My mom drove me to the Ventura County Fish and Wildlife Service building. What unfolded there was a day of bureaucracy—not quite what I was expecting, but probably what I should have expected. I had to fill out a number of forms, as well as complete a tutorial on the government’s computer system and information security that looked like it had been created in the mid-90s, and offered up such challenging quiz questions as “True or false: it is a good idea to leave valuable government equipment in an unlocked vehicle.” I’ve got to say, I really struggled with that one.
At some point, there were burritos.
I met everyone in the office, or rather was paraded around by Joseph, the project supervisor who, with his long blonde dreadlocks and flaxen beard, bears a striking resemblance to Thor. “Let me get you a biologist,” Ivett at the front desk had told me as I stood nervously in the little lobby holding a cup of coffee that had long gone cold, feeling every bit of my inexperience. I swear he had to duck to get through the doorway. He led me from cubicle to cubicle: “This is Angela, our new intern.” If you asked me now what any of those people’s names were, or their position, I would guess Chris or Mike, and…coordinator. No—supervisor. Of…something. I don’t think I’d be too far off.
I met Geoff, my supervisor. Like Joseph, Geoff also has a beard. Are beards a requirement for field work? Maybe. I’ll have to work on that. Geoff gave me all my gear (I have gear!) and labels (now I have gear with my name on it!)
My gear:
At one point I thought I was going to have a panic attack. But let me take you back about two weeks. While reading over the job description for California Condor Recovery Program Intern, I distinctly thought I saw a mention of the vehicles being manual transmission. This fact was worrisome to me: the only two times I’d driven stick had gone terribly. The first ended with my dad telling me for the thousandth time to “Listen to the car”—because that helps—while I burst into tears of frustration. The second time, the car battery died after I’d stalled out one too many times. While my dad told me it wasn’t technically my fault, he should have gotten a new battery sooner, blah blah blah, the insinuation was there. It put me off the whole thing for years. Flash forward to the afternoon of Tuesday January 25: my interview for what is basically my dream job is winding down, and I think it’s going well, and apparently it is because Joseph says suddenly, “So, let’s talk about a start date—how does next Monday sound?” and I nearly fall out of my chair. I manage to say something incredibly cogent to the effect of “Um… Oh! Ok. Uh, I still need to get some things together. Give my two weeks’ notice to the GAP. Buy some…hiking boots? Could I do the following Monday?” In the moments following a spontaneous joyful living room jig, the reality of what I’d just signed up for sunk in: I had two weeks to learn to drive stick. When I thought ahead to the next fourteen days, I envisioned a wacky montage set to Gary Numan’s “Cars”: I’d stall out a couple times, shrug exaggeratedly at passers-by, lock eyes with my dad and we’d both burst into laughter. “Listen to the car,” he would say mystically, and I’d close my eyes, take a deep breath, and listen, really listen to the car, and I’d finally get it.
Let’s just say it didn’t go quite like that.
So two weeks later, when Geoff hands me the key to a Dodge Durango and it suddenly becomes clear to me that I would be driving myself up to the Hopper Mountain National Wildlife Refuge, I nearly had a panic attack. “I may need a quick refresher course on driving a manual car,” I stammered, my heart in my throat. As if that would do anything. Life isn’t like a montage, and when Grandmother Willow tells you to listen with your heart, you don’t just magically know English. Geoff, however, gave me this bemused look. “Oh, all the cars are automatic.” I have never heard such shiny, golden words.
And good thing, too, because I’d have never made it out of the Fish and Wildlife Service parking lot, much less up the twisty, bumpy, dark mountain road that led up, up and up, then down, down into the refuge.
Geoff and I caravanned, first through Ventura for a quick stop at Trader Joe’s, then to a fishery. At that fishery is a freezer. In that freezer are bodies. Straight out of a slasher-in-the-woods horror flick: mangled carcasses of deer, rabbits, and "Oh! That is…half a bear." But that is just the Forest Service’s side. Ours is much neater: heavy black trash bags, with only the occasional furred limb poking out. We took the half-a-bear and four rabbits—frozen solid, as one might expect—and threw them in a cooler in the trunk of Geoff’s Durango. I sent a brief thanks to the universe for sparing me those passengers for the long drive up.
By the time we hit the potholed dirt road that winds its way treacherously up to Hopper Mountain, it was dusk and I had a monster migraine brewing. Only able to see the little patch of road ahead of me illuminated by my headlights, I began the slow climb, careful not to think too hard about how little road stood between me and certain plungey-death. God, my mom would hate to know what I’m doing right now, I realized. Sometimes I could barely see the road through the dust kicked up by Geoff’s car.
Higher we drove, past oil pads and abandoned shacks and giant fans. The pumps, like giant drinky birds, illuminated by muted orange light, looked particularly eerie moving slowly against the star-filled inky black. As we drove, Geoff and I would periodically converse over the car’s radios, as he would point out turns I’d have to take when coming down the same road later, or I’d ask him questions about the program, about condors, about hunters and oil companies. It added to the strangeness, having a conversation with a disembodied voice you can’t interrupt, who can’t hear your reaction, a laugh or a “huh” until you press the transmit button.
Finally we began the descent into Hopper Refuge, and I found myself praying to a god I don’t believe in that I wouldn’t vomit with every jolt as the car hit a ditch or a pothole. There was a light in the distance, a porch light. A house came into view. I couldn’t focus on taking in my surroundings, however, or getting to know the intern currently sitting on the couch watching an episode of “How I Met Your Mother.” Walking past one of our trucks on the way in, I caught a whiff of rotting meat; in the kitchen, the propane smell of the stove filled my nostrils. I bolted to the bathroom and threw up. A couple Tylenols and an hour-long nap later and I was just peachy.
I fell asleep that night to the chorus of frogs from the nearby stream.
