It was my first week as a field tech, and I’d just been caught trespassing by a landowner in Wyoming.
My supervisor offered me the opportunity to put in some extra work by matching up printouts of aerial photos with what was actually on the ground, a process called “ground truthing.” The idea was that for each polygon on the photo, I’d be able to provide detail on what it actually was — perhaps an alfalfa field or a fallow pasture. I wanted to demonstrate my work ethic because recommendations from previous supervisors are essential in getting work as a field tech, and more practically, I had nothing else to do to fill the time. I was doing bird surveys in the early morning and was back at my remotely located camper and done with work by 11AM. So why not drive around a bit to kill some time and show my eagerness to help the project while I was at it?
NO TRESPASSING! REALLY!
I navigated to the location shown on the printout and found myself at a gate marked with a “No Trespassing” sign. I hesitated. Hmm, I thought, I’m not really trespassing, I’m just going in for a closer look, I’m just doing what I was asked, I’ll just pop in for a few minutes and be on my way. And pop in I did. Big mistake! I had been a field tech for only a few days, and I’d already violated what is unanimously known to be the number one rule of the trade – DON’T TRESPASS!
I was inexperienced and I exercised poor judgement; my major miscalculation (the first of the afternoon) put my job — and maybe more — at risk. The stakes were high and my judgment was clouded because this was the job that was going to deliver my salvation from a lifetime of corporate drudgery. I’d staked my future on this job paroling me from a life sentence of imprisonment within a cubicle with no view of the outside world — a cursed, synthetic existence with the sun replaced by tubular fluorescent lights with their subtle but incessant hum and trees replaced by plastic potted plants.
The landowner was in a truck, I was in a truck. He was a farmer in Wyoming, my truck had federal government license plates. I thought that this fact would help my case, make me seem more official and show that my presence was related to some valid, scientific business. Another critical rule I failed to follow: know the culture where you’re working. If it’s one thing that Wyoming farmers and ranchers don’t like, it’s the specter of government overreach. Maybe it would have been worse if I’d had a red license plate with a hammer and sickle, but then again maybe not.
NO WAVE? NO GOOD!
I was oblivious to this, so I did as I’d been instructed to do when encountering other motorists in the field — I waved at him. He didn’t wave back. Even as the greenest field tech working in America at the time, I knew right then that I was in trouble.
Taking stock of my predicament, I could tell that the landowner had positioned his vehicle with the intention of blocking off the narrow dirt road where our trucks stood. But he’d inadvertently left just enough room for me to squeeze my truck between his back bumper and a fence.
During extreme situations, your mind races and you only have a few seconds or less to make a decision. Was I going to be arrested? Shot? Should I try to explain the situation and how I ended up on the property? My heart and my mind were going into overdrive, and I couldn’t pull a single clear thought out of the jumble of swirling fears and scenarios playing out in ultra high speed. I’m not proud of what I did next, but all I can say in my defense is that I didn’t have time to consider the ethical implications of my choice.
He left me an escape route and I took it. Then the chase was on.
THE CHASE
I had a head start because the landowner had to turn around and probably wasn’t expecting me to take my audacious course of action. I rumbled along the dirt road and saw that he was giving chase — running away wouldn’t be as easy as I’d hoped. The pursuit kicked into high gear when I made the transition to the paved county road by bouncing over a small bump, causing all four tires to briefly lose contact with the ground in what felt to me like a slow motion flight from the Dukes of Hazzard.
As I recovered from the rough landing which bounced me around in the driver’s seat, I was in the thick of my first (but not last) high speed pickup truck chase.
There was no soundtrack of banjo music or upbeat electronica as I sped off through the agricultural expanse of Washakie County with my pursuer still visible in my rearview mirror. Flooring it in a 15-year-old Ford F-150 doesn’t result in quite the same electrifying thrill as the same action might in a Ferrari or even a Toyota Camry, but I felt the rush of adrenaline just the same as the truck sluggishly climbed to its maximum speed of 90 or so miles per hour, the steering wheel vibrating frantically like a handheld back massager gone haywire.
I was too busy keeping control of a vehicle that wasn’t designed for high speeds to worry about my personal safety or even my job safety, my focus on my task allowing me the clarity that had eluded me just moments before. I soon realized that in addition to my head start, my other advantage was piloting a truck not quite as old and beat up as the landowner’s; the image of his truck in my mirror receded and then disappeared, and I was able to lose him by making a few quick turns.
