Sabra Purdy: We’re trying to keep chaos at bay

Clear across the country from Washington, it can feel as though Congress is continually in crisis, and a shutdown always looms over us. At any moment, we’ll have to spring into action to keep things from falling apart. For me and 40 or so other volunteers, this means cleaning up after the tens of thousands of tourists coming to Joshua Tree National Park every day. When government workers are told to stay home, we trek in and do some of what they can’t.

We scrub restrooms, restock toilet paper and empty the garbage cans, hoping to keep the chaos at bay. We’ve been doing this amid the flurry of the holiday period, the busiest time of year for the rock-climbing guide service that my husband and I run. It isn’t pretty, but we count ourselves lucky that the park’s gates are open at all. If we’d had to cancel all our trips and refund our customers’ deposits, we wouldn’t have been able to make payroll and our staff would have taken a huge financial hit.

The last major shutdown, in October 2013, locked us out of the park about 130 miles west of Los Angeles for 16 days. Between that and nearly 1,300 civilian employees of the nearby Marine Corps Base Ground Combat Center getting furloughed, the local economy suffered enormously. The motels, restaurants and shops were all empty. Joshua Tree was a ghost town. A shutdown affects not only those directly employed by the government, but all the people whose livelihoods depend on federal land: Although October was relatively early in the season, my husband and I still lost about $5,000 in income. With our schedules suddenly clear, we filled the time with gardening, and getting people to call their congressional representatives and attend our Shut Down the Shutdown rally. (We sang “This Land Is Your Land” in front of the locked front gates and put on some silly political theater involving Uncle Sam being attacked by zombie congressmen.)

This time, the shutdown is happening during peak tourist season. It has barely dented the usual traffic – in fact, more people may have come once they figured out there wouldn’t be fees or rangers. Cars are lining up to enter, then parking in crazy configurations. No one is staffing the kiosks out front to collect entrance fees. The campgrounds are completely full. There are people everywhere.

We now have a standing 10 a.m. meetup to organize volunteers to head to the park together. We’re driving trailers full of trash out of the park and spending hundreds of dollars on cleaning supplies. With the visitor center closed, volunteers are sitting at a folding table at a local souvenir shop, Coyote Corner, show tourists a map of the park and various points of interest, answering legions of questions. We do this out of love of the park, but also because our livelihoods depend on it. Once conditions go downhill, they will be hard to restore.

Still, there are some gaps we can’t fill – namely, enforcing the park rules. We can’t manage the camping reservation system, and visitors are squabbling over campsites. We don’t know how long the contracts for services such as toilet pumping and trash pickup are paid through, or whether the contractors will come at all.

This is a long stretch for Joshua Tree to go without ranger presence. Search-and-rescue coordination has been significantly reduced, although thankfully, full law enforcement ranger patrols came back on duty. Rumors are flying about much wilder bad behavior – pallet fires, cutting down trees – although I haven’t seen that myself. Mostly we’ve noticed people camping where they shouldn’t, or dogs going off leash in the wrong areas. Our main fear is that, with no one to tell them no, visitors will drive vehicles off road, tearing up the land. Meanwhile, Joshua Tree’s superintendent estimates that the park is losing $2.5 million to $3 million in camping and parking fees.

When the government can’t get it together, someone needs to keep things running. Around here, we’re doers: We don’t just sit on our hands. I feel really proud when I see how much our community cares about the park, and how willing people are to do some pretty gross, dirty work to protect it. But we shouldn’t have to. And the excitement to pitch in during the first few days might not last if this drags out for three weeks, or longer, with no resolution on the horizon. This isn’t sustainable. The campgrounds were closed down on New Year’s Day, and if this continues, the park may shut down entirely.

The Park Service employees we’re friendly with aren’t getting too political in public, but privately, they worry about when they’ll get back to work and how long their savings will last. If they don’t get back pay, that’s bad, but if they do get back pay, the public will have lost the work they could’ve gotten done during this period – it’s a terrible deal for everyone.

(As told to Washington Post editor Sophia Nguyen.)