Work is...

A Work Life That Took the Scenic Route

Looking back, the path was not exactly straight, but it all fits together pretty well now: early jobs, factory work, college at night, computer firms, outdoor adventures, travel, volunteer work, graduate school, and finally a USGS career built around rivers, floods, fieldwork, and teaching others.

The Story Begins

I worked for the USGS for 21 years, long enough to earn a pension, beginning when I was 41 and retiring at 62. The timing turned out to be just about perfect.

My work life started much earlier. The day I turned 15 and became old enough to work, I got a work permit and started at McDonald's. I worked there for two years during high school. It was a lot of fun, filled with great people, and it taught me some of my earliest lessons about responsibility, teamwork, and simply showing up and doing a good job.

When I graduated from high school, I wasn't heading straight to college like my five sisters had. My dad informed me that when I turned 18, I would need to start paying room and board unless I was enrolled in college and paying for it myself with student loans. At the time, that didn't seem entirely fair, but compared to my friends struggling to pay rent on tiny apartments, it was actually a pretty good deal. Besides, my parents were good people, and home wasn't a bad place to be.

So I continued working full-time jobs in the factories that filled the old New England mill town of Clinton, Massachusetts. Good factory jobs were everywhere then, and I never had much trouble finding work. I tried to be dependable, show up on time, work hard, and do the job well. That approach generally paid off. I earned good references, moved from job to job when opportunities appeared, and always managed to find work when I needed it.

Eventually I worked my way through college over the course of eight years, almost always while working full-time. During my final semester, I finally attended school full-time while working only part-time. The result surprised me. I earned straight A's, made the Dean's List, and started thinking that maybe graduate school was possible after all.

College, Computer Firms, Road Trips, and the Outdoor Life

Once I finished my undergraduate degree at age 28, I had no problem getting much better-paying jobs, with better working conditions, at the many computer firms scattered all over New England. These were the kinds of places where a four-year degree was required, and suddenly that degree opened doors that had not been open before.

I was constantly applying for biology positions too, but most of the jobs around the Boston area involved working in a lab, wearing a white lab coat. Although I had some excellent offers, I really could not see myself spending the rest of my life, or even the next few years, doing genetic research indoors. So I continued working for the computer firms, which were actually a lot of fun and full of really fun people.

After about a year, I realized I should keep applying for biology positions. Eventually I got an excellent offer from Genzyme, a well-known genetics company. It was a career-ladder position, but I would have been starting at the bottom doing chain-of-custody work. That was when I realized that if I was going to settle into that kind of work, I should probably take one more long road trip first.

I wanted to see the national parks out west again. I had done a similar trip years earlier, but it had only lasted about eight weeks, with just a couple of days in each national park. So I saved for another year and, for my 30th birthday in 1987, spent three months traveling out west, mostly backpacking and heading out on endless three- and four-day adventures in the national parks. I also spent time visiting major cities like Vancouver, Seattle, and San Francisco, along with any other places that had inexpensive hostels where I could meet people and find new adventures to share.

When I came back, something had changed. I realized that what I really loved most was traveling, seeing wild places, hiking, and being outside. So I kept saving money, taking summers off whenever I could, and spending them hiking in the mountains or walking big portions of the Appalachian Trail.

After that first trip in 1987, when I came home, I started taking a ton of instruction in whitewater boating, rock climbing and eventually ice climbing. Before long, those activities became my biggest passions. For years, I was out on rivers, cliffs, or frozen waterfalls almost every week of the year. Looking back, that was truly one of the best periods of my life. I was constantly learning new skills, meeting adventurous people, and spending nearly all of my free time outdoors doing things I loved.

With whitewater boating, I eventually became both an instructor and a safety boater. Since the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) was entirely volunteer-run, the students paid the costs for meals, lodging, and trip expenses, while the instructors and safety boaters volunteered their time. As a result, most of my equipment transport, food, camping, and cabin accommodations were covered. It was a fantastic arrangement that allowed me to spend countless weekends paddling rivers with some incredibly fun and adventurous people while helping others learn the sport safely.

Those years became a steady cycle of work, saving money, and adventure. During that period I spent countless weekends and vacations paddling whitewater rivers throughout New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Vermont, backpacking in the White Mountains, the Adirondacks, and along the Appalachian Trail, rock climbing on cliffs all over the Northeast, and ice climbing frozen waterfalls throughout New Hampshire. Many of my closest friendships came from those years. Nearly every weekend seemed to involve a river trip, climbing trip, camping trip, or mountain adventure. Looking back, it was the perfect combination of being young enough to tackle just about anything, having enough money to travel, and having a community of adventurous friends who were always ready for the next challenge. In many ways, those years helped shape the person I would become and prepared me for a career that would later keep me outdoors, exploring rivers, lakes, wetlands, and wild places for a living.

