Community Post: Beauty from the Outside In

At the end of my husband’s two-mile commute to work, he arrives at a large, red, barn-shaped building at the rear of an office park. A bronze heron, legs trailing as though in flight, rests upon the weather vane atop the cupola on the barn’s roof. As he enters the building, he is surrounded by natural wood—knotty white pine floors, white-washed pine paneling, and cherry desks and tables. Suspended above the stairwell to his right hangs a flying turkey mount, a trophy from a Kansas hunting trip with his father. Windows in the conference room offer a view of the brook flowing quietly behind the building.

When my husband entered college, his intention was to pursue a degree in forestry or wildlife management. As a boy, he spent as much time as possible in the out-of-doors, developing a passion for hiking, hunting and fishing. He spent his summers working for the Youth Conservation Corps, building and maintaining trails, bridges, and dams. These experiences shaped his desire
for a career rooted in a love of outdoors, such as in the National Park Service.

My husband’s freshman adviser, however, dashed those dreams by painting a bleak picture of career opportunities within his chosen field. Openings for park rangers, he said, typically occurred only through the deaths of those holding the positions. My husband’s adviser steered him instead toward the field of environmental engineering, one in which he has worked for more than thirty years.

During the first years of our marriage my husband endured an hour-long commute into the city of Hartford. There, he worked in a cubicle within a State Office building, although sometimes he was released outdoors to perform field work. Years later he traded his cubicle for a position in an
environmental consulting firm. For that role he acquired a leather briefcase, the title of Vice President, and several suits. These he was required to wear from time-time-time, particularly when meeting with attorneys in secured office buildings in downtown Hartford.

When my husband opened his own environmental firm and began the work of designing his office building, he incorporated into it his love for the outdoors. Because his core business is cleaning up contaminated sites, he wanted his office to display a sense of the company’s purpose and the kind
of work they do. His reception area reflects twelve years of site remediation work performed in Utah, complete with photos taken in Zion National Park, leather chairs, a very large cactus, and table and counter tops which depict natural scenes from the West.

My husband places the same care for beauty, evidenced in his workspace, into the kind of work he does. The project in Utah required the design of a treatment system to remove explosives from groundwater. Working in cooperation with the local town council, my husband and his team designed the building housing their system to reflect the architecture of a preserved historic structure in a nearby town center and park. A local brick-maker designed and crafted bricks for the project and, in order to give the building a more rustic look, builders were not allowed to use a level when laying them.

Although my husband spends most of his days behind a desk reviewing reports, he is surrounded by reminders of why he entered the environmental field in the first place. He doesn’t miss the commute into Hartford. And sometimes attorneys from the city are willing to make the drive to meet him in the big red barn, behind which the quiet brook flows.