The following is an excerpt from my reflections on a conversation I recorded while traveling through the US documenting the work and personal stories of wildlife biology technicians. It centers on the dramatic events which convinced Mark Steele, a former field tech, to return to a life as a seasonal technician after working for several years at a remarkably ordinary corporate job. The circumstances which resulted in Mark returning to fieldwork allowed him to appreciate the unusual but rewarding lifestyle more consciously and not to take it for granted. They also gave him a greater capacity to endure the hardships of the work after choosing to alter the course of his life in such a deliberate manner and the knowledge of what he was leaving behind so fresh in his mind. When we join the story, Mark is explaining to me what originally motivated him to settle down in Boulder, Colorado after his first stint as a wildlife biology technician.
Rebirth Through Death
“…I thought it would be interesting to try having friends and relationships. I had never done any of that as an adult, and I wanted to see what it was like. Being on the road and working field jobs for a couple months at a time made it easy to just avoid all of that. So I got a more serious job and before I knew it, I was living a totally different life. Nine to five, regular job. It all just kind of happened.”
“So what made you get back into doing fieldwork?”
“It turns out I wasn’t really ready for any of it. Jobs, relationships. I was so used to living one day at a time and not making any plans that I just lost sight of what I was doing. I thought I’d stay in Boulder for six months; it ended up being closer to six years.”
“But here you are again. What made you decide to leave for good?”
“I saw a man die,” he says evenly while lifting his gaze to meet mine.
I can’t help but smiling despite his grave tone and what he’d just said. “I’m going to need a little more explanation on that,” I reply.
He draws a deep breath. “Well it’s a pretty long story.”
“That’s fine, I get paid by the word.”
“Really?”
“No.” He laughs. “But that’s what I’m here to learn about. I don’t care about the length as long as it’s interesting. I’ll edit out the boring parts if there are any. Or my editor will.”
Branches and Snowflakes in the Window
“Well I found it interesting, a pretty out of the ordinary kind of experience.” He pauses and I allow him some time to think about where to begin. “OK, well a bit of background first. I was working for a third-party logistics provider.”
“Meaning what exactly?”
“I basically arranged freight shipments. Told the carrier where to go and when to go there. Typical corporate job, corporate culture, corporate language. I got really obsessed with money which was totally not anything I’d ever cared about. You just get caught up in it, it’s insidious and you don’t realize it’s happening. I started off working as a cashier in a store, living with a bunch of roommates; you see the managers and then sometimes the big corporate guys come in and especially when you’re young, it’s hard to ignore the differences between them and you. They project this air of confidence and wealth, having made it and being totally comfortable while you’re just scraping by, having to agonize over every little thing you buy, can you afford it or not or what are you going to have to sacrifice to buy this thing. You feel like you need to have a bunch of money to make it and to have people like you.
“Anyway, the thing about this job is that it was a regular desk job, but they had us working in a warehouse that they’d converted into office space. There’s no windows. No source of natural light at all, except there was this one little circular window at the top of the wall opposite me that was like twenty feet off the ground. It’s like the porthole in a ship. All I can see is one tree branch and some little branchlets. That’s it. When it’s windy I can see it bobbing up and down,” he lifts his arm up and down to demonstrate, “and if it’s snowing I can see the snow falling past the window.”
“And you said you’d been living outside right before you moved there.”
“That’s right, I had, but that just shows you how easy it is to get sucked into something.” In this way, the extreme adaptability required of field techs cuts both ways and allows people like Mark to get used to something that’s obviously unhealthy and not right for them. “You don’t know how you got there,” he continues. “Of course this job sucked and was stressful. It started off OK, but you know how it is, you’re the golden boy until you slip up once and then you’re on their bad side and you get treated like crap. Power trips, middle managers needing someone to squash. I felt knots in my stomach every day. On top of all that, the company served no useful function.”
“You mean like benefiting society in some way?”
“No, not even that. And it definitely wasn’t, but for some companies you could at least say it’s ‘helping to turn the wheels of commerce,’” he says this last part in an obviously ironic fashion, wide-eyed and breathy, spreading his hands with palms pointed up and facing forward, “or you know, contributing to the economy, something useful for someone. But it wasn’t anything like that. It was just a middleman in a sea of middlemen. Really we mostly just got in the way and added red tape. So it’s not like I could feel good about anything I was doing there. The only pleasure I got in life was going up to the mountains on the weekends — the higher the better.
