Heather Whitman’s column doesn’t appear again this quarter.

Interpretation

Without interpretation, nothing the National Park Service does matters. I worry that in these tough times park management may find it tempting to minimize the role interpreters play in overall park operations to justify a reduction in the interpretive staff. Interpretation deserves an adequate and reliable slice of each park budget. And, when budgets are squeezed, cuts in interpretation need to be equally proportional to cuts in other divisions. Interpreters need to know how to effectively justify the value of our jobs to staff and management. Park interpretation is not optional, it is critical, and this is why I write this column. I want interpretation to be understood and as strongly supported across the NPS ranks as other divisions.

My idea for this column started when I proposed to some coworkers a provocative statement: interpreters do the most important job in the NPS. I was shocked at their resistance. I thought they’d understand and agree. Did they feel like I was being arrogant, that I was saying interpreters were better than others? Since that wasn’t my intention I quickly reworded the concept.

What I meant was that interpretation, more than any other park division, works exclusively with the core ideas behind each national park. All other divisions complete tasks critical to the park’s value, be it an arrest, a species saved, an archeological site identified, paperwork filed, a fire extinguished, a visitor center built and more However, only interpretation specializes in work with the founding park values.

Perhaps the old saying, “A house is not a home,” is appropriate here. Every park division, except for interpretation, builds, manages, maintains, runs and protects the house. At all the parks I’ve visited or worked at, I’ve felt like I was inside an organization (the house), yet I couldn’t figure out how interpreters supported the organization in any tangible way. It didn’t help that at some parks the interpretive staff was actively devalued. I felt like interpretation was a noble luxury. Then I realized the essential role we play and how few of us in the NPS understand it.

Visitors need skilled interpreters to ensure that their park visit will be meaningful, not hollow and pointless. Interpretation is the one job in the NPS that specifically helps visitors understand the “why” behind the park. Once visitors know why the park is important, their understanding makes the house a meaningful home and gives the NPS its purpose.

How do interpreters support park jobs? Every day interpreters work directly with visitors to help them understand core park meanings. We give voice to the values that inspired the president or Congress to create the park you work in. We take visitors beyond the obvious and superficial into the many layers of useful meaning that make parks special. At the point when visitors become aware of these layers of meaning, that makes every other division’s job worth doing. People who see the value in the park will support what all NPS employees do.

Interpreters are professional storytellers. We spark curiosity and provide intellectual and emotional connections between visitors and the great stories of your park. People are drawn to parks because they sense there is something of value for them to find there. Interpreters capitalize on visitor curiosity and use park resources to create stories. These stories help visitors understand why they were drawn to the park in the first place. The spark turns to fire — and visitors leave the park with new understanding. This creates more well-rounded and educated citizens who value and support parks as living libraries of America’s legacy. This country values national parks because parks provide meanings. The public needs interpreters to effectively reveal those meanings.

Interpretation is a professional trade. We are not dime-a-dozen, rote memorization tour guides. Those of use doing interpretation were drawn to this field because we were skilled at recognizing park resources, their inherent meanings. On top of that, we are able to effectively communicate those ideas with the public. We seek out strangers and share park values. Our goal is to turn those strangers into park stewards.

Every employee of the NPS does something tangibly critical for the park, but the tangible product interpreters create is not as apparent. It becomes tangible when the park gets its funding. I believe interpretation is the most mission-critical and essential job in the NPS for this very reason. The park structure gives administration, law enforcement, maintenance, resources, fire and other divisions their purpose. But, it is interpretation that shows people the value of having parks. Public support funds your park’s very existence.

Why fund interpretation adequately? The work done by all park divisions won’t matter if people stop seeing parks as places of value. Without interpreters fostering public appreciation for park resources, what’s the point of any of us doing our jobs in parks? If visitors stop caring, parks will go away and none of us will have jobs.

Protection

Fire Refresher — Why Bother? — This time of year signals many administrative details for wildland firefighters: pack tests, recruiting, fire academies, and of course, annual refresher training. For instructors, this poses a significant challenge: how to get and keep the attention of an audience that often sees little need to be there in the first place? Every year, more than one pair of eyes rolls that “you’re wasting my time and I’m bored to death” look from the back of the room.

Most of it’s common sense anyway, and if a person’s been fighting fire for more than a season or two, they should know all this stuff already, right? Why do we bother to require eight hours of “the same old stuff” every year?

What’s more, why do we fight fire at all? Why is it that firefighters rush into situations that most folks would rush away from?

For many, one reason towers above all others: They do it for the money. They support the ancient proverb: “Black forest means green wallet.”

There’s no shame in fighting fire for the pay. But for many, their reasons go much deeper. Firefighting provides a cause to believe in, a sense of purpose. Firefighters may get fulfillment out of helping others and feeling like they’re part of something bigger than themselves.

For others, firefighting is a calling. Not a job, but a calling . . . something they feel they were born to do. This hits home for me because I’ve known since I was young that I’d spend my life outdoors doing exciting things amidst magnificent landscapes among high-caliber people. I’ve found that the job of rangering is the perfect conduit through which to fulfill this calling, and firefighting is a pivotal part of that, a traditional ranger skill.

