The Eno and the Office

North Carolina woods smell like home to me.

I spent a year living in an old camp on a bluff above the Eno River, back when I was a newly minted adult. Then I spent many years living in a lowland forest about an hour south of there. We always went back to the Eno every July 4, to work at the festival which raised the money to buy the land for the Eno River State Park. We didn’t really use the park ourselves. It was far, and we already lived in the woods with a creek near the house. Still, something about it is home.

My daughter lives not too far from the Few’s Ford access area of the state park. We hiked about three or four miles the day after Christmas. It poured on Christmas, and the river was wild. The water was up high and rushing brown. The low trails were swampy, but we hiked anyway. The winters there are not as cold as TN, and it was nice just to be outside without bundling up (I wore a sweatshirt. It was a bit cold, but I felt free.) Canoe geeks that we are, we stopped next to each set of impromptu rapids and charted the best course through the rushing water.

The Eno is usually a lazy river.

Spending my birthday in the car isn’t ideal, but we got home safely, and the route around the I-40 rockslide wasn’t bad at all. I started a new job yesterday. Been training the last two days, but tomorrow, I work for real. I’ve never done office work, but it’s the job that was offered to me. It always seemed odd to me that there are buildings upon buildings of people doing nothing but office work. it seems like it should be support work for something else, like maybe where something is produced, but it has become an end onto itself.

This job is temporary, maybe two months. It seems that once you are in the census office, you can pick up other jobs with them. I recognized several people that I worked with before, but in the field, not the office.

So it is another experience to add to my life. I hope I don’t get too sedentary.