"There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you." -- Maya Angelou
The trees were twenty to thirty feet tall and starting to be high enough to block the view of the valley. We drove past the old cutting unit and I was thinking, I helped plant those trees. There are other places around the forest where I was instrumental in reforesting a cutting unit, either from actually planting the seedlings, or as an inspector or contracting officers representative administering a planting contract.
And there are thinned areas that I had helped create, again, either by wielding a chainsaw and thinning out the dense conifer growth, or through administering a contract to thin the forest.
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| Time to say goodbye, Starkey Experimental Forest and Range. |
Trees are located around the forest that I personally selected to become part of the genetics program for the region. Timber sale units had been identified and marked on the ground, and trees were marked for harvest, or for leave trees, usually by following a prescription written by a silviculturist, by me. There are stumps with my stump mark on them. The first time I marked trees, the prescription was to mark every ponderosa pine larger than 14 inches diameter to cut. Now, most of the timber prescriptions call for cutting trees with diameters smaller than 21 inches. How’s that for a change? Before it was to cut all the yellowbellies, as the larger ponderosa pines were known, now the call is for cutting trees that are of a smaller size class.
There are scientific papers that I helped produce, mostly in the collecting of data for stand conditions, fire return intervals, martens, pileated woodpeckers, western toads and black bear diets. Who can say they had a job to sort through bear scat to identify the berries and insects?
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| Basking in the good weather in the Eagle Cap Wilderness Area. |
There are biological assesments, environmental assesments, environmental impact statements and allotment management plans that I have had a role in writing.
There are wildfires that I helped suppress, although I really suspect the weather had more to putting out the fires than my little pulaski ever did. And there were the wildfires I helped mop-up, carrying a bladder bag of water on my back and hosing down every hot spot we'd see.
It has been a great experience working for the Forest Service. I want to stress that most of the people I have worked with have been stellar. Fabulous. Nice. Pleasant. Kind. Understanding of my quirks and incompetencies. Yes, you would have to be a great person to put up with me. And the work has been awesome, in some of the best country on earth!
The first year I worked for the Forest Service was the last year that Jerry Ford was President. There has been some history developed between the agency and me. And yet, I feel that most of that relationship has been, how do I say this, not necessarily one sided, but certainly less than equal treatment compared to others in the agency.
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| In a cheap motel in some small town, after work, working on keying the plants found that day. |
You see, I’m a second class employee. You may not have heard of anything called a second class employee, and in fact we are frequently characterized as being temporary employees, seasonal employees, 1039 hires, summer help, et cetera.
But the bottom line is we are not treated the same as the permanent employees. No matter how well a second class employee does the job they will never receive a step increase. No matter how long a second class employee works, they will never receive a length of service award. No matter how many times they try to put money into their Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) account, they will be told they can’t do it.
I was with a group of FS employees a while back and noticed every one of them had a fleece vest or jacket, or hat, or other garment with their forest, or ranger district, or lab stitched, stenciled, or embroidered on the garment. Everybody except for us second class employees.
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| It was an absolute pleasure and awesome responsibility representing the United States as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Here I'm shaking hands with the future leaders of the world, Botswana, 1989. |
A couple years ago I was starting work on a new project and was told I could set my own schedule. So I decided to continue my usual schedule of the past thirty years and told my supervisor I’d stay on 4-10 hour days. Word got back to me that I could select my schedule so long as it was 8-ten hour days, with 6 days off. So I was very pleased that I was allowed to select my own schedule, as long as it was 8-ten hour days!
Second class Forest Service employees can code up to two weeks of their time to training. This means that they can work two weeks beyond their limit of 1039 hours. It does not mean they actually are sent to any training, workshops, seminars or conventions. What it means is they get to work two more weeks. That is all fine and well, and I suspect somewhere in the bureaucracy is a bean counter who claims the agency provides X amount of hours of training for their temporary employees. I once asked a supervisor, when I was coding my two weeks to training time, what training I had actually received. She said, with no irony in her voice, that it was on-the-job training. This is when I was mainly working by myself, doing a job I had been doing for the previous ten years.
