There are a couple “interesting facts” about working in Jawbone that are taken like a slice of homemade bread. Rather, these “interesting facts” should be taken as a forewarning, like a jawbone on a front door, where it makes you pause, wondering if this is the right house, knowing that it obviously is. In Jawbone, there’s the LA Aqueduct , which is the closest thing to sliced bread here. Then there’s the wind, which made upside down cake out of our white wall tent during the first day of restoration work. Sandbags and stakes be damned, this is Jawbone, where the wind can take a sunny day and transform it into the winter dredges. There's nothing quite like having fifty mph wind exfoliating your face. And then there was the night a helicopter circled our camp three times. I can see, with us out in the middle of the desert living out of a big white tent and a cluster of army tents, why someone wants to check us out, but in the moment it was an alarming and alert, "WTF" that crossed my mind. The nighttime entertainment continued on our last night when Eric called our attention upwards. Marko let out a surprised comment before I also saw the odd formations of light crossing the twinkling night. I immediately thought of Star Trek First Contact, and finally thought that I would have conclusion to my long held reservations about Leonard Nimoy. Yes, the naval weapons base is not too far away, and while they are the logical explanation, it’s also fun to think we spotted aliens.
And yes, surrounding all of this was pretty restoration work. While our days are consumed with our purpose in Jawbone, it is not what has defined them. We've come to know from our first time in Jawbone during First 5 that the ordinary is the extraordinary. So be forewarned when coming out to Jawbone, it’s bound to be more than what you expected.
