29 March 2021
Great! I’ve got a masters degree in biology so what do I do with it? The first thing I did was put in applications everywhere I could for a job as botanist. I had briefly toyed with the idea of going for a PhD and Dr. Pullen had gone so far as to ensure my admission at the University of Georgia – his alma mater – but it came with no financial support. I would have been on my own. I turned it down. I would have been working with Sam Jones – one of Dr. Pullen’s former students.
The most common place for a botanist to seek employment outside of academia was with the government. If you have never filled out a government employment form – good for you. They are challenging to say the least. In the meantime, I got a temporary gig as a director of the Youth Conservation Corps at Tishomingo State Park. It was patterned on the Civilian Conservation Corps but provided summer jobs for teenagers. They would come work on some project in the park and then go home at night.
I was assigned my group and we took on the project of renovation of the museum in the upstairs part of the visitors center and a complete renovation of the basement to make additional space for a museum.
Even though some of the teens in my group were also in shop at their local high school, I quickly learned they did not know how to read a tape measure. We needed to cut a great deal of lumber to “panel” the basement and I had to teach juniors and seniors what 3/4 of an inch was on a tape measure.
George Gilpin, the park manager, was very supportive and gave me some good advice. He said to spread the wealth around the town of Tishomingo. I asked what did he mean? He said not to buy all my supplies from one hardware in town. Duh! There were two hardwares and it made sense to purchase from both to keep both happy. We spent a lot of government money in the very small town of Tishomingo that year.
I was housed in the old park manager home. The front room was a storage facility but the park cleared out the back bedroom and bathroom for me. It was idyllic. My entrance looked out over the public area of the park including the swimming pool. I had pileated woodpeckers to wake me every morning.
One night, I heard something down by the pool. I called George and he came tearing down from his residence at the other end of the park. It was some teen agers who had climbed the fence into the pool facility around midnight and were skinny dippin’. George put the fear of God into them by threatening arrest. I ended up being his eyes and ears on that end of the park for any trouble.
George had a great crew with him and one night, they came knocking on my door and asked if I wanted to go to see the Coon Dog Cemetery in Alabama. I declined but they kept enticing me with beer and whiskey and eventually three of us loaded up in a pickup and set out. It’s amazing we got there in one piece much less made it back in one piece as drunk as we were. I guess they could hold their liquor better than I.
The cemetery was massive. It started in 1937 and there were quite a few dogs buried there and almost all had some massive monument to mark their graves. Apparently, coon hunters love their dogs.
I admit to being drunk on occasion. However, I’ve never been as drunk as I was the night I got back from the cemetery. I had to sleep with one foot on the floor to keep the world from spinning off its axis.
They were simple, good ole boys and they did everything they could to help me in any way they could. It was one of them that pointed out my new truck tires were out of round. They didn’t want me to get into an accident. You can’t buy friends like that.
The YCC group worked very hard. We were nearing completion of the museum and I asked them, as an exercise, to identify the stuffed birds and write a little description of each. I had a meeting to attend at another state park concerning YCC and so left them to it. While I was gone, an ornithology professor from Mississippi State, who was a roving YCC director came in and ripped into their identifications and statements – before I had a chance to check their identifications and correct their statements. I came back and they were in tears. I called up the state YCC director and reamed out the professor to him. It was uncalled for and mean.
Later, I met a grad student of his – who later married the Mississippi State professor – and I eventually taught a short time with her while at Itawamba Junior College. I mentioned it to her and she was apologetic and agreed he could be an ass sometimes.
The YCC work was coming to a close and I got a job acceptance at the Bureau of Land Management at Miles City, Montana. I loaded up everything I owned in a U-Haul, my two cats – Rascal (Siamese) and her “kitten” Sam and drove to Montana. Sam caterwauled the entire trip and Rascal nursed in my lap the whole time. By the time I got to Montana I didn’t have a dry tee shirt from her “nursing” from me.
I made it to Miles City and found a trailer in town in which to live.
