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When I found out what my team’s first project after summer break would be I was more than a little excited. Six weeks in the outdoors doing invasive species removal, building trails, and monitoring wildlife. Living on a former golf course turned bird sanctuary with beach access to Lake Michigan. Less than two miles from a lakeside state park and just forty-five minutes North of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This was my ideal project. And it only got better after our arrival.

The project sponsors, with whom we worked on a daily basis, were a great group of people. Fun and hard working, they were also a blast outside of work. Although we had indoor accomodations in the club house, I decided to pitch my tent on what used to be the practice putting green and sleep outside in the fresh air (the basement of the clubhouse was more than a little musty). I knew I was going to enjoy the project the first night when I layed down and realized I had accidentally possitioned my tent so that I was staring directly at the big dipper! I am not sure I have ever seen stars so bright.

Although the work for our first week was not the most exciting, we spent the majority of our time cutting and bagging thistle and Queen Ann’s Lace, I still managed to enjoy it. It honestly was hard not to; the weather was great, so was the company, and the area in which we were working was beautiful.

There was another volunteer group staying at the golf course while we were there, WisCorps. WisCorps is a Wisconsin youth conservation group for people ages 16-twenty something. At first we thought they were weird. They were always doing bad eastern European acents and Arnold impressions. Then, once we had the prevelidge of working along side them, we thought they were even more weird.

This dream project was to be short lived however. Our team leader got a call form headquarters less than a week into our stay in Wisconsin.  We were shipping out to Joplin, MO to do intake for tornado survivors with FEMA. I was devastated. I had been enjoying virtually everything about the project, even WisCorps was starting to grow on me. We had also found an incredible ice cream and chocolate shop in Port Washington, the nearest town. To add insult to injury, the last morning we were there I got out of my tent to see a deer standing less than ten yards away. On the Friday before we left our sponsors had a cookout for us, WisCorps, and another team that had been stationed in Milwaukee. It was meant as a welcome but was repurposed as a bitter farewell. Our sponsors were deeply disappointed that we were leaving, understandably so.

It was a macabre affair. We sullenly played three games of softball, cheering each other on sarcastically while running up the score as much as possible. We begrudgingly ate the burgers, veggie burgers, various salads, and brownies that were prepared for us. And at the end we sat in a circle and talked about how glad we were to be leaving the project. (This is all saarcasm of course, which I realize is difficult to convey in text. In actuality we had a wonderful time and were all very sad to be leaving).

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