Petroglitch

When Amy and I got married in the fall of 1991, I asked my parents as a wedding gift to get us two round-trip airplane tickets to Albuquerque, New Mexico.  I’d been to New Mexico a few times but Amy had not.  My parents obliged and we were off.  We had planned about a two-week travel circuit that would take us all over the Four Corners area.  My friend Tom, who had driven all the way up from Arizona to attend our nuptials, graciously offered to take a bunch of our camping gear back with him and meet up with us along the way.  And so it went.

We flew to Albuquerque and spent several days in romantic B&Bs in Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Taos, taking in all the sights and falling in love with the Land of Enchantment.  We had perfect weather the entire time.  From Taos we drove up to Durango where we met Tom, and he gave us our camping gear so that we could continue on to Canyonlands where we spent several days getting lost in the slickrock, immersing ourselves in the Colorado Plateau autumn.  We eventually packed up the camping gear and sent it home, returned to Albuquerque via El Morro NM, and I returned to my job at Whiskeytown.  But we had been bitten by the bug, and thereafter I spent lots of time looking for National Park jobs in New Mexico that I could transfer ito.

As luck would have it, several years later in 1994, I saw a vacancy for Petroglyph National Monument, a relatively new national park area on the outskirts of Albuquerque.  I applied for the position and, son of a gun, if I didn’t get the job….as Chief of Interpretation and Cultural Resources.  By April of that year, we were back in New Mexico and absolutely thrilled to be there.  The job had its challenges as Petroglyph was an urban park right on the edge of rapid development along Albuquerque’s west side.  The City wanted to keep expanding and we were in the way.  But we had a dynamic young superintendent and a motivated staff, so for the first two years things went relatively well…until our superintendent got a better offer elsewhere and moved on.

His replacement was an Hispanic female with no prior supervisory experience.  But it didn’t matter to us at first because as a staff we knew we could keep the ball rolling and make her look good.  Suffice to say, that didn’t work out.  Early on she asserted herself to the staff, asking for strict schedules and subservience to her will.  And it became obvious, as well, that she had a real chip on her shoulder for Anglo males.  We began to feel her wrath daily.  She was particularly bothered by my air of independence.  She had me move my office from the visitor center where my staff was, to the administrative office where she could keep an eye on me.  Then she began to make up lies about me not attending meetings and not doing what she asked me to do.  She was becoming the Captain Queeg of the good ship Petroglyph just as  I was taking on the responsibilities of becoming a new father once again.

By the summer of 1998, the writing was on the wall.  She was out to get me. Several of the staff had already moved on.  I began compiling a file on her, and calling the regional office for help.  Everyone on the staff was miserable at this point.  We even got a visit from a Regional investigative team who spent several days interviewing all of us, but in the end they were powerless to do anything.  Meanwhile, I was applying for vacancies all over the place. I was a GS-12 at this point and looking for GS-9 positions anywhere that would get me out.  But every time my superintendent got a call about me, she denigrated my performance.  But then fate stepped in.

I had applied for a vacancy with the BLM at Red Rock Canyon near Las Vegas. It was a great job and I even got a chance for a face to face interview.  And it turned out that my evil boss was on vacation at the time and unavailable for comment.  So I got the job and proudly walked into her office upon her return to let her know that I was leaving.  Instead of congratulating me, she made the next several weeks miserable, not allowing me annual leave to help pack my things.  Not approving travel.  She was a bitch to the bitter end.  But I made it out.  And I sadly had to leave the NPS culture behind.

As it turned out, the BLM seemed to recognize my abilities and quickly promoted me to manager of Red Rock, giving me my grade back as well as my pride, and from there things only got better.  But Petroglyph will always be the stain on my career.  And that superintendent?  She was demoted a few years later for using her government credit card to pay off thousands of dollars in gambling debts. And I eventually got the dream assignment that brought me to Grand Junction, Colorado.