40 Hours into Adulthood

I’m in my safe place, ie Starbucks.

No matter where I travel, I can always count on the same ambiance and products here. I know that familiarity/insecurity is something that franchising corporations prey on. Well, it works.

Anyway, I’m in downtown Bellingham, having driven a half hour to look at yet another disappointing room to move in to. This one wasn’t the worse by far, but it was just a little too far out of my way to justify the price. And the owner wasn’t someone I would have been excited to return home to everyday after work. I still have a few more leads, so we’ll see.

This whole week seems to be pushing me out of my comfort zone. Having just finished my 5th year of college, I guess I got a little to confident and comfortable in Ann Arbor. I knew everyone, I knew the city, life was easy and good.

I don’t know why this transition seems harder than in summers past. Oh wait, of course I know why: previous summers out West were just that, summers, and I always knew in the back of my head that I’d be returning to Michigan in the fall, no matter how bad things got. It’s different now; the back of my head is telling me, whatever mess you get yourself into, you’re stuck with it!

So I just finished my first week of work as an adult and honestly, it was harder that I imagined. Maybe I hadn’t worked 5 days in row full-time for awhile. Or maybe, we’re still defining exactly what I’m doing this summer. As you know, working for the government means bureaucracy, and I’m just trying to figure out how I fit into the organization. As I’ve mentioned, this position hasn’t existed before so there’s no precedence to follow.

The people I answer to are the board of directors, which is made up of the superintendents at, in alphabetical order, Ebey’s Landing, Fort Lewis and Clark, Fort Vancouver, Mount Rainier, North Cascades, Olympic, and San Juan Island. That means I’m working with some pretty high profile people and I’m honored to have this opportunity. I’ll be giving a 1-2 hour presentation to the board in September about my work communicating the science going on in the park and I’m secretly (okay, not so secretly) thrilled to have that much face time.

The other people I’m working with are the lead scientists themselves--who are nearly impossible to track down! Because they’re all spread out at 7 different parks, I can’t just walk into their office and sit down to chat. Even if I could, they’re often out in the field. Plus, they still are unsure of who I am and what exactly I can do to help promote their work. Ah well, this isn’t going to happen overnight.

Quick tangent: have I ever explained how National Parks are abbreviated? If the name of the park is one word (Yellostone), you just use the first four letters (YELL). If it’s more than one word, take the first two letters of each word. And then there are of course some random idiosyncrasies We use these abbreviations in both writing and common speech.

Ebey’s Landing= EBLA
Fort Lewis and Clark=LEWI
Fort Vancouver=FOVA
Mount Rainier=MORA
North Cascades=NOCA
Olympic=OLYM
San Juan Islands=SAJH
Michael Liang=MILI

Okay, back to my job. It took me awhile to figure this out—pages and pages of reports and protocols, lots of phone calls, and e-mails—but I think the research that I’ll be focusing on this summer includes the following Vital Signs:

-Climate
-Fish Assemblages
-Glaciers
-Intertidal
-Landbirds
-Landscape Dynamics
-Mountain Lakes
-Subapline Vegetation
-Elk

Throughout the summer, I’ll be going into more detail about each of these (in interesting and innovative ways of course!). A brief explanation of the importance of Vital Signs- scientists within the North Coast and Cascade Network have determined that these aspects of our national parks here are worth monitoring on a regular basis. Think of it as your annual visit to the doctor where your heart rate, blood pressure, cholesterol, etc are all recorded. Keeping track of this data allows you to establish trends and should any changes occur, you could take the appropriate course of actions to remedy the situation. It seems fairly common sense that natural resources managers should be doing this, but these collaborative Inventory and Monitoring programs have really only emerged in the 1990’s.

So not only is this type of management somewhat new, but the work that I’ll be doing is going to be avant-garde for the NPS. It’s both thrilling and scary.

Well, I think I’ve rambled on enough for tonight. I hope you enjoyed this peek into the workings of the National Park Service. I’ll be in Olympic National Park on Monday and Tuesday and will have some blog posts/photos up next Friday! Don’t forget:
rangermikefriday.blogspot.com