A Sense of Place: Stories of Stewardship from the National Park Service

Maps

In conversation with Nancy Haack. Who makes sure you can find your way around a national park? --- TRANSCRIPT: --- NANCY MORBECK HAACK (narrator): Some people will never be a map reader. They will never get the information. It’s not because they’re dumb. Their mind’s just not wired that way. So, it’s another thing we had to consider always with the maps we made because I think it’s even less than half of the population can successfully get the information from a map. LU ANN JONES (host): That’s Nancy Morbeck Haack. She spent 34 years working with the National Park Service publications group at Harpers Ferry Center. HAACK: Originally when I came, I worked on everything. You name almost any park that was around before 1970, I worked on it. JONES: Over the course of her career, Haack researched and designed dozens of maps for the Park Service, but among her most lasting contributions was the impact she made on the philosophy of cartographic design and information within the NPS. That philosophy was grounded in childhood experiences. HAACK: Even before I went to college, I loved maps. I read maps. I was what I’ve always called a “map head.” We traveled all over the country when I was a kid, four kids in a station wagon; first time, no seatbelts. [laughter] Went to lots of national parks, and I usually got to read the map because I could. Nobody taught me. It’s like people who are good at music—I understood it. I understood it right away. I read Esso maps, Esso road maps, extremely clear and concise. They weren’t full of a lot of extra stuff, unlike Rand McNally or National Geographic maps. They worked, you got to where you needed to go, and they always were there. So that was always, in my mind, my standard of what a good map looked like. JONES: I’m National Park Service historian, Lu Ann Jones, and you’re listening to “A Sense of Place: Stories of Stewardship from the National Park Service.” In this series, we’re diving deep into the oral history archives of the National Park Service, to bring you the stories of the people who shaped the parks, and the Service. Today: Maps. HAACK: Vince Gleason was the head of National Park Service publications at Harpers Ferry Center, and he really wanted to move forward in the design world with the brochures. I had even noticed as a kid and a young person that the brochures were all over the place--all different colors, sizes, shapes, style, even messages, because there was no centralized structure for them. JONES: The problems with the existing park maps may have been imperceptible to the average visitor. They were certainly attractive, and detailed – but the question remained: could anyone actually read them? The consensus was: not really. So, when Haack joined the Park Service in 1977, her primary objective was designing maps that focused on communication first and foremost. To do that, she’d had to consider the way regular people actually absorb information, and tailor her designs to their needs. Questions of orientation and labeling and how thick the lines should be were all driven by a single purpose: the need to communicate. The most significant design switch involved moving to a four-color system. HAACK: I was hired as a professional cartographer. Vince was very excited that he would have someone who could help on his path to this high-style, high-quality four-color maps. So, my job was to plan, design, and what we say compile, meaning collect the information for the map itself. Vince used the maps as one of his justifications for four-color. Now, he wanted that for photographs, too, of course, because we had brochures that were orange and blue. I mean, really unattractive things. Purple. Purple water.  My favorite thing is the purple water. Haack had studied under some of the preeminent cartographers of the day at the University of Wisconsin. She’d learned the latest mapping technology as well as generalized cartographic theory. Among the most significant lessons she’d learned: that a map is a system of communication. Appearance is important, but design decisions have to be motivated. The colors, lines, the symbols – they should all cater to the way people actually think. In other words: no purple water. HAACK: Vince had his definite ideas, most of which were crazy. Because of the language of maps, he wanted the maps to look like the terrain. So, he wanted all the desert maps to look the same. If there weren’t trees, he wanted it to be brown. I would show him examples of Yosemite. Yosemite, up in the northern or the highest parts of Yosemite, there weren’t any trees. Was he going to show that differently than Yosemite Valley? Now, this was way before all these aerial photographs are being used as maps. This was still when I felt very strongly that the parks had to be green. That’s what people expected. They saw green, they think park and they think National Park, because it was a National Park brochure. So that took a long time to work through that, to keep it simple. Red roads, green parks, blue water. JONES: The shift to four-color maps prompted a whole other series of map standards. Standards Haack wasn’t fully prepared to implement on her own. She had trained in the philosophy of cartography, but not the philosophy of general publication design. For that, she teamed with the chief designer for park publications, Nick Kirilloff. HAACK: He was looking for much more of a grace of form. When you put an area label on, for example, the computer or a person who had no training would just plop it on there, but he would position it so it covered the area that it was identifying and there was no mistake of what it was. I mean, that sounds so obvious. Cartographers had all sorts of rules about the first position, the second position, where to put a label according to a town dot, and he didn’t follow those rules. He went with what worked, how people could understand that that label went with the dot. JONES: But aside from standardizing the width of lines, use of colors, and where to put the labels, the new park maps had a different approach to visual communication. A different way of thinking about the way the maps are used. HAACK: The visitor-use map, it’s different than a map up on a wall, it’s different than a map in a book, it’s different than a map in an exhibit. So, some parks are very welcoming. Other parks were pretty set in their ways. If it was a new map, it was easier to have a highly edited map, because the genius of the map is what’s not on it. We had a map done by a contractor of Mesa Verde and it showed the sewage lagoons. We didn’t need to show the sewage lagoons for the visitors, but it was complete. So that’s the sort of thing to think about. A map doesn’t have to show everything. It shouldn’t show everything. It has to have a reason, whether you’re driving around or you’re highlighting where things happened. One of my favorite ones is constant requests for detail maps. So, I had to convince them that the public didn’t need to know where the ice machine was on the brochure map. That wasn’t the function of the brochure map. Usually when you were there, you looked around, you could see everything, so it was a