of every kind. “There used to be seventeen cats her”, explains an attractive younger woman named Nicole who wears bright red lipstick and a long skirt. In the kitchen is a big man they call “Cousin Mark” who found childhood fame as a member of the Mickey Mouse Club. Mark breaths heavily with apparent great labors. His speech is nasily but very friendly. Also in the kitchen is Cocoa, a thin older man I recognize as a frequent diner at the Mateel lunch.
Amy leaves to attend a medical appointment, saying we can take a shower in her absence. The man Cocoa seems somewhat annoyed by our presence, though, so we just sit silently in the living room, waiting. Realizing that Amy may be gone for sometime, I finally ask Cocoa if we can take a shower. This man that has eaten the Mateel food Sarah and I have prepared so many times just sighs and continues walking, saying over his shoulder, “I don’t know. We’re just really busy today.” He returns a few moments later to apologize, but does not offer the shower.
Considering the hay day, a cleansing is greatly needed, so we return to our camp and douse ourselves with wonderfully frigid creek water. Returning to the house afterwards, Amy has returned. Mateel chef Babette and her young daughter Katie are also there. Being the hottest day of the year, nearly 100 degrees, we all lounge around the living room for two hours. Amy’s car has a history of overheating ever since she ran it with the fan belt broken some years ago.
Joining the living room conversation are two more residents of the household, an elderly woman with a walker named Jennie and her middle-aged daughter Jackie. Jennie, despite her extreme age, is extremely calm, cool and intelligent, with a vast memory of her many years. Speaking to her in certain angles of light, I notice her left eye is made of glass.
…..
With the worst of the afternoon heat past, we make the 30 minute trip to Amy’s 40-acre property, with the last few miles being on gravel. Amy was once cut off from civilization for two months due to a recurring landslide blocking the highway. Her property sits at 1300 feet, consisting of several structures on a gently sloping hillside. The next ridge to the east is all that separates her from the Pacific Ocean. The property was logged in the 1950′s, with all the old growth trees removed. Despite that loss, the forest towers everywhere, with the only reminder of what was being the occasional massive stump measuring several feet across.
Amy directs us to our own private cabin! It’s located on the other side of the driveway from the other structures, where she lived before building her current house. The cabin and every other structure was built almost entirely by her and her alone. Only with the house did she have assistance, and that was just one person whom she needed only to speed up the process. Having learned construction by hanging out at construction sites as a young girl, she has put her knowledge to extensive use.
Sarah and I settle into the cabin, a single room with a small mattress on milk crates. In one corner is a tiny wood stove. On a counter top in another corner is an old iron 3-ring gas burner. There is an empty desk and some mostly-empty shelves. A few dresses and blouses hang above the bed. The ceiling is lined with white plastic sheeting. All considering, it’s wonderful. The cabin was previously occupied by a woman claiming to be Amy’s long-lost daughter, who was reportedly killed at a young age in a traffic accident. The daughter hastily departed the property upon being caught in the act of stealing from a neighbor some time ago.
Scattered around the yard is a wild assortment of junk and original artwork. A full-size painted cement woman with yellow eyes waves next to the driveway. Oversized unpainted cement heads rest here and there. Amy’s house and the structures near it are fenced in high with chicken wire. She sits at her cluttered kitchen table listening to the radio. Her home consists mainly of one big semi-circular room lined by windows on one side. A few mosquitoes have slipped passed the screen curtain on the front door. They bite the back of my neck as I cook chicken breasts and pasta on an iron burner identical to the one in the cabin. We sit up long past dark, continuing to talk rather than watching a movie as planned.
Sat. July 10, 2010:
With Sarah sleeping in late, enjoying her first real shelter in months, I walk around the property early this morning. A papery bee nest the size of a small basketball hangs on the rear of the cabin, which I do not notice till hearing the buzz above my head. Following the driveway uphill, I pass two other homes but see no human beings. The nearer of the two homes belongs to Amy’s land partner, who is only home a few weeks out of every year. The further home is another property entirely. Later do I learn I was trespassing. The “No Trespassing” sign had apparently blown away.
We sip coffee with Amy at her kitchen table then follow her behind the house while she waters the garden there. At one end of the garden are the 4 solar panels that power her home. Under a waist-high roof attached to the rear of the house is the bank of 6 or 8 batteries of about the same size used in automobiles.
