the living world is green: What does an intern actually do?

So a couple of people have been wondering what kind of stuff I do on a daily basis, and to be fair, I guess I have been kind of evasive as to the kind of stuff that I do at Scott. The short answer is, anything and everything that needs done. Some things to know: There is a good-sized staff dedicated to the maintenance of grounds at the Scott Arboretum. This includes mostly gardeners and special coordinators, plus people in charge of different aspects of grounds maintenance that I don't know anything about (like athletic field maintenance). There is also a group of people known as the council, which figure out things like funding and special events. All in all, that is probably close to thirty people right there.

My job is mostly to do whatever anyone tells me, although as of right now this mostly means following the curatorial intern, Sam, around all day and help him do whatever he's supposed to do. He is also in charge of the student workers. I think there are four of them, and they each work about seven hours a week.

Also, there are a lot of volunteers, or arboretum assistants. They are, in many ways, the lifeblood of the arboretum. They show up daily, and do all sorts of projects ranging from weeding and planting, to running errands around the campus, to helping with special celebrations and events. Most of them are retirees, and they are fascinating, hardworking, and welcoming; the sense of community they help to foster within the workings of the arboretum is one of my favorite things about the Scott. So sometimes I get to help them with projects.

On the whole, I spend most of my time watering, weeding, mulching/edging, moving/digging/potting plants, planting, and helping with large projects. Large projects include things like:

THE CRUM CREEK CLEAN UP

The Crum Creek Woods: Right along Swarthmore's campus, and right next to where I live. Sadly, I did not take this picture, but it sure is nice.

As is to be expected, volunteers and staff spread out over a rather large area, and moved along the creek and surrounding woods picking up trash to celebrate Earth Day. What was cool about this, besides how much trash we pulled out of there, was this bizarre find I stumbled upon. Sadly, I did not have my camera and didn't get a picture.

But first, some exposition:

I was on the top of a small hill, looking down through the woods towards what would have been the creek, had I been able to see through the understory as the elevation changed. I was surrounded on all sides by some pretty old trees, and their canopies kept the understory rather clear, so rooting around wasn't too difficult. I was looking for trash hot spots: places with a few old logs good for sitting and a hole in the canopy, places that seemed like nice spots where college kids might want to drink beer. There were many of these, as we discovered.

But it was still early in the day when I saw a spot I thought had high beer drinking potential: five trees close together, almost in a circle, creating a space with a rough five foot diameter. When I got there, I didn't see any trash, but upon walking through the tree circle, I heard (and felt) the crunching of glass under my feet.

Groan. Added level of trash extraction difficultly. Moment of cost-benefit analysis. Scanning the woods to ascertain how hard everyone else is working, and if I am being left behind. Everyone else seems to have more in their bags. Groan. Who buries beer bottles?

Jerks. Jerks do. Groan.

But, it wasn't beer bottles. Someone had buried little empty jars, about the size of small jam jars, except instead of that heavy duty glass smuckers uses, the glass was very thin. There were no lids anywhere. After I realized there were multiple jars, I hunkered down and slowly became absorbed in getting them out of the ground.

I dug up eighteen of those little jars, all intentionally buried right next to each other, all in a row, all on their long sides, all filled with dirt. They were almost two inches under the leaf litter, and an inch and a half underneath the surface of the ground. As I pulled on out after another I came up with all sorts of reasons somebody, or a group of somebodies, might do this. None were very satisfying.

About jar ten, it got a little eerie. It got eerie because I suddenly realized how strange it was. These jars had been recently buried. The dirt around them had been recently disturbed, and was still very soft. Soft enough that even with the cushion of leaf litter and actual humus/soil my 110 pounds was enough to break the first two I stepped on. There weren't any kind of markers nearby indicating that it was part of some strange soil experiment, or that data collection of some kind was going on, and there was nothing in the jars. Makes you wonder what people in this world are doing with their spare time.

There was also this strange feeling of just missing a person, as if the jars had been so recently buried that my people sensing subconscious alert system could still pick up signs that a human had been there, and was close by. The other volunteers soon passed me, as I pulled out jar after jar, and the woods around me became quiet as the lines marched onward and the conversations and sounds of bags and footsteps disappeared and I was alone.

The glass was cool to the touch, and the chill spread to the tips of my fingers, and even though no one was around, I found myself listening intently for snapping twigs or the recognizable sound of the human gait through the leaves that fell in the previous autumn, and I was reminded of those times when I knew instantly that something strange and human was happening. Like the time we attempted to set up a tent on your property in the dark and heard someone walking through the woods and we ran back to your house, or that strange night someone knocked on the window next to where I was sitting when I was home alone and I called the police. That feeling of instantly knowing that that is the sound of something that knows you are there. That is what I felt as I threw those last few jars away.

Plants of the day:

Fair warning, there aren't many because my camera is out of batteries. But this weekend I'm going to Longwood and Winterthur (whew!) and I should get some pretty MINDBlOGGLINGLY AWESOME PHOTOS that will eventually be uploaded to picasa.