Susan Munroe » training

Overacheivements

Susan Munroe — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 05:13:56 +0000

Feeling a bit over-extended these days. But oh, it feels good. I’m making up for five months of being unemployed and purposeless, I guess. A lot is happening all of a sudden. I’m going into my third winter in Utah, and I’m reminded of my third year at Clark University: the first two years were rough-ish, but I’m finally hitting my stride, and opportunities are beginning to present themselves. Suddenly the world feels very small and very possible, a feeling I learned to recognize while riding the wave of serendipity in my past travels. I met Clint when I first moved to Salt Lake City, at a block party to celebrate the inauguration of Barack Obama. It was a chilly night in January, but the party organizers had rented gas heaters and wood scraps were burning in barrels along the street. I’d chucked my old tennis shoes at a cardboard cutout of G.W. Bush (“Shoe out the old!”), tucked five dollars into the plastic jar at the refreshment table and mixed a hot chocolate and Bailey’s before finding my way indoors and switching to beer. I thought he was cute, in a round-faced, curly-blonde way. I didn’t know many people at the party, and was grateful to have someone to talk to. He mentioned his wife, Linda, and the conversation wound tipsily around his work as an entomologist and hers as a forester-cum-editor. Almost two years later, I don’t remember how Linda and I eventually met, but we now swap hiking guidebooks over martinis and Mediterranean food. Her husband and my boyfriend have been friends for longer than we have, but she and I have bonded quickly. Mutual friends roll their eyes when we meet up at parties, because they know we’re going to monopolize each other for the rest of the night.

Linda works for an environmental consulting firm. Last spring, knowing that I have a degree in English, she mentioned that the company was looking for a part-time editor. At the time I was packing to hit the road for the summer, and knew I’d committed to snowmaking in the fall. Interested, yes, but it felt like poor timing. A month ago she got in touch to tell me they were still thinking of taking on someone new, so I sent in a resume and cover letter. It was the most challenging job application I’d completed oh, since college, probably. I haven’t applied for a serious, “professional” job in five years. My food service, customer service, and outdoor/physical labor resumes are in tip top shape, but an editing resume? Um. Well. Yes, I have this degree, yes I worked in a publishing house (seven years ago), yes I’ve always been very good at grammar and research, yes I’m a perfectionist and a good reader, but phew, finding solid work experience to back up all of those general acquired skills was challenging. I spent the better part of a day compiling, wording, and re-wording my resume and writing a cover letter. I wasn’t sure it would be good enough to get the job, but I told my parents about it, bragged to my boyfriend, and felt a warm, satisfying pride in actually doing it. I can still complete hard assignments! I do have some innate talents, five years out of academia! Kari, Linda’s boss, wrote back immediately to tell me that my resume had been received and was “in the mix”. Ah well, I thought, at least I tried. It took another month for her to call me and offer me the job, but she did. I was sitting in the waiting area in my local Firestone while the mechanics changed the oil in my car, and I accepted. I started the next day. That was three days ago, and I’ve been giddy every since.

What is this new job? Say that Kennecott Copper Mine (the largest open pit copper mine in the world! the website brags. I can literally see it from my house) wanted to dig another pit. The National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) provides laws and regulations that the mine must follow in order to do any expansion, so Kennecott would hire the company I work for to run tests, inspect the site for archaeological artifacts, and write up an Environmental Impact Statement, which I would then edit. The writing is technical, but fascinating. In two days of work, I’ve already learned about the history of the Shoshone-Bannock tribe of Idaho, and that one of the major issues with building a solar panel farm in the Arizona desert is the amount of water the farm would require. I feel like I’m listening to NPR or reading National Geographic articles while working. I love it. I’m getting paid (well) to learn new things and use my college degree! The best part (or, one of the best parts) is that I’ve been hired on a temporary/part time basis. I don’t have to commit to working in an office for the next year. Kari (who’s my boss now, too) told me they could have anywhere from zero to twenty hours of work for me a week. I’m more or less functioning as a contractor. And once I get the hang of the company’s style guidelines, I will likely be able to work from home, on my own time. This is a dream come true for me. I’m building skills and connections that will ultimately allow me to earn a living from home. This is just the beginning.

