“Why do people ask me how dangerous my job is?” I was eating lunch with a US national park colleague of mine, and she told me about a conversation she had with a park visitor. This ranger had an office job, stationed in the headquarters building. “I mean, I come to work; I sit at a desk. It’s a job. Why would it be dangerous?”
“Is your job dangerous?” is one of the most common questions I encountered while working as a national park ranger. Some people just skipped this question and assumed that being a park ranger was inherently dangerous, asking, “What’s the most dangerous thing that’s happened to you at your job?”
Truthfully, for many park rangers the most dangerous aspects of their day involve driving to and from work. (The odds of dying in a car crash in the US are around 1 in a 100 while the odds of dying in a US national park are around 1 in a million–be careful on the roads out there, folks.)
Many national park employees work in offices or visitor centers or the auto repair shop. US National parks employ all types of staff, many of whom spend their days doing jobs similar to those found at other organizations–answering phones, sending and receiving countless emails, mowing the lawn.
I’m not saying that accidents can’t occur in any job: they can. And otherwise routine tasks are sometimes made more challenging by the remote or potentially hazardous environment of a national park. Mowing grass beside a busy park road or plowing snow on a cliff edge can be a dangerous profession. National park maintenance workers have been injured or–in rare cases–even perished while doing their everyday jobs.
And then there are the professions well known for being dangerous. These do exist in national parks. Fighting fires, building trails, rescuing people during emergencies. Law enforcement rangers protect the park and the people in it, sometimes by endangering or even sacrificing their own lives.
There are bear technicians in national parks whose job is to piss off bears. That’s literally their job–”hazing” being a proven technique to keep curious or food-habituated bears away from people. Shooting bean bags into the backside of a bear qualifies as a dangerous job.
When I worked in national parks and visitors asked me about my own park ranger danger, I would tell them about my second seasonal park ranger job, in Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska.
For the most part, my Glacier Bay job was like any other I had working as a national park interpreter. I answered visitor questions, led hikes, gave talks, and occasionally roved trails, though always with a radio and my bear spray clipped to my hip. It was pretty normal interp ranger stuff, even if Bartlett Cove, Alaska was a more remote location than some other national parks I worked in.
The danger there came from the fact that I spent most workdays at sea (literally, though maybe a little figuratively too). When I worked at Glacier Bay, any commercial vessel entering the park was required to host park rangers. My colleagues and I would step on to smaller touring vessels at the tiny park dock. Massive cruise ships, two of which explored the park each day, we boarded a different way.
Most cruise ship days I woke at four in the morning, threw on my stiff wool green pants, pinned my tie to my shirt with a little arrowhead tie tack, and stumbled to park headquarters along trails bordered by thick temperate rainforest. Often it would be raining (hence the name rainforest) and chilly, and in fall or spring these mornings were pitch black, the only light the beam from my headlamp. For most of the summer months, though, it was already full daylight by five am, and we were grateful for the light as we loaded our large hats and other gear into a van to transport us to the dock.
I never enjoyed waking at 4am, but I found that I did like the calm of a crisp Alaskan morning. The smell of the ocean–sour and salty and thick with mysteries–greeted me as we boarded the small, speedy boat that would take us out to meet our ships.
The trip to intercept cruise ships in the center of the bay’s main channel took about half an hour. The boat’s engines maintained a continuous roar of white noise, making conversation challenging, though this early in the morning none of us seemed to mind not talking.
Sometimes I would stand out on the short back deck, watching the white water and strands of kelp churned up in our wake, keeping a grip at the railing as our boat, nimble and light, wove its way toward the hulking base of a massive cruise ship.
Danger comes in many forms. While working in national parks, I have encountered bears and other wildlife, inhaled smoke in the shadow of a raging wildfire, and once had to be rescued at sea. But I have never faced more routine and life-threatening danger than I did each day scaling up the side of a cruise ship.
This was the task assigned to our little park boat–to deliver us into the belly of a cruise ship. The ships were often fifteen or more stories tall. Imagine a fifteen story building floating on water, even longer than it is tall. Now envision it towering above you, as you bob next to it on your own comparatively tiny boat.
I wore a puffy, oversized, orange coat for safety; it was designed to inflate and keep me visible should I fall overboard. My second summer at the park we were also given orange safety helmets to wear, another precaution to keep government liability hawks from shutting down the entire program. The summer prior a park volunteer at Channel Islands National Park had died from striking his head during a fall while trying to board a park boat.