A Mountain Hike Gone Awry
“So it’s August and that’s a nice time to be up there, all the wildflowers come out above the treeline so instead of just being this mat of green, it’s all blue, yellow, and red, and purple, and pink. Really beautiful. I’m excited to go up there. The parking lot for the trailhead is at ten thousand feet, and it’s some pretty tricky driving to get there. Standard stuff — unpaved, steep, narrow, windy.”
“Sounds like all the right adjectives,” I say.
“Well not all. Uneven, exposed.”
“I think I get the picture.”
“I mean like it’s straight vertical over the edge,” he pushes his hand down perpendicular to the ground to emphasize the point. “Anyway the point is, you’re not driving too quickly on this road. I park and I start climbing, I’m feeling pretty good. There’s a pretty high mountain you can access from that trailhead and I’m thinking, ‘Yeah, legs feel good today, I’m going to make it all the way up.’
“I’m no more than ten minutes in, maybe five, and I start to hear this woman yelling from somewhere behind me on the trail, a bit down the slope. I didn’t think much of it, I figured she was just calling to her dog, but something about it sounded a bit off, so I stopped. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but then she yells out, ‘HELP! HELP ME!’ So without thinking I just threw down my pack and ran down to her. There’s a guy on the ground, he’s convulsing, his eyes are closed, and his face is red. The woman is shaking, she’s fumbling to get some pills out of a sandwich bag. I have no idea what to do, so I just freeze. Luckily this is near Boulder, so a few seconds later a pair of guys show up and they say to me, ‘We’re EMT’s. Go call for help.’
“I don’t see the connection.”
“Everybody in Boulder is an EMT.” I raise an eyebrow. “I’m serious, like everyone. These guys told me to go get help — easier said than done. There’s no phone reception up there. I ran down to the parking lot, no reception there, I asked some other people but no one’s got reception.
“So it’s back down the mountain,” I say.
Slow Rescue
“That’s the only option. I’m trying to go as fast as I can, but I’m also trying not to fall over this cliff. This place is pretty remote, but there’s an emergency phone where the pavement ends. You know, it’s one of these things that’s like a big flat rectangle,” he lifts his arms over his head to give a sense for its height.
“Like you see on a college campus,” I offer.
“Exactly. There’s a big red button and it calls for help. It’s funny because I used to hike there a lot and I’d always drive by this phone and I used to wonder what the deal with it was. You know, who uses it, how often some needs it. Well now it’s time to find out, I hit the button, and… nothing. Nothing happens. I was just shocked. After all that build up. I hit it again. Nothing happens. Well great. There are some houses there so then I run up to the house and ring the doorbell. You know, am I gonna get shot? What’s going to happen here. The guy answers the door, I explain what’s happening and he says, ‘Oh yeah, happens all the time. I’ll call 911.’
“I wait for the ambulance to go up the road and I start driving up behind it. I go up the trail and the paramedics are working on him, doing CPR. There’s a female EMT, she’s got her arm around the woman.”
“The one who originally called for help,” I ask in the form of a statement.
“Yeah. There’s another EMT standing there, a young guy, so I ask him how it’s looking. He just looks at me and says, ‘he’s dead.’” Mark says these words in a completely flat deadpan. “Well, my mouth must have fallen open or something, he says with a little softer tone ‘You can’t do CPR on someone for 45 minutes; he’s not going to make it.’ So I just nodded at him. This goes on for a bit longer and then one of the EMT’s who’s working on him says, ‘hey, are we gonna call this or what?’ The other one nodded and then looked up at the female EMT and nodded at her. She says, ‘he’s gone now,’ with the most compassionate tone you can imagine. I can’t really do it. Anyway the woman starts to wail. I mean the most piercing, gut-wrenching sound. It’s awful. I just went completely numb.”
“You were obviously invested in the whole thing,” I say.
“Very much so. I played a pretty crucial part in the rescue effort. I was getting ready to feel like I’d done something really heroic and you know a bunch of strangers worked together to carry out this daring mountain rescue, but the guy was doomed from the start. His number was up.
Different Coping Styles
“I was pretty stunned. I didn’t know what to do so I just kind of worked my way back to the parking lot. It was like I was in a daze, my feet were moving, but it was like I didn’t really have control over them. It was like I was outside myself and just moving automatically. I was kind of puttering around when I got back there, some guy is waiting for his buddy who shows up and he says, ‘How’s it going?’ and the other says, ‘Better than that guy.’”
