The aspens will outlive the crew

I spent a season on a crew with Arizona Conservation Corps, based out of Tucson, across 2021 and 2022. I write software for a living now, and I have been thinking about that season more than I expected to.

The work moved around the state. In Tucson it was city parks, mostly pulling invasive grass out by the root, and one stretch where I was in mud past my thighs wrenching at it with both hands. I could not tell you now which grass it was. What I remember is standing up at the end of the day and seeing exactly what I had cleared, a wet line between the part we got and the part we did not. In Saguaro we built trail, which is the same trade, tread you cut once and people walk on for years.

The one I keep coming back to is Flagstaff. We were up in the national forest near Snowbowl running Husqvarnas, cutting down ponderosa pine to save aspen.

That takes a second to make sense. An aspen stand is closer to one organism than a group of trees, a shared root system throwing up trunks, and it needs light to keep doing it. A century of putting out every fire let ponderosa grow up through the aspen and shade it out. So the way you save a threatened grove is to fell the pines standing in it. The other half of the job was repairing the elk and deer fence, because new shoots get browsed off before they get tall enough to matter, and the wire is what buys them the time.

None of that pays off on a timescale I was going to see. We cut, we fixed fence, we drove back to town, and whether that grove actually comes back is a question for whoever is standing there in thirty years. I deploy code now and I know inside a minute whether it worked. That feedback is genuinely useful and I would not give it up, but it has quietly taught me to think in units of about two weeks, and the aspens do not care about two weeks.

We were a moment in that forest. A boulder drops into a river and it is small against the whole thing, but the water has to go around it now, and given enough time the river carves somewhere it was not going before. Hopefully somewhere better.

The other thing I did not expect was who was out there with me. Some of the crew were doing it as a first step into the work, the beginning of a career in land management or fire. Others were between things and using the season to think, which the work is unusually good for, since the swinging and cutting takes your hands and leaves your head alone. Both kinds were good to be around, and I think about them about as often as I think about the trees.