waste of time and money, but people were so in love with maps, they thought that that was a solution. Of course, the percentage of people who couldn’t read the map, anyway, it didn’t reach; that information didn’t get to them. So, we still had detail maps that showed you where the ice machine is, but not as many. Parking lot maps, yes, the famous parking lot maps that show you how to get to the Visitor Center. I’m sorry. We all go to shopping malls. We find our way into the stores, right? [laughter] So there are a lot of unnecessary maps. JONES: Sometimes it took a bit of convincing park staff to see the value of a more selective approach--but only a bit. HAACK: I think the proof was when they saw the map and they could read it. I think that’s what swayed them. So, there wasn’t a lot of “No, no, no” on my part. It was taking in all the information, creating the appropriate map. JONES: The same standards applied to wayside maps. HAACK: Once again, it’s a visitor-use map, so it has to be how they understand it. If you’re standing looking north, a north-oriented map is fine, or if you’re standing and the map is a big overview and you’re not really looking at anything, a north map is fine, but if you’re looking at something, the map better be oriented just as the vision is. And that’s been an ongoing fight, and I’m sure it’s still going on today. The people don’t get it. Like a trailhead, you want it to be going out and coming back as you’re looking. JONES: Considering how each map would be used by the visitors assured there was no one-size-fits all approach to cartography in the parks. But it also assured that park visitors would always find them useful. Consider battle maps, which operate on a totally different organizational logic, and consequently, offer a different set of challenges. HAACK: There are many, many excellent battle maps out there, which most people, even map readers, can’t understand, and they don’t need to understand, right? We don’t need to know where so-and-so stopped and tied his shoe on the way to the left oblique or whatever. [laughs] But the Civil War buffs need to know that. That’s what the difference is. I ran into a lot of pushback from Civil War people because I didn’t want to have maps that looked like that. I wanted maps that would just briefly tell the big picture and move on. If somebody wanted to know where a particular regiment was, there are tons of maps other places. They don’t need it in the brochure map or even in an exhibit map that way. There are tons of places they can find that. So, the whole thing was, once again, simplify, simplify. Our late great publications historian, Ray Baker, was excellent at summing up all—he knew all the little details, but he could sum up the big picture better than a lot of parks could, and that’s what led me to realize you could make a very simple map, what we would call multiples, small multiples or series of maps showing change over time, and it would be a snapshot of that time. The only way to really show battle action is with animation, and we couldn’t do that in a brochure. The films do a great job of that. That’s where you show what happened in the battle, because you really show the troops moving back and forth. The other thing they didn’t like is I didn’t use all the traditional battle symbols. I used arrows, but there are lots of crazy rectangles with slashes through them and things that meant things to people who knew the code, and even putting a legend wasn’t good enough. We found out really early that people read the width of the line as the number of troops, even if you didn’t intend that, so we were very careful after that to not show—sometimes you show a wide base because they were coming from a big area. Well, they read that as many more people. JONES: Haack is credited with really driving this movement toward a more visitor-centered approach to cartography in the park service. With designing maps to help regular people navigate the sites they were visiting – which was challenging, since, for years, Haack wasn’t sent to the sites she was mapping. HAACK: I didn’t go to parks for a long time. It was awful. I made maps of these places without going to the parks for the Park Service. I’d been to a lot of them on my own time. So that was another issue that to be a visitor advocate was really difficult when I was never a visitor [laughter]. JONES: So how exactly did she design maps of places she’d never visited in a professional capacity? HAACK: It’s magic. [laughs] No, a lot of research, a lot of research, and we didn’t have the Internet for research, lots of books. The thing that was so great about Ray Baker, this historian I mentioned, is you could go in and ask him any question about anything, not just history, and he’d turn around and get a book off his shelf and give it to you. [laughs] So it was a treasure trove, a treasure trove of information. I’m an information-driven person. JONES: Eventually, Haack did get to make more site visits—and the parks she visited were better for it. HAACK: Well, Mesa Verde is the one that comes to mind--no one could figure out how to leave that park. [laughs] They’d come to these intersections and there’d be a sign to here, a sign to there, but no sign to park exit, no sign to the Visitor Center, no sign to anything. And they [park staff] actually were very grateful—Bill Gorden was the editor out there with me—very grateful to us because Bill and I had traveled quite a bit and cursed out signs everywhere we went, particularly in non-park areas in New England. We thought they [the signs] were sort of like downtown Washington, D.C., how horrible they are. So, Mesa Verde, they took our advice, they changed the signs, and now people can leave. [laughter] JONES: Nancy Haack retired from the Park Service in 2011. And since then advances in navigational technology have only made the world more accessible. These days, travelers are more likely to turn to their iPhones than print maps. Unless they happen to be visiting a national park, where the scarcity of cell towers means that GPS is less likely to work. For those visitors, Haack is happy to know her print maps will always be available to help them find their way. HAACK: Yeah. The idea that you are contributing something for these park visitors was important to me, so that kept me going, kept me coming to work. JONES: This has been “A Sense of Place: Stories of Stewardship from the National Park Service.” I’m your host, Lu Ann Jones. My colleague Betsy Ehrlich and I conducted the interview with Nancy Haack in Purcellville, Virginia, in 2016. This episode was produced by Emma Courtland and Robin Miniter, with assistance from Marcelino Vialpando, for the National Park Service. Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

The Hidden History of Park Publications

