Two Miles

Two miles of trail, a staple gun, and every biting insect in the county — a ranger's afternoon of grunt work, told the way he actually told it to himself

Two miles. That's what they gave me. Not the nice two miles either, not the flat loop by the visitor center with the boardwalk and the shade and the families who ask you where the bathroom is every four hundred feet. No, I got the ridge trail, the one that climbs just enough to make you sweat through your shirt in the first quarter mile and then never lets you cool back down, because the canopy's too thick up there for any breeze to make it through. Ninety-one degrees. Felt like a hundred and five with the humidity, and I know that because I checked, twice, hoping the second check would somehow be wrong.

I've got a roll of flyers under one arm, a staple gun in the other hand, and enough bug spray on me that I should be repelling more than mosquitoes at this point. Doesn't matter. There's a specific breed of deer fly out here that seems to have evolved specifically to ignore repellent as a personal insult, and they'd found me by the second tree. I swatted, missed, swatted again, and gave up somewhere around tree four, deciding that if it wanted blood that badly it had earned it.

This is always how it goes. Somebody up the chain decides the flyer campaign needs doing, looks around the room, and I am, apparently, always standing in exactly the spot where "grunt work" lands. Not the guy who gets to do the interesting trail counts, not the guy who gets sent out on the actual wildlife surveys with the fun equipment. Me. Stapling paper to trees in a swamp of my own sweat while everybody else is presumably somewhere with air conditioning, doing whatever it is that isn't this.

Half a mile in, I passed the spot where the trail forks toward the creek, and sure enough, there it was — a boot-worn shortcut cutting straight off the marked path and down through the underbrush, the kind that only exists because enough people decided the real trail was taking too long to get somewhere. I know exactly where that particular shortcut ends up, too. Right along the bank where the fallen logs sit half in the water, prime habitat for half a dozen species people love to find and have absolutely no business picking without knowing what they're looking at. I've walked out there myself after a good rain and seen the little divots in the leaf litter where somebody's already been through, pockets full of something they found growing on a stump, no idea if it was dinner or a trip to the ER. That's not a guess on my part. That's just what happens when people go off-trail with a bag and no real idea what they're collecting.

Which, fine — that's the whole reason I'm out here with a roll of paper and a staple gun instead of at my desk. I get it. I still don't have to enjoy it.

Somewhere past the mile mark the trail narrows and the mosquitoes get worse, which I would not have thought possible an hour ago, but here we are. I found a good tree — wide trunk, decent bark, right where the trail bends so anybody coming from either direction would have to actually see it — and I stopped to do the thing I'd been sent out here to do. Pulled a flyer off the roll, pressed it flat against the bark with my forearm to keep it from curling in the little bit of wind that had finally decided to show up, lined up the corner, and squeezed the staple gun. It kicked back harder than I expected against that particular trunk — some bark just doesn't want to give — so I had to reset and go again, driving a second staple into the top corner while I held the bottom of the page down with my palm so it wouldn't lift and flap. Third staple bottom-left, fourth bottom-right, and the paper finally sat flat and stayed there, corners pinned tight enough that even the breeze coming up off the creek couldn't lift more than an edge.

I stepped back to check it was straight — it wasn't, not quite, off by maybe five degrees in a way that would bother me if I let it — and that's when I actually looked at what I'd just hung up. Not the roll under my arm, not "another one of these," but the actual page. Don't Make This Mistake. Photos side by side, the ones that look almost the same and aren't. The line about knowing before you go.

And I'll be honest — I stood there a second longer than I meant to. Because for all the sweat and the bugs and the general indignity of being the guy who always gets the grunt work, that's a genuinely good flyer. It's not some vague "be careful out there" poster nobody reads twice. It's specific. It's the kind of thing that might actually stop somebody at that exact fork in the trail, the one I'd just walked past, before they head down toward the creek with a bag and a bad guess. Somebody's going to read this thing while deciding whether to leave the marked trail, and it might be the one piece of paper standing between them and a very bad night. Doesn't make the flies any less relentless. Doesn't make the next mile and a half go any faster. But I picked the staple gun back up, wiped the sweat out of my eyes, and kept walking — still grumbling the whole way, just slightly less sure I had the right to.

If you want to see the flyer that ranger put up, here it is.