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| Flowers seemed abundant everywhere, at times. Grindelia nana and Dianthus armeria in the beard of somebody. |
One supervisor sat me down and told I had to remove from a public website, a privately made video that was showing the Forest Service in a poor light. You see, I noticed a wet meadow that some employees of the Forest Service were using to muddy up the atv’s that they were using at work. They were driving back and forth across a wet meadow, I was told, literally hundreds of times to build a fence. Yet the NEPA documentation specifically said the FS would stay out of wet areas. I was a little torqued off. So, on my own time I videoed the damage, made the video, and posted it on Youtube.
Which for a second class employee is a no-no.
So, for those of you who haven't seen it, and realize that it is an amateur job, but was rather cathartic for all the frustrations I was experiencing, I've posted the link at the bottom.
Another supervisor sat me down at her desk and told me, "You are too chatty." This was somewhat comical to me, for it seems that most of my life people have told me I need to speak up more; I need to tell people what's on my mind. But I did change my behavior to avoid the supervisor. And afterwards realized that that was a form of bullying.
And then there is the blatant discrimination that is so rampant in the Forest Service. You may be unaware of the discrimination, but it is there. I see it a lot in the job announcements that I've seen over the past 25 years. It tears at the heart every time I would be looking for a more permanent position and there in the small print the announcement would say you can only apply for the job if you are younger than thirty-seven years old. That statement was usually within a paragraph or two of the statement that says the agency does not discriminate on the basis of age, among other things.
Sometimes the chutzpah exhibited by the agency, and people in the agency, was amazing. For example, I once applied for a term position that was the job I was doing as a 1039 employee. I did not get the position because all of my education and experience was not enough. The agency hired a person from South Carolina, who had no knowledge of the trees. He did have experience killing people overseas in the US military. So the agency hired him (maybe because they discriminate against pacifists), and I was asked to train him on the differences in Douglas-firs and grand firs. Essentially, I was asked to teach him to do the job I had been doing for the previous ten or so years.
Hey, I seem to be complaining too much. That wasn't my intention when I decided to quit the Forest Service. But if this is the only complaining I've done in over forty years of working, then maybe I should be writing a book! If anything can be learned from my second class status, to help those that follow, then perhaps it was worth it.
Overall it was a great trip. Not, you will note, was it a great career. But I did manage to get through being a second class employee.
Here's the infamous video:
Meadow Creek Destruction
So, for those of you who haven't seen it, and realize that it is an amateur job, but was rather cathartic for all the frustrations I was experiencing, I've posted the link at the bottom.
Another supervisor sat me down at her desk and told me, "You are too chatty." This was somewhat comical to me, for it seems that most of my life people have told me I need to speak up more; I need to tell people what's on my mind. But I did change my behavior to avoid the supervisor. And afterwards realized that that was a form of bullying.
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| See you on the trail, out in the woods, wandering the desert, or on top of a summit, such as Mt. Hood. |
And then there is the blatant discrimination that is so rampant in the Forest Service. You may be unaware of the discrimination, but it is there. I see it a lot in the job announcements that I've seen over the past 25 years. It tears at the heart every time I would be looking for a more permanent position and there in the small print the announcement would say you can only apply for the job if you are younger than thirty-seven years old. That statement was usually within a paragraph or two of the statement that says the agency does not discriminate on the basis of age, among other things.
Sometimes the chutzpah exhibited by the agency, and people in the agency, was amazing. For example, I once applied for a term position that was the job I was doing as a 1039 employee. I did not get the position because all of my education and experience was not enough. The agency hired a person from South Carolina, who had no knowledge of the trees. He did have experience killing people overseas in the US military. So the agency hired him (maybe because they discriminate against pacifists), and I was asked to train him on the differences in Douglas-firs and grand firs. Essentially, I was asked to teach him to do the job I had been doing for the previous ten or so years.
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| Up close and personal with some of the finer vertebrates I've worked with. |
Hey, I seem to be complaining too much. That wasn't my intention when I decided to quit the Forest Service. But if this is the only complaining I've done in over forty years of working, then maybe I should be writing a book! If anything can be learned from my second class status, to help those that follow, then perhaps it was worth it.
Overall it was a great trip. Not, you will note, was it a great career. But I did manage to get through being a second class employee.
As for you: make the most of your life. It's the only one you may have, ever. Do good. Be nice. Respect the land. And maybe I'll see you on the trails of the world.
Here's the infamous video:
Meadow Creek Destruction
"Ain't it funny how an old broken bottle,
Looks just like a diamond ring."
--John Prine
