Huron River Cleanup

I often think our ward should do more service projects. I know that planning service projects is hard work. It's hard to get a good turnout, and hard to find something that will feel meaningful and worthwhile to those who do come, and even though I say I would like more service projects, I don't necessarily wake up when we actually have one and think: Yes! I'm going to go spend my Saturday working! So I understand why service projects are relatively few and far between compared to, say, photo scavenger hunts. I just think more service would be nice.

And we actually have had some great service activities since I've been here. Some of my favorites are the ones that involve being outdoors, because there are times of the year when Michigan is a great place to be outdoors. I've been leaf-raking in the fall and invasive-weed-picking in the summer, and this weekend our ward got us out in the spring, to clean up the Huron River.

This sounded like a fun activity at first. We would be joining other Ann Arbor volunteers to canoe up and down the river, clearing trash from the banks of the Huron. It's been a gorgeous spring. The nice days have been so nice that I have been abnormally tolerant of the fits and starts that characterize this time of year. Thursday was one of those nice days - sunny with some clouds, trees bursting with blossoms, and temperatures climbing to the low 80s by mid-afternoon. Then on Friday the wind picked up and the temperatures began dropping, and by the time the Saturday morning of the service project rolled around it was a chilly 37 degrees, plus some windchill. Not a day for canoeing and pulling trash from a cold river.

I still showed up. I'd said I would, and I wasn't going to back out of my commitment. I just no longer expected it to be fun. In fact, I was not-so-secretly dreading it. By the time I climbed into the canoe with my canoeing partner Celeste, I was already shivering in my extra-warm socks, long johns, fleece, and coat. And worse still, my gloved fingers, which I had kept jammed in my pockets as much as possible while we waited, felt like they were going to fall off. They were sheet-white and bordering the kind of painful that comes after numb, having long passed the kind of painful that comes before.

I hate being cold almost more than I hate anything else in the world. Nobody likes being cold, but only people who hate being cold the way I do (and I know a few of them) can truly understand that "cold" is not just a feeling of discomfort, and not even just a feeling of extreme discomfort, but an emotion - hopeless and dark and miserable. If you think I am being melodramatic, you are not one of those people who understands.

So I was really, really proud of myself for making it down to the park this morning, and even more, I was proud of myself of actually getting in the canoe and committing to 2-3 hours of what I honestly expected to be absolute misery.

The lesson I learn over and over and over again is that doing something good, purposeful, worthwhile that is not fun, a) is almost always not nearly as bad as you think it will be, and b) almost always leaves you feeling really good in the end. This is a lesson that seems to apply to everything, from writing a dissertation (I'm still can't quite believe how suddenly I found myself with a full draft in my hands), to running a marathon. Don't get me wrong - I wouldn't classify writing a dissertation or running a marathon as fun. But in both cases the process itself turned out to be less painful than the anticipation, and even included some unexpected moments when it was almost fun. (Also note that I haven't yet finished my dissertation for good - I still have time to change my mind about the process being less painful than the anticipation.)

And I'm actually really glad I went to the service project. It actually was kind of fun. It was cold, but it got slightly less so over time, and my fingers never fell off as I had initially feared. We picked up a lot of trash and a few questionable treasures (an unflyable kite, a cracked frisbee, half an Easter egg, several wiffle balls, and a heavy can labeled "night crawlers" that I couldn't bring myself to open). And by the time I got home at almost 2 pm, I realized I'd accomplished way more before lunch than I would have had I been running on my own Saturday morning momentum.

I brought my camera in the hopes of getting some nice river shots, but my hands were entirely incapable of pushing a button for most of the trip. I did manage a few. The first is a shot of my lovely Huron River Cleanup partner Celeste. The second is of a swan, because swans are about the only wildlife we encountered (excluding the dead cat we found floating in the river, which we did not retrieve). And the last is a distant shot of fellow canoeists (which spell check is telling me is a more appropriate term than "canoers") Martha and Mike demonstrating how much of our canoeing time was spent navigating the brush along the banks. On this particular canoeing trip it was on purpose.