So, a new job! On top of still making snow at Alta (we should be finished any day now, except the weather won’t cooperate. Salt Lake is stuck in an inversion: polluted, 35°F air in the valley trapped by high, 45°F air in the mountains. I scrape frozen pollution off my car windshield every morning.), I’m coming up on the dates when I told Brighton and Solitude Resorts I’d be able to start work. Weekends at Brighton, weeknights at Solitude (no housekeeping this time, just reception/bellman work at the Inn), and my daytime hours split between skiing and this new, professional editing position. Plus, I have friends! GIRL friends, even. I’ve stuck around long enough to make meaningful connections with women whom I admire and respect. And strangely, staying put seems to be helping me to achieve some of my greater life goals: writing, adventure, travel, baking… I’m writing more, and more easily, than I have in a long time. Adventure lurks around every corner (motorcycling in Moab, downhill mountain biking, dating a man with a 10-year-old). I’m planning my travels purposefully instead of randomly (at least for the moment). The next trip is slated for mid-March, back to Peru, with a possible two week side trip to Colombia. And while I still rely on store-bought bread for my own personal use, next weekend at Brighton I’ll be selling all kinds of baked goodies at the 2^nd annual craft fair. Life is moving like a flooded river: fast, and full. It is good.

Living the Dream – Season Three

Susan Munroe — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 03:13:56 +0000

I started my job as a snowmaker today, though Mother Nature seemed to be sending me a message that, if she was going to be honest, she didn’t really need my help. Thick snowflakes curtained the road up Little Cottonwood Canyon, and Chris’ truck slid around a few corners despite being in four-wheel drive. Fresh snow banks on either side of the road made it clear: winter has arrived. Only after I parked safely at the Alta cat shop, where the snowmakers were meeting for orientation, was I able to look around and breathe in the wintry scene. Barely four days ago had Chris and I stood in this same parking lot, unloading our mountain bikes from the back of his truck. Autumn ricocheted off the smooth, granite walls, colors spread like a rainbow over the four thousand feet of elevation between the top and bottom of the canyon. We pedaled up the aptly named “Summer Road”, which switchbacks uphill for two gravelly miles and provides a view of the narrow rock corridor all the way back down to the Salt Lake valley. Today, the Summer Road was covered in seven inches of Wasatch powder. Not much, by Utah standards, but a fine showing for the first storm of the winter.

Last year, I slid into this job at Alta Ski Resort with only three weeks left in the season. Snowmaking in Utah starts in late October and finishes before Christmas. Unlike in New England, where the resorts churn out man-made snow all season long, or risk their customers skiing on dirt during a February thaw, Utah resorts need only a bit of a head start, a thick base of snow to guarantee they’ll be able to open before Thanksgiving and stay open until mid-April. I endured a great deal of mostly-good-natured derision from the five other guys on my shift last year. They were putting in nine weeks of work for the same season pass to Alta that I was earning in three. I would shrug and smile like I was getting away with something (because I was). There’d been an unexpected opening on the day shift, and I was the lucky person in the right place at the right time. I loved the job: riding snowmobiles and skis to check on the snow guns, hauling hoses and hardware, shoveling snow and chipping ice, climbing into shallow manholes to hook up electricity and water to the machines. I was outdoors, in the snow, working with my hands, getting exercise, using interesting tools, learning about new machinery, and functioning as an essential member of a team. And, it was almost like playing God. I made it snow!

Planning to take this whole summer off and spend the money I earned as a firefighter last summer, I knew I needed to have a reliable job lined up for this fall. Snowmaking was the obvious choice, and so this morning found me seated at a long conference table with fifteen other snowmakers, cradling mugs of coffee and sharing grins about all the fresh snow falling outside. I’m the only woman on three shifts. It’s ego, pure and simple, but I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of why I like the job. Today was about paperwork, safety videos, meeting the new crew members, dotting I’s and crossing T’s, but it felt good to be gathered with this group of scruffy dudes, to be wearing hiking boots, a grubby polypropylene shirt, and new double-fronted Carhartt work pants (I’m a big nerd for outdoor gear; I can’t help it). Third season in, I’m still living the ski bum dream, though it’s sometimes hard to recognize. Today, however, it was unmistakable: gusts of wind moved the snow in sheets across the cat shop windows, chimneys smoked in the lodge across the parking lot, the still-yellow aspen trees on the mountain wore white, and there I was in the middle of it all. Thanks be to Ullr, and let the season begin!