I was given a desk at the Bureau and my assignment was to do a plant survey of 858 square miles of eastern Montana – the Wibaux-Beech area. However, there was very little I could do because I hired on in October. It snowed on Thanksgiving day and the original snow was on the ground when I left the job in April.
Miles City was a cowboy town. It had one hotel (with a Chinese restaurant) and a main street. That was pretty much it. The last whorehouse closed the year before I got there and ranch hands would still come into town on Saturday night and shoot up the place. It was also a dangerous place to drive. People from the ranches would come into town on weekends. They were used to driving over thousands of acres and not having to check on traffic around them when they went in reverse. It was not uncommon for someone to back out of their parking space in town without looking.
Too keep me busy, the Bureau gave me a brand new 4 wheel drive truck, per diem and sent me on a information finding trip of all the universities in Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota. I visited each biology/botany department and asked if any of the botanists would be interested in anything I found and any extra herbarium specimens. Everyone was enthusiastic except an older professor at Montana State University. He wanted nothing to do with me – even though I was doing all the work and was willing to provide him herbarium specimens free of charge. Later, the department head called me up and apologized and said the professor, after consultation, had changed his mind.
I traveled so much that one morning I woke up and called the front desk to ask what town I was in. I didn’t even remember what state I was in.
I also found another government agency in town – the U.S. Forestry Service – had an herbarium they no longer wanted and asked if the Bureau would like it. I jumped at the chance. It was delivered and I had it put in the loft of the vehicle service/storage area which became my secondary office space. I think it was three full herbarium cabinets. Later, I mentioned it to the local college. It had originated with them and a change in personnel in the botany department requested it back. I reluctantly complied but it really helped me get a feel for the vegetation in the area.
Since I couldn’t collect plants in the winter, I went ahead and made plans for the spring to lay out my tracts and plots. I was then asked to help a wildlife biologist with his studies in the same area. For the winter I survey deer mice, mule deer, and sage grouse.
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We would also take count of sage grouse. To do that you had to be up before sunrise and be ready next to their dancing grounds. Sage grouse come back to the same place year after year for mating rituals. We would creep up on their dancing ground and wait until the party started. Only males danced in the center with females along the periphery to select their mate. Because they return year after year, the ground gets beaten down pretty well. Think of what hundreds of years of pounding of little tiny feet will do.
There’s the story, perhaps apocryphal, of newbies moving out west and finding a nice flat place to build their dream home only to be driven crazy in the spring by sage grouse dancing on the roof of their house. They had built their house on a sage grouse dancing area.
With winter arriving, I knew I wouldn’t survive in the trailer. I found a home on the outskirts of town for rent. It was the old home of the owner of the furniture company next door.
The house was a nice change from the cramped trailer. It even had a floor furnace. I did, in December, have to climb up on the roof and chip icicles off the roof because it was getting up under the eave, thawing and causing leaks in the ceiling. I also had to shovel snow off the roof on occasion.
I would be gone a week at a time and have to leave Sam and Rascal alone. I left plenty of food and water and new litter. When I returned, I would always have to clean up shredded toilet paper from the bathroom. I guess it was their way of paying me back.
Sam wasn’t a needy cat. Rascal was very affectionate – not Sam. However, every time I came back home from a week in the field, Sam was the first one to climb into my lap and seek pats and rubs. Rascal would pout and snub me for a couple of days.
They also saw the first snow in their lives and it was hilarious to watch them walk in it for the first time.
I met some very interesting people in my quest for permission to get on peoples’ land for my survey. There’s the old joke about the three greatest lies: The check is in the mail. I’ll love you forever. I’m the government and I’m here to help you. Government workers were not always welcome. However, when they heard my southern accent, they all seemed to warm to me. I had ranchers offer me the key to their house with directions as to where the coffee pot was located.
We are not talking about small ranches. Most of the ranches were 25, 50, or 100 sections of land. A section is 640 acres and it was not uncommon to ask permission to go on a piece of property that was 25,000 acres.
