Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Farewell 2008

These are personal musings, ill-fit for a place of business email, or for that matter, polite society. These are things for a more personal nature and therefore uncomfortably nebulous to all involved. I’ve chosen to put them here, thereby giving people the opportunity to read them instead of shoving them down anyone’s throat and scaring the hell/bejeezus out of someone who doesn’t know me well enough to predict such ramblings. So take as much or as little as you want, and enjoy the ride.

My friends


For reasons that mystify even me, I’ve lived much of my life here as if I were poised to leave at any moment: don’t get too comfortable, don’t put down roots, always stand ready to run. This was partly a side-effect of my years in the itinerant seasonal lifestyle, but also in some measure due to my own personal demons. During my tenure here, I’ve sometimes kept distance between myself and the people who would care about me.

Maybe I did it to make this day less painful, or maybe I did it because, sadly, that is an inescapable part of who I am. When I get fed up, and I grumble about disappearing into the austere, scrubby West Texas desertscape (a territory the size of New England with only 30,000 people), or spending my days in a corrugated metal shack in an Inuit fishing village (ala Dr Joel Fleischman), wise friends like Carrie Guiles warn me that, if I’m not careful, I might actually do it.

Despite all that, I’ll be damned if I don’t leave some stalwart and unforgettable friends behind. To name any of them would only serve to draw emphasis away from those whom I would undoubtedly forget to mention, but it’s no secret how heavily I have personally leaned on the knowledge, compassion and generousness of MacNeil and Lucy, and Bob and Terri. I fear that I was an often a noticeable burden over these past few years, but I know they would never admit it.

My %$&ing health


The world seems to be moving very fast, and I seem to be falling further and further behind. Humanity went from horse-drawn buggies to landing on the surface of the moon in less than a century and the Caspian tiger was described to western science and became extinct over a span of 60 years. And in the month of August, 2004, I went from being able to live out of the back of my truck to joining the ranks of the millions of Americans who will never be able to afford their own healthcare.

That, of course, is because have MS. I don’t necessarily look or sound sick, but I am. I’m lucky right now – damn lucky – and that luck could hold. But it may have to hold for the rest of my life; barring an affordable medical breakthrough I will be sick forever. There is no cancer to fight, no infection to battle, no bones to mend or transplants to await. I just have to learn to live with a vague prognosis which my doctors toss around: a progressively degenerative condition. You will never be better than you are right now, they imply with a practiced clinical lack of emotion, and you will get worse. Those are my bad days.

On my good days, my fumbling GIS experience gives me some hope that I could still contribute to wildlife conservation from the confines of a wheelchair. Then, I reason, all the chicks will want me for my mind. Having said that, though, I have a copy of National Geographic to which I frequently refer in my mind. It was an article about stem cell research, and one of the photos was a guy standing next to his wheelchair. He had been rendered unable to walk by MS, but a treatment utilizing his own (adult, marrow-derived) stem cells changed that. Now if it were that easy, we’d all be healthy already, but I can’t call it anything other than progress. Every day, there are discoveries being made that could change my life a few years down the line. A new US administration can’t hurt either.

So while I will likely never fly through the air as I did during my black belt years (one of the best jumpkickers in the state of Texas, dammit), I’m cautiously optimistic about the future in my better moments. I try to think about how well I’m doing right now, and not worry about later. Right now, I climb mountains, I hike trails, I eat crappy American food, I run off to the Canadian arctic and the tropics. I can walk, I can talk, I’m strong (for a skinny guy). There are people who right now can’t get out of bed or see or play golf or ride a horse or play with their children. In sum, then, right now I have nothing to complain about.

How a little epiphany can go a long way


I leave the GMGM (some of you recognize my little acronym for the Greater Mammoth-Gardiner Metroplex) with a clear memory of the day I received a ‘welcome packet’ from the NPS; it was about 4 years ago when I started a term position following years of seasonal and temp appointments. It was full of notepads with the arrowhead, and pencils, and a letter which welcomed me ‘to the NPS family’. That’s funny, I thought. If I so recently became a member of the family, what the fuck have I been for the past decade? Maybe that’s one of those things people learn at Fundamentals. Yeah, the observant readers will detect a little bitchin’ in there, but in seriousness I bear the NPS no ill will, as I’ve come to believe it’s not personal. I don’t even rule out working for the park or NPS again someday.

But honestly, even given the bureaucratic angst which is news to no one ‘round these parts, it was a hard decision to leave because aside from the NPS there was the park. It felt downright ungrateful: how dare I choose to leave Wonderland, a place which draws admiring people from all over the globe? After all, was it not trapper Del Gue who said, in the iconic tale of Jeremiah Johnson:

“I told my ma and pa that the Rocky Mountains is the marrow of the world.”


Indeed. I long ago learned never to underestimate the profound effect this area can have on people: I’ve met the terminally bored, the terminally ill, the sad, the neglected, the abused, and even a few addicts who came to this 2.2 million-acre corner of the world to start their lives over. Some of those people succeeded and some didn’t, but each of them saw the quiet, lofty peaks of the GYE as beacons of hope, escape, or salvation. More than once, my family proudly proclaimed that in Yellowstone I’d ‘found my place in the world’. And so I found myself often asking how I could walk away from such a beautiful place. Answers came from many sources, including the pragmatic advice of a more contemporary mountain man, Jeremiah Smith, who said (and I paraphrase), “Dude, there are other beautiful places.”

More perspective came during one fateful Death March. Surveying for dead stuff along a transect, we found a spot where a griz had recently been busy scavenging a spring meal from a nearby carcass. I sat down in that bear’s daybed as it overlooked the Yellowstone River and Hellroaring Creek far below and the Blacktail Plateau in the distance. It may not sound incredible, but that was a remarkably intimate and powerful experience for me. My eyes roamed the same slice of the expansive landscape that a robust and formidable predator had seen earlier that morning. The same patch of blue sky soared over both of our heads. The little bubbling rivulet nearby continued to make the same sounds that he had heard. The soil underneath me was the same ground on which the great bear had rested only hours before. For a few moments, with the clarity of uncharacteristically uncluttered emotion, everything – the land, the sky, my life – looked different.

The profound realization that came to me was not about bears, however; it was about people. I wondered how many of those living here had taken the opportunity to sit in a grizzly’s daybed and think about life. Not many, I suspected. People instead had fallen into the routine of work and day-to-day living. The landscape around them had ceased to become the context of their lives – it existed only on the edge of their consciousness, a background to the trials and tribulations of life. They had come to take the park for granted. And, I realized with painful immediacy, I was one of those people. At some point, I ceased to live here and began simply working here. I’ve lost my way and I need time to find the trail again. There are things that I need to accomplish that simply aren’t possible in the GMGM. So while it’s difficult to leave, it’s not as hard as it would have been a few scant years ago.

Folks have urged me to reconsider, to change my plans to leave. As much as I fear life in the stark, brightly-lit world that exists outside the boundaries of the parks, forests, and wildlife refuges in which I’ve spent much of my life (and where people pay attention to fashion and carry iPhones), I can’t. I hope that folks can understand why now.


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