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Retirees Trade Work for Rent at Cash-Poor Parks
By KIRK JOHNSON
The New York Times
February 18, 2010
ROMA,
Tex. — A cold wind whipped down the Texas plains on the night last month
that Sharon Smith, 68, and her husband, Bill, 73, arrived here to be
work-campers.
In
the dark, they had trouble setting up their camper. But Ms. Smith, a former
teacher’s aide from Sioux Falls, S.D., said she looked up at the starry
sky, shook off a few of the burrs she had picked up lying on the ground working
on their truck, and told herself it would get better.
It
did.
The
life of a work-camper, volunteering in places like Falcon State Park in deep
South Texas in return for free rent, is not without its bumps. But as Ms. Smith
also quickly discovered, the rewards can be deep as well — like making
cinnamon rolls as part of her job at the camp recreation center, where she and
Mr. Smith are working as hosts through the end of March.
“We’re
here for three reasons,” she said, as she spread sugar on the dough.
“No. 1, we like to travel. No. 2, we like people. And No. 3, we’re
on a budget.”
An
itinerant, footloose army of available and willing retirees in their 60s and
70s is marching through the American outback, looking to stretch retirement
dollars by volunteering to work in parks, campgrounds and wildlife sanctuaries,
usually in exchange for camping space.
Park
and wildlife agencies say that retired volunteers have in turn become all the
more crucial as budget cuts and new demands have made it harder to keep parks
open.
Work-campers
come together in one place — leading nature walks or staffing visitor
centers, typically working 20 hours to 30 hours a week — then take off to
their next assignments. As they move about, they keep in touch with one another
through cellphone numbers, e-mail addresses and Facebook postings, creating virtual
communities filled with the people they meet.
Camp
life, especially in this bird-watching hotspot, revolves around the great
outdoors: picking up trash, guiding visitors and, with luck, perhaps spotting
the rare roadside hawk that has been reported in the Rio Grande Valley. Night
brings a round of socializing: wine around the picnic tables out by the bird
feeders, an open-mike sing-along at the recreation center, an evening walk
through the South Texas scrubland.
Estimates
of the number of work-campers nationally vary, but a spokesman for Kampgrounds of
America Inc., a private company that franchises camps, said that 80,000 or
so might be a good guess, based on KOA’s percentage of the camping market
and the number of its work-campers.
“It
attracts a certain kind of person,” said Wendy R. Forster, 70, a retired
biologist who lives alone in her motor home and has been leading
bird-watchers’ walks here since January. “There’s a lot of
companionship and security.”
Recession
has cut a fierce crosswind through the subculture, recreation experts and
campers say. Some parks in California that once needed volunteers have closed,
for example, as the state’s budget crisis has intensified. Many campers
are also trying to stay longer in one place to cut travel expenses.
But
other recreation managers say they have become more dependent than ever on a
national network of volunteers, partly because of spending cuts and partly
because remaining staff members have to prioritize what they can do.
“Basic
trail maintenance, for example — picking up trash,” said Nancy C.
Brown, who coordinates volunteers for the South Texas
Refuge Complex, which includes three large wildlife areas.
“It’s important for wildlife purposes, but when you’re faced
with a choice of dealing with oil and gas permits or maintaining a trail, the
trail is the first thing to go.”
In
the last decade, Ms. Brown said, the number of campsites set aside for
volunteers in the complex, including those at Falcon State Park, has risen
twentyfold, to 65 from 3.
In
some places, the retired volunteers are about the only staff members left.
“We
did a state park in Arizona this year that had laid off so many people, we
basically ran it,” said Carolyn Miller, 71, a former small-business owner
from Colorado who has work-camped from Alaska to Maine with her husband,
Warren, 73.
For
many work-campers, the appeal of a nontraditional retirement was also linked to
a life-changing event — the death of a spouse, a divorce, money trouble,
a midlife reassessment of priorities. For whatever reasons, they said, staying
put became an unappealing or unavailable option.
And
for some, there is romance to be found. Sandra Noll, 65, a retired nurse who
has been leading canoe trips for bird-watchers on the Rio Grande since early
January, met her partner, Erv Nichols, 66, three years ago.
Mr.
Nichols, a retired photographer from Big Bear Lake, Calif., had set out to
downsize his life. With Social Security as his only
income, and two previous marriages that ended in divorce, he was so sure of a
solo life, he said, that he ripped out the front passenger seat of the little
motor home that a friend had given him as a gift.
Ms.
Noll, who was reassessing her own life after a divorce and a move back West,
where she grew up, found Mr. Nichols’s zeal in tossing aside his
possessions appealing. “You wanted to simplify your life,” she
said, glancing across the table at him in their little trailer. “That
drew you to me.”
Ms.
Forster, the retired biologist, became a volunteer partly out of grief. When
her husband died of cancer 17 years ago, in his 50s, she immediately set off,
she said, continuing the motor-home life they had imagined together, but now on
her own. She has led bird-watching trips all over the country and has already
made plans to come back here next year.
“We’re
nomadic,” she said. “But a lot of us are coming back next year, so
that will be a reunion.”
Other
campers are moving down the road. Ms. Noll and Mr. Nichols, for example, are
headed next to Nebraska, to work as guides along the sandhill cranes’ migration route.
Starting in June, the Smiths, from Sioux Falls, will work on an island in Puget
Sound. Ellen Lawson, 66, of Evansville, Wyo., will head for a dulcimer festival
in Mississippi. She said she was already dreading the goodbyes when she and her
husband, Ron, 67, leave here in March.
“I
cried when I left home to come here,” Ms. Lawson said while raking leaves
at Falcon State Park’s Butterfly Garden, “and I’ll cry when I
leave.”
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