Last winter, we met Samantha Marks just after the feds laid her off from her job as a probationary physical science technician and volunteer coordinator on the Bridger-Teton National Forest. That meant she lost her federal employee housing, too. She had just started building a straw bale house on a piece of land she bought outside Pinedale. She got through the winter couch surfing since rent is expensive there. It’s around $2,000 a month. Then in the spring, she got rehired when courts blocked the mass firings. Now she’s back to work and camping out in her barn. Against all odds, she’s continued to build a home for herself.
Wyoming Public Radio’s Melodie Edwards visited her the day she hoisted a large beam on her roof with the help of friends.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited lightly for clarity and brevity.
Sam Marks: [offering a tour of her strawbale house construction site] There's going to be a front door here and two beautiful doors because this is like the beautiful sunset view for the Wyoming Range, which is kind of why I love the place. This valley, right over there is a giant ranch. In the middle of the night you can hear the cows mooing.
I'm back working for the Forest Service, which is really nice. It doesn't feel as secure as it did last year. More than a couple [of] months ago, since I was previously fired and rehired, I already came to terms of, ‘All right, if I have to move on, I'll figure it out’. But I can't live every day thinking, ‘Oh, what if I get fired tomorrow?’ I'm just not going to be happy or do anything. It's not worth it.
When I first left, I was previously in employee housing. With losing the job, I left that. I could have come back when I was rehired, but job and living tied together just felt like too much. So then I stayed with some friends, while it was winter and during the cold. They were great and I rotated between them. So it was really nice to have a little bit of a community in Pinedale that I could rely on.
Then, once the weather warmed up, I moved to my place here, which has been really nice. When the weather's nice, it's great. I don't think the house will be ready for next winter, so I think I'll [have] to actually rent a place. Honestly, people in town have a lot of dogs, so I've been doing a lot of dog sitting and house sitting. And we have access to the aquatics center, which is really nice. So it's not pure camping.
That was one of the main overwhelming things about being fired. I was like, ‘Okay, I have this much in savings, I can find another job.’ But, also, having to find a place to live felt so immediate. I was like, ‘Okay, I can figure out one of those at a time, but doing both just was really overwhelming.’
That's my goal, is to have this place livable before next winter. There's a very small chance it’ll happen this winter, but that feels very ambitious. So I don't really want to rely on that. But my line for livable is, I need heat and running water. I don't know if I'll have the heating system in, but maybe I'll have until November to work on it. That's just not determined yet.
It's been a hesitant back-to-work. Because a lot of it is like, ‘Okay, here's the work I had planned for the summer.’ But then we lost all funding, and a lot of the work I do doesn't take that much. I want, like, a hundred dollars for a water sample. But we don't even have that.
Almost generically, everyone's working with smaller budgets. We're like, can we spend anything? We don't currently have any budget officers working for us. The trickle down, it's not even like who can sign off on this if no one's authorized to sign off? No one's getting hired and no one's getting promoted.
So a lot of it's like, ‘Okay, I want to plan this summer, but am I going to get called into something in a month or a couple of things.’ We really rely on volunteers [at the Forest Service] and I was like, ‘Well, I didn't call any volunteers because I wasn't working at the time and I wasn't trusting I could come back.’ Usually, the volunteers are showing up this weekend. It's like, okay, we have some in September, but that's not the same.
But, also, we were given very, very clear directives on what the priorities are. The priorities are fire, the priorities are keeping sites open. [People are] just like, ‘Oh, look, the campground's open. They must be doing fine.’ You're like, ‘Yeah, we took 20 people away from their normal jobs just to open this. And we have locked several bathrooms because they're too full and we don't even have the company to come pump them out.’ It just hasn't quite hit because they're like, ‘What do you mean? There are some of them open.’ And you're like, ‘Yeah, but this is not operational in the way you think it is.’
Part of me is, like, we're not really gonna not look at water, right? Like we're definitely going to start monitoring the air again, right? Like, I don't fully believe that we're just not going to pay attention to these things. But we aren't and it hasn't changed yet. So we'll see.
