AmeriCorps 2020: The cows never came home

This post continues the story of my AmeriCorps term in Colorado in 2020, and it will make more sense if you read the previous posts in this series.

Following my camping trip near Nederland with my friend Mark, I had to return to that most dreadful of activities: work (although in AmeriCorps we’re not allowed to say that we’re doing “work,” we have to call it “service”).

My first day back to “service” was boring, so I’m not going to write about it. Instead, I’m going to write about a serious problem I had on the following day, August 11, 2020, when the cows never came home.

I started the workday (sorry, serviceday), on August 11 by backsloping a section of trail that I’d started working on the previous day. Backsloping essentially means giving the upper edge of a trail a nice, gentle slope so that water runs off it without washing the trail away.

Once I’d finished backslapping, our fearless leader Jo had me perform the noble task of collecting dirt. This was a critical, high-octane job (service) that had to be performed in an exact order.

First, I grabbed a wheel barrel. Second, I walked up and down the trail we were building with the wheel barrel, yelling, “Bring out your dirt!” Third, I had to inspect the dirt, to make sure it wasn’t too dirty. Fourth, I wheeled the dirt to a section of old trail that we were closing, and dumped it there. Fifth, and finally, I had to tamp the dirt down until it formed a “crown” over the old section of trail.

This task (service) would’ve gone well, if I hadn’t asked Jo how long I should tamp the dirt for. Her response was, “Until the cows come home.”

Now, Jo was probably used to dealing with normal people who do normal things, instead of engaging in “malicious compliance.” I, however, was not normal, and knew that I had to tamp the dirt until the cows actually came home.

The only problem with this was that we were in a nature preserve, and there were no cows. This meant that I tamped and tamped, but I never saw any cows.

Eventually Jo realized that I’d been gone for a long time, so she came looking for me. There I was, right where she left me, tamping. She asked me what I was doing, and I told her that she’d ordered me to tamp the dirt until the cows had come home, but I hadn’t seen any cows.

Perhaps that’s why Jo no longer talks to me.

The other, minor occurrence that took place on August 11 was that an AmeriCorps member in Wyoming had a tree dropped on her. This meant that one of our crew leaders had to drive to Wyoming that night to deal with that situation.

Like I said, a minor occurrence.

Back in Colorado, the rest of us finished our workday (serviceday) at the standard time and returned home. We’d managed to avoid dropping any trees onto each other, which I guess is alright, but I never saw the cows come home. This left me with a feeling of incompleteness that plagues me to this day.