By 1990, I had saved enough to take another five-month road trip, traveling through Canada and all over the western United States. Those journeys kept growing: national parks, Central America, South America, and eventually a volunteer position with the Smithsonian Institution in the Amazon.

When I finally came home after that Smithsonian volunteer work, I decided it was time to get serious about graduate school and see if I could earn a graduate degree. A nearby university had some incredibly fun courses in marine biology, oceanography, meteorology, reptiles and amphibians, and all kinds of other subjects that actually sounded like the life I wanted to be living. Since I was still working full-time, it was easy enough to take graduate courses a couple nights a week.

Then, almost by accident, one of those volunteer positions changed everything. I was helping assess watershed and stream connectivity when the team leader mentioned a six-week position available with the USGS for a qualified graduate student. I contacted Dave, who was in charge of the project, met with him the next day, and was pretty much hired on the spot. It still took four or five weeks for all the paperwork and clearance to go through, but the door had opened.

That six-week position turned into about seven months of incredibly cool project work. I traveled all over New England, assessing streams, wetlands, and lakes, and worked with roughly a dozen different project chiefs. For someone who had spent years trying to find a way out of indoor work and into field science, it felt like I had finally found the right trail.

But seven months later, everything changed.

USGS, Field Work, Rivers, and the Career I Never Quite Planned

After seven months of working on some really fun hydrology projects, a permanent career position opened in the data section. It involved much of the work I had already been doing: field work, river work, equipment work, and being outside in all kinds of weather. I had originally hoped to land a hydrologist position where I would mostly be writing reports at a much higher pay grade, but the truth was pretty obvious by then. The field work was what I loved most.

So I applied. Out of roughly 100 qualified applicants, I was rated number seven, partly because I was already doing the work and had many of the skills they needed. I got hired full-time, and that temporary door into the USGS turned into a 21-year career that was, for the most part, incredibly fun.

I worked all over New England, Pennsylvania, and eventually Florida. With about five years left before retirement, I transferred to my dream location near St. Pete, Florida, which was where I had planned to retire anyway. Letting work pay for that move was not exactly the worst career decision I ever made. After five years in Florida, I turned 62, became eligible to retire, and jumped on it.

Most of the field work was exactly the kind of work I loved. I was usually responsible for about 20 rivers, maintaining the instruments and equipment that measured streamflow, water levels, and, in many cases, water quality. Much of that data was transmitted in real time by satellite and sent back to Earth, where anyone, anywhere in the world, could see river levels and floods as they were happening.

There were also fish surveys, ocean deployments, and plenty of work in boats, kayaks, canoes, and powerboats. Somehow, I also managed to get many of my photographs published in USGS and partner-agency publications, and I ended up on the cover of at least three or four of them, usually showing me out in the field doing the work I enjoyed most. When a new generation of Doppler-based flow measurement boats was being introduced, I took the advice of a colleague who told me, “Develop a specialty, and you’ll always be valuable.”

So I accepted the challenge. I went to courses and workshops, learned the hydroacoustic technology, and stuck with it even when much of it was way over my head at first. Eventually I became one of the hydroacoustics specialists, traveling around the country, giving presentations, presenting posters at conferences, and helping teach others. That period came at the perfect time in my life, when I had the energy and focus to put a lot into work, learning, and mentoring.

That specialty also helped me transfer to Pennsylvania for four years, where everything was new: new rivers, new landscapes, scenic mountain towns, and plenty of interesting places to spend a week or two during field trips. Eventually, though, I decided I had spent enough years being cold, and Florida started looking better and better.

USGS turned out to be an incredibly fun career, and the whole thing came about because of volunteer work. A volunteer project led to a temporary position, the temporary position led to a permanent one, and that eventually became 21 years of rivers, floods, boats, fieldwork, technology, teaching, and a retirement that arrived at just the right time.

Field Work & Adventures with the U.S. Geological Survey

These pages highlight some of the more unusual parts of my work life and the outdoor fieldwork that came with it.

Photo and Story Placeholders

This page can eventually grow into a visual career memoir, with photos and short stories from each part of the journey.