When I was young - 18 - 24 or so - I was a professional river boatman all over the west. Yampa, Green, Desolation Canyon, Cataract, Middle Fork, Salmon, Hell's Canyon of Snake River, Cataract, Grand Canyon. I loved that but thought I needed to have a serious job of some sort.
I was a ranger in one of the huge, rivered, western National Parks for 3 years. Had a patrol staff doing interpretation and law enforcement, did concessions management, worked with many many riparian researchers, made some ranger pards with whom I am still close these decades later. Flat hat, gray shirt, gold badge, green pants, .357, Type V lifejackets. I loved that. But I came home one day to a wife who said, "In August I'm going back to Denver and taking the kids. You can come or not." I was never a fan of Marriage by Ultimatum. So by then I was thinking, "I wouldn't cross a placid street for you, but I'm not being separated from my kids." I was yet to learn that any marriage that needs to be salvaged isn't worth saving.
Lately I started re-reading El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, to try to figure out why Cervantes included that dismal episode about the love-slain pseudo-shepherd Grisostomo, and the virtuous and beauteous Marcela who was his unintended and inadvertent basilisk. I found myself thinking, "I wonder if any of these people on the Forum have an opening for a caballero andante. That seems like a good 10th career for me. Me and Travis McGee." Then I realized I had had a job after FI where I was a sort of ombudsman and simultaneous enforcer at a very large subsidized housing project, saving from eviction the tenants the staff had unfairly targeted, casting the violent assholes who had imposed upon the staff and terrified the tenants out into the street. I loved that, though in a very different way, and it is only now, years later, that I see how quixotic it was and how the quixotic part was what attracted.
