Category Archives: Paid in sunsets

My mostly wonderful career as a park ranger

A warm fuzzy

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Once a year I drive to an elementary school in the Quad Cities for a National Park Fair put on by third-graders. Each child researches a different national park and makes a display about it. They set up their displays in the gym and kids from other classes visit. When a display has a visitor, the display’s creator reads a short report of interesting facts about that park. They also hand out “souvenirs” like stickers or bookmarks decorated with the park’s name and a picture.

Third graders admire displays about national parks in a school gym.

Third graders admire each other's national park displays in the school gym.

While I’m there, I give a short talk about being a park ranger and then the kids ask me questions. Among the questions I always get is, “How much money do you make?”

The visit is usually the highlight of my work year and, lest I forget amid the routine and the bureaucracy, a good reminder of why I have that job.

I am just not reaching that kid

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Toward the end of a tour this week, a fourth grader asked me why our maintenance workers were getting ready to paint Herbert Hoover’s birthplace.

“Because we have to take care of it,” I said. “That’s our job.”

“I would just let it fall apart and burn down,” she said.

My co-worker pointed out the kid is a future voter. Yikes.

Independent for president

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A lady who visited the park today mentioned that it seemed like a good place to stop. She wore business dress and was alone—a sign of an incidental visitor, someone who is in town for other purposes. “Are you traveling?” I asked her.

“I am an independent running for president,” she said as she left.

That’s not something I expected her to hear, for a couple of reasons. One is that presidential candidates avoid anything related to Herbert Hoover as if its radioactive (though the occasional fringe candidate comes during the Iowa caucuses). The other that she didn’t even say who she was, which would be helpful when unknown and seeking votes. To her credit, election campaigning is not allowed in national parks and perhaps she was following that rule strictly. If so, this may a good example of how integrity doesn’t help to win elections.

Things I know from flies

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I’ve finally given up on winter. Spring is here. It’s warm this week, with highs in the upper 70s at least through the weekend. I know the warmth is here to stay because I saw three pairs of flies copulating on the windows at work. I figure insect copulation in March is a sure sign of warm-weather optimism.

Interesting note on fly mating: they don’t move. The just sit on the window “in congress” and don’t move. They were on the outside of the window so I could walk up an watch without disturbing them. What a pervert.

But not a day under 61

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I’ve come to expect at least a little bit of false modesty from people. A lady came in to buy a senior pass. “You have to be 62 years old,” I told her.  “I’ll have to see your drivers license. The pass is ten dollars.” That’s all automatic; we say it to everybody because we need the identification to sell the pass. Most of the folks laugh about it, some because they are way older than 62.

“I know I don’t look like I’m 62 but I am,” she said. “From all the years of hiking.”

Which was funny because she looked about 62 to me. Maybe 61.

Second-graders

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Second graders visited the park today. They were a little younger than the kids we usually take on tours so I had to make some adjustments. While I was lining up my class to go into one of the buildings the little girl in the front leaned forward and hugged me. It caught me off-guard. Too bad there aren’t hugs on all my tours.

Cicadas and carpenter ants

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I work in a small park and we don’t often see big animals, but we see insects when we’re observant. This summer has been good for grasshoppers and damselflies, and the season of daddy long-legs and monarch butterflies is just getting underway. Today, though, it was all about the cicadas and the carpenter ants.

I encountered a bunch of Girl Scouts who were fascinated by something on the ground. Turns out it was a cicada emerging from a hole in the lawn. They had an earnest debate about whether it was just hatching (“they lay their eggs in the ground”) or if it had somehow been grounded by an injury (“it’s too big to be a newborn”). Ever the useful naturalist, I weighed in on the side of “just hatching” since I know cicadas live underground for a while before emerging as adults.

Later our blacksmith pointed out a little pile of sawdust accumulating in the corner of our blacksmith shop, and where they were coming from. Every half a minute or so, a black ant appeared on one of the ceiling beams and dumped a little fragment of excavated wood over the edge. There was something very anthropomorphic and workmanlike about these ants that made me laugh. Of course we’ll have to poison them; eating historic buildings is a no-no.

Annual fire training

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Safety refresher training is an annual ritual for wildland firefighters. I attended the class in the Conservation Education Center, a nice facility park at F.W. Kent Park between Tiffin and Oxford. As usual, I took a short walk in the snow during our lunch break. There were some animal tracks but mostly people tracks.

People tracks lead to a hole in an ice covered pond.

Ice fishing hole

A bird house on a post overlooks a snow-covered frozen pond.

Wood duck box

The class itself usually involves watching safety videos and discussions of last year’s accidents. This year we had a new fire shelter video. I was getting sick of the last one. The fire shelters are our portable refuges of last resort. Anyway, the video demonstrated how the new models hold up to direct flame contact better than the older ones by pitching them (uninhabited, of course) among a small brush fire. At the end of the class, we practiced deploying the shelters. Practice involves shaking out the shelters and covering yourself with it while laying on the ground like a giant baked potato wrapped in foil.

Meadow vole

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Walking along one of the roads at work, I nearly stepped on a small rodent: a meadow vole.

I’ve seen meadow voles before in pellet form, that is, after owls were done digesting them. This one ignored me as it foraged inches from my feet. Insulted that I did not inspire fear in this insignificant beast, I stamped my feet couple of times but it did not scurry away. When I mentioned this to our biologist, she said that voles spend most of their time burrowed under something, and so aren’t as skittish as mice or other similarly small critters when out in the open.