By Carey Lang, Pepperwood Summer Intern
Less than
one week into my Pepperwood internship experience, Lisa and I road-tripped to
the California Academy of Sciences to meet with a handful of scientists and
researchers and discuss the crux of my internship project up at Pepperwood this
summer. As we were driving down the freeway (at first I wrote “highway” but I
changed it so I would sound more west coast…), she asked me what I thought of
the rolling golden hills of Northern California. I squinted out the window,
trying to figure out what she was talking about. Everything just looked kind of
brown to me. Brown and dry.
Of course, as I told Lisa, I meant
that in the most observational and scientific way possible. There’s nothing
wrong with brown and dry, but when I left my home in western Massachusetts, the
woods around my house were saturated with emerald and jade and everything was
alive and pulsing with early summer energy. I know that green and wet do happen
here; I’ve been told I just need to wait until the winter. But having never
been to the west coast before, I was experiencing a little bit of a landscape
identity crisis.
Now I’ve been here for
six weeks and have eaten breakfast with a herd of deer munching on the grass
less than two feet away from me. I’ve cantered through the field below Roller
Coaster Ridge on Simba, one of the horses that lives on the preserve. From the
picnic table on Three Tree Hill I’ve watched a fireworks show over Windsor to
my left while a lightning storm flickered through the sky to my right. And I
celebrated my 21st birthday exactly as a 21st birthday should be celebrated,
with my coworkers who have become my friends. I’ve also had bats land on my
face while I was sleeping. I’ve shared my house, my shower and at one point my
coffeemaker with 300 roommates -- all of them tiny cockroaches. I’ve been
jolted from a deep sleep by an apocalyptic thunderstorm shaking the walls of my
room at 3 AM and I’ve discovered that one person cannot consume enough Annie’s
Mac and Cheese to make purchasing a pack of 12 boxes a good decision.
The coolest thing I’ve gained from
TeenNat is that up until this point, I’d never really considered a real career
as an educator, but the other day I found myself browsing through my college’s
course catalogue looking for education classes. I’ve really enjoyed interacting
with kids who love to learn as much as I do, and I’ve even impressed myself
with the things I’ve been able to teach them. The other day I just started
rambling about the different types of lichen that we could observe on the
preserve, which was something I’d learned about a few weeks ago while out doing
fieldwork. As I pointed something out to the TeenNatters, I suddenly realized
that they had all gone silent and were staring at me, listening intently. The
best part, however, is that I actually knew what I was talking about. While I’m
nowhere near as skilled as the fantastic education staff at Pepperwood, TeenNat
has exposed me to a whole new side of myself I’m eager to explore.
I’m starting to see the gold in the Californian mountains.
