1. Davis

New jobs were always stressful, even in an industry one knew well, an industry that seemed to fit like a second skin. And Nathaniel (never Nate) Davis— who, actually, always went by Davis and never Nathaniel Davis— knew forestry. He reminded himself of that as he took a deep breath, letting the pine-infused air soak deep into his lungs. He focused on the ache in his left knee left over from a particularly nasty fall during his last ride in West Virginia. He could also take in the trees, because this part of Colorado had a particularly excellent old-growth forest.

He also knew that a year in, it wasn’t considered a new job, per se. It still felt new, because the mountains he got to see every morning were so different from the mountains of his youth and early adulthood. The Rockies were large and imposing, cutting through the clouds with defined peaks and arguing with the sky at the tree line. The Appalachians in West Virginia were more subtle, older, more like rolling hills with a golden sunset above them.

There was probably a metaphor in there if Davis looked hard enough, but he hadn’t had enough coffee yet, and his back hurt. He needed a new mattress. He ignored the stiffness in his back, just like he ignored the brown tips that poked up and meant that Pine Bark Beetles had taken residence in this part of the forest. He ignored the whistling that meant there was a crack in the window behind him that he needed to fix.

Heading in from the rear porch, groaning as he stretched his back, Davis prepared a pot of coffee. It was quiet outside, one of the reasons he headed to the porch every morning to collect his thoughts, but it was too quiet in his cabin. He thought about getting a speaker for the cabin. While Davis loved the crisp silence of the morning, after a year, he had begun to feel like the place was missing something, a bit empty. He hadn’t really begun to set up until recently, convinced that he would be told to leave. But he was beginning to feel settled. Music could help.

Or someone in his bed.

Shaking that thought off, Davis threw on a hoodie and beanie and walked over to the main office for the morning ranger meeting.

“Morning,” he grunted at Alex and Yesenia, who were always early. Davis was, too, but not as early as those two. Somehow, they usually managed to go for a trail run or a mountain bike ride before work most days, too. Not for the first time, Davis thought about asking to go along or scheduling a weekend bike ride. He wasn’t going to be fired. His coworkers liked him. He was doing well at his job, had consistently booked programming throughout the past year, and had organized a series of educational hikes that had even gotten a write-up in the Denver Post, even if the reporter had paraphrased most of the answers that Davis had stammered through.

It’s been a year, Nathaniel, he berated himself, using his full name like it was his gram chastising him for not doing chores on the weekend. There was a list a mile long of reasons that this move to Colorado had been right for Davis, and one of them was that it was his chance to work for the federal government, which felt a bit like getting called up to the MLB after struggling through AAA.

Plus, he got to learn new species of trees.

Chokecherry. Prunus virginiana.

Quaking aspen. Populus tremuloides.

Rocky Mountain Juniper. Juniperus scopulorum.

And yellow-bellied marmots. Marmota flaviventris.

And those little critters were cute.

Just like Alex when he yawned in the morning and scrunched his nose. Just like his boss, Eric, was. Silver hair and crinkles around his eyes from a career spent in various nature-focused jobs. A prominent nose that Davis found intimidating and sexy. But Davis had a rule about never mixing work and pleasure, and that definitely extended to his boss. Especially the boss who had gotten him out of West Virginia once and for all over a year ago.

Back then, while working for WV State Parks, Davis, who struggled even on the best days with text-heavy websites, had spent the better part of three months battling with the USAJobs site, uploading his resume and experience and jumping through every other hoop imaginable to prove to some computer somewhere that he was actually qualified to be doing the job he had already done for the past decade. And once he had successfully put everything into the computer, he had to wait. Wait so long that he had honestly forgotten all the places he had applied to, until he received a phone call from Head Ranger Eubank, inviting him to interview at the national forest in Klarluft, Colorado.

Fast forward another agonizing seven months, and here he was, the newest outreach and education forest ranger at the Klarluft National Forest and the newest employee of the Department of Agriculture. Though he’d had the same position at the state park in West Virginia, it had felt like a new start.

And god knows, Davis had needed a new start.

That had been over a year ago, and Davis still felt like it was his first day. He couldn’t nail down why, only that thirty-odd years in West Virginia had taught him that if something was too good to be true, it probably was.

