I spent several years working as an interpreter, making the natural world relateable to the people who came to the National Forests. I went on to make maps, and gave my weekends as a volunteer, holding campfire programs and leading hikes. When I worked in conjunction with the US Forest Service, I saw the funding and people slowly trickle away, so that forest visitors arrived to see ghost towns of a former heyday. There was no one to greet them, no one to help them connect to the place they were visiting.
I became a geographer out of convenience, as it paralleled my environmental studies degree. What was a couple more classes in the grand scheme of college? I read books about a "sense of place" and I wrote essays and took tests, and I don't think I really took hold of what "place" was. It was living in my subconscious all that time, I was living out a love of place, but I couldn't find the words for it.
Years later, what was asleep in me has now awakened. The truth is that people want to care for places they love. They want to see them protected, cleaned up, and maintained. They want to share them. Now that I have children, my work is more focused. I can see how my own life has unfolded in the places I've walked and wandered, and I wish the same for the generation I am helping to raise. To that end, we spend one day a week in forests and fields, embracing the landscape before us.
Some of our time is simple, and other days we take long hikes. My goals are several: to establish in my children a love of place, to help them learn to enjoy all weathers, to teach them safety and preparedness, and to give them places that will live inside their personal store of memories. We all need somewhere to go when the world is too much. Most importantly, we all need to know that the land can give us everything we need, in a world that tells us what we need is only a click away.
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