In conversation with Ed Zahniser. Why do national park brochures have a distinctive look? --- TRANSCRIPT: --- LU ANN JONES (HOST): Today, when you visit a national park -- no matter which park you visit -- you receive a brochure with entry. It’s a glossy, sturdy piece of paper, folded in half and quartered, with a thick black band running across the top. Whether you’re visiting a desert park or a forest park, a glacier or a beach, these cultural and literal roadmaps to the parks articulate a unified system of land management. But it wasn’t always like that. I’m National Park Service Historian, Lu Ann Jones, and you’re listening to “A Sense of Place: Stories of Stewardship from the National Park Service,” a podcast series about the people who shaped the parks, and the Service. Today: the hidden history of parks publications. ED ZAHNISER (NARRATOR): I don’t know how to make this story short. [laugh] JONES: That’s Ed Zahniser. ZAHNISER: I’m a retired senior writer/editor for the publications group of the National Park Service. JONES: For almost as long as there have been national parks, there have been park brochures—but the earliest iterations were worlds away from the brochures we know today. The very first were created by the first park stewards, the United States Army in 1916, the year the National Park Service was born. Later, production was handed over to railroad companies, since most of the traffic to and from the parks was on trains. Over the years, publications continued to evolve as the number of parks in the system grew—and grew. By the middle of the 20th century, there were over 250 parks. And each had its own brochure, with its own singular design. For the publications department, it was a lot handle. Something had to give. The National Park Service began to reimagine publications as a system, rather than a collection of unique titles. To articulate that system to the public—and keep up with the growing demand for publications— they needed standardization, in both the look and the voice of their print materials. To meet those needs, in 1970 the National Park Service opened an Interpretive Design Center. For the first time, the parks’ various interpretive media functions – audiovisual, publications, museum exhibits – were located under one roof. Still, inefficiencies remained. ZAHNISER: Shortly before I came, the protocol, I was told, was that the editors would write a manuscript and just sort of, in the parlance of publishing world, throw it over the transom to the designers, and they would lay that out as a brochure. And the size of the brochure would really depend on how long the text was or how short the text was.  So they weren’t that involved in the concept. They were, like, illustrating a piece of writing.  JONES: When Zahniser joined the office of publications at Harpers Ferry in 1977, the NPS was undergoing a cultural renaissance. They wanted to reach ordinary park visitors—folks who were curious about but not specialists in archeology or wildlife biology or geology or any of the myriad subjects explored in national parks. And revitalizing their publications was a big part of that mission. To do that, the publications office needed to make some changes: they needed a more efficient workflow; they needed a welcoming voice and standardized design; they needed Massimo Vignelli. ZAHNISER: I thought that the best thing that ever happened to the office was Massimo Vignelli. JONES: Modernist designer Massimo Vignelli had recently won acclaim for designing New York’s subway signage and maps. But the national park publication project presented the designer with a unique set of challenges. Chief among them was how to unite such naturally and culturally diverse sites under a single design standard, while still capturing what was special about each one. His solution was misleadingly simple. ZAHNISER: He established the idea of a design platform, and that the more gridded that platform was, the less time you spent wondering what size sheet of paper should we use, should it be horizontal, should it be vertical, should it be this wide or that wide? He established that for printing economy, but part of design is recognizing that you’re doing this on paper, and these papers go through presses, and presses are a certain size. So those sheets of paper were all standardized in width and modularized so you could have a narrow brochure, and it would be half of the whole sheet, and then you could have different lengths.  JONES: Vignelli’s modular grid system measured roughly 16 inches by 23 inches. Those dimensions allowed the Park Service to create brochures in ten different sizes and formats. A distinctive black bar at the top maintained a consistent look; inside this bar, the pamphlet or page title is set in white Helvetica typeface. And he called it unigrid. ZAHNISER: We had this theory of thirds, which I think still stands: which is that anything you look at can be pleasingly divided, I mean, intellectually pleasingly divided into three parts, visually and intellectually. JONES: The unigrid is not just another template. It is a comprehensive graphic design system that standardized formatting and production. It allowed the designers, writers, and cartographers to focus on content and creativity while conveying a strong visual identity for the agency. Perhaps most importantly, Vignelli’s unigrid concept allowed designers and editors to work together, to focus on visual and written content simultaneously. ZAHNISER: So that set the stage, I think, for the writer and the designer and eventually the cartographer to really work together in advance of doing anything, to work together on what’s the story, how do we tell it, how do we divide it up. I think Vignelli at least intuitively understood that a reader makes a preconscious decision when looking particularly at print. There’s a preconscious decision of whether or not this looks like I can readily read it, and today there are so many other options instantly available, that if you look at something and the type is too dense, you will move on.  So, you’ve wasted whatever effort you put in, you know, big budget, into trying to communicate. JONES: All this time and effort for the sake of communicating with visitors they would probably never meet. And that’s the job of the Service members at the Interpretive Design Center -- toiling behind the scenes to enhance the visitor experience, through engaging print materials like brochures and signs, and later, books. ZAHNISER: Vignelli was not a writer, but he was a genius designer, just no question, and a visual genius, too. Because in that Yosemite book, like we were talking before this interview about how we provided him with six hundred photographs. He came to our office to work on that book, and we started at about ten o’clock in the morning.  So we had these six hundred photographs, and he went through a lot of the photographs. I had been working with the photographs for a couple of months, so I had a pretty good grasp of what they were and how they related to the different parts of the book that we were trying to present. At around ten o’clock in the morning, I started showing him photographs.  Well, like at three in the afternoon, he might say, “You remember that photograph you showed me?”  And he could describe that photograph from five hours ago with enough precision that I, who was pretty familiar with the whole body of photographs, could find that photograph and hand it to him.  