Lawn Order
~ by Mark Blackwell
There was a time, at the start of the last quarter of the previous century, when I applied to and was accepted to a U. S. government job training program. I was a young man and at that time employment was as scarce as honesty in Congress. I raised my hand, bit my tongue, and enrolled in CETA.
CETA stood for the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act. It was a Nixon-era creation but had more than a faint whiff of the New Deal about it. I joined up and was promptly sent out to Yellowwood State Forest to relearn just about everything the Boy Scouts had taught me ten years earlier.
I identified trees, built trails, picked up litter, and rescued wayward raccoons from trash cans. I learned how to harvest acorns and Tulip Poplar seeds( sent to a state tree nursery). I assigned campsites and obtained some modicum of social sensitivity from drunk / rowdy campers who thought that camping in a state forest conferred the right to be jerks. What I didn’ t suspect was that spending a lot of time outdoors and in close proximity to big trees would result in falling in love. I was already infatuated with camping, boating, hiking but somewhere along the line I came to want a committed relationship with Mother Nature. Now, you might think that I would have considered going to college and getting a degree in forestry so I could spend my life in the woods, but I saw what that did to the professionals I worked with.
I saw that the people with the best instincts for forest management were always over-ruled and harassed by office dwellers and bean counters and that situation would negatively affect my affection for nature. I realized I didn’ t want to work in the woods. I wanted to live in the woods.
My job at forest came to an end, babies were born, other work came along, houses were bought and sold, moves were made, and life went on. And then when the children grew up and the demands
60 Our Brown County • July / August 2018