Moving up and moving out: Letting go in the Park Service. - Part 1. Context.

Note: This post and the one that will follow it are two parts to the same story. It started with a brief post about moving on to bigger and better Park Service jobs, but after writing it I realized that without an understanding of the culture inside NPS it wouldn't convey the true emotional weight. This blog is dedicated to helping people get an inside view of what life in the Park Service is like, so I decided it would be better to provide the context first (In this post), and then follow up with the story in the next post. Both ended up significantly longer than I expected, but I wanted paint the complete picture to really explain why this was such a meaningful experience for us.

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At some point in their lives everybody moves away from home. For some people that time is when they go off to college, for others it's their first real job. For me, it was leaving my Home Park.

First, let's put a little bit of Park Service lingo out there: 

"Home Park"

A home park isn't a designated base that we're each assigned to upon our Park Service Birth. There's not a box on a form somewhere that says "Your home park is _________ ", and it's not something official you'll find filed somewhere in Human Resources. 

A person's "Home Park" is generally the first park they ever worked in. But, not always. Sometimes it's the first Park they fell in love with, their favorite Park Service site, or even a site they never even had a direct connection with, but feel strongly attached to. It's a nebulous, touchy-feely thing (like many things in NPS) but it's a strong piece of a Parkie's identity.

A person's Home Park is self-declared, and as such normally holds great meaning to them. In many ways, it marks a person's birth as a Parkie and can tell you a lot about a person. Eastern, Western, Southern, or Northern. Urban or rural. Monument, Historic, Recreation Area, Lakeshore, or Park; it can show what brought them to the Service, or what kept them. It can give hints of their personality though an infatuation with a hidden, quiet, secluded location or display an outgoing personality expressed through the brash love of a big, boisterous, untamed wilderness. It can tell you where they came from and where they've been since then. Home Parks can hold great meaning to people. Experiences, stories, friends, goals (and tattoos!) can all be tied to where you found your niche, made your park, and were reborn into your new home. As people have immense pride in home parks, it's common to discuss in parkie circles not just the park you currently work at, but the home park that shaped you.

So there, good readers, is a overly verbose explanation of a shadowy half-secret part of Park Service culture. 

I might also mention that while "Home Parks" are somewhat of a park-insider term, there's going to be very big push for the National Park Service's centennial in 2016 to help people find their own park. I can't say much yet, but what I can say is that It's gonna be an awesome year if you love the National Parks!

We now move on to the amazing community, the not-shadowy half-secret of the Park Service:

Over an NPS career you build a genealogy of your parks. From your home park you move and grow, and with each jump you help weave the tangled social fabric that makes the Park Service such a tight knit community. Throughout a Park Service career you will likely bounce from place to place for seasons, jobs, promotions, and status. Every time you land in a new site you're displaced, alone, and in a strange new land. Repeat this at hundreds of Park Service sites across the country (and a few we have scattered across the world) you build a working community that understands the difficulty of relocation and works to ease the transition as people come and go. Luckily, most of us share our love of the parks, so the first introductions almost always have an easy topic as people share "their" part of the Park Service.

Add in the remoteness of many parks and the small populations that serve them and you have the foundation for the Park Service culture of incredibly strong, friendly, supportive, self-sufficient communities, complete with their own stores, schools, hospitals, and other services. In a big place like Grand Canyon you have an amazingly tight knit community that exists as an island, even as millions of tourists flow through it every year. The locals all know each other, and if you have a job that lets you interact with other locals it's very common that anywhere you go you'll know every single local there. 

It can be a difficult transition for people who are used to a life with anonymity, or a life that their work and home lives are two very separate things. In many parks there's not really an on duty or off duty. You spend your free time giving lost tourists directions, and your work time joking with your friends (who also happen to be your coworkers, your bosses, your subordinates, the person serving your lunch, etc.) You often end up living every moment of your life as a living, breathing, part of the park, whether you want to or not. Some people hate this, and it chases them away from the Park Service, but others (like me) flourish in it. Your life becomes your park, and helping people see and feel the the place that means so much to you can be an amazing thing. It can give a meaning and purpose to live that might otherwise be lacking, and sometimes you get to feel like you really make a difference to someone. 

Back on topic: Now, you have a strong community system with constantly relocating employees with shared interests. What happens? Strong social networks! With only 20,000-30,000 employees (Depending on who’s counting) NPS is a pretty small organization, and it’s an organization in which many people spend whole careers. Match this with the high relocation rate and it’s very likely that only have a few (if any) degrees of separation from employees at any other park.

Take this example:

In 2012 SaintLost and I visited Puerto Rico. We did very little advanced planning, and had no real plans ahead of time to visit the National Park Site there (San Juan NHS). To be honest it hadn't really occurred to me that that NPS had a presence there, as Puerto Rico wasn't really on my radar as someone who was raised in a Western state. 

After a few days drinking Pina Coladas in San Juan we decided to mosey over and visit Castillo San Cristobal. We pranced over to the interpretive area near the entrance and chatted with the Ranger. We talked about his park and our park and wandered off to go explore. 

After an hour or so we wandered by one of their information desks. As we passed a Ranger said our names. She came over, said hello, and explained that the Ranger that we met when we entered the site had mentioned there were two Parkies visiting from Grand Canyon. 

Image Credit: CBD

One of us had blue hair at the time so I can't imagine we were hard to spot.

The Ranger explained that she had recently transferred from White Sands National Monument and wanted to know if we knew a Ranger she had worked with there (Who had since moved to the Grand Canyon). As a result of the tight knit community at the Canyon, we knew her friend quite well, and we filled her in on the happenings in her former coworker's life while she and another Ranger gave us a tour of the park. 

 Image Credit: CBD

National Park Service and the Caribbean? Sign me up!

That was an amazing experience. More than 2,000 miles away from our home park we were able to walk in and not only be surrounded by our extended Park Service family, but had a single degree of separation from someone. It's an incredibly positive feeling when you realize how far away you really are, but you still feel like you walked right in the door at home.

 Image Credit: CBD

Like many historic doors in the Park Service, walking through this one without looking can have dangerous consequences.

Now, lets take this another degree, because there's no understating how interconnected the Park Service can feel. This month, more than two years after our visit to San Juan, I took an online training. In that training was an employee who worked for San Jaun NHS, and with just a few chats back and forth they had passed on my hellos to the Rangers who I had met all that time ago, reinforcing the community ties that make the Park Service feel like an extended family.

With each Parkie conversation, a new connection is created. Each new connection links a multitude of extended Park Service family members forever, tied by our strong sense of community and love of the places we protect. 

Source: https://www.newton.ac.uk/files/events/themes/idd-350x276.jpg

Okay, that's actually a map of how infectious diseases spread, but I'd bet that Park Service friendship transmissions rates are even higher!

Together we support each other, across parks, across states, and even across countries as US Parks pair with other National Parks all over the world to foster America's Best Idea. 

 Image Credit: CBD