How You Get the Job

I wake up to a green-foam pool-noodle in front of my face.  It cushions a wooden board from the top bunkbed and prevents me from hitting my head.  Someone from seasons past has drawn a picture of a fat cartoonish man on the noodle next to Sharpie-inscribed Walden excerpts and summer quotes about fleeting moments.  I slink out of bed horizontally and shower while listening to someone else’s music.  The bathroom’s ceiling tile is loose, and a pinky-nail-sized spider descends from its spool and dangles in the air.  During the breakfast rush-hour there is a line for the toaster because only two out of four slots work.  My commute to work is a walk through the woods, and I am careful not to step in the mud.  A logical question to ask is:  How did this happen?  (The entire morning routine, not the toaster malfunction.)

Guests always ask me the same questions:  How did you find this job?  How did you find housing?  So is there just one company that sends you around the country wherever a position needs filled?  Most outsiders are very curious about the mechanisms of seasonal work.  I’ll address those FAQs here to broaden your understanding as I continue to write about life in Acadia.  I’ll answer the third question first:  no, there is not one mega-company with a vast Rockefeller monopoly.  Now, the origin story:

Four years ago, I was working in a chain restaurant in the city where I went to college.  I had never visited a national park let alone crossed the Mississippi.  I had no idea these seasonal jobs existed until I moved to Florida and could not readily find gainful employment within driving distance.  One day when I was checking my email I saw an advertisement for a Caribbean cruise and decided to apply for a film editing position on a ship out of Miami and a server assistant gig in Hawaii.  I never expected anyone to call me back, but the recruiter from Hawaii did.

That brief phone conversation filled my head with swashbuckling fantasies but mostly fear.  Even when I got the job and completed the laundry list of prerequisite doctor visits and paperwork, part of me never expected to get on the plane and go.  It was much more fun to think about going while remaining in the comforts of my own living room.  Needless to say, I got on the plane and flew to Maryland for two weeks of firefighting and shipwreck training before working on a cruise ship that sailed around the Hawaiian islands for five months.  I have written about this experience here: http://braedendiehlhawaii.blogspot.com/

On the cruise ship, I became close friends with a man named Mark Pottage.  We trained together in Maryland and consoled each other with hopeful expectations.  Once we got into the chaotic mess that is ship life, he was my counselor and the buoy that I clung to when my morale threatened to dip and then drown in the boggy, relentless pessimism that results in back-to-back-to-back 70-hour work weeks while hardly getting enough sunlight despite living in a tropical paradise.  

We wore Popeye Sailor paper hats and clear gloves while we wiped buffet counters and dodged obese wanderers wielding sticky plates.  Most likely their brains were either deep-fried or nearing dementia, but we still had to clap for them as they left the auditorium on their penultimate night.  We had to thank them for spending the money that filtered into our pockets even though we checked flights daily because quitting always lingered in the back of our minds. 

When we needed to escape, Mark and I would talk about the past, and he told me about the times he worked for a company called Xanterra in the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.  This was the first I had heard of anybody working the national parks who wasn’t a ranger.  He told me about this website called coolworks.com that became the only job search engine I would use for the next three years.  He had a Skype interview for a bartending job for Vail Resorts in the Grand Tetons in Wyoming.  He got the job, and as soon as I got home I was hired for the summer season in Yellowstone.  All it took was a chatty phone interview.  The manager asked me if I could arrive the first week of June, and the matter was settled. 

Once you get one seasonal job, several doors open.  Managers are confident to hire you based on experience alone.  I’ve worked now in four resorts in four different states, and I have seen a network of familiar faces.  A few of my coworkers in Acadia know Mark Pottage because all three of them worked in the Tetons.  Recently I discovered a former coworker in Yellowstone is here on Mount Desert Island in Maine, a few miles away from me.  We both chose to work here without any knowledge of each other applying. 

