August 29th, 2012

When I was a year old, my parents bought a chunk of land in the Pembina Valley which is now the setting for a pile of idyllic childhood memories, and I think I was 7 or 8 when my dad gave me my first book on environmental conservation. That’s why, when I heard of the opening for a summer intern at the A Rocha Pembina Valley Field Station, I didn’t really have much choice but to apply.

When I showed up for work on my first day, I was very quickly introduced to the ironic nature of much of the duties that lay under my responsibility. At A Rocha, a conservation organization, my responsibilities consisted of deliberately killing any plant I deemed to be distasteful. The carcasses of thousands of weeds have piled up before me over the summer as I mercilessly yanked, dug, and hacked them up. Many of the weeds I evicted were growing in the vegetable and flower gardens at the Pembina Valley Field Station, and this is what I started with on the first day of my internship.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the gardens since then, and I have gone from knowing literally nothing at all about gardening, to knowing enough that I feel pretty sure I could start my own garden next year–and have at least half of my plants survive. But despite this accumulation of useful gardening knowledge, the most important thing I learned while plunked down in the soil was that I actually like gardening. The whole idea of gardening is something that I have come to appreciate as incredibly resourceful and I’ve been surprised to discover in myself a spark of unbridled enthusiasm for the art that is producing and using your own plants, and a laughable level of incredulity at the fact that it actually works.

This new appreciation of gardening was a fairly broad highlight of the summer, recalled less by isolated incidents and more by this general picture of sitting in the dirt and sun. The specific moments that stand out from the summer actually have nothing to do with gardening. I think my favourite moment occurred while hiking the trails in the Pembina Valley Provincial Park looking for leafy spurge. I suddenly came out of the trees at the bottom of the valley into an expansive meadow and could see up and down the other side of the valley, and there was no one in sight anywhere. Having spent the first part of the summer living in very close quarters with strangers in a busy and crowded area just outside of Paris, it was a long-awaited release.

It was exactly this solitude and quiet that I found both when hiking trails and working in the garden that was the most useful part of the job to me. Or, to be more accurate, the solitude and quiet I had while performing a task gave me some room to think and reflect. I haven’t had a summer completely without school since I was 12, thanks to the availability of correspondence courses and my own nagging drive.

Before the summer began I had to choose between working for the summer and taking four months of biochemistry. It was an easy choice because I thought I might rather drive a screwdriver through my retina than study for another four months, and it turned out to be the right choice. Working with A Rocha this summer has been like pressing a reset button. What I needed was time to let my mind wander and also to process some of the heavier issues I deal with as a nursing student, that I don’t have enough time to evaluate while I’m in school. And pulling weeds for a whole day certainly gives me plenty of headspace.

At the end of the summer, I have now reconnected with my true identity of “giant nerdball”. I find myself actively looking forward to getting back to school and when something even slightly interesting and science-related is mentioned, I whip out my unabashed, geeky overenthusiasm and fascination. The motivation that went missing when I got burned-out from studying has now been handed back to me and life is a lot easier and more enjoyable when I’m not pushing against a tired apathy.

Taking the summer “off” has been rewarding and beneficial to my mental health.

Samara Bugden

Summer Intern, A Rocha Prairie Canada, Pembina Valley Field Station

If you would like to intern at A Rocha Canada, please visit https://arocha.ca/internships/ for more information. To volunteer on a one-time or recurring basis, please e-mail <manitoba@arocha.ca>.