The Forest Service
I got to talking with a ranger this morning at the Grand Sable Lake overlook, which has the best cellphone signal around. I needed to check on some work stuff, but I ended up chatting with the ranger, who shall remain nameless, for some time.
He came over to ask about the Volvo, we talked some about Volvos and cars that run forever. He was a fan of Toyota vans from the late 1980s, the kind that I always thought looked like an oversized jelly bean. He was a westerner, looked a bit like Edward Abbey, long hair, long beard, long time in the sun.
He was originally a back country ranger, a trail ranger with thirty years experience. Someone used to spending a week at a time in the back country of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, even Alaska one year. Some used to being surrounded by the natural world. Now he’s emptying trash cans and stocking toilet paper in Michigan. According to him that’s because all the hiring for the forest service (including National Parks, BLM, Forest Service, etc) has been centralized. You’re no longer hired by the people you’ll be working under, the regional and district manager, who actually know what needs to be done in their area.
Instead all hiring is more or less like standardized testing. You get a score based on some inscrutable categories and series of questions and then you get assigned to some job, pretty much, again, according to him, irrespective of your experience. It sounded about like the kind of screwed up system you’d expect a bunch of Washington bureaucrats to come up with. He never got specific about what he thought kept him from the jobs he wanted, the jobs he used to have, but my guess would be that he lacks the experience gaming a system like that that younger applicants — who’ve been wading through bureaucracies all their lives — mostly likely have.
The ranger had long hair, a long beard, smoked hand rolled cigarettes, and seemed to like nothing more than getting out there, way out there. Not off the grid, off the whole damn map. I used to like nothing better myself, but it’s getting increasingly hard to do that, let alone do it and get paid for it.
Modern American culture has no room for individuals, however much lip service it loves to pay them. The reality is you need to buy in hook, line, and sinker or you’ll see that the whole thing is a house of cards ready to tumble down. The minute too many people see that, down it goes.
America has always had a no compromise attitude toward people who wanted to go their own way, and for good reason, the only thing that sustains the farce is making sure no one calls it out.
This country has a long history of hunting down and killing individuals who flipped the finger to the farce and dared to live on their own terms. Geronimo, Cochise, Captain Jack, Ocsen Tustenuggee, or pretty much any other tribal leader who dared stand their ground against the U.S. government. See Howard Zinn, et al for non-Tribal examples — there are plenty.
This is why the west is, historically, very anti-federal government — they’ve already seen what the federal government does to people who go against its wishes. Never mind the irony that the same people who now fear the feds are probably the same ones who would have cheered the government rounding up tribes. To be fair though, things are never so simple as good and bad. Life is complex, messy and gray, not black and white.
None of that came up directly in the course of talking to the ranger. I sat their staring out at the lake after he left, considering what he’d said. There’s a happy ending though, I talked to him several more times in the course of our two weeks here and on the last day we were there I ran into him again at Grand Sable overlook and he told me he’d been offered a full time position finally. It was not in the backcountry, since those are mostly seasonal jobs, but it was at least full time with benefits, and perhaps more importantly, it was out west, in Washington.