On Oct. 12 I found myself aboard a yellow school bus with about 30 graduate students of the Faculty of Forestry. We left the downtown campus of the University of Toronto at about 9:30 a.m. We headed east, on our way to the Rouge Park. The day broke cold and rainy, so most students wore windbreakers and hiking boots.
I sat next to a young woman whom I will call Patricia. The Masters of Forest Conservation candidates got quite close in September, when we spent a week in the Haliburton Forest north of Toronto. There, we went into the woods several mornings at 6 a.m. to measure course woody debris (CWD) and to inspect little tin traps baited with peanut butter and apple slices, and see whether, during the night, we had captured any small mammals, such as American deer mice or southern red-backed voles.
Another young masters student, whom I’ll call Christine, sat in the seat ahead of me and leaned back to talk to us. I pulled out flash cards I made, which on one side show a photo of a tree leaf, and on the other side the Latin and common names. For example, red mulberry is Morus rubra; honey locust is Gleditsia triacanthos. There are 55 cards in all. In the third week of October we will write a test where a prof will lead us to different trees on campus — 25 of the 55 on our list — and we will have to identify them, and correctly spell their Latin and common names.
The two young women knew their Latin names better than I did. After awhile we took a breather, as the bus roared up the Don Valley Parkway.
‘I originallly registered to attempt the masters part-time, and keep my job at the National Post,” I told them. ‘Then an opportunity came up for me to take a buyout from the newspaper and come back to school full time. That means I am on salary until next fall.”
Patricia sat there in the yellow school bus, with her knee, in her fashionably torn jeans, propped up on the grey padded seat back in front of her, and let that sink in a bit.
‘So you’re getting paid to go to school,” she summarized. ‘You’re living the dream.”
By contrast, she noted, ‘I am going further into debt every week that I am at this school.’
So there you have it. I am living the dream.