Maggie | When plans shift...go geocaching + other pandemic reflections.
[re: mask mandate on federal land signed by this Administration]
For my friends working in Parks over the summer, visitors have not been caring about their health. Now visitors are required to care about my friends’ health. I really appreciate that.
Maggie and I met in Iceland—quite literally at a table at a hostel on the first morning of a three week adventure class through the West Fjords. It was summer and the moon was a new moon sliver series which is something only she understood and because of the midnight sun, we couldn’t see it at all… so every day we asked, “Where’s the moon, Maggie?” Because she was the only one who knew. Anyway—we saw a blue whale and the moon finally and it was magic. In the cool way the world works—our different interests and skills have led both of us to goals of careers in the Park Service. Though, both our starts in that world have had extra challenges due to covid. Maggie is amazing and fun, and I hope you enjoy our talk about all the things, including but not limited to geocaching.
“It’s been an adventure, both my parents are doctors. So I’ve seen the pandemic mostly through a medical viewpoint.
Back in early January I saw something was going on in China and thought, “This is soon going to be here!” Which I figured out before anyone was talking about it here in the United States. So, for collecting supplies for a pandemic, I was months ahead of everyone else which was really nice.”
“At the time I was living at Crater Lake National Park in Oregon, I was working in the Visitors Center there, there were three of us who staffed the Visitors Center. And, around first week of March I started noticing that cases were really high in New York and were starting in Washington State and heading south, so I knew because we were a place where most our visitors were from the Seattle area or New England, that we were in a very high risk situation. So I decided I was going to be the one to break the news to everyone that the Visitors Center was no longer going to be open—as a volunteer. Which was bold on my part. [...] literally the next day the entire country shut down.
That was a pretty rough start. Because I was like, ‘Why am I the only one seeing this?’”
Crater Lake Visitors Center from nps.gov/crla
“After we closed I stayed in the housing there for about two months because I didn’t know what was going to happen with my summer job. I had been accepted and on-boarded at Great Basin National Park Nevada as an astronomy interp Park Ranger. It was going to be my first season in the official uniform, I was really looking forward to having the Green & Gray and the flat hat. I had been working for free for the National Park Service for the last two years,working towards this. Crater Lake was gracious enough to let me stay in their house until I knew what was going to happen [...] then Great Basin rescinded my offer. So then I had no job.”
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I had not seen what PPE looked like before, and she [her mom] walked out of the airport with a face-shield, and N95, a surgical mask on top of that, and gloves. And I was like, ‘okay this is real.’
We managed to drive across the country in three days. Normally it takes me a week or week and a half to do that. We tried to stop as little as possible because we knew that infection control measures were not being taken seriously at any of the places we needed to stop. We had people glaring at us, we had people making weird comments. It was constant every single time we went to get gas.
I got home the first week of May, and I’ve been here in Rhode Island ever since [Jan. 2021].”
“I worked for the State for a little bit [...] living with two doctors who are exposed every single day, it’s been pretty on edge in this house. I notice that my parents are grumpy and tired, and they haven’t had a day off in almost a year. It’s a lot to watch. I think a lot of people are isolated from the medical practitioner experience right now in this country, and I am living it everyday.”
“I have started new hobbies [...] As the weather started to get very cold, I decided that I wanted to start geocaching—which is not a winter time activity in New England, but I am doing it anyway. So it’s like twenty degrees out and I am still marching around in the woods looking for containers that are hidden so I can find them and sign their log books. It’s been a lot of fun.
It’s been fun to look at the different maps and imagine adventures and going places. In my normal life I am living and working in National Parks so I am surrounded by little adventures like that [...] so I am trying to create that same sort of feeling but in a new setting. So still map research, planning trips, planning destinations. All the same skill set that I am used to using, but the adventure is not to look at a cool rock or cool sunset, but to find a hidden container.”
“Its [pandemic] opened up pathways that I didn’t know existed, because they did not exist before the pandemic. The prime example here is that I’ve wanted to go to grad school, but the GRE is really complicated to request accommodations for [...] Because of the pandemic GRE cannot be done in person, so the program I was looking at waived the GRE requirement for January starts. And I was like, ‘this is my moment to apply.’ [...] It was the perfect way to open an opportunity that I thought was more or less off the table.”
Below are two photos from our Iceland-times way back in 2015 (!!!) First is Maggie in the amazing Hornstrandir Peninsula and the second is us looking VERY sassy and unhappy on our last day in Reykjavik.
Thanks for sharing your time and story with me Maggie!
“There are reasons to be hopeful for the future.”
