I've been out at camp for a week now, and have just come back into Reno to sign paperwork. One week, going on what seems like 6 months. Where to start the tale of such a strange little adventure?

The field camp I worked out of last summer in the Alaskan Arctic was the Ritz Carlton in comparison to my living situation now. We work out of a gravel pit several miles off a lonely little highway in a sagebrush valley in central Nevada. We are surrounded by pinon pine/juniper covered mountains that still have snow on them despite valley temperatures in the mid 70's. We each have a tent where we sleep. A weatherport with a plywood floor serves as office, kitchen, storage and living room. Behind camp we've dug a hole in the ground and built a plywood box with a hole cut in it for a toilet. The new luxury this year is a plastic seat set on top to cut down on the number of splinters received in unfortunate places.

I live with three other men, and a dog, Beowawe, which is Shoshone for "gateway" and a slang word for female genitalia. One of the guys is married and half republican: the first time we argued politics I felt like I was going to have to quit. One of the other guys comes from a navy family and is very much a tough-guy, hunter/fisher outdoorsman. I wouldn't doubt conservative political tendencies on his part either. He is hearing impaired and is teaching me sign language. I'm still amazed at how well we can communicate with so few words. My boss reminds me of a jowlier, balder, modern-day, American Heathcliff from D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterly's Lover." An interesting camp dynamic to say the least.

I'm desperate for female company already. The dog, in all her muttish, quizicallness is a small comfort. I've never worked in an all male co-worker environment. In a field camp there are a lot of chores to be done, and I find myself gravitating towards the more uxorial duties. I'm afraid to touch the generators that power our freezer and lights, but I jump all over tasks like cooking, cleaning, and sewing up bird observation blinds. I'm uncomfortable tackling the "manly" tasks mainly because I don't have the expertise. I feel like one of the guys should step forward and show me how. I guess I could also step forward and ask, though part of me doesn't want the responsibility because I know that if I mess-up the blame falls on my sex, not on the fact that anyone could have made the same mistake.

Dates and days of the week are irrelevant in camp. Night, day, and most especially the crepuscular hours between, are the cycles we have adapted too. We wake up between 12:30 and 3:00 AM, and work until about 8:00 AM, either observing or trapping birds. Then we take a long nap before our tents get too hot. Birds are tracked using radio telemetry during the heat of the day. Camp chores wind down around sundown, and it's off to bed before the stars have come out in their full, desert brilliance.

We get into town about once a week to shower at another UNR research trailer in a failing mining town in the mountains 50 miles away. In all wierdness, one of the technicians on that project is a girl I'd done desert toroise research with in Las Vegas four years ago to the day. We'd completely lost touch, and I still haven't stopped marvelling at the small, roundishness of this world.

I'm swallowing Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire and Mary Austin's Land of Little Rain in great draughts. I've decided that I plan on extending this twilit youth for a good, long while yet.

Sometimes (most times?) there is nothing so important in life as a clear sky.