Also, I watched him. Every once in a while, he would just stop and stare off into nothing, and I realized he’s going through every page in that book in his head. So, what we got from him were little thumbnail drawings of each two-page spread in the book, little thumbnail gestures with his fat pen, but the gestures were so accurate that the designers could place all the photographs that we selected out to go with that thumbnail dummy.  We started that book at ten a.m. and finished at midnight in the conference room. We just stayed in that office and worked that whole time. We got the manuscript set in the typography of the book.  So, as he was working on it, he was reading it, and I was in heaven, because he kept saying, “Wow, this is interesting. Did you write this?” No, he said, “Who wrote this?” I said, “Well, I wrote it.” He kept saying that, which that was great validation for me. But that was back in the days when we had time to work on those books, because there’s a lot of great stories attached to Yosemite if you have time enough to learn them and put them out. JONES: Unigrid was adopted as a cost-saving endeavor, but it would end up changing the way the publications team approached their written interpretation efforts as well. ZAHNISER: So, that started to help you think about telling stories, because most places have more than one story.  A place like Yosemite it has a natural history, it has a human history, it has a National Park Service history, it has a controversy history, and it has, in my opinion, the most spectacularly concentrated, stupendous scenery that I’ve ever seen anywhere.  We eventually convinced Vince, our boss, Vince Gleason, that since an increasing amount of energy was going into design, and into refining the cartography, that we needed writing that came up to those sorts of standards of communication.   JONES: Before this publications department renaissance, most of the writers were scientists and research historians. They had their own agendas about what should be covered. And this created some tension. ZAHNISER: We fought to present these natural parks, so to speak, as cultural places, because some of them had a cultural history that was greater than some cities. So that was a big breakthrough in treating parks holistically as a human experience, as natural experience, as humans as part of natural history, natural history as part of humanity. I quickly realized that one of my jobs as an editor was to protect the readers from geologists and archaeologists, because they want to take people so far into the weeds--because they’re not thinking about the reader. JONES: Ultimately, that’s what it’s all about. Serving the visitors. Creating materials that anticipate their needs and speak to their interests. Materials that echo the ethos of the National Park Service at large, and communicate with one voice: The parks may be diverse, but the Service, that is singular. ZAHNISER: I think somewhere you asked about, or maybe I made up my own question about, “How do you measure success?” For me, it was like I was out in Yellowstone, out of my car but at a viewing place or something, and there’s these people on bicycles and they’re reading the park brochure and reading it as a group, sort of.  “Hey, did you read about this? “Yeah.” “Well, did you read about this?” “Yeah.” That’s success. JONES: Over 25 years later, the NPS still uses unigrid for all its publications. Ed Zahniser wrote and edited new unigrid park information brochures for many National Park System areas. They included Channel Islands, San Juan Island, Death Valley, Petrified Forest, John Muir, River Raisin, Bryce Canyon, and Yellowstone. Also, among his publications are national park handbooks on Apostle Islands, Assateague, Big Bend, Great Smoky Mountains, Yosemite, North Cascades, Yellowstone, Glacier Bay, and the U.S. Virgin Islands sites. Ed retired in 2013, after 36 years with the National Park Service publications group at Harpers Ferry Center for media services. This has been “A Sense of Place: Stories Of Stewardship from The National Park Service.” I’m your host, Lu Ann Jones. My colleague Betsy Ehrlich and I conducted this interview in November 2015 at Mather Training Center in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. It’s part of our National Park Service oral history collection. This episode was produced by Emma Courtland and Robin Miniter, with assistance from Marcelino Vialpando, for the National Park Service. Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

The Urban Parks Mission

In conversation with Ed Rizzotto. How have national parks served as places of social reform? --- TRANSCRIPT: --- ED RIZZOTTO (narrator): When I was first there, one of the staff referred to one of the students as “emancipated.” And I thought it was a racial pejorative. LU ANN JONES (host): When Ed Rizzotto joined the National Park Service in the mid-1960’s, the country was at a crossroads. RIZZOTTO: Because the only time I’d heard “emancipated” was in terms of slaves after the Civil War. It turns out it’s quite a specific term. These were kids who’d been picked up and been brought into court at the age of 16 or 17. They weren’t legally adults. But the judges had looked around and their parents were in jail, dead, drugs, whatever. They declared these kids at 16 or 17 legally responsible for themselves because they had no one else in the world. We would find them and bring them back in. I mean, they literally came with the clothes on their back. And we’d get them through high school. We’d get them clothing. JONES: Just two years earlier, Martin Luther King, Jr. had led 250,000 people to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, demanding civil and economic rights for African Americans. All across the country, people were waking up to social inequities in America. And many felt called to respond -- including George Hartzog, then-director of the National Park Service. "What higher purpose can a national park serve," he asked, "than to be responsive to the crisis in our society, to the voice of the underprivileged, to the voice of the protester who's objecting to the institutional status quo?" Question was: How could the Service address the changing needs of the population, when most of the big, iconic parks were hundreds of miles from the nearest cities? The answer? Establish new parks -- where people actually lived. I’m National Park Service historian, Lu Ann Jones. And you’re listening to “A Sense of Place: Stories of Stewardship from the National Park Service.” In this series, we’re diving into the oral history archives to bring you the stories of the people who shaped the parks and the Service. Today: the urban parks mission. In 1972 Congress created two parks to serve city residents: Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco, and Gateway National Recreation Area in New York City. That’s where Ed Rizzotto held several positions from 1988 to 1994. RIZZOTTO: Gateway was a unique experience. It was trying to do Park Service stuff for people in a big urban area who are never going to see the Park Service any other way. I mean, there’s people in New York who never leave the city. Never drive. JONES: For those urban New Yorkers, Gateway certainly delivered on the national park promise. RIZZOTTO: We had a wonderful national wildlife refuge there, which you can reach on a subway line. The A Train goes to