My daughter Clare turned twenty-seven years old last month. Her birthday made me wonder where I was and what I was doing when I was the age that Clare is now. Adding twenty-seven to my year of birth revealed that the year was 1981. It was January 1981 when I put my few belongings in the back of a Chevy Vega and moved from Boston to San Francisco. I immediately took a job at a backpacking store to pay the rent, but was always looking for other work. After seven months without finding anything, I was offered two interesting jobs in the same week. This, I have come to realize, is the norm for me. At first nothing, then multiple offers at the same time. It’s as if the universe wants to remind me that I always have choices.
One of the job offers was for an entry-level administrative position with Save the Bay, an environmental advocacy group dedicated to protecting the natural ecology of San Francisco Bay. The other was a naturalist position with San Mateo Outdoor Education (SMOE), a residential environmental education program in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Since my junior year in college, I knew that I wanted to do environmental work, but had yet to figure out exactly what that meant.
I took the naturalist position, not because my strengths resided more in teaching than in administration, but because SMOE’s campus was in the middle of a redwood forest. My initial interview for the job was the first time I’d ever seen coastal redwoods. Until then I did not even know that such trees existed. I remember leaving the interview and thinking that if I didn’t get the naturalist position, I’d ask the facility director whether he needed someone to work in the kitchen. All I knew was that I wanted to wake up each morning surrounded by the tallest trees in the world.
I worked at SMOE for two years. Then I left California to start a Ph.D. program at the University of Minnesota. Still my time at SMOE gave direction to my career aspirations. Clare, like me when I was her age, wants to do environmental work. Also like me, she is not sure what that means. She needs to find her redwood tree. She will.
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