Working from the Heartland

David Dionne
Park Superintendent, Baltimore & Annapolis Bike Trail
Anne Arundel County, Maryland

Sometimes your dream comes true. But it might not be quite where or how you thought it would. David Dionne, for instance, always wanted to be a park ranger. Growing up at a time when John Denver and Rocky Mountain High was big on the pop charts, Vasque hiking boots were really big, and a bear had its own television show, there was a vogue in dreaming of a career in the wide open spaces. Sunshine on your shoulder makes you happy, and all that. I certainly got caught up in that bug...although I personally was never in quite the shape I needed to be to hike up into the high alpine meadows. David Dionne was also caught up in that dream, and like so many of us during our school years, thought that it would be great to find a job in Alaska .

What he had in mind for himself as a career of vast vistas. Standing lean and muscular on some high rocky point, sturdy in those hiking boots, scanning the distant peaks, and maybe doing some kind of eagle head count. But instead his destiny handed him a different plot on the planet to tend. A narrow strip of greenway and pavement where an inter-urban train once connected consumers with their jobs and homes. Instead of hundreds of thousands of acres, he gets 13 miles long and 66 feet wide.

He couldn't have anticipated it. He might not even have accepted it, had he been giving the choice of Alaska over Anne Arundel County . But now he wouldn't trade it for the world. He's still a ranger, doing all the rangery stuff (outdoorsy workstyle, wildlife and habitat management, etc.). But now, he says, his job is about making connections for the park and the people and the communities it serves.

David is accustomed to seeing uniforms. Green ones, at that. He grew up in an Army family, moving every 18 months or 2 years to new posts. Making new friends, saying goodbye as quickly as they started collecting memories. Actually spending a few years leaving at West Point , he was exposed to thousands of "older brothers" who adored his popular father and used the family home for a getaway from the rigors of West Point life. The military was his childhood, and his father assumed it would be his life as well. But, with one exception, David wasn't attracted to that life for himself.

" West Point did have a big impact on my life," he says. "But overall I was an unmotivated student. Except I loved military history. I liked to read the biographies of the guys who went to West Point.I was interested in learning what successful people did to become successful. It wasn't the story of their military career that attracted me, exactly. It was the story of what it took to be a great man.

"Take MacArthur's biography, for instance. That guy had an enormous ego. But he also had vision and drive. He looked ahead and said, 'this is what I want to do.' I picked up on some of that."

What he envisioned for himself was a green uniform as well, only a park ranger's uniform. Only in Alaska . But by the time he graduated from West Virginia University in park management, there were plenty of other people caught up in the dream as well. As the national parks simply weren't hiring. So he went to work for small county parks in Maryland , with one important stint with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. That's where he learned to not endure unhappiness.

"It was good experience in hindsight," he says. "It taught me to move on. If I was in a situation I needed to adapt to it, adjust to it, make the best of it, but then move along. Don't get stuck in a rut that makes you miserable."

Because of a few connections he had made during summer jobs he was quickly tapped to be among Anne Arundel County 's first park rangers. A far cry from Alaska , this wealthy Maryland county offered its own opportunities and challenges, the primary one being to set up a parks management structure where there had been none before. Although David didn't realize it then, he was accumulating the experiences he would later need to rescue the dream for the Baltimore & Annapolis Bike Trail and make it one of the country's most important model in the rails-to-trails movement.

"The most important lesson I learned there was that the community plays a huge role in your success," he says. "You can make your job a lot more fun if you can bring in the right people to help you."

So it was the community he went to first when he took the job as ranger for the very short, first-phase B&A trail. While 13 miles of railroad right-of-way had been purchased, only a short length in Glen Burnie was actually finished when he took over in the early 80s. And that length had already become more of a greenway to the open-air drug market than a park for pleasure, commuting and communing with nature. And that drug issue was the main community objection to the idea of a converted rails-to-trails park.

So he went to the Glen Burnie communities lining the park and told them, "we can beat this thing." With their help, and the cooperation of the police, drugs were off the trail in six months. And suddenly the trail was a place where drugs didn't happen, where flower beds happened instead. And the scariest thing you might find at any given spot is a snake or a child without training wheels.

Today residents from all socio-economic groups, all ages, all races, use that trail to get to work (like our forefathers used the trail's original train to get to work), burn fat, and stay young. On summer nights, live string bands play at the ranger station and suburban families home from the city's working day take their lawn chairs and children for a twilight evening of fresh cut grass and music. In almost a Disneyesque scenario, David has more than once spotted muskrats and rabbits come out of hiding and sit companionably at the edges of the crowd.

His pride in this park is partly due to the fact that it embodies his work philosophy: concentrate on the good and keep your standards high.

"People notice when the park is taken care of, and they notice when things begin to slip, and they adjust their own behavior and treatment of the park accordingly," he says. "If the place is trashed, they're not going to have any problem dropping that extra candy wrapper. But when the grass is mowed, the trash cans are emptied and the flowers are taken care of, our visitors will take care of the park as well."

Interestingly, he himself took care of the park a little too well. He found out only a couple of years ago by sheer accident that the bike trail was originally only a temporary idea -- as space saver, as it were. Because the city planners had in mind the idea to reinstall a light rail commuter train on that right-of-way. I suppose all of us citizens should have figured it out when the new High Bridge connecting downtown Annapolis with the major road lining the bike trail would not have a bike path. In fact, original plans prohibited biking on the new bridge.

Then one night in a Leadership class he was taking, one of the county's leaders was a guest speaker. And he pointed to the bike trail as one of those projects that had been managed well...too well in fact. Because now they had to find another light rail right-of-way to Baltimore, one of the two big cities that Annapolitans commute to. David was flabbergasted. All that hard work he had invested, all those years, had been originally bound for the scrap heap.

"I'm not anti-light rail, I'm pro-light rail," he says. "We need to get people out of their cars. But I'm also pro-bike trail.

"But I would also make absolutely no progress at all doing all this hard work and then lobby against light rail," he says."So my decision was that I would simply operate the bike trail at such a high level and with such style that people would so absolutely fall in love with this thing. It would become part of their lives, a part of their transportation, a part of their exercise regimen. The bike trail would and does have such an impact on health, wellness and on the local economy, we simply can't afford to lose it.

"So, I kept an eye on the negative but I didn't lose any sleep over it. I just continued to operate the trail according to the standards I had already set.

"They didn't expect it to be the outrageous success that it was," he says.

Today David has big designs for the next decade. Active on the East Coast Greenway, he's helping link up the many trails that run north to south along the Eastern Seaboard. When all is said and done, you can get on your bike in Key West and head north. Bring your sweater, because you will be in Maine before you have to stop peddling.

Or what you can do instead is turn west and head on the American Discovery Trail and bike to San Francisco on that. But you have to wait until you get to Annapolis before you can pick up on that trail.

In a town that's notoriously a sailor's playground, David is anticipating "tens of thousands" of bicyclists converging on Annapolis every year. From all over the world. The hotels better stock up on bike racks.

Copyright 2005 by Martha Finney. All rights reserved.