Final Hitch Report
Greetings from Music City, USA! After a long, humid summer the survey season has come to an end and here in Nashville our final two weeks have been very interesting. Surveying has been pretty slow and the weather has been extremely hot, luckily we have had some exhilarating conservation projects to take our mind off of the surveying. In honor of Bianca’s early departure we organized a trash clean-up/barbeque/cliff-jumping party. The park we cleaned up is known as Elm Hill Recreation area and is located on J. Percy Priest Lake, it is quite beautiful when not littered with cardboard, Styrofoam, unwanted shoes, empty cigarette packs and beer cans. Luckily for the Elm Hill Recreation Area the Nashville crew stepped in to do the dirty work and after only a few hours we managed to fill 15 bags with trash (as a side-note the strangest things I picked up were a full Heinz Ketchup bottle and 1 cowboy boot). After we had finished with the clean-up we grilled some hamburgers and enjoyed our last time as a complete team. Bianca left us in the wee hours of August 24th and has since returned to North Dakota State where she studies zoology.
Have you ever seen Johnny Cash’s burnt down house? Probably not, but the Nashville Crew has. On our final conservation day we worked with two Army Corps rangers to construct fish attractors. These are made by taking two or three dried out Christmas trees and a plastic bucket filled with concrete and stringing them together with thick wire, we then dragged these monstrosities onto a beat-down pontoon, rode out to the right depth and finally dropped the trees into the lake. After we had placed all attractors into the waters of Old Hickory Lake our good ol’ friends took us on a little ride around Old Hickory and showed us the ruins of the one and only Johnny Cash’s beloved lakefront house. I guess ol’ Johnny spoke from personal experience when singing about that ring of fire.
Well there you have it, the final hitch report for the Nashville SCA survey team. Roy has already made his way back down South where he has started his final year of college at Baylor and Alison is heading to Illinois where she will be studying engineering. As for Darryl, Mike and myself we will be heading back to where we belong soon enough. Thanks for reading.
