AmeriCorps 2020: The big wigs

This post continues the story of my AmeriCorps service term in Boulder, Colorado in 2020. The rest of this series is located here.

Until this point, the majority of my time working with the City of Boulder’s Open Spaces and Mountain Parks (OSMP) department had been spent on the Fern-Mesa reroute project. We had been building a new section of trail; but, like I said in the last post, we were nearly done. Perhaps that’s why we received a visit from two of Boulder’s “big wigs” on August 19.

August 19, 2020 was weird from the beginning. The trail we were building was obviously closed, with barricades at either end. Keeping people off the budding trail was important, because if someone were to walk by and get hit in the head with a pick axe, then we’d lose valuable time cleaning up the blood and hiding the body.

Nevertheless, on the morning of the 19th we encountered multiple groups of hikers on the closed trail. I wanted to tell them to leave, but apparently you’re not allowed to do that in Boulder. This irritated me, because we were allowing people to do something that was not only against the rules, but a safety risk to everyone involved.

Later in the day another group of hikers approached us. They were two older men dressed casually, and clearly up to no good. At this point I’d had it. I was tired of having to stop working to cater to rich, entitled hikers – especially when those rules were set up to protect them – and I was going to tell them off.

Fortunately I didn’t, because these “hikers” were two of the most powerful people in Boulder’s OSMP department. They weren’t out for a stroll: they’d come to visit us and inspect the new trail.

These two men were named Jim and Jerry. I didn’t have many interactions with Jerry, but I had a good conversation with Jim. He was a little older, perhaps in his sixties, with white hair and a deep voice. He also had a calm demeanor, and was remarkably polite. I can’t recall exactly what Jim and I talked about, only that it was a pleasant conversation.

I needed the break that my talk with Jim gave me, too. On August 19, I dealt with a host of symptoms that were becoming common: I was dizzy, extremely tired, and spent the whole day feeling like I couldn’t catch my breath. At the time I couldn’t figure out why I felt so bad, but in retrospect there was an obvious culprit.

I wrote in my previous post that the afternoon and evening of August 18 were incredibly smoky. Wildfire smoke had descended on the Joder house, and my fellow AmeriCorps members and I had no escape. Then, on the next day, I felt exactly the same as I always did after inhaling a bunch of wildfire smoke.

The answer was clearly aliens.