AmeriCorps 2020: The crowning

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

There are moments in life – rare ones – when you feel like you’ve made progress. Brief feelings of mastery, like when Anakin Skywalker believed he’d surpassed Obi-Wan, only to have all of his remaining limbs severed and to be burned alive. August 26, 2020 was one of those moments for me.

Back on August 11, 2020, our dictator leader Jo had me “crown” a section of trail that we were closing. Crowning meant taking wheel-barrel loads of dirt to the proper location, dumping the dirt on the decommissioned trail, and then tamping it down until the cows came home.

Apparently I mastered crowning, because on August 26 Jo had me teach Nick, one of my crew leaders, how to do it. I therefore showed him how to crown with maximum arrogance:

1. Step one: pick up wheel barrel with much contempt.
2. Step two: load dirt from other crew members’ stations into wheel barrel.
3. Step three: Inspect crew members’ dirt. If it has too many rocks in it, scoff at them.
4. Step four: While scowling, wheel the wheel barrel to the dump site.
5. Step five: Dump the dirt on the desired section of trail. Grunt in French while doing so.
6. Step six: Tamp the dirt with extreme violence.
7. Step seven: Repeat until the cows come home.

Nick tried to follow my expert advice to the best of his ability. He did alright, but if you ask me, he could’ve used more contempt.

After lunch, we all spun some sort of wheel app on Nick’s phone to figure out what our next jobs were. Clay and I, one of my fellow AmeriCorps members, both got “rock work.”

I thought that this meant getting the bejesus knocked out of us by The Rock. Much to my disappointment, it did not. Rock work, in this context, meant taking two long, metal bars and using them to move a large boulder up a hill.

Clay and I were supposed to use the rock bars as levers, sticking them under the rock, lifting up, and making rowing motions to move the boulder. We could’ve even used smaller rocks as fulcrums to increase our mechanical advantage.

I said “supposed to” and “could’ve” because, well, what do you think would happen when you tell a jock and an idiot (not Clay, by-the-way) to take heavy metal bars and move a big rock? Clay and I attacked the rock with maximum strength and minimal thinking, and consequently had little success. We didn’t finish moving the boulder until the next day, when we had the assistance of someone with a brain (hint: it was Jo).