Pipestone

Today, I accepted a position at my current job series and grade level at Pipestone National Monument. I had promised myself to take the job if it was offered to me as long as the season was not bogus. The position runs for a typical "long" NPS summer season, from May to late September. The site is superb because I will be able to go home, mow, watch TV, and use my barbecue grill on the weekends while acquiring some new skills in archaeology interpretation, which can only help the long-term employment landscape. Mmm, portfolio diversivication - it goes down smooth!

Based on my experience on a Cub Scout trip circa 1992, quarries are the most boring and headache-inducing things on the planet. I will try to keep that version of Nathan in mind when preparing programs. Mature Nathan, however, recognizes that Pipestone National Monument preserves an important archaeological site. The particular stone quarried at the site is interesting and significant, and its story is one that a historian like me can latch onto. The pipestone, or catlinite, mined at the site was traded by Native Americans across the continent, and is known to have reached as far as the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. The rock has a sacred significance because it was used in ceremonial calumets. Who would have known that the bored-out-of-his-mind Nathan taking that Archaeology class (with a bunch of grad student nerds who constantly asked annoying grad student questions) and learning about the importance of pipestone, flint, and chert, and the various sizes and shapes of paleo-Indian spearpoints, might one day need to dust out that corner of his brain and become an expert with a badge and nametag.

Pipestone National Monument is located in Southwestern Minnesota, approximately 50 miles northeast of Sioux Falls, SD, and 30 miles north of Luverne, MN. Luverne is one of the towns featured in Ken Burns' The War and the home of pilot Quentin Aanenson from the documentary, if my memory serves me correctly, and the home of National Geographic photographer Jim Brandenburg, who I met by a freak occurrence while traveling with a geology field trip while a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The monument is small, just 282 acres* that encompasses a native tallgrass prairie, three quarry sites, and a waterfall. It may be interesting to note that upon working there, I will have worked in all three types of prairie in the Northern Great Plains - the shortgrass prairie of St. Mary, the mid-grass prairie of Theodore Roosevelt, and the tallgrass of Minnesota. I'll have to learn a bunch of new flowers again, though nothing will ever be as familiar or as nostalgia-inducing as the plants of the Northern Rocky Mountains.

*The meadow in St. Mary is roughly the same size as the entire monument, for those of my friends who might look for a comparison. Pipestone is equivalent to .02% of Glacier's land area.

For years, I wondered how I could ever leave Glacier National Park. For the first couple years, the thought made me physically ill. I ached to go back, longing to find whatever it was I was looking for there. I don't know what I was looking for, or if I found it. I do know that the experience shaped me as much as anything could. I was lucky to be selected for an internship there (a whole other story) and luckier still to ever get that job. I didn't want to let it go, much to the disappointment of every SCA intern who ever came into St. Mary since then, with but one solitary exception. It will be a sea change, at least in St. Mary, as most of my friends who have also worked there for several years are moving on.

Thinking that Pipestone would never be able to offer me a job before I needed to commit to re-hire at Glacier (the period to apply only closed the last week of March and it usually takes weeks if not months for them to come back with an offer), I already had visions of huckleberries and mountaintops dancing through my head. I was slated to be at Two Medicine, where I would have hiked every day through woods, sub-alpine, and alpine zones, looking for familiar friends flitting among the trees or blooming on the forest floor. It would have been good for the heart, the lungs, and the waistline. I would have hiked in the hot sun among whitebark pine stands to Scenic Point, through the woods to Rockwell Falls and Cobalt Lake, and up to the ever-windy Dawson Pass; I would have ridden the boat across Two Medicine Lake and walked to Twin Falls and yukked it up with the crowd as I attempted to follow Pat Hagan's popular acts at the Two Medicine campground. I had some jokes at the ready: "How many of you have visited Two Medicine before? Keep your hands up! How many of you have seen one of Pat Hagan's programs before? Keep your hands up! How many of you were expecting Pat tonight? Keep your hands up! How many of you were disappointed when you saw me walking up instead?"

Me with my pant leg windsock on Dawson Pass, 2008. Photo by Matt Wibbenmeyer.

For all the reasons to return to Glacier, the reasons to do something different take priority. After conversations with my supervisors at both Glacier and Theodore Roosevelt, and on the heels of another round of interviews that included the question, "I'm curious as to why you haven't worked in more parks," it became clear that working with new people and learning something new would be most beneficial in the long run. Such is anything with government work, a bizarro world of employment that is the opposite of everything you think you know know: breadth of experience is more valuable than loyalty, resumes should be as long and inclusive as possible and not a single page like you learned in your Career Skills class in high school.

Pipestone will be a change of pace. I am very excited to make the most of the opportunity there. Now I just need to find a place to camp out while I'm there. I also need one of those things that hangs off my grill from which to hang grilling tools.