I pulled over and waited a few minutes to make sure I was in the clear and also to give my heart a chance to transition from its audible pounding back to a normal, quiet rhythm. With danger averted and thankfully no shots fired, I slowly dragged my way back to the camper nestled among cottonwoods and low hills near the banks of the Powder River that was serving as my home for ten days, wondering if the landowner had taken down my license plate number and if the incident was truly over. Thankfully, I never heard anything about it, and I was able to continue working as a seasonal wildlife biology technician.
PROS and Cons
I assume every new field tech has had the experience of explaining the work they’re about to do to friends and relatives only to immediately be asked, “isn’t that dangerous?” The people asking this question or some variation thereof probably imagine that the outdoors is filled with bloodthirsty beasts lurking behind every tree, waiting to pounce on the first unsuspecting human to wander into its territory. There are certainly dangers associated with the work, but not the ones that people unfamiliar with working outdoors might expect. Talk to enough field techs and you’ll learn that the greatest source of danger is indeed an animal, but not a bear or a mountain lion. No, it’s the type of animal that’s writing these words and that greets you every time you look in the mirror. While other dangers exist, none is more likely to result in a dangerous situation in the field than a person, be it a landowner or some local yokel yahoo, possibly on meth.
Despite the relief that comes with a recovery from a massive burst of adrenaline, I wouldn’t say that I enjoyed the experience. However, I didn’t consider quitting for a second and there’s very little that would have convinced me to leave the work behind and go back to spending my days crammed in a cubicle shared by four temps, chair backs nearly touching and the clacking of keys pealing like an irregular but perpetual hailstorm falling on a shanty village of plastic roofs.
Aside from this dramatic brush with danger, one of many I experienced in my career as a field tech, I suffered any number of minor but nonetheless irritating or frightening inconveniences. I was chased by swarms of angry wasps, trapped in sludgy swamps, cut by thorns, rattled at by rattlesnakes, and stared down by bears. I suffered ear infections caused by mosquitos dying in my ears and painful injuries to my back and knees.
But I also got to stand on a high mountain and look down on a solid blanket of clouds revealed by clearing fog while waiting for a workday to start, a view most people can only experience from a window seat on an airplane. I held a Peregrine Falcon, the world’s fastest land animal, while I thought about the awesome power it unleashes as it darts towards its airborne prey at 200 miles per hour before knocking it unconscious by punching it in the head. I worked under clear evening skies so bright with stars that I could navigate through a dense forest without a flashlight. I listened to the haunting howls of coyotes in the distance while flocks of Pronghorn gracefully trotted by me as night gave way to the surreal pastel palette of a Kansas sunrise.
These individual instances fail to capture the subtle sensory pleasures I experienced every day with the outdoors serving as my office, whether it was the aural spectacle of the daily chorus of birdsong at dawn or low angle sunlight creating a fantasy mosaic of soft light and shadow as it filters through the dense canopy of a pine forest at dusk. The work gave me the opportunity to travel throughout the US and to work in places that will never be seen by tourists but which offer visitors just as much as any well-known attraction in terms of experiencing beauty and serenity in the natural world.
I could have gone back to the safety of the cubicle, but I would have missed out on a spiritually rewarding lifestyle enjoyed by a dedicated few behind the scenes of normal, stable American society along with the opportunity to be a true outsider. Instead, I learned the importance of following the rules and making better decisions. I carried out my bitter opposition to soul crushing treadmill capitalism with each day of work as opposed to mounting socially acceptable rebellions just mild and generic enough to avoid being offensive. I wouldn’t trade the experiences I had for any title or position, and it turned out that I still managed to earn the right to be called “Doctor” before my 40th birthday.
It’s never too late to work a dull job, invest in mutual funds, or slave away in pursuit of a terminal degree, but it can be too late to do physically demanding work and to live out of a car, nomadic and free of most forms of responsibility. I can feel satisfied knowing that I took advantage of the opportunity to be a field tech while I was young and the liquid assets that I cared to accumulate were beautiful memories and harrowing tales of death-defying escapes.
While painful and even terrifying at times, by putting my life in danger I was able to truly live. By choosing to live more like the animals I studied than my human contemporaries, I was able, if just for a short time, to feel truly free.
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