Meadow Commission

Since it’s almost time for me to leave SA, my boss has been trying to get me out in the field to balance out the shear mountain of time spent in the office at a computer. As such, the last 2.5 of my working days have been spent in the field. Much adventure has resulted.

Thursday and Friday I went out in the field with my SA officemate, who, despite working at the Department of Forest and Wood Science, is not a forester by trade. In fact, she's an arts kid, psych to be more specific!

Needless to say, she was entirely unprepared for the heat, dust and heavy machinery that awaited her introduction into the forestry industry. It probably didn’t help her opinion of forestry that our task wasn’t the most intellectually stimulating in the industry. In fact, my mother even suggested that the two of us could easily be replaced by a camera placed in a strategically high tree. To demonstrate the skill involved, our task was as follows:

Follow a skidder as it drags trees from where they were felled to the roadside and write down how long each step within this task takes.

In order to exercise our minds, forget the heat, and just generally pass the time, we played an alphabet game. Choose a topic (i.e. countries; designers; plants) and alternate listing off things that fit under the category in alphabetical order (i.e. Australia, Belize, Cameroon; Armani… I wasn’t any good at this one; Arbutus, Birch, Cyprus). It still amazes me that such a simple game can happily provide two days of eight hours each worth of entertainment.

Compared to Thursday, Friday was ever so slightly more eventful. We decided from the start to sit in the shade, since the day was much hotter and there was no wind. So we made our camp near where they were choking (attaching to the skidder…for all intents and purposes) the trees and contentedly sat on some branches. About an hour into our work, the skidder comes back from the roadside and the operator jumps out with the machine still running. He calls over one of the chokers and together they start trying to get some pieces of log out from behind the winch…WITH THE SKIDDER STILL RUNNING!!! At this point all I can think of is how I’m about to witness something so gruesome it would put WorkSafe BC Awareness videos to shame!

Once they had removed these chunks of wood, they began carrying them towards us. They brought us stumps! They brought us stumps, so we wouldn’t have to sit on the ground!!! I think I’m still a little in shock. This is possibly the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me. At least anyone I had only communicated with via the occasional “Hello” and smile. Stumps. Stumps! I spent the rest of the day regaling my poor officemate with various renditions of “Stumps! No one has ever brought me a stump before!” and smiling to myself each time I remembered. I don't think anything else I have experienced here better demonstrates the South African chivalry and lack of workplace safety.

…Stumps!