The first time I moved back to my hometown was the summer after I graduated from college. Fresh out of school with a degree in natural resource management, I got a job working at a state park for minimum wage. Tourism was the area’s big industry, and I couldn’t find an affordable place to live. Eventually I found a place staying with a woman who offered me a room in exchange for working in her yard for ten hours a week.
I applied to work at the park because I thought I might be interested in a career as a park ranger. As it turned out, the job was crap. I cleaned incredibly dirty restrooms for six hours a day and picked up trash / mowed for the rest. The rangers treated us park aides like we were juvenile delinquents doing community service time (and I know this because we had kids doing community service, and they got treated the same) and apparently I looked sketchy because the moms clutched their kids’ hands when they walked into the women’s restrooms and saw me cleaning. And that made me feel very uncomfortable. At the time, my gender presentation was relatively ambiguous, so I think it’s most likely they thought I was a guy and that I didn’t belong in the women’s restroom. Or else they thought I looked like someone who was going to molest their children. (at the time, I was working through pain surrounding the religious community where I grew up, where there are many people who do think ALL gay people are child molesters. So I assumed other people thought that too.) Anyway, the scenery was nice, but the job was no keeper.
And the woman I was working for was unstable. She would act friendly towards me sometimes and other times would scream at me and accuse me of things. I tried to meet my end of the agreement but felt unsafe at home and tried to spend as little time there as possible. I kept trying to find another place to live but it wasn’t affordable.
Also, she lived in what appeared to be an all white housing development on an Indian reservation. To get to her house, I had to go through a guard station. I felt like the guard was there to keep the reservation residents out, and I was uncomfortable with it.
Eventually the woman kicked me out cuz she didn’t think I was getting enough done on her yard. I wasn’t too sorry about it other than I didn’t trust her at all. My brother came up when I packed up my stuff. We cleaned really well and took about a hundred photos of the condition of the room in case she decided I had done something and called the police. I was afraid she would decide I was trespassing and wanted to have an officer there when I moved out, but we decided against it.
Anyway, I decided to submit my resignation to my parks job, too. My grandpa was dying of cancer, my family was doing hospice care for him at home, and I thought that was infinitely more worthwhile than my crap job.
The park rangers were jerks about me quitting two months into the summer season. One said he thought I should have given a month’s notice for them to hire someone else cuz that’s what he would do. Thanks dude, only problem is I’m currently HOMELESS. What the fuck. Another said all the out of area folks they hired turned out to be unreliable, so they should only hire locals. I ended up wasting a ton of money spending a week in the cheapest hotel I could find while working out my notice cuz I wasn’t brave enough to sleep in my truck. At no time did anyone mention me possibly camping at the park for free or a reduced rate.
And I came home for a month during which time I helped care for my grandpa and experienced the family insanity generated by the patriarch’s death. And it was one of the most transformative experiences of my life and totally worth it, but I was glad to head to Seattle after a month to start the Americorps position I’d already lined up.
The end.
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