“It was just like Parks and Rec except nothing like Parks and Rec.”
I mentioned a while back that I’ve been working as a seasonal naturalist for a local park district in the Twin Cities area, and I also mentioned that that job was seasonal. And, if I recall correctly, I also said in a rare moment of prescience, and I quote, “future Andy can suck it because now he’s the one who has to figure out long-term income,” in reference to the fact that the job was only temporary. Oh, boy, isn’t that one coming back to kick me in the ass. Because that seasonal job is now over! As of mid-March, I am now without a regular job. Hurray?
Yes, lacking gainful employment makes things much more complicated in this weird game called life, can you believe it? It’s only been a few weeks, sure, and I’m waiting to hear back from a couple other applications, but that pinch of existing in-between seasonal jobs is real, and it’s real weird. But I’m not going to talk about that, because listening to me bemoan my financial woes is no fun for anybody, least of all me. So, really, all of this is to say that “I’m done with another real job! Now I get to tell random family members and strangers alike about it! Whee!!!”
What can I say about my job that I haven’t already said in that same previous post, hmm? Well, a lot of things, to be sure, but you kind of get the idea already. I was a seasonal naturalist for the Baker Outdoor Learning Center, which I suppose I can say now that I’m not working there (could I not say it before? I dunno, it did feel a little weird to put that much personal info out there while it was still accurate). My main responsibility was teaching classes of children about how to exist in the woods, but even this could take many different forms. Usually, kids would show up, I’d get like fifteen of them, and I’d tromp them through the trees like a pack of crazed weasels while I taught them how to build fires, make shelters made out of sticks, shoot archery, the whole works. These classes could be anywhere from forty-five minutes to two and a half hours in some cases, and the kids were anywhere from three (at the very, very youngest) to, like, fifteen. So there’s a lot of variability in my job. Not a day goes by that is the same as any other. And on top of that, our programs changed as the seasons changed, too; stuff I taught in October had to be altered for classes in January. Mostly due to the fact that there is now a whole bunch of snow on the ground. Minnesota does get quite a bit of that.
But my job had more than just teaching the kids. Classes involved preparing program materials, which could be anything from fifty pairs of snowshoes to a literal box of kitchen supplies, and clean up could be anything from throwing stuff in a box to three hours of washing dishes. Like I said, variability. “Other duties as assigned” is the long-running joke among staff. And speaking of staff, I worked with a handful of other naturalists at the park, most of whom were full-time and a few others who were seasonal like me, and I have to say, they were uniformly some of the nicest people I’ve ever met. I mean, I guess you have to have a pretty sunny disposition to want to work with children in the woods all day, every day, so it makes sense that a place like Baker would attract some shining stars of the human experience. My coworkers were perhaps the highlight of my time at Baker, come to think of it. I don’t want to give specifics or names or anything because personal info is kind of a grey zone on blogs like this, but believe me when I say that my coworkers were awesome. I’d talk more about them if I could. But between working with them and getting to work outside 99% of the time, it was a pretty sweet gig.
I suppose I should set a bit of the scene for the place itself, though, I may be getting a bit ahead of myself. The Baker Outdoor Learning Center is a tract of woodlands that’s roughly 300 acres inside of a bigger park that’s close to 3,000 acres. I spent almost all of my job within those 300 acres, so I did get to know it pretty well, and it is a really special place. The Learning Center itself has a main lodge building, with enough space to feed a hundred ravenous fourth-graders, and then eight cabins scattered on a loop around the park. There’s also a shower house that’s been under construction since before I worked there, and it still isn’t quite done, which is a bit of shame since I never got to see the inside, but I’ll be back some day to check it out. As staff, we’re equipped with a bunch of different doo-dads and assorted treasures that we can teach a huge variety of classes without needing to go to other sites or parks. We’ve got onsite archery, snow shoeing, atl-atl, canoeing, team-building games, wrapping children in tarps, and more. The sheer amount of stuff that can be done at Baker is incredible. Oh, look at me, using a “we” pronoun like I still work there. How… sad. I miss it.
But while the buildings and program equipment are really nice, it’s the nature that makes Baker especially special. Makes it especial. Just on that 300 acres or so of land that we’ve got, we have two ponds, a couple different wetland marshes, access to a veritable lake, our own maple sugarbush, an ephemeral stream, a moist valley, and more species of trees and critters than you can shake a stick at. Believe me, I’ve watched the kids shake many sticks at the critters, and they never got them all. We’ve got squirrels, muskrats, wood ducks, owls, turkeys, deer, otters (somewhere, I guess), a very sickly raccoon that we had to call the cops on, pond bugs of all shapes and sizes, salamanders, and more. Oh, boy do I love those salamanders. I saw a live salamander in the wild for the first time in my very short life while I was there! I turned over a whole bunch of logs and disturbed entire micro-ecosystems to find them, but with the determination of an angry bloodhound tracking down a T-bone steak, find them I did. The turkeys were pretty cool, too. They’d stop by and eat our corn from time to time.
