when we pull up you know it's a shutdown
October 1st, 2025
In the blink of an eye, it seems September has passed by, and my time in West Virginia might be coming to a close... just as I was getting all cozy and settled too! I think it is widely agreed upon that September is the month of change, as a kid I would start each school year with renewed enthusiasm for the new classroom, new students, forgetting I had just gone through the worst psychological torture of my life the year prior. Here at the NRG, fall is peak season for sport climbers, and we've had a new wave of dirtbags roll into the American Alpine Club campground. New faces, new drama, it certainly felt like the first week of school! And I've been capturing it all on my new digital camera.Thanks to the Waterstone partner board, and the random public endorsement of the mayor of the gorge (Stella), I've made a lot of new friends. ALL of them being pretty girls. Which is pretty sweet, I've always felt a strange disconnection to girls and girlhood. Being in female friend groups has always made me feel like an imposter, a fake, poorly constructed imitation, a vegan meatball of a GIRL. Which, yeah, I AM! Because of this whole gender social dissociation bla bla thingy, female friendship is something that has been missing from my life for a very long time. Like, god, I MISS mindlessly gossiping about who hates who and who's kissing who! Until now, I didn't realize how much I've been craving teen-girl energy. Along with my newfound, slightly strange inclination towards a feminine gender expression, online shopping addiction, fucked up car, tendancy towards gossip... am I a 24 year old non-binary teenage girl? What do the words that come out of my mouth even mean?
Stuff that happened!!! I volunteered for the Golden Carabiner competition here at the NRG, it's like a rock climbing scavenger hunt where participants solve clues to find golden spray painted carabiners hidden on routes all around the gorge. Me, Zhelia, and Nicole ended up at Endless Wall, my favorite :), and had a lovely climbing afternoon on Legacy and Strike a Scowl, that soon turned into a lovely climbing night on Jesus and Tequila. Although my sport climbing has degraded significantly (I'm barely able to get up 11's now, no thanks to worn shoes that my toes poke through) I think my trad's alright. I climbed with Deb and her two shiba's one weekend, and onsighted The Entertainer, not my first 10 onsight, but the first that didn't make me want to CRY! (Looking at you, Black and Tan...).
I've hung out a lot with Delia and her dog Sam this month, a girlie from Baltimore with an actually insane facecard. Delia was initially planning on only staying here for a week, then heading to the Red River Gorge for the season. I was the first person she climbed with here, and I like to think I was so cool and hot I changed her mind! But yeah, we had a good boat day out at Whipporwill, and last Saturday I convinced her to go with me to a local sauna. 'Sauna'. For a wooden box hitched to the back of a truck, the wood stove packed a punch! I sweat out all my negative emotions and self doubt, bursting out the door to douse myself in the fridgid shower water. And then pet goats, because we were at Arrowhead. My whole life I've been told to go to therapy and take drugs to deal with my mental illness, but I legit think the thing that's worked out the best for me is getting really hot and then really cold six times... weird. The sauna's 25$ an hour, total rip-off but it's cheaper than a shrink, I guess.
As tradition to Fayetteville it seems, all the new people have managed to get into messy situationships and start drama... I'm so jealous! Why am I not in any drama? I asked Micheal the other day whether there were any rumours in town about me. They said the only thing they've heard is that I ate a concerning amount of mushrooms at the mycology festival back in august, which isn't even a rumour because I cleaned five plates! It's true, it's true! It seems if I want attention, I'll have to go spread some nasty rumours about myself. I'm open to suggestions if you have any.
