The Dawn of My Career Voyage

Imagine this: After an hour of off trail navigation through downed trees, up nearly vertical mountain slopes, across boisterous rivers, and over fresh bear shit, you arrive and at a lush clearing in the forest where the groundcover is vibrant with patches of purple and yellow flowers and the winding brook is babbling back at the bathing songbirds. Three deer beam at you in the distance, still gnawing in circular rhythmic motions on the forage they’ve yanked out of the fertile soil. The sunlight comes and goes in waves as wholesome cotton candy clouds drift by above at a surprisingly impressive speed considering the light breeze you feel from where you stand in the subalpine meadow you’ve discovered. You take a few strides forward and your tattered hiking boots are now toeing the edge of a pool that has diverged from the stream. A tiny plop three feet down the bank directs your vision to a copper-colored frog paddling leisurely to the opposite shoreline. It’s just a Pseudacris you say under your breath. Adorable, yes, but not your aim. A couple more careless strides to the low side of the pool and your boots are now two inches deluged in muddy water that the mat of grasses furtively hid. Subtle movements in the mud grasp your curiosity, so you squat down for a closer look, squinting painfully to see into the puddle, which only reflects the gray image of the clouds overhead. Then you see them and gasp: metamorphs! Awwwww! In your imagination, you couldn’t construct a cuter image than the one in front of your eyes: the smallest toads you can dream up, freshly morphed out of the tadpole stage, jet black and kicking lazily through the puddle. More of them are crawling through the mud and suddenly you feel surrounded, fearing that your feet may tragically be on top of a few. You’ve had ten quick seconds to embrace the moment for what it is: the warmth in your chest, the crows feet of your smiling eyes, positivity pulsing through your veins like when you stare into a huge cardboard box to find a litter of excited puppies leaping up to greet you. Suddenly, you hear the hungry grumble of thunder and peer up to see that the blue is gone and drops of rain are beginning to spot your face. Your biggest enemy in the wilderness is a lightening storm that builds quicker than you can react. With a jolt, your heart begins to race knowing that you’ll be burnt toast if you don’t seek lower elevations and heavy tree cover, so you estimate the number of metamorphs in your vicinity – twenty, fifty, eh… two hundred-ish – and bound down the mountain toward safety. The warm feeling from before now originates from the release of adrenaline, and as you race through the woods you wish the day had blessed you with a cloudless sky so you could sit down in the saturated meadow and watch the tiny toads swim laps across the puddles. Yet, that’s just another unpredictable day on the job, and you’re thankful for both the pleasure and the fear it brought you, as well as all the emotions in between.

Let’s rewind.

  

A job hunt from scratch with few applicable credentials can feel like looking for a needle in a haystack or Sasquatch in your own backyard. Out of desperation, I applied the shotgun approach toward the situation, and to emphasize my use of the word desperation, I thought I ought to annotate by providing the Dictionary.com definition of shotgun approach.

shotgun approach: (noun) the hasty use of a wide range of techniques that are nonselective and haphazard.  

            If you know the slightest bit about my personality, you may agree that that ain’t my style. So there I was, emailing every local field biologist I could think up, offering my free assistance to the Forest Service and Nature Center, and drafting cover letters justifying my merit in the form of passion for the outdoors and work ethic. I came up short all fall and grasped still air with cold and empty hands all winter.

            Applying for jobs became a game of sorts, without consequence nor reward. I sought out every job in the Western United States that I fulfilled at least a few of the minimum requirements for, which amounted to around 150 jobs. I would take a moment to paint a mental picture of my life in each position, revamp my resume, draft up a new cover letter, and send it off into the deep abyss of the Internet, expecting nothing in return. I was at peace with the idea that I was simply gifting my employers with one more application to shuffle through and coldly toss aside. I suppose I became numb to the rejection. Yet there was still that glimmer of hope, like the first star to shimmy through the orange evening sky, that someone somewhere would give me a chance.

Driving toward Tuolumne Meadows

            Spring burst through the frost and in a matter of three weeks, I received ten requests for interviews. Things were looking up! I created tables weighing pros and cons for each job and studied up for the interviews. A few were nerve-racking, a few were pleasant, but only one truly moved me. In fact, it felt less like an interview and more like chatting with an old friend that I hadn’t seen in years. Everything about the job description was thrilling, too: backpacking, Yosemite, endangered species, bighorn sheep, amphibians, physically demanding, $25 per day stipend… wait what? Can I even live off that income? I decided I’d make that sacrifice for the sake of my happiness. How could I not when the quote I held most dear during this career searching voyage was “Look for a situation in which work brings you as much happiness as your spare time.”

            So I accepted the position, passing up an opportunity to perform small mammal trapping at a GS-5 level for the Forest Service in Lake Tahoe, another to work in fisheries in Eureka, and a few others that I could have succeeded in. I was going to spend my summer as an ecological intern for the USGS in Yosemite National Park.