When the bus is a rocking…
There’s usually a massive storm front moving in with gusts above forty miles an hour.
Usually.
We’ve moved on from the desert canyons of northern Arizona and deeper into southern Utah. A spot among the red earth and multi-hued canyons outside Capitol Reef National Park near Torrey, Utah.
Last night, a cold front blasted through taking the abnormally warm early spring weather back into the wintry territory.
We would’ve woken up to a couple inches of snow. That is had we actually slept. We didn’t. Not even a wink.
Once winds push above forty miles an hour, the motorhome transforms into a vessel adrift in a restless sea. The slide toppers whip and crack like loose sails.
It’s a reminder how much the nomad lifestyle relies on modern conveniences. Things like weather forecasts. And what happens when I get lazy about heeding them.
Usually, when forecasts warn about high winds, I don’t drive anywhere. And, if we’re parked, we pull in the slideouts.
This time, I got lazy. So I ended up going outside at three in the morning in a flurry of snow to prep the slideouts so we could turtle up.
As I write this twelve hours later, the snow is already gone. I got up early though to clear the solar panels then go for a drive in this high desert winter wonderland.
Utah is beautiful country. Rusted earth shot with evergreen pinyon pines. Vibrant layers of sediment color co-rordinated to whatever pre-historic era laid them in place.
It took eons to sculpt this wild topography. And Capitol Reef National Park is a masterpiece of the forces at work.
I’d never given much thought to this park. It sits in the shadow of Bryce Canyon and Arches. Even Canyonlands next door receives more attention.
The park was once home to intrepid souls who sought to eke a living off the vast desert. Men and women who didn’t have the luxury of weather forecasts or a rolling home loaded with every modern convenience.
Mostly the canyons were shortcuts for settlers aiming for greener pastures. But in the former village of Fruita inside Captiol Reef NP, a group of those pioneers stopped beside a trickle of a creek and decided to start an orchard.
There are the remains of a similar settlement at Lee’s Ferry in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area seventy miles south of here. Like the orchard there, this plot relied on igenuity and pure grit to maintain in the harsh conditions.
But both of these oddities survived against all odds. A testament to our nation’s pioneer spirit.
Here at Capitol Reef, the park maintains the home of the last residents as a museum and bakery. They stock the shelves with local goods and fresh baked pies from the orchards.
At Lee’s Ferry? They fired the orchard keeper.
I try to steer away from politics on my author blog. You have yours, I have mine. I’ve got no desire to try and convince anybody over the internet about what’s the “right way” to do things.
But we Americans used to share two things pretty universally: a skepticism of politicians and a love for our public lands.
There’s always a time when trimming the fat from any enterprise is a painful necessity. I can’t comment on most government agencies or how best to do that.
However, I’ve volunteered at public lands all across this nation. West Coast, East Coast, and everywhere in between. I’ve visited twenty-one of the sixty national parks. Even worked at one for a season.
And I can report there is little in the way of waste and fraud happening in these majestic places.
In fact, despite our national love of our parks, they are perpetually underfunded.
Those who work there don’t do it for the money. They surely aren’t getting wealthy off their paychecks. They are rewarded in other ways. By having the good fortune to participate in a career that is often a calling to them. A duty to protect and maintain these lands for future generations. To keep them easily accessible to their countrymen and the world.
The parks employ only skeleton crews of fulltime employees year-round. They supplement this workforce with seasonal employees to face the hundreds of millions of visitors the system receives during the tourist season.
When you begin mass layoffs of those skeleton crews AND freeze seasonal hirings, it spells trouble for the crushing summer season.
Even if you lift the freeze after several months, the late start makes sure the parks will not be ready when those cars line up miles deep at the gates.
But the folks who were fired deserved it, right?
For whatever reason, politicians have decided to float the idea that these public servants are lazy. Part of a bloated bureaucracy who doesn’t deserve to be on the government dole.
They’re “waste.” Or “fraud.”
In the seven years I’ve been wandering this country, I have yet to see any overwhelming evidence of that in the agencies who serve our public lands.
If anything, their underfunding has produced untold waste in perfectly serviceable buildings left to rot and stories of ingenuity as workers push aging equipment beyond reasonable service lives.
As far as those workers go, the National Park Service, the Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife, and the Bureau of Land Management simply don’t have enough of them.
I’ve seen single rangers assigned to cover multiple forest distrcits. Millions of acres they can’t possibly effectively patrol alone.
Popular wildlife refuges treated like far-flung outposts whose nearest maintenance crews are hours away and borrowed from a different agency.
And nearly every campground among the thousands the public land system provides is staffed by unpaid volunteers who assist visitors and maintain the grounds.
The lack of funding causes these systemic issues. But this need to find ways to do more with less has also kept costs down so these treasured spaces are open and available to all Americans regardless of income.
They are already efficient, despite being starved. And yet these trimmed-back, shoe-string operations contribute billions of dollars to local economies.
This is not a flaw. Or a sign we have a resource in need of exploitation. It’s an example of a highly successful use of public resources deployed for a shared public good.
And those who work in these agencies are often veterans. A means to transition to civilian life and continue service to their country. And as I mentioned, the majority of these employees feel the same.
They aren’t getting rich cleaning toilets, putting out fires, and maintaining trails.
They aren’t scamming the public by doing research to maintain the ecology of these delicate places amid the flow of milions of visitors.
They aren’t a waste of resources when teaching children and adults the reason these spaces are so vital to human history and the natural order.
And they certainly aren’t being unAmerican when they tell the stories of the people who lived here long before us. Or when they speak of the hardships we have all, as a diverse nation, faced.
Many of these park employees started as seasonal hires, too. Working irregular jobs while waiting to land the coveted and rare full-time roles.
Like I said, it isn’t a job for them. It’s a calling.
And if there comes a time their numbers need to be trimmed back, well, they deserve all the respect we can give them. It’s a disgrace that hasn’t been the case.
Those who survive the continuing cuts will soldier on. Doing more with less and less. Why?
They carry the stories of those first pioneers. Intrepid adventurers who struck out into canyon mazes and withering gulches in search of the promise of our once and always great nation.
We owe it to everyone to keep those uniquely American stories alive. I can think of no better place to do so than our public lands.
May they be tended with great care and kept open for all of us long into the future.
Thanks for reading,
Russ
RUSS LINTON 
Well said, from someone who actually knows what he’s talking about. I will be sharing this post.
Appreciate it!