It sucks when it’s really hot. It sucks when you’re outside all day and you have to wear long sleeves because you are clamoring through seven foot tall woody shrubs. You start realizing that your brain only knows where your foot ends and not where your boot ends, so you keep tripping and almost falling into the mud below. At some point though in your grumbly stampede, you feel the sun radiating on your skin and the shrubs falling away- heaven is that you?

No, it’s a meadow.

I look around, blinded by the sudden light shift. To my left – yarrow. To my right – more yarrow. A plant that we have found so often, it is practically of no use.¹ I walk five more feet and feel myself sinking. My boot is ankle deep in mud and in order to get out, I’m forced to rely on the strength given to me by the hit workout series that my coworker and I have been tearing up in the gym – Hip Hop Abs. We plunge onward in our squishy search for a diamond in the rough. Mosquitos pimple my face as we scout for what seems like hours. The sun is scorching us, and in fear of heat exhaustion, we decide to call it and head back through the shrubs. In our retreat, one particular shrub has had enough of my stomping, and she scratches me right across the face. At this point, my frustrations reach such a high that I find myself in the midst of an inner crisis. I’m tired. I’m stinky. My protein bar has melted. My water has dirt in it, and I’m beginning to question why I even came out here.

Then, like angels coming down from the heavens, I hear the operatic voices of my darlings, Katie and Ella, as they call out, “Let’s work it on the remix.” The words strike my ears in such bliss that I am compelled to join in, and we continue to sing a perfectly-tuned rendition of “The girl, so confusing version with Lorde.” The shrubs no longer seem so tall, my thirst recedes, and as we emerge from the brush, I look around. In front of me lies blueberries – Mother Nature’s nourishment after a weary journey. I thank her for her gifts and beg for forgiveness for my tude (and the murder of her twiggy children).

Most of our days go something like this. We spend lots of time researching meadows and finding previous recordings of native plants. We drive down bumpy roads, trek through the forest in the midst of the hot summer, only to find ourselves entrenched in wet meadows. It gets really miserable. However, the magic lies in whistling while you work. I am forever grateful to have two wonderful coworkers who are always down to sing and laugh at our situation. We make up our own little songs and currently have about 12 ideas primed for an album. All this just to say that the Willamette Forest crew is staying strong. We have actually found a couple of good native plant populations, and our yarrow identification skills are breaching on mastery. We will prevail, and we will emerge not only with beautifully pressed monkey flowers and bountiful fireweed harvests, but also with an album that will (most likely) go triple platinum in every country. 

¹ I hate defining organisms as “useful” or “use,” but my limited vocabulary has me stumped. To elaborate, I disagree with the idea that nature should only be valuable when it is inherently valuable to humans. Whether that be because it’s beautiful, it has medicinal properties, or it provides some ecosystem service. I hear it all the time when people joke about extinguishing mosquitos. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve heard something along the lines of, “What purpose do they even serve? They’re annoying, they spread disease, and they’re not even a primary food source for anything.” I don’t think species protection should be based on how useful we find them. Does life not have a right to exist simply because it does?