NCC
For me, NCC stands for Nevada Conservation Corps, an arm of the Great Basin Institute. From October 2007 to May 2008, I was on one of three restoration crews in Southern Nevada, based out the good old Sin City (Las Vegas). Though the field office is in the city, on the Eastern side near Boulder Station, most of our tours were outside the city and some in wilderness areas. Tours were either four or eight days in duration, and our weekends were either three or six days depending on which tour length we had completed. Two of the restoration crews began in October and had 6-month contracts; the third was actually a year-long Reno crew that the admins sent down to the south for the winter.
My posts in the category NCC, with the exception of any within that category after 2 May 2008, were written after we got back from the tours. Sometimes, I created more than one post, if I had written excessively in my journal for those days in the field. Other times I just noted specific days via subtitles within a single post.
What’s it like living and working out of a tent, or just a sleeping bag, for four or eight days in a row? Dirty, dirty, dirty! Starting in late October, we caught the end of Daylight Savings Time, and our days hit dusk around 5 pm. Temperatures plummet in the desert when the sun hides, whether because of the rotation of the earth, or because of a random and rare cloud. For so many months we cooked, ate, and washed dishes in the dark. Many nights were windy, too windy for a campfire. Many nights I read in the truck, usually with the other crew members who adopted truck #40 with me, sometimes alone. Other nights I just went straight to my tent after dinner. Pitch black outside when the moon was new; unbelievably light when the moon was full. But bedtime for me, unless there was a campfire, was usually between 7 and 9 o’clock.
On weekends, it did not seem as if my body was used to going to bed at 8 pm and getting up at 5:30 am. Maybe it was the separation of outside and inside, because now that I’m home, it is very difficult to change my sleeping schedule.
When Daylight Savings Time came ’round again, and suddenly we were cooking, eating, cleaning, and sitting around in the light, and my body still felt that 7pm was a good nighttime, it was a very odd feeling going back to my tent, or sleeping bag on the tours where I didn’t bring my tent, to go to sleep before dusk had even started to fall.