Week 4, 9/12
This was our second time at the Fort Worth Nature Center and Refuge. The
Buffalo Trail that we were assigned had some obvious wear and tear, so it was
our job to tend to it for the hour we were there. At the entrance of our trail,
we saw a herd of buffaloes on the other side of the fence. We tried to discern
the males from the females, and the babies were easy to identify. I snapped a
picture for SnapChat and saved some pictures to my phone for the future,
assuming they would be of importance at some point.
We started walking from the edge of our trail towards the site we would
be working on for the day. After walking for what seemed like five minutes, a
man on staff pulled up in his cart and asked if we needed a ride. Upon
discovering we were only halfway there, my group decided it would be best to
get in the cart. It was not a cool day. The part of the trail we were tasked to
work on was about fifty meters long. I’m not sure if this is the right measurement
for the image I presently have in my head, but it would be the equivalent of
about three soccer goal nets.
We were given gardening gloves and tools (shovels and rakes) to transfer
piles of clay onto the trail. There were four piles. My group was a little
confused as to why the clay had not been dumped on the trail to begin with. It
just seemed like there was an extra step being taken that just was not
necessary. The truck that transferred the clay could have definitely done a
swifter job than my team and I. I came to the conclusion that the reason that
this had to be so was because the trail was still in use. People were walking
up and down that trail daily. The staff at the Nature Center has a lot of
volunteers come in to help out, and I’m assuming that instead of them dumping
the clay all on the trail and spending time to make sure it was laid out nicely,
they had the volunteers do all the work.
It really felt like like I was doing
manual labor, but at the same time, I was enjoying it because I was getting my
workout in for the day. Every time I think about working out, I think of going
to the gym, not realizing that nature offers a lot of tools for doing some
exercise. I’ve heard of people lifting branches as weights, climbing trees to
tone the upper body, and throwing large rocks to build up arm strength. All I
could think of while I was transferring the clay, appart from how much I was
sweating, was how sore my arms would be the next day. The good kind of sore.
The clay offered a nice source of reflection
for me. Initially, we thought the clay was mixed with various sizes of rocks
because some of it seemed too hard to be considered clay. Then, I accidently
hit one of the “rocks” with my shovel and it broke open. I thought to myself
that this must be a pretty brittle rock, but upon closer examination, I
realized that it was all clay. The center of the clay that I had broken open
was a little wet, which made sense. The center had not been exposed to the
elements, so it had not had an opportunity to dry. We started smashing some
other chunks of clay to examine their interiors. Some of them were hard and
difficult to break, but with enough force, the impossible was made possible. I
likened all of this to a child’s brain. When babies are born, their skull is
very fragile and soft, but over time, the skull becomes harder and the
different bones begin to fuse together. Unlike the clay, which can become damp
again with the rain, a person’s skull can’t become soft once it has hardened.
At the end of our workday, we walked
back on the trail towards the trail entrance. Unfortunately their was no ride
waiting for us anywhere, so we made the relatively long but relaxing trek back.
As I walked, I scanned the scenery to see what I could take pictures of. I did
not see anything that was necessarily intriguing or that stuck out as something
interesting and worth taking note of. I saw trees, butterflies in flight,
cactii, flowers, bushes, tall grass (most likely inhabited by chiggers), and
dirt. These were all things that I had seen before.
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