When we arrived in early June, we didn't have a clue what we were doing with our lives.  Freshly graduated from a pathetic state college, we had learned no marketable skills except how to fake/cheat our way through it.  We came to Salmon either looking for or running from something.  Initially, most Salmonites seemed extra slow, disinterested and hostile.  We quickly befriended the volunteer coordinator who hired us at the last minute over the phone, saving us from another boring Massachusetts summer.  Michael D. Demick was not very typical to these parts.  He was sarcastic and almost quick-witted and since he was in our age bracket he became an instant hit/new best friend and not the old crotchety eastern-hater we had feared he might be.

We built a great friendship with the lifelong Salmon resident and in the process pushed his kindness/ tolerance to the limit.   He drove us all over the forest, set us up in his recently deceased grandfather's horse ranch, put up with our western/wilderness ignorance and got us out of many work/town related jams.  All he got in return was blunt probing into his love life, endless character assassinations/ observations (our most marketable skills) and an extra 2600 miles on his new truck.  He managed (with very few exceptions) to receive all this with his trademark goofy-ass western chortle.

Many folks could never figure out how a young east coast, comparatively urban couple with useless college degrees, no fisheries/ Forest Service experience  got this much sought after job.  It became evident the moment we arrived for orientation that this animosity was going to be an issue, but that was only a taste of the bizarre work situation we fell into.

Our new boss, Deb Carter, softlyintroduced herself wearing a slew of bird feathers mashed into the plastic adjustable strip on the back end of her crooked red and white mesh baseball cap.  She was nearing middle-age-dom and she accelerated the process 25 years by wearing a pair of gold wire framed, old lady bifocals.  On top of these she wore another pair of huge, glaucoma- patient-looking, black Terminator- style sunglasses. These lopsidedly covered the bifocals as well as most of her forehead.  Her red turtleneck seemed a bit overbearing for the 80 degree weather and her thick, rubber hip boots that clunked all over the floor seemed out of place for the bright, cloudless day.  It was obvious that she was made fun of a lot as a kid and probably still is, only now it's behind her back.  After Deb's peculiar introduction, she immediately told

us that this new and controversial Salmon Recovery Project we were hired for held “great national significance.”  Many of the locals and some fellow employees did not approve of the project, the money allocated for it or the person conducting it.  She then went on to say how tough she'd be working us, how strenuous the conditions would be and how the long hours would drag.  At least this didn't put much pressure on us right away.  I deduced that she must have had an earth- shaking divorce that threw her far away  from her two kids.  She seemed pretty scared from all that family turmoil, so she decided to build up her academic career, earning several different doctorates.  She held a master's degree in Biology and knew everything about the Chinook Salmon, but had no field experience with any kind of fish, never mind this particular endangered Salmon.

Even though she worked very hard and had the best of intentions, she was so  quirky/unbalanced that all the data from the project came out looking queer.  Her real problem was interacting with others.  Deb's people skills needed some major
work, maybe some implants or at least a push-up bra. 

It was always difficult approaching her; you feared some kind of breakdown, love-in or tantrum.  With bad luck on our side, we had to be trained by her for the   first month or until “we grasped the focus of the project.”  This meant that each day all three of us would travel throughout every inch of every river, creek, stream, brook and dribble of water in the forest.

It surely didn't seem like anything so significant that a 220 year old country with tons of other problems would give a shit about.  Broken down to its simplest form it was a bunch of driving, take some water chemistry tests, do some observing of the creek characteristics, jot down a little bit of info and then hop back in the truck and onto the next site.  Deb made it seem like the fate of the National Forest system, every aquatic being, Jesus H. Christ, our parents souls and the future of man-kind were riding on its results.  We could tell she did really like us and tried to the best of her abilities to make us like her back.  She'd do this by giving us compliments on how well we took the water temperature, how neat/thorough the data appeared in the notebook, how straight I drove down the road and by semi-anonymously leaving us a 12 pack of beer/pop (everyone in Idaho calls soda “pop”) on our stoop.

The reason Gina and I took this job was so we wouldn't have to work with any more annoying (no matter how nice they might be) fucks.  We wanted to be on our own.  Not stressing out about fragile supervisors and whether some chemical mixed with a sample of some stream's water will turn a hazy shade of red inside some glass test tube.  Deb was going to make sure we knew how to do everything and exactly where every site we'd have to periodically test was.  Neither of us could wait until she'd finally finished the arduous training.  One long month turned into two and our patience wore thinner than Karen Carpenter at her last show.  Finally, after a few semi-heated exchanges in the tight fitting cab of the Forest Service rig, she told us that the following day's training was our last together.  We would all go to the last site on the survey, a very remote creek, deep in the Wilderness portion of the Forest.  This great news had come none too soon!  We just had to get through one more aggravating day with the legendary Ms. Carter.

--Rod Murphy, Jr.