GARRETT (aka Gary) JONES
The 50 Years of After-Domes
I was involved with the Dome Project from the initial dome-raising of ’72 (stakes, PVC pipe, parachute) through the hot summer of 1972 that broke late September with a thunderstorm and the beginning of rain and mud, until my departure September 1973. I have since visited a few times and have found it has become a peaceful oasis in a rushing world. As for my post-dome career: during the summer of 1973 I was an odd-jobber on campus, and this is when I ended up at UC Davis Extension (continuing education, not Cooperative Extension) pasting labels on brochures and catalogs. This turned into a work-study position and in 1975 I was hired half-time–a career job at the university. A few years later I had earned a master’s degree in public administration from Sac State with the idea for a career change, but instead my job changes happened within the dynamic Extension organization over the years, and included planning and scheduling courses and conferences to eventually managing editor of the quarterly catalog and senior publications coordinator for the Marketing Department.
In my personal life, in the fall of 1980 I paid 50 cents to join a very early version of computer dating, which involved a questionnaire, a computer punch card, and a mainframe computer in the basement of Freeborn, with the end result being a list of nine first names and phone numbers. So this is how I met my future wife Phyllis. We married in 1981 and are still together. She taught special ed for a few years in Woodland, but left that stressful job to work at the UC Davis bookstore.
Though the pay and benefits were fine, neither of us were happy at the university. At the end of April 1993 we were hit by a truck while returning from Seattle. Our new truck was a crumpled mess, but we survived our injuries and after reading Your Money or Your Life, decided to try full-time RVing–selling the house and disposing of almost everything in it, buying a 21.5-foot fifth wheel to go along with our modest new truck #2, and living on the road. So we left our jobs in early 1995 and did just that, traveling around the country and Canada seeing many of the places we’d heard about all our lives.
When Phyllis and I met, she introduced me to birdwatching. She had been birding since the late 60s, following her mom’s lead, and this became a part of my life as well. Wherever we go, there is a new world that is mostly invisible except through binoculars, and it has added so much to my appreciation for what is left of the natural world. So when we traveled, we also volunteered at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon and Audubon National Wildlife refuge in North Dakota, a total of fifteen months full-time. We staffed the visitor center and helped the biologists with bird surveys and bird banding. The work also allowed us to live on the refuges and explore them much more thoroughly than casual visitors. Malheur Refuge was like a home we returned to every year, and in 1997 we became Oregon residents.
But our travel boat was about to be sunk. We were living off interest income and breaking even, but the low interest trend in the 90s caused money from some bonds to be being returned to us (called), so we could see our travels would no longer be sustainable. So after four and a half years, and 325 places we called home for at least one night, we had to look for a place to stop and get back to work. A former boss of mine had mentioned Corvallis, Oregon, as a town like Davis used to be, so we stopped there for a while, still living in our fifth wheel, rode our bikes around town and liked it very much. Phyllis got a job at the local community college with a special ed program, and later was hired as a special ed teacher with Albany schools, and I eventually found a part-time job at Oregon State, working for benefits mainly, but one program I enjoyed working on was an internship program for environmental engineering students in which they could gain practical research experience in the summer while also earning money. I know this turned out to be valuable for their later graduate work or jobs, and I was happy to be part of that. The grant ran out of money in 2012, and that is when I retired. We’re active with the local Audubon and Phyllis is involved with their education program, and we are enjoying all that Oregon has to offer. My life in the last 50 years has only a few what I would call milestones, and the Dome Project is certainly one of them