There is a fractured community——a family tree with tangled vines——of seasonal workers who all share at least one mutual acquaintance.  I’ve heard one manager refer to himself as a “Parkie,” but I don’t care for this term because the abbreviation sounds too much like junky and mostly self-admiring babblers use this moniker to boast about their peripatetic lifestyle to impress strangers and fellow “Parkies” alike.

This scene may seem underground and hard-to-find, but it is not.  Granted, most of the jobs are remote but easily acquired if you can perform simple duties such as lifting twenty pounds and forming coherent sentences.  Some places don’t require (or strictly enforce) a background check.  During those interviews, you’ll hear fewer questions about aptitude and more about expediency.  I’ve spoken to hiring managers who’ve said something along the following lines: “I see you’ve done this type of work before.  How early can you get here?”  They need a warm body, particularly one that can arrive tomorrow and stay until the autumn leaves fall from the trees and all the tourists head to the tropics or ski towns.

Everyone’s foray into seasonal work usually involves a plunge into the unexpected, or at the least they shrugged their shoulders and asked themselves what they had to lose by trying.  For a tiny percentage, this is the end of the road, the one beyond the most forgiving friend’s couch, but for the rest of us this is a divergence from the usual rising slope of college-career-marriage-mortgage-children.  The job attracts a wide variety from missionaries to blackout drunkards to adventurers to hippies to locals to Eastern Europeans to divorcees and retirees.  A wealth of backgrounds co-mingle all in the name of money and fun wrought by selling T-shirts or slinging overpriced pancakes.

This world is wonderfully chaotic and ridiculous but highly structured.  In a nutshell, here’s how it works:   Within the parks, the National Park Service owns and oversees all the buildings (in the present case the Jordan Pond House restaurant and the dormitory) that sit on federal land.  Concessionaires bid on these properties, and the highest bidder agrees to a contract, usually measured in decades.  Ortega is the concessionaire parent company in charge of Jordan Pond House in Acadia National Park in Maine as well as Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley National Park in California.  The local subdivision of Ortega is called Dawnland, and this is the company I work for.  (They are both my employer and landlord.  A flat rate of 200 dollars is deducted from each biweekly paycheck to cover my rent, utilities, and three meals a day for the duration of my employment.)

You can count on an insurmountable gulf between the corporate businessmen and the Park Service whose goal, after all, is to preserve these lands for future generations.  The Park Service was established one hundred years ago to prevent developers, homesteaders, and even petty thieves from vandalizing a unique plot of earth that deserves to be studied and appreciated.  Basically, admirers and devotees of land did not want to tarnish landscapes in the vein of Niagara Falls.  Within these realms human destruction is outlawed, and the best way to achieve that goal is to regulate the number of visitors. 

The businessmen, on the other hand, want to attract more and more people because they think in terms of revenue, not the longevity of special flora and fauna.  Conflicts inevitably arise due to these opposing philosophies.  The general manager of the concessionaire acts as a liaison between the Park Service and the seasonal employees to ensure that our practices align with the Park Service’s pledge to protect the environment.  We live and work in federally-owned buildings and are subject to the stipulations of the company’s contract with the Park Service.  This contract affects everything from renovation hassles, a paucity of parking lots, to the types of food on the menu and the prices at which they are set.  We do not work for the Park Service but we are very much under their thumb even when they are out of sight.

And that is how this world-apart is created, entered, and lived in.  Most of us live in accordance to the Park's philosophy while simultaneously contradicting it by profiting from the flocks of visitors who both keep us in business and threaten to overrun the place.  This balance is worth an examination unto itself.  As far as our moral sense goes, we have stopped using drinking straws that in previous years have littered the lawns and spoiled the pond's clarity.  We cannot graffiti the granite cliffs, but many people before me have written on the walls and, in some cases, the ceiling.  Their advice is both vulgar and wise. One artist took great pains to draw a platypus on the underbelly of the top bunk.  Other writers made permanent the ephemeral nature of fading summers.