When I was in middle school, living vicariously through books to get through the week, one of my best escapes was a novel called The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly. It followed a girl named Callie living in the early 1900s as she learned to become a naturalist, a student of all living organisms. With her grandfather, the kind of old man with a dark, looming study full of old books and strange specimens, she explored and documented the plants and animals on her Texas farm, marking down every observation as she went.

I was entranced by this life of discovery, the process of distilling wild outdoor adventures into little rows of figures and neatly labeled illustrations. I even dragged my sister out into the woods to try it out a few times, notebook in hand, making up names for the plants we didn’t know. I had no charmingly cantankerous grandfather to teach me the Latin ones, so we got very creative with our naturalist nomenclature. I don’t remember most of our inventions but I do recall that all saplings, regardless of species, were called bendy-shoots.

Now here I am, several science classes later, working with the DEC, and in the past two weeks, I have become the real-life version of my young naturalist dreams. I mentioned a new land purchase a few columns ago, a ridge that hasn’t been heavily explored in several decades. We did some preliminary crashing around in there in June, but last week our survey began in earnest. The goal is to capture the area in its nearly untouched state and get it all down on paper, and it has fallen to the stewards to do this. So I, with my single year of college under my belt, have been launched into a professional research project, the kind of thing that would constitute a graduate thesis, and I am loving it.

The process is called vegetation monitoring, and basically, we do exactly what middle school me pretended to do all those years ago. We wander around in the woods and at certain intervals, we mark out a meter square and record everything we see. It all goes in a cute yellow notebook, all the species lined up in a row. I’ve got my fellow steward Ben, with his biology degree, to help with all the identification, and I have learned an enormous amount. I can tell you the names of all sorts of bendy-shoots now, I can point out the beech saplings from the maples and the ashes, the birches and aspens are harder to tell. I can recognize some flowers now too, and I’ve even done some drawings, Calpurnia Tate style. True memorization and understanding of biology takes years I’m sure, but it’s been such fun jumping into it head first and learning as I go, like the naturalists of old.

In between all my stewarding exploits, I do still find some time to read. I recently finished Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck, which was certainly a fitting choice, a magical read that filled me with envy at his beautiful writing. Steinbeck’s narration of his American odyssey was all the more powerful from my little Adirondack outpost, not just an escape, like Calpurnia, but a celebration of the land that I could truly share in.