The routine, which we called a “transfer,” was this: the park boat would match the speed of the cruise ship (around 13 knots) and bump up against it at the spot where the ship staff opened a hatch and threw down a rope ladder. We would climb up that rope ladder and into the bowels of the ship.
Climbing a rope ladder from one moving vessel onto another while at sea. What could possibly go wrong?
Many, many things, of course. And yet, they didn’t. For decades before I worked there this program had been in place, transferring rangers in this exact way from boat to ship, ship back to boat, and there hadn’t been an accident.
Perhaps this flawless track record was because we took precautions, trained in rescue scenarios, and wore our safety gear.
I think what actually kept us safe though was how obvious the danger was. Not once did I think, “Ho hum, just climbing up the side of a moving ship over frigid Alaskan waters like I do everyday, no big deal.”
I grew accustomed to the danger, but not once did I become complacent. And I felt safe only because I could tell that my colleagues–our boat captain and crew member as well as the other rangers, took the whole affair as seriously as I did.
Only once–and here is the story people were looking for when they asked a ranger about danger–was I terrified I might actually die while doing the transfer.
It was the afternoon, and I was leaving the ship, about to climb down to our park boat. My days on cruise ships were long and exhausting–often twelve to fifteen hours–and that day I was eager to relax and decompress with my colleagues.
The rope ladder was about three feet wide, each wooden slat a couple feet above the next one. Usually we only needed to climb or descend three or four rungs between vessels. The rope was cold, wet, and frayed enough to feel like teeth trying to chew through your hands. I took to wearing my leather uniform gloves for the transfer.
This day was like any other, cloudy and cool, though it wasn’t raining or foggy. I backed my way down the first and then second step of the ladder, gripping the rope, so thick I could just get my hands around it. I was taking my third step down when I heard yelling.
“Up! Go up!” Our boat captain, a serious and quiet man with a trim beard, rumored to be an accomplished opera singer when not ferrying us to and from cruise ships, was uncharacteristically screaming. I had never heard him raise his voice.
I leapt to the top of the ladder, just as the park boat reared back and crashed into the side of the ship. The boat lifted and slammed a second time into the ladder, exactly where I had just stood. Had I not moved I would have been pancaked between the boat and the side of the ship.
“We got waked,” called a colleague who was clutching the front railing of the park boat, riding the large waves sent out by a passing vessel like he was on a bucking bull. I could see the other boat–carrying its own load of tourists–already moving swiftly past, oblivious to the serious accident their wake had nearly caused.
Our captain steered the park boat away to ride out the sudden waves, and then he navigated it back to the ladder. I watched him like a hawk, my whole body still trembling with adrenaline. When the boat was once again in position, he made eye contact with me and nodded. I turned my back to the vessel and once again began the climb down, though this time my hands were shaking so badly I could barely feel the rope.
I made it to the solid, still bobbing deck of the park boat. I called out a thank you to our captain, who only nodded again, as though such moments of danger were commonplace to him. Perhaps they were.
As our boat veered away from the ship in a wide arc, the rope ladder pulled up and the opening in the ship’s hull already closed once again, I stood with my fellow rangers on the deck and waved, as was our custom. Hundreds of folks, many of whom we had spoken to or who had witnessed our various programs throughout the day, stood on the deck of the ship to see us off.
They came for the danger. The transfer at sea was a big draw for park visitors; it was one of the things we were asked about most often. “Did you really climb aboard our ship this morning?” they would ask. “While we were moving?”
Yes, we would tell them, and you can watch us disembark this afternoon. And some of them would, enough that the decks were full of waving hands, all focused on us, as we made our retreat back to our little park dock.
Imagine people looking and waving at you from every window of that floating, fifteen-story building you envisioned earlier. It was a thrill, a curtain call for a day of challenging and sometimes stressful labor.
None of these happy, waving folks understood that I had almost died just now. I could still hear my heartbeat pounding in my ears. But I smiled and waved back, not out of duty, but because this moment was the one that made it all worthwhile. This was the reward for waking at four am, for braving the danger of a work commute that most people thought I was crazy to sign up for.
I waved and I smiled, and I felt grateful to be alive, to be in Alaska, where every moment seems charged with a little more energy, where being this close to the edge of nothing brings you also closer to your own mortality. When the ship was out of sight, I pulled down my hand, now no longer trembling, and thought–not unhappily–about how I got to do all this again tomorrow.