While my social life was blooming, my work life was dying, like a native plant I accidentally doused in blue pesticide. My co-intern was feeling it too, and the three of us on the plant team had this weird tension between us, mostly due to the strange, erratic behaviour of the seasonal plant tech, Jon, who had a mental crash-out like every day. To be fair, me and Lucy could have been nicer him. But to also be fair, Jon's a dick. It's clear that he was overworking himself, logging in extra hours on the weekends, kissing our boss's butt, desperately trying for that sweet permenant position. Guess what buddy, wrong line of work, 'cause the government don't give a fuck! His scheduale of constant work and 0 rest days meant that me and Lucy had to deal with his spiraling mental state, his passive aggression that turned aggressive, his constant dissapearing when there work to be done, his tendancy to make everything as dangerous and inefficient as humanly possible. Like this one day, we asked him for directions to Mcreery's boat ramp. He pulled up BING maps, and pointed to the town of Mcreery. "It should be over here somewhere." Jeez, thanks! We told him we'd ask literally anyone else. This shattered his fragile ego! A few minutes later, me and Lucy were perusing the plant-team closet, a rack of jackets and hats our boss encourages us to wear. As I put on a hat, Jon approached angrily. He insisted that interns couldn't wear any NPS clothing, and accused me of getting blue pesticide all over one of the sweaters. As he pulled that sweater out to show us, he was suprised to see... yeah, a completely clean sweater, one that clearly hadn't been washed in ten years. Last thursday, he saw me leave the office with it on. Little did he realize, I had taken it off immediately, so the sweater had not a single spot of blue. Caught in a lie! But Jon decided to double down, he insisted the sweater belonged to someone in the office... someone who was very mad at me! Hey, if you're going to try to scare someone under false pretenses, at least come up with a coherent story. Obviously Jon's fib would have fallen apart if I had just asked WHO? but at that point I was DYING of CRINGE. Jon has been very quiet since that incident, fearing that we'll tell our boss, probably internally spiraling. I've never seen someone try and play mental chess, only to loose to themselves. And I say working for the government is punishment enough!
There have been some cool days at work, mainly when we're not paired up with the Joker. One day, we went out to a grassy field to do pollinator surveys, AKA count bugs. Another day, the plant interns got sent to death island. In the 1900's, they sent people with tubercolosis there to die, and the island is full of old graves. One of the graves is enscribed with the phrase, "Suffer little children to come unto me." Spooky! I told Trey, a local jeweler, that I had found a lot of sea glass on the island, and he went to scope it out. He made a ring out of one of the green pieces he found, and to his suprise the ring had a mysterious letter 'A' inscribed into the inner band, that he swears he didn't make. I'm looking at my sea glass collection in excitement... could this 'A' be haunting me too? Need more ghosts in my life. Last week Bossman Doug ran out of things for us interns to do, so we ended up traveling to random beaches, trailheads, and campgrounds all over the new river gorge on the lookout for new invasives. It was the first red week of fall, the fog was rolling in through the hills, it was gorge! On several beaches, I hit the sea glass mega-jackpot. TBH, that's how I've been spent most of my time at work. I'm obsessed! I would return home every day with pockets full of shiny treasures, and my trinkets have piled up so ferociously on my windowsill that I can't close my blinds.
I also got to participate in Bat Blitz this month! That's where a bunch of wildlife scientists gather at the entrance of old mining portals at night in an attempt to capture bats. At the very last minute, Bossman Doug managed to get me a friday night slot at the Beury Mine Portal survey, the busiest bat hot-spot in the area. Unfortunately when I got the memo, I had just taken a handful of shrooms... this is why you let me know things one week in advance. After shaking the high off, I joined the researchers at the site, which was set up with several harp traps. As the sun set, the bats flew into the layers of fishing wire, clumsily falling into tarp nets. That's when the scientists would grab them, tag and measure them, putting them into little paper bags to weigh them, and give them a little haircut in order to attatch a tracking device. I don't know exactly what I expected, but I really didn't expect the bats to be SCREAMING AT THE TOP OF THEIR LUNGS the entire time! We saw a huge variety of speicies, little brown, western small foot, and even the endangered townsend's big eared, whom was held like an ice cream cone. Overall, 130 bats were captured and recorded. A part of me wishes I had the rabies vaccine, so I could pick 'em up. But I know I would not have been able to resist kissing them on their little bat heads!!! So yeah, my job was cool sometimes. But if you've been paying attention, you know what came around the next week... Government shut down! Womp Womp! Hey, I'm not to peeved about it. Had a good run, bigger issues in the world, ya know. But it was nice getting that paycheck... gimme more money! Money! Whatever dude, I'm ready to move on. Just heard back from the YMCA of the Rockies, looks like I'll be in Estes Park, Colorado for the winter! Before that, I have some fun climbing plans before the season ends. Day after I write this, I'm heading down south for the Chattanooga Kiki! My roomate flaked on our plans last minute, which is always ANNOYING, but I love a personal trip. Zia time! Might hit up the red with Delia later this month, then in November it's my dreaded SPI exam I haven't studied for, and maybeee a week at Indian Creek... STOKE! Big plans ahead guys, great news for Zia and the three of you that stalk me.