Making Like A Tree

The year was 2015. I was working in a miserable job, in a windowless basement for Denver Health hospital group. My job, which started at 6 AM, consisted of looking at a number on a patient chart, making sure that number matched the number on a computer file, and then throwing away the paper. At the end of each day, I would literally put that day's work in the trash. Needless to say, I did not love that job. One day - don't tell my old boss - I took an interview by phone in a quiet corner of the warehouse from Jenna Van Meeteren (nee Pollock, her name at the time), and Abbey for the naturalist position in Clayton County.

The interview went well, but there were a lot of great interviews, I would later learn. So, at Jenna's request, I made arrangements to fly out to my parents home in the Quad Cities and travel north for an in-person interview. One problem: I needed to be there on a Friday, and my soul-sucking job for Denver Health did not have PTO. But, they did have sick leave. So, like an old TGIF sitcom (look it up kids), I proceeded to sniff pepper packets in my cubicle, sneezing constantly until I drew the attention of my coworkers. When I called in sick the next day, they were none the wiser, and I boarded my plane.

Fast forward to June of 2015, and I am moving into my apartment in Marquette with my wife, a native of Half Moon Bay California. I am hoping against hope that she can find the beauty in this small, rural community that could scarcely be more different than where she'd grown up. Half Moon Bay averaged 52 in January, and 58 in July. Iowa was.... Not that.

But, she came to love this place as much or more than anyone else. She works now as the naturalist for Allamakee County. We had met as rangers for the National Park Service, and against all odds had both landed wonderful jobs in our desired field while so many of our former coworkers got chewed up and spit out by the rollercoaster of the last 10 years in the NPS.

Look at the baaaaabies on their first project A.W.A.R.E. in 2015!

Coming into this job, I had never done day camps. I had never visited classrooms, never hosted field trips. I had minimal experience working with youth, and almost none working with what we tour guides called "involuntary audiences," as opposed to the people attending a talk or tour as part of their vacation.

I learned so much about not only young minds, but minds in general, from the experience of helping students understand and appreciate the natural world. It is a truism in interpretation that age does not dictate intelligence; at least, not the kind that leads to understanding. Young people just know fewer facts.

I don't know who Tracy is but I know that snake did not want to help teach children that day.

To this day, whenever a kid asks me how I "know so much," I simply tell them I'm older than them. Just like Mr. Burns told Homer after Homer observed he "really knew how to cheat."

One of the most beautiful things about working for the CCCB has been the freedom. One of my first projects, after finding an old vision plan for Bloody Run County Park, was to build a hiking trail. Building trail had been my first conservation job out of college, and I love swinging a Pulaski to this day.

I found the goal; now I needed some money to hire a crew. So I wrote my first grant. And one day, while still trying to orient myself to the county properties, I "discovered" the hiking trails at Motor Mill. "Holy cow, these are amazing! But where is everybody?" I thought. This was some of the most beautiful scenery I'd seen in Iowa, but it seems as though they were a hidden secret - no maps, minimal signage, and nothing on the big brown highway signs indicating the site was so much more than just the mill. So in 2016, I hosted a trail run to highlight the hiking trails, and to get some money to supplement the grant so we could build the trail at Bloody Run. On the success of both the grant and the race, the Wells Hollow trail at Bloody Run was built with assistance from the Conservation Corps of Minnesota & Iowa.

CCMI crew building the Wells Hollow trail at Bloody Run

In 2018, we hired CCMI again - this time, at the behest of the USFWS partners program, who had just opened up shop in the area and offered to help kickstart some of the land stewardship that had been on the backburner since the plans were written up in the mid-aughts.

Jenna asked if I would be the point man for their work, and I readily agreed. We got to work at Motor Mill and Bloody Run, at the Pleasant Ridge wildlife area and Osborne, rehabbing oak woodlands and effigy mounds and trail systems.

Motor Mill South Unit savanna before 2018 work

Same savanna after 2018 work

So it was that, at the end of that year when we had a staffing shakeup after the retirement of the legendary Marty Mulford. Jenna recognized my passion for stewardship and offered to let me wear the "natural resource manager hat," and thus began the most formative 8 years of my life.

Slowly but surely, the wanderlust of a young man became replaced with rapt attention for all the little details of nature study reserved for those with the privilege of visiting sites over and over, year after year.

Desperate to catch up from a lack of formal education in the field, I latched on to any expert who would tolerate my curiosity. I learned so much from walking in the woods with foresters, entomologists, botanists, and my fellow elbow-grease aficionados who do the hard work of stewardship in other areas or for other organizations.

Hands-On learning at the first workday of the Eastern Iowa Habitat Partnership

10 years ago, when I got here, I thought I knew what it meant to love the land. But like any meaningful relationship, to build a love that lasts takes time. It takes effort. It cannot be achieved by simply reading Zoobooks and crying about the extinction of the Javan Tiger and writing letters, though all that matters too. To love the land requires actions as well as words.

In no uncertain terms, these last 8 years have been the best possible education in the world of natural resource management. I feel so incredibly lucky to have landed here when I did, with the leadership and coworkers I have and have had to help teach me, and to let me exercise the freedom to learn on my own terms how to best love the land.

Most importantly, I am thankful for their grace. I have made mistakes, and there's plenty more where that came from, I'm sure. But they have recognized that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly, at least at first. They have let me develop my flight feathers to their fullest. I'd like to think now, at least, that I have moved this work forward. We have reintroduced fire to long-starved pyrophillic landscapes. We have better documentation of what needs what, when, and why, than I had to go on when I was chasing the ghosts of employees past who did not have the luxury of infinitely large computer drives on which to store their notes.

We have established a culture of stewardship, of curiosity about how to listen to the world and hear its needs, desires, and importantly, its gratitude. If I didn't have the coworkers I do, I doubt I would feel comfortable enough to step away and turn over this responsibility to whatever iteration of the CCCB comes nest, but this is truly an amazing group of people.

So, with no small amount of reservation, I will be stepping down from my role with the Clayton County Conservation Board on Friday, March 27th. I want to thank everyone whose path I have crossed in this last decade, for I have learned something from each and every one of you, no matter how brief our interaction.

Starting this spring, I will be moving into the world of professional ecological stewardship as a full-time private enterprise, so I can keep doing this work on the lands that need it most. I could not have built the skills and confidence to do so without the support of this community in allowing me to learn on this most precious and rare resource: public land in Iowa.

If you want to know my next steps, feel free to shoot me an email while it's still live at KSlocum@claytoncountyia.gov. Otherwise, in the interest of keeping our website ad-free, I will simply say that if you ever wished some of the habitat work on county property could occur on your own back 40, keep in touch. Thank you for 10 unforgettable years. It has been an honor, a privilege, and an absolute joy each and every day. I'm so glad I sniffed those peppers packets.

"I hereby solemnly swear I will not run over these trees with a lawn mower."