This is the second story of our winter break story series! I was racking my brain trying to think of a story that didn’t involve the ranch, and this is the one I landed on.

Side note: I am currently writing this at the airport while I am waiting for my flight back to Maine, and I really have to go to the bathroom. I hate taking all my carry-on luggage in with me, so I’ll probably just hold it for the next 4 hours. 

Anyway! This is the story of how I got the cops called on me…

The summer of 2016, before I started college, I worked for the Rockland County Conservation and Service Corps. Although a mouthful to say, it was an AWESOME place to work. New York readers, this is an awesome opportunity for college-age students interested in environmental science or other similar fields. I am SO lucky that there was something like this is my hometown to give me practical field experience before I went away. I was one of the youngest on the corps, as many were in their later college years and I had just turned 18. But then again, I tend to be the youngest wherever I go.

Building new trail on the AT’s little brother, the Adirondack Traill, that runs from Albany to NYC!

This was the corps after cleaning up a lake with literal tons of trash pollution in a hasidic community. Fun fact, this was me a couple hours before the night of my senior prom!

Farming…

We had a week of intense training up at a Cornell University site, then the corps of about 30 people got split up to different agencies in the county to work for the summer and steward the environment in unique ways. Some got placed at the recycling plant, others to farms, another group were the water quality peeps, and two incredibly hard workers were sent to split rocks and break ground to make new trails on the AT. I was in the largest group of 6 people working on major trail restoration for the county parks, invasive species removal, and water testing. Water testing sounds fancy, but was really just us putting a net in a river and collecting the bugs that live in the water and plopping them in vials to see how healthy the river was.

So the vials were a little smaller than my fist, but I swear on my life one day while we were saining we found a millipede that would barely fit in the jar, and flailed around in the alcohol meant to kill it for 5 minutes!!! In other words, IT WAS REALLY FREAKING BIG AND CREEPY-CRAWLY!

Anyway, that is pretty much what I and my team did for the whole summer, along with many other larger projects with the whole corps. We basically got paid to hike.

The snag was most of the time we had to do either the water testing or the invasive species blocks in hard to get to areas in the county. One Tuesday, we split up to cover all the blocks for the day, and my coworker Tim and I pulled into a street adjacent to a field surrounded by woods to check for invasive species. We were smack dab in the middle of a hasidic community on a regular residential street. For those of you who don’t know what that is, they are a sect of Jewish Orthodox people (like the New York version of Amish, although not entirely the same as I know some very lovely Amish people). They speak Hebrew or Hebrew dialects as their primary language (most speak english, although the kids rarely do), live in massive multi-family houses in very close community with each other, and usually are very distrustful of anyone not hasidic.

So obviously, Tim and I are not hasidic. We parked on the street and gathered our gear to test the woods and the field. On the lawn of one of the houses, we saw a hasidic mother and her daughter. We waved hello, then went into the woods. I literally didn’t think twice about it because after all, we were just doing our job, until I heard a deep voice behind us in the middle of the woods call out, “Hey! What are you doing here?”

Tim and I whipped around and saw three police officers in full gear. I’m talking bulletproof vests, guns and tasers, the works. We stopped, and they came up to us and we tried to explain what were doing. It was not easy; they caught us off guard and made us tongue-tied as we tried to explain that we actually work for two government agencies. One of the officers looked at us and told the others that they could go. We headed out of the woods and explained our situation, and he told us that the woman called the cops when she saw a guy and a girl head into a remote part of the woods that she thought was private property.

Duh…

In retrospect, we probably should have gone up to her and introduced what we were doing, but we thought our clipboards made us look official enough. The cop kind of gave a chuckle at the end of it as he took our names and the number of our boss and let us go. Tim and I looked at each other and gave a nervous laugh. We finished quickly, and I went home after a very stressful day at work.

Looking back, it makes me sad that most hasidic people are a) so distrusting of outsiders and b) do not know how to take care of the environment. And I’m not saying they don’t just recycle. The day we did a cleanup at a lake in their community (the picture of us in the truck), we removed hundreds of garbage bags full of trash from the shore of a lake there. We even got on a boat and went out in the middle and collected more trash. That was a full days work and we barely made a dent.

So the moral of this story, I guess, is pick up your trash and always introduce yourself.

~J

P.S. Garlic Mustard and Wineberries are common invasive species in New York, and I’m sure in many other places, that are both completely edible. Not only will you help the local ecosystems by picking them for consumption, but they are both delicious. They were trail-side snacks we would eat as we did our trail maintenance. Nothing raised the group moral more than stumbling across a Wineberry bush. Garlic Mustard is delicious in pastas. If you ever come across them, try it out! As always, practice safe plant identification techniques before consuming anything wild! 🙂