As a teen, Colman Lee strolled around Greenfield neighborhoods while playing a flute. For speedier journeys, he traveled by skateboard. Lee sometimes even played the flute while riding his skateboard, rendering him a visual blur and auditory delight. After high school, he worked as a ski lift operator (a “liftie”) and did cross-country hitchhiking. Lee’s affinity for creativity and natural beauty may help explain why he’s now studying geology and hopes to concentrate on the health of waterways.
Lee, 32, settled in Las Vegas, New Mexico, eight years ago to work with Conservation Corps New Mexico (CCNM), an Americorps program through Conservation Legacy. “The Las Vegas I lived in wasn’t the famous one,” he said. “It’s right across the border from Mexico and has some cool history. As part of the wild west, it was a major town. Fun fact: Billy the Kid was held in a jail cell there.” Lee spoke highly of CCNM: “We got to be outside and explore the country. I did trail work, maintenance, and occasionally invasive plant control.” He was tasked with mapping the density of invasive plants, but there was a catch: “It had just snowed, and most of the plants were dead, so it wasn’t easy.”
When asked whether he was willing to do disaster relief for Americorps, Lee said yes. In 2018, he was deployed to North Carolina following a wintertime hurricane that led to major flooding. “We did muck gutting, which involved dealing with houses that had been submerged. We stripped drywall down to the skeleton and threw all that stuff away.” Workers sprayed bleach and scraped each side of every beam with a stiff wire brush. “Due to mold contamination, we wore full hazmat suits with gas masks. At the end of each day, we sanitized our suits and showered carefully.” He added, “Lucky for us, it was cool and rainy. I heard about people in Texas doing 10-hour days during summertime heat in that gear. That sounds horrible.”
Lee gained new skills, but the program folded due to a government shutdown. “I went up to Taos,” he said, “to a ski place to ask if they were hiring. I had worked as a Berkshire East liftie in my early 20s.” Lee got a job and found a place to stay, “actually just a spot in a broken down school bus. It had bullet holes in the windows, and it was freezing, but it’s what I could afford.” Lee stayed in Taos for a few years, rotating between winter liftie work and CCNM summer work.
During the pandemic, Colman Lee came home to western Mass to do farm work, landscaping, and other types of labor. Ultimately, he headed back to New Mexico to work in a greenhouse growing tomatoes and “started to feel like going back to school.” He enrolled in community college entrepreneurial courses but gravitated to geology. “I discovered a natural resources management program that, in addition to schoolwork, offered help in setting up resumes and provided guidance into agency positions,” said Lee. “New Mexico has a lot of those kinds of jobs.” After community college, Lee enrolled in New Mexico Highlands University. Now in his senior year, he hopes to do restoration work or environmental engineering with a focus on water. “We need to rehabilitate watersheds and wetlands,” he said. “More infrastructure is needed, as well as methods of water conservation, like collecting storm water more efficiently so it doesn’t wash back into rivers, but instead infiltrates into aquifers.”
Earlier this year, Lee traveled to the Czech Republic under the auspices of IRES (International Research Experiences for Students). “We collected data in the form of block samples from volcanoes, quarries, and mountain outcrops,” he said. When asked if proximity to volcanoes was dangerous, Lee said, “Not at all! They’re 300 million-year-old volcanoes that’ve been inactive for a long time.” He explained that “block sampling is used when we can’t bring a core sample drill or modified chainsaw into protected areas. Instead, we collect a block big enough so that we can eventually get a bunch of cores. But not so big that we can’t carry it out … about the size of a toaster.”
In addition to procuring blocks of natural materials, “we also had to orient them, because we were collecting for paleomagnetism,” said Lee. “Magnetic minerals in igneous rocks are oriented in a certain way, and it’s important to keep track.” The Czech project involved typical field work: “We used a Brunton compass and a rock hammer. We had to break (the blocks) out in situ, making sure they were from original outcrops; data from glacial erratics would be useless.” Quiet volcanoes aside, the work did involve risk, since “rock faces are dangerous in active quarries,” explained Lee. “Only one person could go in at a time. The collector had to work quickly while wearing a hardhat, and then get away from the (rock) wall right away. Next, we had to label samples very carefully and mail them to the U.S.” Another invaluable tool was a waterproof notebook for recording data in wet conditions.
Hard work aside, one of Lee’s favorite moments in the Czech Republic occurred in a shopping mall, of all places: “This mall had a sauna with six different rooms offering varying temperatures and humidity, a cold plunge, a restaurant, and a bar. That was really fun!” Lee is an avid snowboarder and still loves skateboarding and playing music; he also hikes and shares life with a sweet dog. When asked about his dream career, Lee said an important element would be to have time and space to grow a garden: “Farming has always been one of my goals, too.”
In the meantime, Lee looks forward to taking a stratigraphy class “to learn about depositional environments and stratigraphic layers. I’d like to be able to identify different formations.” Depositional environments are areas where sediments accumulate, as in a riverbed, lake bottom, or ocean floor. Lee whipped out his wallet and said, “I always carry a geologic time scale card. I also have this info on a big poster, so it’s easier to read.” That’s just one of the many ways Colman Lee pays close attention and takes delight in his surroundings.
Eveline MacDougall is the author of “Fiery Hope.” To contact her: eveline@amandlachorus.org.