The Construction of a Wildland Firefighter

Susan Munroe — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:20:44 +0000

White's 10-inch, lace-to-toe Smokejumpers, men's size 5.

Welcome to the new Susan. From hippie world traveler to burly, smoke-breathing firefighter. Instead of hugging trees, now I’m wishing they’d catch on fire so I could save them and start getting some of that legendary overtime and hazard pay. It’s not a natural transition; it’s taken training and various other components.

Start with $453 boots.

White's Smokejumpers - BEFORE fire season.

White’s Smokejumpers: ten inches tall, handmade, leather, Vibram® soles secured with fireproof thread and steel screws, reinforced toes and logger’s heels. They’re tough to break in, and not only for the hard leather and hard foot beds that wear red puffy blisters into sensitive heels and arches. I wore my new boots to my first day of chainsaw training. The six foot lumberjacks who taught saw school peered down their impressive beards and indicated my shiny, clean White’s with a twitch of the chin or elbow. “This must be your first year,” one said, his eyes raised appraisingly to my face. “Oh, well…” I looked down and saw their battered, scarred boots next to mine. “What gave me away?”

It was a relief, during our field testing day, to scuff my boots in the dirt and fill the eyelets with sawdust as I felled my first two trees. Armed with a 28” Stihl 044 saw, thick green chaps, a felling axe and a pouch of wedges, I strode up the hill behind my tester. My legs felt heavy; I had to lengthen my stride and step purposefully, balancing the 25-lb. chainsaw on my shoulder. I dropped two trees, two bug-killed pines. My arms shook as I finished the back cut on the last tree and stepped away, watching it land right where I’d placed it. Tired but thrilled, I caught a glimpse of my shadow as we came out of the trees and crossed the road back to the trucks. It looked like a firefighter’s shadow.

Add Nomex®: the forest green and sunshine yellow fire-resistant uniform of the wildland firefighter. The pants are stiff and the cargo pockets make them heavy, loaded as they are with ear plugs, lighter (every good firefighter knows how to start a fire as well as put it out), Leatherman (or comparable pocket tool), pen, notepad, Smokey calendar (for documenting hours worked and tasks completed), and the indispensible IRPG (Incident Response Pocket Guide – required, abbreviated “how-to” for every imaginable fire scenario). I also wear my gloves on a carabiner at my belt, and, because I work on an engine, I carry a spanner wrench for tightening hose fittings.

There are several types of firefighting resources in the employ of the federal government. Initial attack (IA) squads respond to a fire when it’s first spotted, typically when it’s a single tree that’s been hit by lightning and can still be handled by six people with shovels and a chainsaw. Hand crews fight fire the same way that the IA squads do, using tools and saws to cut miles of line – a wide swath of mountainside cut and scraped down to mineral soil – in an attempt to stop the fire from advancing in a certain direction. Every fire fighter will work on a hand crew at some point in his or her career, whether it’s an initial attack effort or while fighting a 50,000 acre fire in conjunction with other resources. Helicopters and air tankers are expensive but essential tools that can quickly drop hundreds of gallons of water or retardant on large fires, as well as transport ground crew and supplies to remote edges of a fire. Finally, there are fire engines, smaller, modified versions of the shiny red pavement queens that deal with structure fires in cities and towns across the US. I work on Engine 411 in Salt Lake City, serving the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache (yoo-IN-tah) National Forest. There are seven people on my crew. Shane is our engine boss and Watson’s our lead; between the two of them they have close to twenty years of firefighting experience. Graham (25), Brock (21), and Tomas (23) have worked on the engine for 2-4 years each. I’m the new person, the FNG, and so is Maren, the only other woman on the team: a 19-year-old, blond, French student from Brigham Young University. I like my crew. I like rolling around in our engine and unloading at a gas station or campground and moving like black-booted posse through the parking lot.

