Boughs that won’t break: Sleeping Bear Dunes employees should stand strong against Trump’s attempt to humiliate federal workforce
Opinion by Jess Piskor
Sun contributor
On a snowy Feb. 3 Monday, the Philip A. Hart Visitor Center at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in Empire is nearly empty. The lone visitor is warmly greeted by a classically-attired park ranger and strongly encouraged to warm up in their auditorium to watch a new and exciting Lakeshore documentary. Upon the third insistence, I buckle under the fierce pride this ranger shows for Sleeping Bear Dunes and I enter.
The auditorium’s walls are covered in art, made through their artist residency program, bringing the Park to vivid color on a winter whiteout day. This art is new since I last visited the auditorium, half a lifetime ago. Then I was 22 and a seasonal worker at the Lakeshore, thinking I was just filling out paperwork for a summer job fixing buildings and trails. Instead, I found myself alongside a dozen others pledging my loyalty to a cause greater than my own:
“I, Jess Piskor, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
I spent the next two summers [2002-03] restoring old barns, learning tools, paying for college and falling in love with the Park. Those summers made me a better person and a better citizen. I often think back with pride to my time at Sleeping Bear Dunes, but nostalgia isn’t what brought me to the Park this Monday.
The lights dim and the video, Water, Sand and Sky begins. I grew up around the Park and feel like I know it, but the sweeping drone shots and the beautiful retelling of the “Legend of the Sleeping Bear,” spoken aloud in Anishinaabemowin capture my attention. The seasons play out in rapid succession. A ranger describes the solitude and the beauty of a windswept point. There’s the Crystal and the Platte, the lighthouses, the plover, the dunes and the Climb. Out on the Manitou Islands — the cedars and the shipwrecks. Back on the mainland — the barns and the rescue station. And behind each of these are people. Native peoples keeping their language alive; descendants of lighthouse keepers polishing a brass fixture; a young biologist who holds an endangered species in her hands; a forester touching a 1,000-year-old cedar that will outlive him by another 1,000 if all goes well. It’s our community working together to love and cherish and protect this place. Our home.
The voiceover variously describes the Dunes as “Fragile and obstinate. Timeless and ever-changing. Precariously balanced. Perched.” It could as well describe our current democracy.
I’m feeling obstinate, so after the lights go on I head outside in the snow to give voice to my feelings. Standing out in the falling snow, the few cars in quiet Empire pass slowly. The sign I’m holding says I *heart* My Park. Hold the Line. Don’t Resign.
Inside at their cubicles, federal employees opened their work emails last week to find threatening form letters from our own government. From a new regime hell-bent on shrinking and neutering our United States government and the crucial services it provides to our citizens and people around the world. Addressed to nearly every public servant, the generic letters question their worth, belittle their service, and encourage all to resign. A simple one word reply to the email is all that’s needed to end a lifetime of service.
It is, of course, wrong to treat people as replaceable and unwanted tools, but that is the clear sentiment behind the current flurry of messages. Seasonal worker programs like the one that shaped my life are at stake. The federal workforce deserves to know they are appreciated and assured that their work is important.
Our civil servants are avowedly non-political. This is a matter of law, but also a point of pride and principle. No one at the Park wants to talk politics, and I don’t press. They’ve got work to do. I am happy to report that everyone I saw seemed in good spirits, enthusiastic about the National Lakeshore and doing a great job fulfilling their oath.
My sign gets a few waves from passing cars. The snow keeps coming and after another hour and another inch the nearby pine branches are heavy. The burden piles on these boughs and they look weary, almost touching the ground. But the big lake is just across M-22 and a quickening gust stirs down past Taghon’s Gas and the trunks sway. The limbs shrug off the white weight and rise up. They are made of stronger stuff.