The biggest surprise of this weekend at Amy’s house is the fact that she has Internet access. Despite having her own access, she drives once per week into Garberville to use the Internet because she has no computer. Turns out that she has Internet because she had to have Internet to get a phone. With no regular telephone company providing service to this rural area, the locals use a VOIP system(Internet telephone). A mountaintop tower provides a wireless signal at just under $100 per month.
Knowing Sarah and I have a computer, Amy curiously asks that we find out if she does indeed have Internet access. In one corner of her house is a power inverter, power strip, two power adapters, a Internet router and the device that powers the antenna system. Conveniently, an Ethernet cable is plugged into the router. Hooking the other end of it up to the laptop, I discover that Amy does indeed have Internet access. She had been considering removing the phone service but now appears to have changed her mind, wanting us to help her purchase and set up a cheap laptop in the future.
I attempt to walk down the mountainside to a creek below it but am deterred by dense brush. Sarah and I fall asleep in the cabin. Amy is found to be making potato salad upon our awakening, in preparation of a party at a local strawberry farm. We arrive to the party too early 6PM, before any other guest.
….
Sarah and I befriend one of the first arrivals, a young man named Elijah who works on the farm. He once started a non-profit utilizing an old bus that he converted into a traveling soup kitchen. Elijah shares his rolling tobacco. “Could you move further away with the cigarettes?”, a woman asks, although we had been smoking some 20 feet away from the gathering. Certain other types of smoke are inhaled freely and not complained about by anyone in attendance. Here and now I had confirmed it to myself beyond any doubt; Northern California is the most liberal place on the planet.
A dozen bluegrass musicians arrive before dark, playing in a large circle atop a makeshift plywood stage in the yard. The bass is homemade, an overturned steel watering tub with a rope running up through it. The bass player sits high on a stool, with the other end of the rope attached to a wooden pole. Moving the pole changes the tension on the rope as the player strums it, resulting in a surprisingly effective bass.
Many bottles of wine and a few dishes of food appear on two portable tables. We sit on a blanket with Elijah plotting our coincidentally similar ideas of an alternative world order, ideas that Sarah and I have developed in increasingly great detail during our frequent periods of boredom over the past weeks.
“Social networking finally makes the idea possible.”
“I hate it when I get those Farmville requests on Facebook. People send things like ‘Help me water my cows’ and I’m thinking, ‘NO, for REAL, help me water MY cows’.
Sun. July 11, 2010:
I awaken to a small deer peering up towards the cabin window. Sarah brushes her teeth out underneath the big nest of swarming bees. “I know it’s there”, she assures me, completely unconcerned. After having breakfast together, Amy drives us some seven miles to the main highway, dropping us off there so we can hitchhike back to Redway.
The very next car stops, Becky, who hadn’t picked up a hitchhiker since one smoked in her car and gave her the flu some years ago. Becky, a local coffee shop owner driving a clean new air-conditioned car, tells of the “Golden Road” she had as a youth. Straight out of high school she was recruited by a government program to bring young women to Washington DC and train them as secretaries. She traveled Europe doing such work, changing jobs on a moment’s notice without a problem. In her most extreme move, she decided in the middle of the night to relocate from Berlin to Paris, but then on the train she met a girl from London and decided to go there instead, where she found a secretarial job in the Parliament building. So much for that Golden Road today.
……
Thanks to Becky’s quick ride, we arrive to Redway in time to attend a “Community Journalist” meeting at the local radio station, KMUD. Attended by 8 people, the meeting is held in Studio B, the same room in which we had been on the air some weeks ago when invited by Mateel Chef Bob to be guests on his show. The meeting is led by Terri Klemetson, an attractive young blonde who has enough energy that she may be at risk of spontaneous explosion at any moment.
“Can you collate for me!”, Terri asks wildly a few minutes before the meeting is set to start. Sarah and I staple stacks of handout packets as the other meeting attendees arrive to Studio B. The meeting begins, with the point being to organize an emergency response team of volunteer journalists that can be activated at any hour of any day to report on anything from fires to alien invasion. Terri spends the meeting time going through the handout packet page by page, elaborating greatly on many details, speaking as fast as the human mouth allows.
