Like most free-range kids, we were always making something out of nothing. We built forts, tree houses, and underground hide-outs. One year, we damned the stream and made ourselves a swimming hole, then cleared the sticks and stones and made ourselves a sandy beach.
When I got a Barbie for my birthday, I loved the case she came in best. That case opened up and had drawers and a rod to hang Barbie’s clothes and I thought that was the neatest thing I’d even seen. Instead of playing with Barbie, I made her an entire house out of cardboard and trash. I even made her a garden. I was so into my Barbie making world, my folks took to saying, “no, you may not use that for your house” about everything I even looked at.
For high school, I attended a private Catholic girl’s school in the city. In our senior year, we took a battery of tests to identify our “aptitudes” so the nuns could direct us into college. My highest aptitude was engineering, and the nuns directed me into teaching (don’t ask me why, cause I really do not know).
In my last year at university, I needed one more lower division course to graduate and signed up for Industrial Design. On the first day of class, the professor asked if anyone knew what Industrial Design was? Nope. The professor started walking around the room, stopping by various projects, and showing us what Industrial Designers did. One of those projects was a model of an exhibit. That model reminded me of my little girl Barbie world so much, I stayed after class to find out more. Once the professor explained the emerging world of exhibition design, I was hooked. I stayed in college another three years to earn a degree in Industrial Design.
Back then, exhibition design was such a new profession, I had to kludge together classes at three different colleges and universities to get the skills I needed. Sometimes risk pays off and before I graduated, I had so many job offers it was hard to decide which one to take. I spent the next 20 years designing exhibitions, and public spaces, all over America and several other countries too.
When I finally followed my heart back to the mountains, I moved into rural land use and public policy work. Just like my Barbie garden, rural landscapes are gardens too. Nature’s gardeners are not all human. There are fires, dirt, rocks, and all kinds of wild things tending rural landscapes - and everything needs a place to live, something to eat, a little water, and fresh air. Take one of those things away, and there are going to be conflicts and migration problems as everything seeks a new place to live. If you disturb their habitat, rocks and dirt can migrate so fast, they swallow human homes and entire towns, even kill people (think mud slides, floods, breached and broken damns etc.).
Only now, as I reflect on my past, can I see the role that serendipity played in my life. Thanks to chance and dumb luck I’ve been playing Barbies all my life. As they used to say, do what you love for a living, and you will never work a day in your life.
That’s the long way of saying, I wish people would ask kids what they love doing most, before they direct them into work (or college).
