Welcome Sign at North Entrance to Chaco Canyon
Today is the centennial of the establishment of the National Park Service on August 25, 1916. It’s getting more media attention than I had expected, although I had noticed that the NPS had mounted a noticeable publicity campaign in the lead up to the date itself, so I probably shouldn’t be surprised. Anyway, it’s a good milestone to mark. I have my issues with the way the NPS works and some of the things it does and has done, but it’s definitely a hugely important institution both to the country as a whole and to me personally.
I started this blog in December 2008 when I was working for the NPS at Chaco Canyon, and the early posts were mostly attempts to put the information from my tours and my background reading into a more permanent form so I could refer people to them long after I had left the park and moved on to other things. It’s worked quite well for that, although in the meantime the internet has moved on and blogs like this are much less of a focus for interaction than they were then. I’ve kept it up, though at a much less frequent pace of posting, because I like having a platform like this to talk about the things that interest me, and I now have a fairly small but consistent reader base that is interested as well. (Which is not easy to find for what is after all a pretty esoteric interest.)
But beyond being the starting point for this blog, the NPS is an important institution for setting me on the path my life has taken in more general ways too. That job at Chaco allowed me to really delve deep into the backstory of the area where I was born and where my family has a long history (at least by white-people standards). What I learned there has had a profound effect on my life since in all sorts of ways, and I expect that to continue indefinitely. This blog may have slowed in posting frequency in recent years, but it’s not from any decline in my interest in the subject matter, which I’m sure I will continue to write about for many years to come, not necessarily just here. I have some ideas for books I might want to write on related topics at some point, although I’ve been realizing recently that it’s awfully hard to find the time for a project of that magnitude while also working full time. But someday.
Welcome Sign at Alaska/Yukon Border
The influence of the Park Service on my life goes even further than the Chaco stuff, though. It was an internship with the NPS that brought me to Alaska a little less than five years ago, and my experience there, while frustrating in some ways, led me to discover the first place I had ever lived where I could seriously imagine living permanently. It’s not at all clear that I will actually end up settling down here, and the Alaska of 2016 is so different from the Alaska of 2011 that it’s hard to even explain the difference. But that feeling of finding a place I liked enough to stay, even if I didn’t necessarily have a lot in common with most of the people here, was important to me and it set a standard that anywhere else I might end up will have to meet or exceed for me to stay permanently. And I have the Park Service to thank for that too.
I may or may not ever work for the NPS again. My career path has never been along an established route, and I have no idea how much longer I’ll stay in my current job or what I’ll do next. Some of the most important factors in the future of my career are totally out of my control. But others are mine to control, and I’ll probably have to make some serious decisions in the next few years, if not sooner, about where I want my life to go next. I have to be honest that working for the Park Service again is not my top choice for a next step. It really was a frustrating place in some ways, for a variety of reasons, some of which are I think inherent to the structure and culture of the agency. But it’s a large organization, and I’m sure there are some positions within it that I would find congenial, so it’s definitely still on the list.
Anyway, despite my ambivalence about it, the Park Service has done a lot of good for me and I am very appreciative of that. I’m very happy to celebrate 100 years of this complex, occasionally infuriating but just as often inspiring, American institution. Happy birthday, NPS!
National Park Service Alaska Regional Office, Anchorage, Alaska
Gambler's House 