at the workplace

Who knew that in a park that sees 4 million visitors a year, most of them in August, you can still find a quiet(ish) place to sit, think, relax, hike, explore, and just be quiet, without getting more than 2 miles from a paved road?

I worked for 2 summers + 3 weeks of a third summer at the North Entrance to Yellowstone, which was an absolute zoo. I loved it most days, when it became a game to see how fast I could get people in and out, while still being as helpful as possible (10 seconds was the minimum, if they had their $25 in cash ready and didn’t ask any questions; credit cards took up to 45 seconds and old people, with their questions and chit-chat and what-did-you-do-to-get-this-lovely-job? usually took over a minute. Man, I really did love all those older people in their RVs, even if they did create massive traffic jams behind them as they trundled down Highway 89 at 55 mph, dragging a hundred poor cars behind them all the way from Livingston, who then had to wait even longer as said RV took twenty-five times longer than anyone else to leave the entrance station. The reason I loved those RVs was because they were ones that really wanted to be there; people in smaller cars had driven across the country because A) they loved Yellowstone, B) they thought their children should love Yellowstone, C) they felt it was their vague duty as an American to see their National Parks, and so had driven for 3000 miles only to be stuck in line for 30 minutes just waiting to get in, or D) they thought it was a shortcut to wherever else they were going. The last two groups were the problem groups; they were the Yellers. The RV drivers, however, especially if they were older and retired, were invariably kind, and usually hilarious.

A selection of conversations with those RV-ing visitors:

ME: “What kind of pass do you have?” (I’m suspecting they have a Golden Age Passport or an Interagency Senior Pass)

VISITOR: “Just my wife!”

ME: “What? No, what kind of pass?”

VISITOR: “Oh! I thought you said ‘what kind of pets?’!”

RANGER: “What kind of pass do you have?”

VISITOR: “What kind of pants? Oh, 501s,”

Another ranger is just getting off the register. Visitor pulls up. ME: “We are switching shifts. If you pay with cash, we can get you out of here now. If you pay with credit, it’ll be a while,”

VISITOR: “Have I got West Nile?”

ME: “No, I said it will be a while!”

RANGER: “Would you like our park map and newspaper?”

VISITOR: “Could I have a USA Today?”

VISITOR (blonde, about 40 years old): “Can I pay the Senior rate if I’m driving a Senior-type car?”

VISITOR: “Wanna see my Golden Ass Pass?”

VISITOR: “Wanna see my thing?”

VISITOR: “I am not playing with myself. I am just getting my wallet out,”

All of these comments and conversations are true and documented, and happened with visitors of a Senior-type age. There are hundreds of other wonderful questions, but I’m not going to put them all in this blog. The point is that these people always made my day!).

Now, I’m working in Grand Teton National Park (GRTE), which is usually much less of a zoo than Yellowstone, and the Laurance S. Rockefeller (LSR) Preserve (my current workplace) at the southern end of GRTE is the quietest, most tranquil part of the park. On a busy day we get just over 400 visitors inside our visitor center, and on a normal day that number is around 250. Most of those people come in between 10am and noon, so chances are, if you are there in the early morning or afternoon, you’ll have the place to yourself. It’s lovely, clean, quiet, has a beautiful lake, two rushing creeks, is bursting with wildflowers, is home to several black bears and an occasional moose, and I’ve been able to enjoy it for four whole months.

Also, instead of “hi-welcome-to-yellowstone-the-entrance-fee-is-twenty-five-dollars”, I get to actually interact with visitors. My favorite ranger program that I developed is called “Nature’s Five-and-Dime.” It’s how the Native Americans used Jackson Hole and the native plants of the area, and it’s so much fun! I’m not necessarily very good at interpretation yet, because it’s just my first summer, but at least I’m having fun while learning. All of us who work at the LSR do two formal ranger hikes, an informal program on the green features of the building, and sometimes we get to sit up at Phelps Lake and do a “Lakeshore Chat,” which involves sitting by the shore of the lake and chatting with visitors. It’s lovely.

Unfortunately, we don’t get too many noteworthy questions at our peaceful little corner of GRTE. There was the one story about a car that hit five bison in one incident because they thought they could drive 35mph through a bison jam at night… but that didn’t happen at the LSR, thank goodness. (Actually, I’m not sure where it happened. I heard the story fourth-hand; the visitors involved in the accident were talking to a friend of a friend of a friend who works up in Colter Bay, which is at the north end of GRTE, but the visitors who were sharing the story thought they were still in Yellowstone. They said it happened “up north”, and that they couldn’t see the bison because a ranger was flashing his lights at them. Huh.)