Jamaica Bay National Wildlife Refuge, which is part of the park. If you’re a birder, you can go there and build your life list like crazy. In a good year, we might have 400 species of birds in the park. Some of which were there all the time. There’s a lot of things you can do in New York only at Gateway. Like camping. Like horseback riding in a natural area. A lot of the salt water beaches. The park meant a lot to people. JONES: The rangers at Gateway offered much more than outdoor adventure and world class birding. They wanted the parks to feel relevant to the community, to design programs that addressed the needs and struggles of people in the surrounding boroughs. And that meant offering job training and education to youth, helping them learn skills that they could turn into work that paid well. RIZZOTTO: When I first came there, the Park Service and the Department of Labor put their money together to run a training school that was within the park. We were training restoration technicians--carpenters, bricklayers, and people who are in restoration masonry. And the way I describe that is, if you had an old house, that should have had four gargoyles--do you know what a gargoyle is?--and your old house only had three gargoyles, my kids and their instructors could copy one of the gargoyles and make you the fourth corner of the house. So, they did very high trade stuff. We had great instructors. The original intent of the program was, they would become preservation people in the Park Service. JONES: The program was called Job Corps. Originally established in 1964 as part of the War on Poverty, Job Corps has gone through many changes over the years. What made it different, though, was its approach to poverty, which was a problem of environmental and economic circumstances. The Gateway Job Corps program offered surrounding youth a comprehensive set of services that included health care, nutrition, social work, and the arts. Students completed a general education diploma and they learned a career skill. During Rizzotto’s stint as director of the Gateway Job Corps Civilian Conservation Center, the NPS hosted roughly 125 students at a time. Job Corps gave them room and board and 24/7 programming, completely free of charge – which was critical, because many of the students were extremely poor. Some were even homeless. RIZZOTTO: I remember one time I was counseling one of our tough kids. He thought he was going to be expelled. He wasn’t going to be expelled. But he started crying. I wasn’t being tough with him. He just was sad. He had come in sad. But you saw kids, these were out of the Bronx. These were tough kids. And I said, “Gee, what’s going on?” He said, “Are you going to expel me?” Here was a kid who was homeless. His mother and baby sister were homeless, too. They were living in a shelter somewhere. And the three of them were counting on him graduating, getting a job, and then they would have an apartment. They would all be off the street and could live as a family again. He was like 17 years old. JONES: Everyone knows national parks as places to hike, learn history, observe wildlife. But national parks as sites of vocational training? Of social reform? RIZZOTTO: People would criticize us. That’s why I mentioned, it wasn’t that expensive. The whole deal, including clothes for these kids, work clothes and relaxing clothes, was almost $15,000 a year. But at the same moment, across town, their peers were at a place called Rikers Island. You know what that is? It’s a juvenile facility, and that was costing the city 42 grand a year. So, I just said, just in the taxes we’re saving you, and then when they get jobs, they’re paying it back. This is a no brainer. Cause people saw it like, what are you doing--this is a social thing. We were doing good things for lots of people. It was a program I felt really--I felt good about a lot of these Park Service things. I felt good about that. And those kids are probably still out restoring buildings, for all I know. Maybe they’re contracting. Ellis Island is being fixed now, maybe they’re there. They’re old enough so they’re probably be training other people. Maybe other kids are there. I don't know, but it was a pretty cool thing. JONES: For many of the rangers in the National Park Service, stewardship is more of a calling than a job. But this may be especially true for urban rangers. Rangers like Rizzotto, for whom each day presented new opportunities to change the social landscape of the community -- not just through programming, but through small gestures of humanity and service that bonded the people to the park -- and even saved lives. RIZZOTTO: Riis Park is a big ocean beach that the Park Service runs down there. It’s a historic structure, all restored, but a big waterfront. When it was very hot, a lot of people would come down from what we would call tenements. The upper part of the city had old, old, nasty housing that typically didn’t have any air conditioning. You’re living in little boxes, not even necessarily with air shafts. They’d come down to the park for the day, normally closing at sunset. But we let them stay. We put a few extra rangers on. And they’d bring their blankets and their picnic gear and they’d kind of roll up in their blankets. We’d let them sleep on the beach because it was so much better than forcing them back up into their probably what you’d call slums. I mean, people would die in those places. I don’t mean everybody. But older people who are under stress. No air conditioning. Maybe nobody watching them. It was shelter, okay? When you look at how the balance is in Congress, we need people valuing us, understanding us, supporting us, from every place. They can’t be just rich white kids who went to prep school and had the summer to travel out west. It’s got to be kids from the city. And kids from poor families. If you’re having a hard time with food and you’re living off McDonald’s, and a park is 20 dollars to get into, then you wouldn’t go. But you can go to Gateway and you can remember that they took you in at night when it was too hot and uncomfortable to go home. And those people got to come to the parks, get the experiences. It’s a hot day. Don’t worry. The parks are open. Everything will be fine. Rangers are here to watch you. JONES: After Gateway, Ed Rizzotto moved to the Northeast Regional Office in Boston to be closer to his aging father. There, he held a number of administrative positions. He enjoyed all of them because they forwarded the Park Service’s mission. Rizzotto retired in 2011, after a nearly 46-year career, mostly with the Park Service. He now lives on Cape Cod. This has been “A Sense of Place: Stories of Stewardship from the National Park Service.” I’m your host, Lu Ann Jones. Alison Steiner conducted the interview in October 2013 at the Ranger Rendezvous in St. Louis for the Association of National Park Rangers Oral History Project. This episode was produced by Emma Courtland and Robin Miniter for the National Park Service, with help from Otis Gray. Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

The Helpers - Life, Death, and Safety in Our Parks

