My Spring Break wasn’t at home.
It wasn’t in Panama City.
It wasn’t even anywhere where it was supposed to be warm.
My Spring Break was spent volunteering and sleeping on the floor of the visitor’s center at Horicon Wildife Refuge.
And it was easily the most worthwhile, best mid-semeseter break I’ve had.
Back in November, I’d signed up on a whim to be a site leader for Alternative Spring Break, an organization at Mizzou that sends students all over the country to help with different problems: AIDS, homelessness, disaster, etc. After getting back from a 9 hour car ride and weekend in Wisconsin for an Ultimate Frisbee tournament, where we’d wrapped up in Under Armor, thermals, tights, and headbands, I came home to a relatively warmer Missouri and an email telling me:
“I just wanted to say Congratulations for being selected as a site leader for the Environment 2 spring break trip and to inform you that you will be traveling to the Horicon Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin!”
My reaction: Are you kidding me? WISCONSIN?
My co-site leader and I met, wrangled 10 volunteers together through a series of intense drafts and alternates, and got the meetings started. Thankfully, we’ve all got amazing friends and relatives who were able to donate what they could towards the cause and 3 months later, I’m driving a minivan (aka The Moneyvan) to Mayville, Wisconsin.
Population: ~5000
Internet: None
Stoplights: “Just keep going past the stoplight. You can’t miss it. Only one we got.”
Muskrat population: Probably more than people in Wisconsin.
We ended up saving a couple muskrats, cleaning out birdhouses, doing waterfowl surveys, and an epic trust exercise. I volunteered to dangle horizontally over an algae-fied marsh, being held by two of the volunteers, while holding an 8 foot net to pick up a soda bottle out of the cattails.
If only we’d gotten pictures…
The thing that did seem a little odd, however, was the Buckthorn clearing. By the end of the second day, my volunteers, two people from the Refuge, and myself had all cleared close to 1000 individual Buckthorn trees, spraying the stumps with herbicide afterwards. While I realize the species is invasive, it seemed sad to cut down so much youth:
Despite the manual labor…
The sleeping bags for five days, and the early morning wake-up calls, adventures like these made it all worth it:
My wife did ASB when she was in college and loved it. Glad you had a good time.
It looks like you had fun as well as a learning experience. Was that calf sucking your finger? That must have been lovely, I am sure you coo’d!