Stir in some required training. In six weeks I’ve been paid to attend chainsaw school, fire school, resource management school, map-reading class, radio class, SOP class, pump school, driving school, sensitivity-and-political-correctness class, first aid and CPR class, rules-and-regulations class, and ATV school. Fire school was a week long. Lessons ran the gamut from the sleep-inducing: “Chain of Command”; to the confusing: “Programming Radios”; the fascinating: “Weather and Fire Behavior”; and the terrifying: “How and When to Deploy Your Fire Shelter”. The latter involved an hour of video footage of walls of flame against night skies, shots of mangled trees choked with smoke, and a somber narrator’s voice describing how Firefighter X’s series of errors led to his hellish demise. After being properly scared into paying attention, we were led outside as a class and given practice shelters made of green nylon. We took turns being timed, shaking out the fabric, wrapping ourselves up, rolling around on the green lawn. It was about 65 degrees, partly cloudy, and extremely difficult to imagine someday facing a 6,000 degree flame front with only a bottle of water and a sheet of aluminum foil to keep me alive.

Today’s June 21. It’s pouring rain. As of a week ago, Utah had received 120% of its average rainfall for June. The mountainsides are a patchwork quilt of saturated green leaves and fat grasses. White clouds hang around the peaks like pillows. Nothing’s burning. There’s lightning every day, but the rain douses it immediately. Anything it strikes sucks up the scorching energy and carries on being wet and happy. The government, however, pays me to be on duty forty hours a week, and as there are no fires, the crew’s got to do something to keep busy. This means classes. It also means sharpening tools, washing hose, building hose packs, and lots of thumb-twiddling.

Pour on copious amounts of exercise. We train as a crew, at the gym if it’s raining, hiking if it’s not. When we hike we dress in full fire gear, hardhats, long sleeves and all, carrying our 30lbs of required personal gear plus a tool (shovel, rhino, Pulaski, combi) or a chainsaw or a can of gas for the saw. We carry radios and practice passing messages from the head of the line to the back, and we go as fast as we can as far as we can until we can’t. Then we do pushups, wall-sits, lunges, and crunches. Marching as we do in a line, in bright yellow shirts and blue hardhats, we draw attention on the trails. One day we paused for a water break on a rock outcrop halfway up Mt. Olympus. The sound of spinning rotors suddenly drowned out our conversation as the Channel 4 news-copter appeared above us and zeroed in, its nose camera swiveling to catch us in action. We waved and grinned and shook our heads.

The hikes are hard, even for me. And it’s only going to get harder. And hotter. Training, gear, and instruction aside, I’ve been told again and again that I won’t get it until I actually see a fire and smell the smoke and feel what it’s like to dig line for sixteen hours straight. I’m missing that one crucial ingredient, and it’s going to have to stop raining before that happens. In the meantime, I listen to the stories of my crew, absorb the advice of the lumberjacks and the other experts, explore my national forest, and look forward to that first spark.

Sweet As Part III: Sawdust and Sunshine

Susan Munroe — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 16:51:00 +0000

Finally! Let’s get a big YEE HAW from the middle of Dubois, Wyoming (DOO-boys – pronounce it in the French fashion at your own risk). The town is small (900 souls) and high (6,900 feet above seal level), but it’s got a library with wireless internet access. I’ve been here for two weeks, and I’ve been writing up a storm in between sawing, hammering, leveling, insulating, sanding, painting and sheetrocking. I’ll try to get you oriented as quickly as possible, and then get on to the meat of the update. Home, for the moment, is on the Quarter Circle X Ranch, 27 miles outside of Dubois (it’s perhaps a 45 minute drive, but I’m trying to adopt the western manner of telling distances: miles, not minutes). I’m living at the end of a long dirt road at the bottom of the East Fork River valley. It’s mostly desert: dry red and brown dust and rocks and hills with a smattering of spruce, fir, aspen, cottonwood, and pine trees down in the irrigated valleys. I’m living in and working on a 1920s Sears Roebuck log house that’s been mostly gutted and is now about 3/4 of the way to being completely renovated. I’ve got my own room, upstairs, with a big double bed and mismatched furniture. Bob, my boss, sleeps next door in an equally countrified room. There are two cats, Jasper and Cricket, who roam freely between my bed and his, leaving clumps of fur and sawdust and the occasional dead grasshopper.

