Peace, quiet, and...compost?: A peek at a caretaker’s day
By Jim Collins
Before his current placement at Speck Pond Shelter, Chris "Buzz" Kaldahl was the Mahoosuc Rover, the caretaker responsible for four shelters in the Mahoosucs, northeast of the high Presidentials. "I like the variety of moving around," he says. "On the other hand, I had to deal with four outhouses instead of one." Outhouses, or, more accurately, composting the waste from outhouses, occupies much of Buzz’s time.
He is clean-cut, friendly, talkative. He can, in fact, talk for hours about the philosophy and science of composting human waste, how helping that waste break down is ever more important as hiker numbers soar. On occasion he offers demonstrations to hikers coming through his shelters. He can, just to pick a subject, easily tell a meat eater from a vegetarian by a casual glance at the feces.
By comparison, Buzz’s other caretaking duties—educating campers about trail safety and backcountry ethics, doing light trail and site maintenance at the shelters, being available for first aid and emergencies, collecting hiker fees—seem routine. It’s the composting that Buzz brags about.
Today is the second of three days for Buzz at Speck Pond, a dark, high mountain pool that fills the basin of a steep-walled depression. The Speck Pond shelter is the only AMC facility out of radio range for transmitting. A caretaker can receive radio calls there, but to transmit them he has to hike up to one of the ridges overlooking the pond.
On this cool, early September morning, Buzz grabs his radio and hikes the half-mile up to Mahoosuc Arm, into transmitting range. At the summit he waits for his turn on air, and looks off at the wild cloud formations building in the east. He loves this landscape and the solitude. Like a lot of caretakers, he has worked elsewhere in the organization before getting a shot at one of the coveted caretaking positions. The winter before, he had worked the reservation desk down at Pinkham Notch Visitor Center. "I can’t imagine a better job than this," he says, then adds simply, "It’s Speck." On this morning, with light shafting through the roiling clouds onto the dark water below, no more explanation is needed.
The routine radio messages drift past him. The hut workers report and confirm reservations, rides are arranged. "This is 69 Speck, standing by with no messages," Buzz says, which is what he says most mornings here. The job of the shelter caretaker is, compared to the higher profile jobs at Pinkham and in the huts, solitary and relatively quiet. Except for emergencies there’s not much need for a radio.
Back at the shelter, he returns the radio to his tent and gets right at it. He pulls on long blue rubber gloves, grabs a long-handled shovel, and systematically turns the compost pile in one bin, adds fresh bark chips to another. The moist piles—for just a moment before they turn sickly—smell sweet. "I don’t even notice it anymore," says Buzz.
The afternoon turns sunny. For the moment, the shelter is quiet. Gone are the three yipping dogs that had irritated Buzz the night before. The day’s composting is done. Buzz relaxes in his temporary home, a large canvas-wall tent on a wooden platform. He pulls out a book on animal signs by naturalist Paul Rezendes. Outside his tent, the pond turns the darker blue that comes with the lowering sun. Inside, Buzz Kaldahl reads descriptions of habitat, looks at pictures of paw prints, of animal stride patterns, of scat.
—Jim Collins is the acting editor of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. In 1984 he was a volunteer trail crew leader for the AMC and a member of the fall trail crew.
