Wait, she said what?
Picture this, it’s the blazing hot summer of 2013 and a lifted, white Chevy Silverado parks in a campground in the northeast corner of Utah. Out of the cab jumps a five-foot two blonde with a ponytail tighter than the Hoover Dam. She is wearing starched green shorts and a collared Forest Service shirt tucked in cinched in place with a belt.
Her march around the campground begins. The nasty scratch of pen pressed into copy paper is heard as she notes “noncompliance” down her checklist. A seventy-nine-year-old veteran hobbles after her, “It’s a campground in the woods, of course there is supposed to be unmown grass over there.”
The red pen draws blood every time she slashes another line.
Bathrooms uncleaned, trash cans full, widow-maker branches unpruned, and horror of horrors! Hot coals steaming in a vacated campsite pit.
Her boots clobber the ground as she searches for more breaches to the Forest Service permit. The veteran, Ian, has given up placating her. He resigns to his campground’s fate. The two both stop short at a large Forest Service issued dumpster plastered with one large sticker.
I ♥ BJs
The forest is so silent, even the birds have stopped twittering and the chipmunks hold their munching as everyone waits to see what the young woman will do.
She realizes with absolute clarity that this moment would be a defining point in her career. Either she could take herself so seriously she would become the law, or she could laugh. Four counts and then she and Ian look at each other and burst into belly-aching laughter. They laugh so hard tears spring from their eyes. The globular heart and cartoonish letters tease them from the dumpster.
“I’d left it up there because it just made this place a little jollier for all the old folks who come through this way,” Ian had blushed brighter red than the candy apple ink of the printed heart.
It took the better part of the hour, but we managed to pivot the dumpster away from the road so visitors could see the sticker from their campers and the Forest Service Ranger could see the official emblem from the road. It was with a great amount of pride I found the sticker still there, tucked behind a bramble, last time I passed through the Ashley National Forest to vacation with my husband.
I told this story, about my early career, to my team the other night. We had a rough week of high delivery demands, uncomfy peer interactions, and the nasty lies of anxiety whispering over our shoulders. The lab was too serious. Anyone could tell by the music blaring through the lab speakers. Even though this is a new position for me, it felt important that I remind them all why we were truly there.
And being reminded to laugh isn’t as weak a suggestion as some might take it be. Laying down our defenses and chuckling at the tight spaces we navigate ourselves into floods our lungs with air. The worst part about a panic attack is not having the air needed to clear one’s own head. We in a way, through our body’s physiological response, starve ourselves of fresh oxygen.
And there is so much more to not taking oneself so seriously. I was a twenty-year-old with a badge and a uniform unwilling to listen to a seventy-nine-year-old who had been to war and back, probably loved hundreds of people (enough to think about encouraging them to get freaky in the woods) and had found essential purpose in ushering people into nature. He was hospitable and happy and gracious. I had so much to learn from Ian.
Just the way my new team, starting their journey at our company, has much to learn from me and our director and their senior peers. All of which will tell them, “Our work is important so long as we don’t forget the main thing.” We are helping people, inside our building and outside in the world.
I loved the way my coworkers’ faces split into glowing smiles when they heard me drop the line of the story about the sticker. One of them whispered to another, “Wait, what did she just say?” Not one of them ever imagined me speaking those words out loud because they do take me seriously, and so do I. But not so seriously, that a raunchy bumper sticker can’t get me laugh now and again.
Drop me a comment about something that made you laugh this week. Have you shared that story with anyone else in your life? Hoping with you that you get to laugh long and loud this week!