In conversation with Butch Farabee and JD Swed. Who do you call when you’re in trouble in a national park? --- TRANSCRIPT: --- LU ANN JONES (HOST): This episode contains stories of injury and death, so sensitive listeners are advised. There are some National Park Service rangers that visitors hope to never meet: at least under certain circumstances. Butch Farabee is one. And he’s got a lot of stories. BUTCH FARABEE (NARRATOR): Here is this little six-year-old, laying on the floor. He's been gored by a deer. The local rangers are working on him; there's blood everywhere. JONES: He was performing search and rescue and emergency medicine as a ranger -- along with JD Swed. JD SWED (NARRATOR): A Boy Scout group was up there learning to climb. Near the end of the day, one of the kids needed a couple of carabiners, so he untied one of the ropes and then tied it off with an overhand, and then took the carabiners out so he could rappel one more time. Another kid rappelled off that rope, and it just came untied and he fell to his death. JONES: They were on the front lines helping to develop the parks’ emergency response program. This would ensure that all protection rangers got advanced emergency medical and rescue training. Accidents happen. And often, in really inconvenient places: remote trails, steep cliffs, deep lakes, swift rivers, hot canyons. And when they did happen, that’s when Butch, JD, and their fellow rangers would get the call. I’m National Park Service historian Lu Ann Jones, and you’re listening to “A Sense of Place: Stories of Stewardship from The National Park Service,” a podcast series about the people who shaped the parks and the Service. Today: The helpers: life, death, and safety in our parks. Farabee joined the National Park Service in the 1960s, Swed in the 1970s-- right as two important trends emerged. Outdoor recreation was booming--and people went to the growing number of national parks to climb, hike, backpack, ski, swim, and boat. Around the same time, there was a national push to make sure that first responders received standardized emergency medical training -- that they knew more than basic first aid. FARABEE: When you went to work in the morning, you did not know what the day was going to bring. I mean, you had to know what you were doing, because otherwise you’re going to kill yourself or kill somebody else. JONES: They did a little bit of everything. FARABEE: On one given day you could be jumping out of the helicopter, darting a bear, making a felony arrest, fighting a structural fire, and starting an IV on somebody—and then you could also just do the general run-of-the-mill, take a lost person report, you know? But it was the totality of the excitement. It was the unknown. JONES: Exciting, yes. But as Farabee and Swed know, search and rescue work takes an emotional and physical toll. Sometimes rescue turns into recovery. Searching for and rescuing is one thing; dealing with the trauma of recovering bodies is another. Farabee remembers it well. He got a call out to Tenaya Canyon in Yosemite National Park. It was August 1971. A missing hiker. Farabee and a fellow ranger ascended the notoriously dangerous rock face. The young man had been missing for almost a week. The scene is gruesome. They put him in a body bag. FARABEE: We had to lower this deceased young man several different drops of maybe fifty, seventy-five feet vertically down to the next ramp; I think we were fairly as delicate as you could be under the circumstances, but we still had to get the job done. JONES: The descent was tough -- it was impossible not to jostle the stretcher and the body. FARABEE: And I'd say, "Well, jeez, I'm sorry, Rick." Of course, I wasn't making fun; what I was trying to do was do as you say, gallows humor. I was trying to protect myself and partner a little bit. Anybody that does much of this for very long has to do that. Now at a certain point, you sort of grow beyond that as well. You become hardened enough. I don't think an ER doc or a flight nurse who sees this sort of thing all the time probably doesn’t need to protect themselves that much very often. But when you're starting out, you do. JONES: As for Swed, he first learned how to deal with fatalities as a seasonal ranger at Yosemite. A gallows humor can be emotional armor. SWED: The way we dealt with it in those days is that night we got around the campfire and we drank a few more beers than we did the night when those things didn’t happen. And it was a macho deal, I learned later, you know, much later. JONES: The work can also raise thorny ethical questions. SWED: The young woman who rolled her truck and died and her parents wanted to go to the exact location. Of course, there’s a large blood spot. I took the fire truck out there and tried to wash it all off and I couldn’t. Then, morally, I had to decide whether or not I’d take them to the exact spot because of that bloodspot. I battled with that internally for a little while to try to figure it out--I don’t know if I asked for any help; I don’t recall that--but I decided that it was best to be honest. I’ve always done that with all the deaths, and I’ve handled hundreds with the Park Service in my career now, and that’s always paid off well for not only me but for the people that I was dealing with. I just set it up for them and told them, because I didn’t think it was fair to take them to a place that was a hundred yards down the road, because they would always have the wrong spot. JONES: Butch Farabee has hundreds of missions behind him, but there’s one that still stands out. He often tears up thinking about it. It was November 1977, Yosemite National Park -- and a little boy is bleeding profusely after being gored by a deer. Farabee and a park nurse were returning from another call when they heard, FARABEE: "Do you want us to bring the EMT kit?" I heard that, and I didn't hear the response, but I recognized the voice as being one of my friends. So I went on the radio and, I said, "We've got the park ambulance, we’ve got a park nurse, can we help you guys?" Whatever it is, you know, we're there. They said “Yeah, report up to the ranger station.” So we got there and here is this little six-year-old laying on the floor. What has happened is he's been gored by a deer. The local rangers are working on him, there's blood everywhere, his parents are there. So, the nurse gets on the telephone, calls the clinic inside the valley, and says, "Which way shall we go?” JONES: The doctor tells them to head toward a hospital in Fresno— eighty miles away. Farabee is driving. The nurse and the boy’s father are in the back. The boy’s mother, sister, and a family friend are following in the car behind. The roads are curvy and slippery with ice. They are a few miles outside of the park. FARABEE: The nurse says, "Butch, you better pull over. I can't get this boy's pulse." So fortunately there's a pull off and I pull in, open the back doors, and we slide a backboard underneath this little boy, and the father is sitting right there in the back seat with the kid. The car with this unknown male and the mother and the daughter slide in behind us. JONES: Farabee and the nurse begin CPR on the boy. FARABEE: And this unknown male comes up and says, "Can I help you guys?" I said, "Get in the ambulance, drive us, don't kill us." We go another