I always thought that being a park ranger would be cool. I even looked into it when I was in high school. Well in 1999 I was attending an adult day program for 4 days a week. One day a counselor came up to me and said, “Hey, I saw this ad in the newspaper and this company is looking to hire someone for a park ranger job, why don’t you apply”.
I told her I had no experience and that I didn’t think that I could handle being a park ranger anyway.
But she talked me into applying and I got hired.
Now up until that time I thought that being park ranger would be peacefully living in big parks in a cabin and strolling through beautiful forests helping campers, and scanning the forests with my binoculars to see the first sign of smoke to detect a forest fire, and having lots of solitude and having lots of time to think.
This job was nothing like that. I was disolusioned about being a park ranger the first week I was there. A large part of my time was spent on emptying garbage cans, picking up trash and cleaning restrooms. When I wasn’t doing things like those I would spend a lot of time just sitting for hours in my truck doing nothing. It also meant sometimes sitting in a small cramped office in the middle of a park with people walking by you and looking at me and making me feel like I was some curiosity on display.
And then having to walk around the whole park in the hot sun making sure that no one brought in booze or too many plastic chairs or tables. Don’t get me wrong, occasionally it was pretty neat when I got in open territory and got to cruise around in my truck in uniform with the radio playing and spotting wildlife like coyotes and herons and wild geese. But most of the things I had to do were a huge pain in the ass.
I lasted two years there. I do what I always do to make it through. I grin and bare it. I endure and plod along though it with one foot in front of the other.