To the great credit of this fast talker, she’s a good organizer whose speech usually ceases the moment anyone else chimes in. The discussion among the group is in depth and practical. Terri becomes increasingly animated with each new idea. Seated right next to her, backed into a corner, she lightly smacks my arm with the back of her hand to elaborate on a point I’d suggested. Not expecting the backhand, I jump slightly, but she doesn’t appear to notice.
The meeting lasts 3 hours but I find it entertaining for the most part. An attendee tells of how a new police deputy is misbehaving in Shelter Cove, seizing individual pot plants and parading around town with them on top his truck. Terri tells of how she was recently threatened by members of the listening public when reporting on a certain drug bust.
……
The intense summer heat finally having set in for the season, Sarah and I spend the remainder of the day attempting to stay cool. As is the norm for this area, the next several weeks should regularly climb above 100 degrees. Funny thing is that just a few miles away at the coast the temperature often struggles to rise into the 60‘s. A relatively short drive can mean a difference of 50 degrees.
Mon. July 12, 2010:
As the Community Journalist meeting was breaking up yesterday at KMUD, the organizer Terri Klemetson had mentioned that anyone was welcome to stop by the station any weekday before 2PM to assist with news story research. With nothing better to do today, that’s what I decided to do. Sarah chose to stay behind at camp and spent the entire day.writing in her notebook.
Upon my arrival to the radio station, Terri immediatly makes good on her offer, directing me to a free desk in the office upon which I plug in the laptop and connect to the wifi. She rattles off a series of requests at high speed as I take notes on a yellow Post-It pad. For the next three hours I research two topics; a nearby spiritual retreat called Area 101 and the Mateel’s Reggae on the River event.
A majority of the time is spent searching for the legal standing of Area 101. I find no record of the retreat being registered as a marijuana dispensary or marijuana collective, although several people had recently been arrested there in an undercover drug operation while an event was taking place. With all Internet research leading to dead ends, I switch to phone mode, but even the person answering the phone at the Mendocino County Sherrif’s office does not know what the retreat’s legal standing is. A phone call to the county tax assessor’s office does reveal the property’s parcel number, which I use on the tax assessor’s website to retrieve records. The hope was that the online information would reveal when the current owner had purchased the property, but the only available data was related to property value and recent tax records.
Although much of the information I gather is not suitable for the today’s news stories, Terri is impressed by my having accessed the tax records, inviting me back later in the afternoon to sit in the studio while she prerecords the day’s broadcast.
I rejoin Sarah at camp for two hours, making grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch before returning to KMUD. Terri is found there in her tiny studio connected to the newsroom. “I’m in recording mode”, she explains while not ceasing motion, “so I’m going to be running around like crazy.” She directs me to take her desk in the newsroom and make phone calls to request email copies of press release faxes that the fax machine had not printed clearly. This takes just a few minutes then Terri invites me to stand in the tiny recording studio with her while she prepares her broadcast.
For two hours I wear the second set of available headphones, observing and listening to the recording process from beginning to end. Terri gesticulates her arms and hands wildly while speaking into the mic, positioned in front of a Macintosh computer screen running audio editing software. Her hands never cease, rapidly punching keys when not moving to her voice. She occasionally stops to ask my opinion on certain wordings, “Is that English?”, “How should I say this?”. For the Area 101 story, she decides against my recommendation of the phrase, “drug arrests”, explaining that it’s not politically correct in Northern California. This place never ceases to amaze with with its own specific brand of liberalism!
We finish the recording and upload it to the engineering studio minutes before the news is set to begin playing at 6PM. The broadcast has already started when I depart the station a few moments later. Wow, this reporter(Terri) is good, and to think, she claims to not even have any formal journalism training! I’d initially misjudged her excited personality as erratic, but it’s actually quite the opposite. Little more than 24 hours after our initial meeting I now consider her quick skills an asset to the community. She will certainly go far if she stays in this field of work.
….
Returning to camp, I find Sarah to STILL be writing on a bench by the fire pit. Apparently, she had maintained that same position all day long, pen in hand the whole time. Considering this, and considering how much I enjoyed doing the news today, I think to myself that we may be a destined reporting team.