fifteen minutes or so and we meet up with an ambulance that had been coming up to meet us. We switch. I know that this boy's not going to live. And as we're getting closer to the hospital, I start talking to the father. Sort of prepping him. And this man is not blind. I mean he knows what’s going on. He's been, you know, very stoic. I'm preparing him mentally, or emotionally. We pull into the ER, emergency room driveway, and they've got him out there in a surgical unit real quick. Forty-five minutes later or so, one of the surgeons comes out and the boy is dead. And the surgeon tells me, "Even if we'd been there, I don't know that we could've saved this boy," because what had happened is this little spiked horn had gone in and clipped the pulmonary artery on this boy, right underneath the heart. I had a three- or four-year-old boy of my own at this point. And so this was really pretty emotional for me, and for many, many nights, it wasn't like I laid awake and thought about it at every waking moment, but there were a lot of times when I'd cry myself, not so much to sleep—but my wife, bless her heart, was very sympathetic, very supportive. I mean, that’s forty years ago, and that’s probably the one that’s the most memorable. JONES: Farabee participated in over a thousand search and rescue and emergency medical missions before he retired. There were lives lost, but a lot more lives saved. FARABEE: I really enjoyed it. I mean when somebody got seriously, seriously hurt or killed, then it became more distasteful. But if you can get to them and alleviate that pain and/or get them out of their predicament, that was the challenge as well. And, you know, forty years ago, the state-of-the-art equipment, techniques, training was a heck of a lot less sophisticated than it is today. But when we went home at night, you had to assume that you did the best you can, even though you might have lost somebody. JONES: JD Swed discovered that he had a gift for comforting bereaved survivors -- a skill honed as he worked in national parks claiming some of the most challenging terrain on the planet. SWED: When I was up in Alaska at Denali, in those ten years there was almost a hundred deaths that I helped manage or dealt with directly, so I got really good at it. I still have people who write me letters or notes on the anniversary of their loved one’s death and thank me for helping them get through that. So it’s one of those things that I really take great pride in, in how I was able to help people all those times. There were a lot of people, especially on my staff up at Denali, who didn’t want to make that call, couldn’t make that call, and I would always take that burden. And it never seemed to be a burden to me, because I always felt that I could really help people through. I just was able to help people. JONES: Today, any protection ranger you meet will likely be certified in firefighting, EMS, and/or search and rescue. At larger parks, they could focus or even specialize in just one. But in smaller parks they may do it all. When JD Swed retired in 2009, he was the chief ranger at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in California. When Butch Farabee retired from the National Park Service in 1999 he had served as the agency’s emergency services coordinator and had received the Harry Yount Lifetime Achievement Award, given to those who exemplify the rangering tradition. “A Sense of Place: Stories of Stewardship from the National Park Service.” I’m your host, Lu Ann Jones. I conducted these interviews in October 2012 at the Ranger Rendezvous in Indian Wells, California. They were completed for the Association of National Park Rangers Oral History Project. If you’re interested in more behind-the-scenes stories of the search and rescue life, check out Butch Farabee’s book, Death, Daring, and Disaster: Search and Rescue in National Parks. It’s a must-read. This episode was produced by Emma Courtland and Robin Miniter, with assistance from Marcelino Vialpando, for the National Park Service. Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

A Park as Home

In conversation with Laurel Munson Boyers. What’s it like to spend most of your life in Yosemite National Park, from childhood to wilderness manager? --- TRANSCRIPT: --- LAUREL MUNSON BOYERS (NARRATOR): The family used to go for outings into the high country, and Dad used to carry me places in a banana box. You know, I was a little kid; we didn’t have backpacks. I think I just got the wind on my face and the feel of the mountains at a really young age, and it imprinted. There I was. I was stuck with it. LU ANN JONES (HOST): Laurel Munson Boyers has called Yosemite National Park home most of her life. She was born there, and family roots run deep in the Sierra Nevada. In the 1890s her great grandfather ran a store just south of what would become the park’s main entrance. Her grandmother developed what Boyers calls her “mountain smarts” as she grew up in the Sierra foothills and as she later shared fire lookout duties with her husband. Boyers’ parents worked for the park’s main concession company. Boyers and her brothers spent the early years of their lives there. Her backyard was the entire Yosemite Valley. As Boyers recalled: BOYERS: It was a pretty wonderful childhood I think to be raised there where this stupendous natural beauty and the world on vacation JONES: It was the early 1950s. The park system was beginning to boom. Soon new interstate highways would make parks easier to reach, and young families were eager to pile in their cars and travel. The Park Service needed new staff, new facilities. What Boyers’s parents didn’t realize is that two decades later their little girl in the banana box would find her calling in the National Park Service and she became a pioneer in her own right. I’m National Park Service historian Lu Ann Jones, and you’re listening to “A Sense of Place: Stories of Stewardship from the National Park Service,” a podcast series about the people who shaped the parks and the Service. Today: A park as home. We view Yosemite through the eyes of someone who first saw it as a child and never lost her sense of wonder. For Boyers, Yosemite is not only a park and wilderness. It’s also home, workplace, and lifelong companion. The park shaped her, and she shaped the park. The 1960s and 1970s were a time of transition here in the states -- the Civil Rights Movement. Vietnam. Energy crises. The environmental movement. The women’s movement. The National Park Service was feeling those ripples when it became Boyers’ professional home in 1976. It was an opportune time for someone with her outdoor skills, ecological values, and even temperament. Someone who had a sense of comfort and belonging in the woods. BOYERS: I was physically fit for it and I think emotionally fit for it too, because I like people and enjoyed helping people as well as this commitment to protecting wild places. I was completely comfortable here, completely comfortable on my own, very comfortable in wild settings. JONES: Boyers was among a trailblazing generation of women who assumed new roles as back country and law enforcement rangers, jobs that had traditionally belonged to men. She came to know Yosemite National