Content area
Full Text
Visitors to our national parks experience much more than a brush with nature or a quick glimpse of history, thanks to thousands of rangers who consider the job a calling. Here are three of their stories.
North Dakota in the 1960s. A Native American man tells his son about a park ranger he'd recently met-a man in a broad-brimmed hat who cares for the trees and the river. The awestruck child imagines a ranger at least ten feet tall, with the best job in the world.
Meanwhile, in Maryland, an inquisitive boy with a butterfly net pursues insects on the family farm, his curiosity piqued when he cant identify his finds in popular Golden Field Guides.
At the same time, a teenage girl accompanies her neighbor to the Florida Everglades, and her fascination with the lush plants and abundant birds lingers long after she returns home.
Flash forward four decades later. Gerard Baker has since assumed the duties of his childhood idol, working at Mount Rushmore National Monument. Keith Langdon, the Maryland farm boy, can now tell visitors to Great Smoky Mountains National Park that there's a beetle with his name on it: Anillus langdonii, to be precise. And the Miami teenager, Sandy Dayhoff, has spent more than 30 years as a ranger, introducing young people to the Everglades ecosystem.
Baker, Langdon, and Dayhoff belong to an extraordinary corps of about 8,000 National Park Service (NPS) employees who proudly wear the ranger uniform. Although rangers in the 388 units in the system dress identically-whether working in immense natural tracts or intimate cultural and historic sites-they're actually diverse specialists in botany, ecology, history, archaeology, and curatorial sciences. The 1916 Organic Act, which created the National Park Service, pledges employees to "preserve the scenery, natural resources, and historic objects unimpaired for current and future generations," and these three rangers embody the act's ideals. Despite worrisome budget cuts that currently provide only two-thirds of the funding needed to operate the National Park System, most rangers consider their careers far more than a 9-to-5 obligation. Rangering is their lifestyle.
Answering the Call
"I feel very fortunate I grew up surrounded by natural resources," says Baker, recalling his youth on a windswept cattle ranch. "I had the opportunity to...