Working in a national park sure is an adventure! I have one month left of my summer in the mountains, and I'm sure I'll enjoy it to the last drop.

summer on my andirons

The title requires some explanation. This story starts during January 2009, when my good friend Joy went on a winter camping, skiing, cooking, and all-around fun class, where Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac was a course reading.

Fast-forward to August 2009, when Joy and I were sitting on a train which was zooming from Stuttgart, Germany to Tønder, Denmark. Although I was lugging 30 pounds of books with me, I had finished reading every one, and Joy lent me her copy of A Sand County Almanac. She had brought it along to finally finish after all those months away from snow camping and required readings (who finishes a book when it's required, anyway?).

What a wonderful book! As Europe got flatter and flatter, Wisconsin and the Sand Counties became more and more detailed. Aldo Leopold's easy prose and careful descriptions were a perfect complement to the rocking of the train. After that, when visiting (yet another) bookstore (70 pounds in a backpack, including 30 pounds of books, just wasn't enough to last me through Denmark and Norway, apparently), I skipped the John le Carre section and headed straight for the dusty old Natural History shelves in the back, looking for another author as magical as Aldo Leopold.

Now, fast-forward to yesterday, when I was greeting cars in the parking lot ("Hello! Welcome to the Preserve...") and I got into a conversation about how the Laurance S. Rockefeller Preserve (my current place of employment) has a commitment to sustainability, and the visitors I was talking to said they really wanted to listen to the Ranger talk on Building Green. First of all, NO ONE wants to go to Building Green. We are lucky if we get 1 person every day. Secondly, these people had arrived ten minutes late already, and because our parking lot was full, as usual ("Our parking lot was built purposefully small so that the trails don't get too crowded...") they were going to miss the entire talk, so I agreed to give an impromptu Building Green while they waited in line in the lot. They wanted to know about how the Preserve consumes and saves energy, and we started talking about renewable energy sources (which provide 75%+ of the Preserve's power). That discussion led the gentleman I was talking with to mention that he wished he could have some sort of efficient energy-storing device, a battery, that would store summer's heat and release it slowly throughout the winter, so he could feel June in December.

In comes Aldo Leopold, and an excerpt from "Good Oak":

"There are two spiritual dangers that come from not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.

"To avoid the first danger, one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue.

"To avoid the second, he should lay a split of good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no furnace, and let it warm his shins while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside. If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own good oak, and let his mind work the while, he will remember much about where the heat comes from...

"This particular oak now aglow on my andirons grew on the bank of the old emigrant road where it climbs the sandhill. The stump, which I measured upon felling the tree, has a diameter of 30 inches. It shows 80 growth rings, hence the seedling from which it originated must have laid its first ring of wood in 1865, at the end of the Civil War. But I know from the history of present seedlings that no oak grows above the reach of rabbits without a decade or more of getting girdled each winter, and re-sprouting during the following summer. Indeed, it is all too clear that every surviving oak is the product of either rabbit negligence or of rabbit scarcity...

"It is likely, then, that a low in rabbits occurred in the middle 'sixties, when my oak began to lay on annual rings, but that the acorn that produced it fell during the preceding decade, when the covered wagons were still passing over my road into the Great Northwest. It may have been the wash and war of the emigrant traffic that bared this roadbank, and thus enabled this particular acorn to spread its first leaves to the sun. Only one acorn in a thousand ever grew large enough to fight rabbits; the rest were drowned at birth in the prairie sea.

"It is a warming thought that this one wasn't, and thus lived to garner eighty years of June sun. It is this sunlight that is now being released, through the intervention of my axe and saw, to warm my shack and my spirit through eighty gusts of blizzard. And with each gust a wisp of smoke from my chimney bears witness, to whomsoever it may concern, that the sun did not shine in vain" (A Sand County Almanac, Good Oak, 6-7).

This blog is going to be my good oak, my renewable memory-storer of summer's sun and summer's work, as I have another twelve months of summer adventures: four months in the mountains and eight months in Majorca. I'll be warming my shins by the andirons!