By: Luiza Cavalcante, Crew Foxtrot
Somewhere deep inside our crew’s trailer there are 4 crosscut saws and about 13 sleeves of Kroger bagels. What does it take to clear hundreds of feet of protected wilderness area? What does it take to fill the rumbling bellies of 11 voracious, mountain-freak crew members? Crosscuts and bagels. Lieu of a chainsaw’s obliterous roar, cross cut saws have been wielded in protected American wilderness areas since the beginning of conservation corps work. It’s a quiet, steady miracle that we still get to use them today.
Before I started this job, I had no idea what a crosscut was. I had no idea what living with 11 people would be like. It’s beautiful and it’s finite. Existing here requires balance, which is a new challenge if you have ever enjoyed sitting comfortably with feet on the ground on one end of life’s seesaw.
There are 6 people left in the states who know how to sharpen a crosscut saw. There are innumerable acres of land that can only be tread if if maintained and can only be properly maintained through a blue collar pas-de-deux thar takes place when 2 corps members possess a bestial hunger of epic proportions which is satiated in large part by sleeves of bagels. Toasted over the blue glow of an MSR fire, swallowed down with pink-seared spam, building up in our bellies like goopy sawdust from a crosscut performed during a torrential downpour. Corps members eat together or not at all. We pull granola bars, fruit, and bread from commercial grocery store aisles aglow in plastic colors into simple rations that ensure everyone eats. We’ve figured out how to time travel. I’m not sure if it’s backwards, to a time of quarter century frugality and the golden ages of corps, or whether we’ve gone to the future: a brave new world where wilderness is accessible and amity happens over breaking bread. When I look at my crew, swaying to the rhythm of a decades-old crosscut or sharing the smallest, most perfect bites of food, I start to think that maybe this is just our remarkable not.
