On a snowy Saturday in February, seven just-fired, now-former U.S. Forest Service employees — including my partner and me — gathered in our living room, in a small town nestled against the east slope of the Washington Cascades, to mourn, rage and toast the end of an era. Each of us had worked for the Forest Service for at least five years — some for over a decade — and after years of seasonal work, all of us had finally, last year, been promoted to permanent positions. None of us made more than $23 an hour; none of us had ever received a negative performance review.
We sipped whiskey from jam jars. We made a pyramid of Rainier beers on the coffee table and picked them off one by one. We shared brownies, chips and dips, and stories. Stories that some of us had heard many times already: ill-fated bushwhacks in search of lost trails; unsettling encounters, human and not, deep in the woods. These stories are our oral history, our institutional knowledge — a record of a way of life, one dedicated to service and stewardship, that our country is on the verge of losing.
Every summer, my trail crew cleared thousands of downed logs from hundreds of miles of trail, often in burned forests. We used dynamite to blast away backcountry rockslides. We built bridges by hand in the wilderness. We planned and supervised projects for volunteer groups and youth corps. Our mule packer, who was also just fired, hauled in supplies and tools for those partner crews, as well as for our own crew, the fire crews and the tree-planting crews. Our wilderness rangers buried thousands of pounds of poop and packed out thousands of pounds of trash every year from fragile alpine ecosystems. They assisted on search and rescue missions, and, by intercepting unprepared hikers, prevented many more rescues from needing to happen at all.
The more time I spent doing trail work, the more convinced I was that becoming aware of our interdependence with the land and with each other is crucial to humanity’s survival.
Our work was physically challenging and never lucrative, but we did it because we believe in the importance of access to public lands. The day-to-day reality of our jobs only reinforced that belief. Spending time in wild spaces is what makes us feel at once more human and more connected to the world outside our individual human selves. In my job on a trail crew, I experienced this power for myself every day, at the same time that I worked to make it possible for the public to do so, too. The more time I spent doing trail work, the more convinced I was that becoming aware of our interdependence with the land and with each other is crucial to humanity’s survival.
Working in the woods wasn’t always a “dream job.” Over my eight years on a Forest Service trail crew, I endured countless minor injuries — strains and sprains, puncture wounds and bright green bruises, insect stings that made my limbs swell alarmingly — and I watched friends and co-workers suffer worse. In a still male-dominated field, I put up with plenty of casual misogyny, men who assumed that I was less strong or smart or experienced than I am. I worked in driving rain, in shoulder-season snow, in triple-digit heat, in burned forests where trees fell without warning. I took immense pride in all of it, but the low pay got harder to stomach each time I hefted my pack and stepped out, saw on my shoulder, onto the trails I’d come to know like rooms in a childhood home.
It’s a testament to Forest Service workers’ belief in the fundamental value of our jobs that so many of us stuck with it, even when cushier options presented themselves, even when our work so often felt invisible and unappreciated. Many hikers don’t even realize that trails need maintenance on an ongoing basis, especially after wildfires, and that the scale of that essential work requires experienced professionals with local knowledge. The trail users we encountered on the job often assumed we were volunteers. The outpouring of support for fired federal workers over the past few weeks has meant the world to people like me, but it’s also been a sharp reminder of how much of the important work done in this country is easily taken for granted, until it’s suddenly gone.
Many hikers don’t even realize that trails need maintenance on an ongoing basis.
Assurances that we’ll all find other jobs before too long miss the point. We don’t necessarily want other jobs. We don’t want sympathy. We want our work, and the places we’ve done that work, to be recognized and valued.
A few weeks before we were fired, my partner and I went to see a beloved local band play at a beloved local bar, the kind with old wooden skis and crosscut saws on the wall, where regulars wear hoodies memorializing the last big wildfire. During set break, we fell into conversation with a couple on the patio. We tried to describe what we did for a living. The sweaty, dirty days of running saws in shadeless, burned-over forests. The long backcountry trips when we eagerly awaited the twice-daily fire weather forecast on our two-way radios. How we met and fell in love as our rawest, stinkiest selves.
“What a beautiful life,” the woman said. My knee-jerk reaction was to rankle at the romanticization of what, in reality, often felt like just another form of thankless, underpaid labor. I hemmed and hawed in response, launching into a practiced speech about how, yes, it does seem cool at first to get paid to work in some of America’s most remote and breathtaking places, but before long you’re 35 years old with no savings and a tired back. Yes, we consider ourselves lucky. We’re grateful. But.
My new friend wasn’t buying it. “It really sounds like a beautiful life,” she repeated. Now that it’s gone, I know — as I’ve always known, deep down inside — how right she is.
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