The situation, thus far, is fantastic. Bob is the man who’s hired me, an acquaintance from the Ice. He’s an excellent teacher: patient and understanding. For the first time in my (reasonably) long career as helper/general assistant/laborer, I’m being actively involved in the work. I am a part of the entire project, from conception to design, start to finish. I am learning. No more am I left on the sidelines, struggling to find ways to help – Bob’s determined to see me made a carpenter, and I’m drinking in the skills like the dry earth outside soaks up the water. It’s an unfinished house, as I said, which means we’re living in pieces – there’s only one sink with running water, and that’s in the outdoor toilet. Our kitchen consists of a stove, fridge and a fabricated piece of cabinet/counter top to hold food and our few mismatched utensils. These are necessarily moved around every day depending on where we’re working. The front and back doors are always open; when I prepare for dinner, I have to rinse the sawdust out of the frying pan and wipe it off the spoons. This is life in a construction site. Still, I’m incredibly house-proud, living among the work I’ve done, fixing up this and that, slowly making this empty log shell into a home. So far, I have: filled nail holes, sanded and polyeurthaned the wood trim; nailed down loose floor boards; caulked the bathroom; patched a hole in the wood floor; hung sheetrock in the kitchen; leveled the kitchen ceiling and then fitted the entire thing with tongue-in-groove aspen boards; insulated about fifty feet of hot water pipe; and today will tackle the plumbing so that we can have a sink in the kitchen. At the end of work every day, around 6:30, I sit on the porch, tired, splintered, and filthy, a bottle of Corona cold in my hand and sweet in my dry, dusty throat: perfect.

In our off-hours, Bob and I sit on the front porch and watch the world turn. The ranch is so removed, so peaceful. There’s a sizeable canyon on the property, about a ten minute walk from the house. It is gorgeous. Tall, reddish walls, soft and round yet full of interesting nooks and crannies and ledges and chimneys just begging to be climbed. It’s narrow – perhaps only 15 feet across, and the water at its deepest point is barely up to my neck. The path between the house and the canyon is thick with cottonwoods, wild roses and gooseberries. When Bob gave me a tour of the property, he pointed out animal prints in the dust, and lectured me on safety in the Wild West: how to survive among grizzlies, mountain lions, bobcats, lynxes, scorpions, rattlers, wolves, coyotes, moose. It’s not all bad news, though – there’s no poison ivy! During the day the sun is hot and the air is dry. Rabbits hop timidly around the driveway, magpies screech in the trees, and cicadas shrill along the fence posts. On Sunday we watched a whitetail deer and her fawn prance and feed in the field next to the house. There are horses too, five of them, and the promise of rides and pack trips to come. At night, the earth is still and eerily quiet. There are no night birds, no crickets or frogs. Silence. Cold, too – from one hundred degrees during the day to forty at night is the norm for late June at 7,000 feet.

There’s no one else around, except for Cal and Arlene, the aging owners of the ranch. Originally from Minnesota, the two of them have spent their summers out here since 1970. Arlene’s not well, but Cal is still actively involved with the upkeep and management of the property. He cruises around in a John Deer Gator, fixing fences, digging irrigation trenches, and periodically stopping in to see if Bob and I need anything. Two nights ago Cal invited us over to watch the sun set from his porch and enjoy a glass or two of wine. Other than that small excursion, my time has been spent reading, chatting with Bob, and exploring the garages and outbuildings for items to make the little cabin more inhabitable. My best find yet has been a string of party lights shaped like red tractors; Bob nailed it up along the front porch. Now every night’s a party on our porch! Is it strange, you ask, for me to be living and spending nearly every waking minute with this forty-something-year-old man? Maybe. Is it going well, so, far? Absolutely. He gives me plenty of space and privacy, and my time out of work is my own, though we have a surprising number of things in common, and I’ve found that I enjoy his company as a friend as much as a boss.

We’re still trying to sort out the internet situation on the ranch…there’s so much more to write, but I’m feeling pressed for time. I’ve still got to stop at the lumber yard on my way back out of town, and it’s already nearly lunchtime. Until next time, I’ll keep swinging that hammer and you all keep sending me love – peace.