Problems With Forestry

My trusty steel toes

 

You know what’s hard? I’ll tell ya.

Being a girl and trying to dress adequately for a professional event in a male dominated field (read: forestry). That’s hard.

You are expected to be in dress clothes and look professional but also convey that you could throw on a hardhat and lay out a skidder trail. Now, to make things harder: you’re a girl.

It is so hard to find the line between not looking so feminine that people will discount your abilities but not dressing in a way that appears frumpy or overly masculine. It’s literally a nightmare.

Interviews are supposed to be stressful. I get that. But when you are more stressed about what to wear for shoes than questions like, “What is your greatest weakness?” or, “What is a time you made mistakes at work and how did you handle them?” you know it’s bad.

Should I wear heals? No, they’ll think I’m a girlie-girl.

Should I wear my steel toe boots? No, they’ll think I don’t know how to dress for the office part of the job.

How about sneakers? Ha-ha nice try. No.

Sandals? Maybe if you just really don’t want the job you could.

Flats? Too bad my pants are long enough to fit an Amazon…nope.

Of course this dilemma never begins until the night before at 9:37pm so it’s not like I can just run into town and find the perfect women’s-forestry-super-interviewer-shoe-of-the-year. (By the way, if you ever see an ad for such a thing, send it over this way and help a sister out…)

So guess what.

I wore my steel toe boots. Yup. I did. I cleaned &oiled them that morning so they looked brand new. And you know what? Then I had to worry that they would take one look at my brand new (looking) boots and think I had never done any real work and only wore them so that they would THINK  I did real work! ARRUUUGHHHGH! WHY ARE THEY SO JUDGY!

At this point I decided that I was being UTTERLY REDICULOUS and just left and went to my interview.

You would never believe what they said when they saw my shoes.

Nothing.

Because they didn’t pay any attention to my shoes at all. It was all over nothing.

There is no intended moral to this story, but I hope you enjoyed it anyway. I can’t be the only one who has thoughts like this about interviews. Why do we always assume that everyone is judging us so much? All that being said; I do still feel that it is very difficult to dress correctly for such events. Especially as a woman.

Those Who've Passed This Way Before Us

 

Saw in a maple tree

Sometimes when I walk in the woods and it's so quiet that I can hear the leaves fall it can be easy to feel like I'm on ground never walked by another person. The animals carry on with their business and run around through the trees and the brooks babble gently along. It's so calm that when my cell phone goes off it sounds so loud that people from miles away could hear it.

Places like this are a treasure in today's world. It's one of the reasons I love my job. I also love the little forgotten tidbits left behind to remind me that I'm not the first or only person to pass this way. Yesterday I snapped this picture of an old bow saw grown into a maple tree on a state owned piece of land in New Hampshire. When I see things such as this I love to try and figure out how it got there or how long it's been there. Was the sawyer trying to cut or prune the tree and the saw became pinched and he gave up on it and left? Unlikely... Perhaps someone hung the saw on the branch of this maple long ago while they stopped for a drink at the stream less than ten feet away and then forgot the saw when they left. Who knows? That's the wonder of it. It seemed that the blade had rusted away as the tree continued to grow around the saw which might mean it's been there for quite some time. Knowing that this land used to be owned by one of the paper companies and was cut relatively hard, combined with the size of the tree, it is easy to assume that the saw hasn't been there for too many decades, but it's a fun find either way.

Treasures and artifacts left as junk by those who have been here already can be so interesting and often lead to others. This saw for instance, was not far from an old campy-looking site that is now only a few bricks and some metal pipes. If somebody knows what to look for they could also notice the smooth, flat strip running by it that was likely an old road, long abandoned and overgrown.

It's funny how land changes overtime. Areas once bustling can feel utterly untouched in just 30 years or so. Some uncharted woodlots transform into sub-divided suburbia while others grow wild where they were once carefully managed and traveled often. I hope that as our population grows we will always have forgotten areas to discover clues about those who have passed this way before us.