The strangest person I met was a lone female (who had about 15,000 acres). I actually called her “sir” when I first met her because I didn’t realize she was female. She brought me into her house through the living room. I noticed I was steeping in about 1 inch of liquid all through the living room. She looked back and told me not to pay attention – it was dog urine. She raised chihuahuas and told me she couldn’t let them out during the winter so they used that room to poop and pee.
You might think this a tad eccentric. She was a rich old woman. She raised and sold Arabians. She had just sold one for $25k. She seemed to like me and I got permission to go on her land.
It was in the new house that I got the sickest I’ve ever been in my life. There was a Dairy Queen close to the house and I got in the habit of stopping there for dinner. They had a pretty good hamburger. I must have gotten a bad one because I came down with food poisoning. I was so sick I could not turn over in bed without vomiting. I had a phone to call for help – I just couldn’t get to it. I was so weak I had to put a trash can by the bed to pee. It stayed with me for about three days.
Later, when lecturing in college, I talked about sea sickness in relation to Charles Darwin. Darwin was chronically seasick during the entire voyage of the HMS Beagle. Anyway, my lecture would talk about Darwin’s seasickness and how he would use that as an excuse to leave the ship to go collecting. I told students that food poisoning could kill you and seasickness would make you wish you were dead.
Two days after I was back on my feet, an old graduate school buddy, Sara Hurdle, came to visit. I had promised I would take her to Yellowstone.
After we got on the road, I felt better. Sara was an older graduate student at Ole Miss. Her ex was a fancy lawyer in Holly Springs. She caught him cheating and her three sons made sure her ex saw that she was well off. She actually went to school with Andy Griffith at Chapel Hill. She was in public health and he was trying to break into acting. She tells of his lamenting he couldn’t lose his southern accent. She would throw pool parties in Holly Springs for biology graduate students with her indoor pool.
Sara, as a graduation present, bought me a very expensive Canon camera. I think the reason was no one wanted to go on field trips with the “old” lady. I was always up for a field trip and I always took her along. She collected insects and I collected plants. We made a good team.
Anyway, we had a ball in Yellowstone. She insisted on paying for everything – a great room in an historic hotel in Jackson Hole, a bombardier trip into the park, snow shoe lessons, ski lessons, and a trip to the National Elk Herd.
I was to go back to Yellowstone some 50 years later and they still used the same old bombardiers that Sara and I took into the park.
I have to tell you she and I both tried downhill skiing at Jackson Hole at -20°F. It was a little too much for her when they taught us how to get up after we fall but she was game to try.
Later, at Yellowstone, she insisted I learn cross country skiing. It’s a lot harder than it looks. That was also my first time on snowshoes.
Sara and I kept in touch the rest of her life. Before she passed, she gave me her entire lifetime collection of insects. I later donated it to the college at Broward. It was two insect cabinets full of specimens and literally tripled the collection I had amassed for the college.
It wasn’t much longer after she left Miles City that I realized I was living the life of deficit spending. I think I was on a GS-4 pay grade. The cost of living in Montana is extremely high because everything has to be imported into the state. They have timber but it’s sold out of state so if you want a wooden screen door, you have to order it from either the east or west coast.
I reluctantly decided to leave Montana. I never collected a single plant – hard to do when it’s under 3 feet of snow.
Hilda Hill, back in Mississippi, was trying to get an environmental center going near the headquarters of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway project near Pickwick Lake on the Mississippi/Tennessee state line. She had met me while I was a graduate student at some presentation I made and she basically decided I was the perfect person to run the center. The only problem was it not only hadn’t been built, it hadn’t even been funded.
She cooked up the idea that I could be a park manager in a state park in Mississippi until the funding came through. I think she probably personally walked my job application through. Hilda was a force of nature. When I drove back to Mississippi – with Sam caterwauling and Rascal “nursing” me the whole way – I had a job as park manager of Golden Memorial State Park near Walnut Grove, Mississippi.
Stay tuned!