Oh, but how could I forget the chickadees? One of the things that we were able to do in the winter was take advantage of the wildlife that don’t go into hibernation. For educational purposes, of course. In Minnesota, you’d be surprised at how many different kinds of critters don’t migrate or go into any sort of slumber for the winter time; a lot of them stay quite active. But because they’re still active, that means they have to find food, and will take any opportunity at an easy meal. Enter the chickadee; we had a place called Chickadee Landing, which was really just some birdfeeders surrounded by benches and incredibly uncomfortable wooden cutouts of people. Over time, we’d put bird seed in the feeders and on the heads of the cutouts, and eventually the birds would get used to the shapes of people. This had been going on for years when I got there, so by the time I was on the scene, you could sit down and throw some birdseed on your head during any day in February and the birds would flock to you like nothing else. I got probably six or seven birds to land on my head this season. They just fly over, jump on my hat, grab a seed, and fly off. And plenty of kids would get birds, too. It’s so cool.
That reminds me! Are you wondering about the other classes that we’d teach, besides bird entrapment? I hope so, because have I got a lot to say about them. The class I taught the most was definitely Survival, which draws from the very famous build-a-shelter-out-of-sticks-and-leave-the-adults-alone-for-two-hours method of youth education. Of course, ours were more than that, we asked the kids critical questions and gave them guiding ideas and things so that they could develop their own thoughts and conclusions based on what they were doing. Speaking of, that’s kind of the guiding backbone of Baker, the instructional doctrine, the formula and model of teaching outdoor education. Very rarely did we (or do they) just lecture at the kids; almost every class followed a scientifically-based structure of outdoor education best practice; invite the kids to the learning space with some sort of cool facts or interesting questions, give them time to explore something for themselves, ask probing questions to get them to develop their own ideas, deploy a task for them to use these ideas, and then get them to reflect on what they’ve learned. It’s the true BEETLES method of teaching, and I think it’s great. I especially think it’s great because it a) lets the kids explore in nature and builds in that oh-so-important unstructured play, and b) means that I don’t have to teach for two hours, I really only have to teach for thirty minutes and then spend the rest making sure they don’t kill each other.
I jest, of course, there’s more to it than just that, but you get the idea. Using that survival class as an example, we’d talk about what humans need to survive, then have them build debris shelters before transitioning into making fires with matches, newspaper, and sticks they found on the ground. It’s a neat class, very popular with everyone and applicable to all ages. Probably why I taught it every other friggin’ day for the last six months. And yet, somehow, I was still late for lunch no matter how many times I taught that class.
The many, many other classes were about all sorts of other things besides survival. We had a map and compass class that I never taught, a class specifically about fire making that used four different methods of making a fire (matches, magnifying lens, batteries and steel wool, and flint and steel), a class that gave the kids some cameras and just had them take cool pictures, snowshoeing which was really just hiking around looking at stuff, and so many others. I really, really liked this one class called Voyageur Life, where I dressed up like an old french fur trader and got to put on a goofy accent and make fun of the kids in-character. That one was mostly about flint and steel fire-making, hatchet throwing when the weather was warm, and voyageur games, but it also had one of my favorite activities; the trading post. The kids would collect a ton of laminated pieces of paper as “furs” and then trade them with me for goods that actual voyageurs might have had. It was always incredibly chaotic but the kids seemed to have a blast. And I’m all about chaos, so I guess that kind of fits.
Team building was also one that I really liked, because you got to see the lightbulbs going off in their heads when they figured out a particular puzzle or challenge. Usually we’d give them different challenges, like the glass bridge maze a la Squid Game (there was way more talk about Squid Game than I thought third graders should have had), or aqueduct where they have to roll a ball down a hill using only half-pipes. With an almost uncanny regularity, there was always one or two kids per group who would figure out some sort of “trick” to the challenges, and more often than not it would be a legitimate lateral-thought solution to a problem, and the kids would absolutely love it. They ate that stuff up. It was super satisfying to watch. Believe it or not, I hated team-building activities as a kid, even though it’s literally just games. I didn’t learn to appreciate them until I went to Philmont the second time, but facilitating team-building can be just as fulfilling as participating, even when they don’t quite succeed. Playing things by ear and changing it on the fly is a mental exercise, but it’s so much fun, too.
Night hikes are a good time, too. Walking kids through the woods is interesting enough during the day, what with every stick being a potential source of excitement, but at night it’s a totally different ball game. Not in any immediately obvious way, but the differences are there. You have to kind of bring activities with you at night, whereas activities during the day sometimes find themselves. But giving a cub scout pack a handful of lifesavers and telling them to crunch down really hard is always a good time. And listening with bated breath after I use our barred owl call is a moment of tense excitement that’s hard to match during the day. We never did get any owls, though.
And winter totally shakes things up, too! Getting to walk on snowshoes is one thing, but walking on snowshoes on a frozen pond is something totally different. There’s a weird kind of joy in stepping out onto the ice for the first time, no matter how old you are. Maybe it’s the risk inherent to walking on frozen water (no ice is safe ice), or maybe, more likely, it’s the fact that a frozen pond is a blank canvas of possibility. Want to go explore the shore? Go ahead. Want to try digging down through the snow to the ice? Right on. Want to use your snowshoes to draw pictures in the snow? Absolutely. Want to just run for ten minutes and never stop? You do you. Kids love frozen ponds. It’s just too bad that we couldn’t go on the pond for half the winter because the muskrats and spring water kept melting holes in the damn thing.
