The Volunteers
The volunteers meet at the cafe in Carnation on the first Saturday of every month, eight in the morning, for what they call the river breakfast and what is, in fact, a standing meeting of an informal citizen-science network that has, over fifteen years, become the most reliable distributed sensor array I have access to in this watershed. There are nine regular members. There are, depending on the month, another six to ten semi-regulars. The membership is stable the way such groups are stable, which is to say the core is stable and the periphery is a slow tide. People move. People age out. People come back.
They are, for the most part, retired. A former high-school biology teacher whose name will become important in this chapter. A retired Boeing engineer with a field notebook more meticulous than most of my students'. A semi-retired family doctor who walks her reach with a Bernese mountain dog who has, over the years, become a kind of informal co-observer. A retired postal worker who has lived on a small parcel bordering the middle river since 1989 and who has, without being asked, kept a weather log since the year he moved in. A retired librarian. Two semi-retired software engineers who moved out from the city seven years ago and got, as they tell it, religion about the river within six months. A woodworker in his forties who is not retired but has rearranged his working life