Forest Service
My note to myself says stay positive because this is about the Forest Service that was. It’s not gone completely yet, but it’s fading faster than I ever thought possible. Someone got the idea to ‘modernize and homogenize’ the Forest Service. The changes come daily with a coldness foreign to employees with any years under our belts. I suppose, as the saying goes, all good things must end. It’s hard to live it though.
The Forest Service was always a warm organization. We had a job to do, yes, and each of us knew success rested on our fellow employees. While now it sounds altruistic, that doesn’t make it any less real.
I took a job with the Forest Service on the White Cloud Ranger District in WhiteCloud, Michigan reluctantly. Originally, I’d just gone in to the office because I needed one more signature on my unemployment form to get my check. In those days, one had to have signatures of where one had sought work. I went in with my form and handed it to the woman at the front desk who was wearing a Forest Service uniform.
“Hi, would you sign this, please?”
How must I have looked to her! Twenty-years-old, in good health, and on unemployment?
She handed it back unsigned. “We have a slot in our Young Adult Conservation Corp program. Come in on Monday, we’ll give you your forms and send you for a physical.”
Stunned, I could hardly say I didn’t want a job. I think I managed to stammer, ‘thanks’.
I was hired and the woman became my friend and mentor. The Y.A.C.C. program was a way for people my age to learn job skills, make a decent wage and for the Forest Service to have work crews year round. It was, as with many of their programs in those days, a win-win situation.
True to the Forest Service then, and now, being female did not mean answering the phone. I was hired to first work on, and then lead, a survey crew. Eventually I ran transit and set boundaries between private and federal land. It was refreshing and challenging.
It was a Forest Service district of caring and honor, made up of people who quickly became family.
When I was hired over another to be a crew leader, my competition decided she’d been unfairly treated. She complained, out of anger, when the crew had to sit in the truck all day as I and the lead surveyor searched for a corner marker.
Honor required my supervisor to address the situation. Fairness made him start the meeting with, “I have to talk to you, though you’ve done nothing wrong.”
It was the first of many examples I would use in the future on handling awkward situations.
Eventually I was hired full time as a receptionist. In a Midwestern town of 2000, with no college degree, it was an excellent job opportunity complete with benefits. Later, it was a way to expand the family by transferring around the country; new jobs I knew I could already do. New families I already had a connection with.
In those days, on a small district, being a receptionist also meant doing campground patrol on the weekends, fighting fire, being an aerial fire observer, manning the radio, and going out to patrol the woods to keep an eye on things. In those days, support and opportunity flowed both ways. We had a district to run. All of us together. Which included my District Ranger babysitting my son in the office so I could fight fire.
We laughed, a lot. We shared stories and adventures. We watched out for each other. No supervisor went home if one of their employees hadn’t come in from the field.
The supervisor waited or called the employee in for the day. You knew, in those days, you had an office full of people who would stand up for you, professionally or personally, it didn’t matter. Nor did our hours. We stayed as late as we needed to get the job done.
Stay positive, my note says.
Then someone flipped the switch and said ‘it’s over’.
The reason, they say, is money though their ‘studies’ are showing otherwise.
The reason they say, is money...
The loss, we know, is caring.
I am so glad I can miss the old days, because I lived them.
A while ago I was on a conference call with twenty people of ‘opposing’ sides—those needing things completed to do their job, things they’d waited months for. Those who couldn’t fill the need because of sudden changes. People on both sides had a right to be angry, to be frustrated. And I smiled. So many sentences started with ‘we know you’re trying’ and ‘we know your need’.
Us. The dinosaurs of a changing organization caught in systems that don’t work, still remembering the family values.
Rebecca lives in Montana in a log cabin by a river. She has over 100 published stories and a book of short stories, Reaching Beyond, published by Bellowing Ark Press. She loves to read, take walks with Dodge, her dog, and volunteer at the local animal shelter.