What about adventure and camaraderie? More people yearn for adventure and camaraderie than would admit it. The half-crazed bush pilot in the movie Never Cry Wolf understood this truth when he told his scientist passenger that “the real gold is south of sixty sitting on their living room couches.” He meant that people all over the world below the 60th parallel are willing to pay big bucks just to experience a little adventure in their otherwise sterile and boring lives.

Firefighting (not including the hurry-up-and-wait part) is anything but boring. The destination unknown, band of brothers (and sisters), helicopter rides, crackling radios, the physical and mental challenges, enduring suffering through adversity together with fellow firefighters. It is the classic adventure!

An to top it off, we get to do it surrounded by some of the prettiest places on the planet. It’s not just the scenery that’s beautiful, though. What about the fire itself? Firefighters are blessed with opportunities to be up close and personal with sheer beauty and immense power that can only be witnessed on the fireline. We see things other folks will never see. Trees torching, a blowup in the distance, fire whirls, and how about an entire hillside aflame at night?

In his book Fire and Ashes, John Maclean wrote, “Fire, though, is an enchanting mistress.” Anyone who’s fought fire long enough knows what he means. During prescribed burns or burnouts, where is the holding crew supposed to be looking? The Green. But how many times do we catch folks staring at awe into the Black?

The crux of this whole thing: what about risk? Danger? Is risk something we seek? Maybe for some people.

Risk and danger certainly used to exist. Unfortunately, we have a mounting fatality list to prove it: Rattlesnake Fire, Dude Fire and Mann Gulch.

In his account of the Mann Gulch Fire, Young Men and Fire, Norman Maclean wrote about the risks of firefighting, including this memorable line:

“In 1949 the smokejumpers were still so young . . . they hadn’t learned to count the odds and to sense they might owe the universe a tragedy.”

But what about today’s modern world of fighting wild fires? Is it still dangerous despite all the safety checks we’ve put in place? Another, more recent list to remind us: Storm King, Cramer Fire, Thirtymile, aviation fatalities at an alarming rate, the NPS’s Danny Holmes, and now, the Esperanza Fire.

There is still danger in firefighting. Those who died because of it knew it. We must remain ever mindful that these dangers can have tragic consequences.

We still rush into fires and put them out. But we do so “. . . fully knowing the hazards of our chosen profession.”

That is why we hold fire refresher courses, why we’re all forced to sit through the boring old 10 & 18, LCES and more. We hold them so we might “fully know the hazards of our chosen profession.”

~ Kevin Moses, Big South Fork

Resource Management

Many parks have been spending time this year analyzing their “Core Operations,” especially as a way to plan how to accomplish the parks’ most important, mission-oriented work in a time of stagnant or effectively declining budgets.

I think the exercise is as good a way as any to make us think about what we do and why and how we do it. But I’m always a bit uncomfortable about the term “operations.” I think when most park employees hear the word, they think of the regular daily activities done to keep the place open for visitors.

Rangers and maintenance workers fight the crime and the grime, and their successes and failures are often apparent within a short, human time frame — or, at least, the ramifications are (such as when the plumbing fails or the rescue is concluded).

Parks justifiably spend a lot of effort on activities to keep the roads repaved or plowed, to keep visitors safe, informed, directed and satisfied.

Resource managers aren’t exempt from this; they’re called to get animal and insect pests out of the museum or the dining hall, to pull or spray the thistle patches around visitor centers and trailheads, or to get picnic-eating bears out of campgrounds. But more often, resource managers’ work activities don’t yield immediate and visible results.

It isn’t very often that staffs get to reintroduce wolves, excavate a newly discovered archeological site or restore the last intact dude ranch.

Core work for resource managers usually means a lot of slow, methodical collection of information, be it through research or monitoring efforts. It means analysis and re-analysis after a longer time and additional data has been amassed, perhaps under changing human and/or environmental conditions.

It’s not as likely to be front-page news, and it’s often portrayed (perhaps unnecessarily) as complex and subject to varying scientific interpretations. It’s not likely to result in short-term success, such as we’re urged to produce for project completion statements and reporting under the Government Results and Performance Act (GPRA).

How many endangered species have been recovered after 30 years of ESA protection? How many invasive species successfully eradicated? How many studies do we need to provide decision-makers with the information needed to help set a course for the future? How much money and time has been spent?

Important and worthy questions — yet, has the low number of successes meant that the time and effort was misspent? Or does it mean that successful accomplishment of many biological resource objectives should be measured in terms of the longevity of the species being managed?

The most important resource management activities may not result in something we can operate. I contend that it’s imperative that resource professionals, perhaps similarly to interpreters, continually communicate to their fellow park workers, their managers and their many constituents about expectations, time frames and measures for success, and the relevance of their efforts to the core mission of resource conservation in parks across the NPS.

And, we resource specialists should be careful about promising more than we can deliver, at least in the near-term.

~ Sue Consolo Murphy, Grand Teton

NOTE: Are you in resource management and interested in becoming a columnist in this space? Please contact the editor at fordedit@aol.com.