Park intimately. She became a bonafide ranger. She patrolled the back country on foot, horseback, and Nordic skis. She often spent weeks at a time alone, based in remote cabins or traveling through the farthest reaches of the park. BOYERS: The rumor was that women couldn’t do the mounted ranger job because they were too weak to get the saddles up on the horses. I was the first female wilderness ranger so it was kind of like I had to be really tough. I could show no weakness. You know, I had to be really strong; so, it was hard back there. JONES: She was able to join early efforts at Yosemite to meet the national standards of legislation protecting wilderness. The first orders of business: collect visitor data and draw new boundaries around the park’s wilderness area. How many people could use a place in the wilderness before they muddied the streams or eroded trails or disturbed wildlife habitats? BOYERS: We were really encouraged to try to find out as much as we could. We did great studies, you know. We did one when I was the Nordic supervisor, we decided we needed to try to find out what we could about Nordic users: “Are you carrying a map, yes no?” You know, “Did you do what you thought you were going to do?” You know, things that came back not only to resource protection but also for really good search and rescue information about what people think they’re going to do. JONES: Yosemite was one of the most heavily traveled wilderness areas in the United States. Boyers’ boots-on-the-ground research measured how human use affected the park’s vegetation and wildlife. By 1987 Boyers was the assistant wilderness manager in the park; a decade later she had moved up to manager. As her career evolved, Boyers came to appreciate Yosemite more deeply as a homeplace. It was land that had belonged to several indigenous tribes that had been forcibly removed as well as her own birthplace. By the time she joined the Park Service, Native American inhabitants of Yosemite, new settlers, and government agencies had struggled for decades over who had the right to live there and use its resources. BOYERS: I think in Yosemite that maybe the Park didn’t look at its indigenous populations very well for quite a while--people that had been there before or people that were actually using the land in a different way than sort of the way the Europeans came to use these lands. JONES: Beginning in the 1990s, indigenous tribes from Yosemite revived a centuries old religious event known as “the walk.” BOYERS: If they’re going west to east, they go from the Valley up through Tenaya to Tuolumne and into Bloody Canyon, so over Mono Pass and down into the east side there. It is the traditional route that they used for trade with the Paiute on the east side or the Mono Indians on the east side. JONES: It lasted up to five days, with large groups of people -- crossing sensitive ecosystems of the high sierra from Yosemite Valley to the Mono Lake basin. BOYERS: We’d spent so many years dealing with group size and capacity and people and limits and things, and then all of sudden here’s this group of sixty or eighty or as many as a hundred people that want to walk as a group, and it was something that needed to be talked about. I think all of us realized that it was appropriate for them to do it and it was part of their tradition, but what about that many people doing it and what are they doing about all of the things we talked to other users about, and how do we protect the resource? JONES: And it wasn’t just about stewarding the physical space -- it was also helping to honor the relationships that inhabited it. BOYERS: Then there’s this thing, from a Native American perspective, or the tribes, the bears were their partners in life. The bears were part of their society. And for us to come in and say, “Well, don’t you have your food storage? Where are your food canisters?” JONES: Laurel sought counsel from jay Johnson and les James. They were elders and leaders of the Southern Sierra Miwuk nation. One day, they went for a walk. BOYERS: We went up to Mono Pass, and they were going to bless the route. They had wormwood smoke and took it up, and we talked all the way up. They’re both just wonderful, gentle souls, just amazing people. I was just delighted to be out in the woods with them. We went up and we got up on top of Mono Pass, and Jay lit the smoke and blessed the four directions, and they sang a song that was about the Walk. I was moved to tears with it. It was so real to me and it was so genuine, and it was so clear that what they were doing was very appropriate and very much attuned to the woods. I was embarrassed that we were so bureaucratic about the whole thing. I was like, “You are kidding me.” I mean, this is real. These people are tied to this land. This is sacred to them. What in the world am I doing as a bureaucrat saying, “No, no, no, no, no”? And it totally changed my perspective on it. JONES: And Boyers carried that perspective with her. Over the course of her career, she had witnessed a lot of growth -- in the Service, in herself. There’s an old saying that you are a product of your environment -- and it leaves one to wonder if the converse is true: how would Yosemite National Park be different without Boyers’ thumbprint? She’s retired now. But before hanging up her flat hat in 2007, she made one last backcountry patrol: a ten-day horse packing trip with friends and colleagues that spanned her career. BOYERS: We went as far as we could. We went from one end of the park to the other. All of us had done long trips. All of us had done ten-day trips. I used to do ten-day trips all the time, but not to cover one end of the park to the other, to go through all of the ecosystems. The south end of the park is very rolling, grassy, wildflowers, forested, and then you start working up higher and go over those passes, and you get into the Cathedral Range, and it has a character itself. Then you get into the Tuolumne drainage, and it has its own character. The north end is very rugged and rocky and up and down and up and down. Just to have that all in one trip was just magnificent. I was so emotional on that trip because it was the end of my career and it was such a cool time, all these neat people. Coming down through Jack Main Canyon, which is one of my favorite places, there was a little wild bear, and he came down. He kind of was up on the hill above us, and he looked at us. But it was so wild. It was just a young bear, and it was so touching to me to know that this place was back there. JONES: For Boyers the small bear was a striking symbol of all the fragile wildness she had worked to protect at Yosemite. Both she and the bear were at home. This is “A Sense of Place: Stories of Stewardship from the National Park Service.” I’m your host, Lu Ann Jones. We were fortunate enough to sit down with Boyers for a number of interviews -- here, you heard excerpts from a series of interviews conducted by myself, Brenna Lissoway, James O’Barr, Heather Young, Greg Cox, Joan Ilacqua, and Kathy Komatz between 2010 and 2012. This episode was produced by Emma Courtland and Robin Miniter, with assistance from Marcelino Vialpando, for the National Park Service. Music by Blue Dot Sessions.