“Wow,” I said.
“I understand now that sometimes people need to joke to deal with something like that, but I didn’t find it funny. I was shocked, honestly. To make a long story short, after that I couldn’t sit at that desk anymore, and look out that tiny window and watch that tree branch bob up and down. I thought I could just drop dead at any moment like that guy. And for what? So I could have spent my life doing this useless job under fluorescent lights helping a bunch of assholes enrich themselves. The owner was some rich kid who inherited all this money, sometimes he would just park one of his Lamborghinis outside and rev up the engine real loud so we could all hear it. While I was trying to talk on the phone to clients!”
“Are you serious?” I ask.
“Oh deadly. He had like nine of them, I’m not exaggerating.”
“I can see how that would get you disillusioned.”
“Yeah, it’s weird. You learn to deal with it, but then all of a sudden the veil is pulled off and it’s like ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ What is the point of all this?’ I made it a couple of weeks after that and then I quit.”
Processing and Moving On
“And then back to fieldwork?”
“Oh no, not even close. The only advantage I had was I’d saved up all this money and had cheap rent so I just did nothing for almost a year.”
“Taking stock?”
“Exactly, just trying to figure out what I was doing. What I’d done, what were my priorities, my goals. Just try to process it really.”
“What made you decide to start applying for jobs again.”
“Once it got to a certain point, I realized I had to do something. Working with birds was the only thing I ever got any joy out of, so back to Texas A&M, sending out cover letters and all of that. Well, they wanted someone to drive around Wyoming and do point counts. I could do that. I put a bunch of stuff in storage, sold some stuff, gave some stuff away, and six years after I’d dropped out of it, I was a field tech again.”
The Critical Conflict
Mark’s story, with its range of emotional conflicts and personal challenges related to money, meaning, and freedom, encapsulates many of the key motivations that encourage people like him to leave a life of professional and financial stability behind and instead to set out on the dynamic and often dangerous path of seasonal fieldwork. So many find themselves stuck behind a desk with the ideals and principles of their past suppressed by their current everyday fixations as they struggle to justify the tedious, repetitive work they perform. The situation is exacerbated when they consider that this work often has no redeeming social value and exists for no reason other than to enrich an already outrageously wealthy and bloated bourgeois managerial class.
The daily and weekly routines in which they find themselves are created so subtly and incrementally that they fail to comprehend how these routines were created and how they grew to be so pervasive and all-encompassing. A life of repetition, replete with commuting, aimless meetings, form letters, and scripted conversations crowds out any possible considerations of spiritual development and satisfaction. While many people require these types of routines to create structure and purpose in their lives, for others such as Mark and the ranks of seasonal field techs scattered throughout the continent, these routines subtly but powerfully drain fulfillment out of life one repetitive day at a time. Instead of providing an anchor, this lifestyle which conflicts so starkly with their beliefs and desires sparks a never-ending stream of doubts and creates a profound spiritual emptiness which seems to have no resolution.
Yet, the need for dependable income which allows one to provide for their most basic physical needs cannot simply be discarded as a superfluous trapping of an individualistic capitalist society. The need for money is very real along with the degree of independence gained by earning that money. In this sense, there’s a clear trade-off between certain freedom of economic choice with freedom of movement and even of speech and thought. An extreme of either one can create physical or psychological discomfort, and striking a satisfying balance between the two can be difficult and require constant adjustment to one’s daily activities and overall course in life.
Beyond these most practical concerns, Mark’s story also draws attention to the less tangible but equally important considerations of relationships and community. To enter into life as a field tech is to withdraw from the community of which one is a part not only in a strictly physical sense, but also sets one apart as different and unusual. While some field jobs allow for the creation of tight-knit communities, at best these will be fleeting and temporary, dissolving after a brief period of powerful intensity. But it’s just as likely that a group of techs working together doesn’t mesh and fractures into cliquishness while some individuals end up reverting to a mostly solitary social environment. For jobs like Mark’s current position in Wyoming, a tech has to be prepared to spend most of their days including all of their working time alone, speaking primarily to restaurant servers and grocery store cashiers.
The decision to become a field tech is therefore not taken likely and is especially deliberate for someone like Mark who’s experienced the extremes of being fully nomadic with all of one’s possessions transported in a passenger car on the one hand and corporate employment with its sedentary and firmly rooted lifestyle on the other.
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