15 July 2008

Oh Ranger: Making Something That Will Last

A park service worker paves the way for visitors to take pleasant strolls on the rugged coastline of Maine.

By Chris Barter

I am a trail crew boss at Acadia National Park.  The crew goes out at six in the morning and comes back at four. We spend most of our time cutting, moving, and building with stone—that is, after we’ve hiked our packs and tools out to the job site. It’s hard, physical work requiring skills that can take years to master, but most of us wouldn’t trade it for anything. I started working on the crew on my summer breaks from college and nineteen years later I am still doing, and loving, this work.

There is the beauty of the place, of course. Acadia is filled with cliff-faced mountains that stand up out of the ocean, quiet forests, songbirds, deer twitching in the trail, loons drifting on a lake… There’s also the deep satisfaction of the work itself: repairing stone stairs and walkways built by hand eighty or a hundred years ago — using the same methods they used then, with the same goal stoneworkers have had from the pyramids to now — to make something that will last and be meaningful long after you’re gone.

The most satisfying thing of all is to see visitors climbing easily on a staircase we’ve built or strolling on a causeway we’ve laid down to cross a stretch of mud, while they’re chatting about the view or pointing to something in the sky and not thinking about the trail at all. At times like these, I realize they don’t have to because we’ve taken care of where they put their feet — for now, and for a hundred years from now — so they can focus on  more important things, like cliff-faced mountains that stand up out of the ocean, quiet forests, songbirds, deer twitching in the trail, loons drifting on a lake….

Barter is the supervisor of a trail crew at the Acadia National Park in Maine.

This article originally appeared in the American Park Network guide to Maine’s Acadia National Park.  More information on visiting the parks is available at OhRanger.com