I could go on and on about this. Taking the kids up to the ridge to look for gall flies and play camouflage in the grasses. Making a bunch of sixth graders walk through the cattails because they can’t walk on the dock with their snowshoes, then seeing the kids that figured out they could just crawl. The excitement of a group watching snow snakes as someone hits it out of the park. Or the same thing with archery. Hatchets. Atl-Atls. And those moments where you really talk to a kid or an adult and feel like you genuinely had some little connection, or gave them something meaningful to think about. It was a really good job.
And I got to do overnights, too! Oh, I can’t believe I almost forgot about that. One of the other responsibilities of the job was to stay at Baker park with overnight groups sometimes. It could be a scout group that was renting the place for the weekend, or a religious group that was just going to be there until midnight, but someone had to be there to make sure that no one burned the place down. And I was lucky/unlucky enough that it was me quite a few times! I say lucky because I really enjoyed it, getting to stay in my own little cabin in the woods for a weekend and get paid to do basically nothing after about eight o’clock. I say unlucky because it ate up a lot of my weekends, but that’s ok because Cheyenne works weekends anyway so it’s not like I would have done much anyways. And I still found time to see Nick around that schedule, too, so it wasn’t too unlucky, I’d say. The pros outweigh the cons, because it was just a pretty cool thing overall.
It was also kind of spooky, too. Like, in a good way. I never met a group of people at Baker that made me feel threatened or ill at ease. Pretty much every member of the public that came to Baker I got along fine with, and nothing sticks out in my mind as being a problem. I can’t necessarily say the same for everyone’s experiences, there’s always that possibility of something iffy happening, but I never had any issues with people. But I would just psyche myself out, about things in the woods or in my cabin, and it was kind of nice to feel that silly kind of fear that you know is irrational. It’s like watching a horror movie or a horror video game, and that sense of dread that makes it tough to sleep. Nothing’s made me feel that way in ages! Which isn’t exactly a glowing review, but hey, I did it to myself. The fact that I wrote up plans to stage a short horror film inside the cabin I was actively sleeping in at work probably had something to do with that, to be fair. That, and the fact that the fire alarm or the staff cell could go off at literally any time and awaken me from whatever slumber I had been in. That was… admittedly less pleasant, but still fine.
There’s so much that I could talk about with my time at Baker. The people, the place, the program, all of it was so great. I really got along well with my coworkers, I feel like I was able to provide some sort of meaningful content to the visitors that came to Baker (I even got to chat with a boy scout troop about Philmont for a little bit, which was a nice surprise! And took just one family on a night hike one time, it was like a private tour for them and the kid just wanted to do flips all over the ice. It was very sweet). I feel like I learned a bit, too, about not only best methods in education but also how to wrangle a group of middle-schoolers, which I’m sure will come in handy some day.
Sure, I could talk about the downsides of the job. The pay wasn’t fantastic. Well, realistically, the pay itself was fine, I just didn’t get enough hours during the “off-season,” or after Thanksgiving until about February. I mean, 75% of the groups we got were school groups, and what school is going to schedule a field trip between Thanksgiving and Christmas break? So number of hours wasn’t always the best, and sometimes the hours were kind of sporadic. I’d know at least a month in advance what my schedule would be, and my boss was really, really great about scheduling around my requested days off, but it could be tough to predict, month by month, how much I’d be working. I could have gotten a second job, sure, but then I got the climate change book instead, and that became a whole big thing. I’ll tell you about it some other time.
Really, though, I had a very positive experience with my first real job out of college. Sure, it wasn’t quite what my academic advisor likely expected out of me (or was it, Rob?), with my GIS minor and a small focus in computer stuff. And for both the sake of my wallet and to keep Cheyenne off my back, I can’t do a seasonal job again, but I am glad that I had the job. I met some great people, learned some cool things, taught a bunch of kids some stuff about nature, and hopefully, will remember it for a long time. Maybe one day I’ll get those horror-themed YouTube videos out there that I filmed while I stayed in that cabin in the woods. But in the mean time, you can watch videos from the actual place, too! Check them out!
Until next time!
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A special P.S.! As a brief aside, I have this constant looming sense of dread that I’m not remembering enough about positive experiences in my life, so sometimes these reflections become an exercise in fighting myself, trying to control the urge to compulsively document every positive experience I had, for myself and for posterity. It’s a weird tightrope to walk. It’s really just for me, too, more than anything. Hopefully you got a good picture of what I did at work, but for myself, it’s hard sometimes to feel comfortable in what I can remember or recall freely. Not that necessarily matters here much, but hopefully the neuroticism doesn’t come through too strongly. Either way, I’m going through experiences at work in my head right now as I type, trying to figure out what’s really important to remember and what’s not, because I don’t really want to lose anything. But I need to come to grips with being comfortable with forgetting some things. And that’s hard! Memory is weird, and it’s my biggest fear. So let me know if I get too neurotic!