“Good morning, good morning,” Eric said to the assembled crew of forest rangers and support staff. It was early spring, still too early for any seasonal staff to be around. So it was Eric, who led the group, then Davis, who oversaw educational programming and outreach, Yesenia, who managed the endangered species conservation plan in conjunction with a host of other governmental organizations and nonprofits, and Alex, who worked in water conservation and testing. It was an odd crew, but in Davis’s experience, most people who were drawn to jobs in conservation were. When he had moved from West Virginia to Colorado a year ago, it felt like the culmination of everything that he had been struggling through for years. The jobs he worked to afford community college and undergrad, then weird seasonal jobs with state parks that had led to a full-time job. It felt odd to finally be figuring out that he might be in the right job at the age of thirty-eight, but Davis wasn’t used to following any sort of normal path or fitting in where he was supposed to.

Davis knew that he was going to help save the forest. Or, as the mission would be for the Forest Service, make sure that it was properly managed and conserved. People like Davis had to be practical.

He was really good at pretending to be listening as the meeting kicked off, which wasn’t unusual. It was how he had gotten through high school and stuttered through seven years of college. That, plus a very corny Appalachian ability to connect with the trees in a very deep manner. Davis didn’t need to look at a dichotomous key to know if something was a pine or a spruce. Flora and fauna were able to be ordered in his brain the way that the shapes of words never could have been.

Davis wanted more than anything to prove that he belonged here, that he was someone who deserved to work for the national forest system and speak for the trees.

“What’s going on?” Yesenia asked. “I have a group coming in to do a bird count this afternoon, and I need to get started on looking at last year’s data so we can understand—”

“You’re good. Yes,” Alex said, kicking one booted foot over his thigh and leaning back in the chair. “You know that group is going to be late anyway.”

“Heh, true. Remember that one year—” And so it went. Alex and Yesenia were the only two staff members who’d stayed on site during lockdown, so they had an incredibly close relationship that Davis was jealous of. Eric, he had managed to surmise, had been transferred to Colorado from a national forest in Arizona, a goal of his for a long time, as his grandmother lived in the area. Davis felt like an outsider, an interloper, and had been waiting every day for them to let him know that the newest budget had come out and his position had been cut. Or that they’d discovered why he occasionally visited Denver and had decided to fire him.

Davis knew you couldn’t fire people for being queer anymore, but it still didn’t stop him from imagining the worst possible outcome.

“Anyway, as I was saying,” Eric said, raising his voice just enough to take over the room. “I was informed today that we have been the beneficiaries of a grant that needs to be used quickly.”

“Why so quickly?” Yesenia asked the question that Davis would have asked if he had a bit more courage and a bit more coffee this early in the morning.

“Shitty communication,” Eric said. “You know how government work is. Hurry up and wait, and then wait, and then it’s a damned emergency.” He rubbed his hands together as he went over the details and the three rangers tossed ideas around. Alex wanted to invest in new monitoring equipment. Yesenia wanted to try to use it to advocate for wildlife crossings over one of the major roads near the forest.

But Davis had an idea. Not only something to bring people into the forest, but to educate. It would help his job, yes, but it would also benefit them all, because it would bring people to the national forest, and it could help with education and outreach.

Davis cleared his throat. “I think we should update the visitor center.”

“But no one goes to the visitor center,” Alex said.

“That’s the point, dumbass,” Yesenia said, and Davis hazarded a smile, which she met.

Davis felt as if he’d gained a power-up in one of the animated driving games he loved and continued, detailing how an updated visitor center would not only bring more recreational hikers and families but could help the overall mission by spreading education back to the cities.

“Should we vote?” Eric asked.

“Nah, Davis’s idea is a good one,” Alex said. Yesenia agreed, and all of a sudden, Davis was on his way to live his dream of being the Lorax.

Okay, well, he wasn’t the Lorax, but he would try. Plus, the Lorax hadn’t actually saved the forest. Maybe Davis could. And the first thing he was going to tackle was this god-awful, horrible, no good visitor center. Davis couldn’t draw, but he could communicate his ideas to a professional. He pulled out his computer and googled Colorado Exhibit Consultants, pulled out his phone, and began to speech-to-text a message detailing what he imagined.