Susan Billingsley interview

Hear interview excerpts:

Today is July 25, 2001. My name is Robert Marvin Garcia Hunt. I'm happy to be here in the Cline Library with Susan D. Billingsley who has an impressive history working in many nontraditional roles throughout her life. This interview is part of an ongoing project entitled "Fire on the Plateau." Jennifer Kern is also present in the room for today's interview.

Garcia Hunt: Good afternoon, Susan.

Billingsley: Good afternoon.

Garcia Hunt: I'm glad that you came in to help us with our project here at the Cline Library. My first question would be would you please tell us a little bit about yourself, where you're from, and your education?

Billingsley: Okay, I grew up in Custer, South Dakota, in the Black Hills. I grew up with two older brothers that were twins, and either because they were just nice, or my mom made them, I was able to follow them everywhere, and do everything they did. I never got left behind, I always played with boys. They were my boys, so I did everything. I went hiking, I played basketball, we did everything together. So it never occurred to me, I don't think, that I couldn't do anything the boys couldn't do. And my parents never even suggested that it wasn't applicable for me to run around with the boys. So I just had a good growing-up period, I had a wonderful childhood. We lived out on the edge of the national forest, and I just was out in the national forest all the time, and just grew up having a great time.

Garcia Hunt: Can you please tell us a little bit about your education, from home all the way up to this present time?

Billingsley: I had probably a normal education, went to regular public elementary school. We moved down to Tempe when I was thirteen. I went to Tempe Union High School, which was probably the worst period of my whole life. We'll just skip that whole four years. And then when I graduated, my parents wanted me to go to college, so I thought, "Well, sure, I'll go back to South Dakota," because I really liked it. And they said, "Well, no, Flagstaff has trees, so you can go up to Flagstaff, if you want to go." So I came up and had no ambition, no desire, really, to do much of anything. I came up and I looked through the catalog and I saw Forestry, and I thought, "Gee, that might be interesting." So I signed up. I didn't speak to anybody, any advisors, I just signed up and walked in.

Garcia Hunt: So pretty much your parents brought you to Flagstaff when you were a young child. Can you explain to us what Flagstaff was like when you came to come to college?

Billingsley: Oh, it was just great. It was small, it was fun. At that time, of course, women were still in their own dorms, and I think the whole time I was here, that was the same way. I spent a lot of time in my room in the dorm, because we'd been breaking silly, silly rules—being in a women's dorm at that time was bizarre.

But being at NAU was great. The buildings were old, like even the regular PE classes were fun. You'd do things like, you could take fencing, and just odd things like that. You could walk all around campus, you didn't have to have a vehicle. Life was just real tight-knit here.

Garcia Hunt: What year was that when you first came?

Billingsley: In 1966.

Garcia Hunt: Can you tell us how you began your career in forestry, after you spent maybe four years here to get your B.S. in Forestry?

Billingsley: Well, my career in forestry was actually probably pretty short-lived. Took me five years to get through the program. During the last two years I worked in the summer, part-time for the Rocky Mountain Experimental Station. It was right next door to the Forestry building on north campus at that time. And I worked with Dr.—well, his name has escaped me right now. Anyway, so I worked in the summers with them. And we worked doing, oh, just regular technician jobs. We counted trees and measured trees out in the Gus Pearson Natural Area. I got in at the tail-end of the Beaver Creek Watershed Project, which was a great project where they were measuring flows from all the different little watersheds down in Beaver Creek.

The first winter I was out of school, I worked during the winter with them, and it was a very heavy snow year. We worked on snowshoes, surveying out watersheds down there all winter. It was a great time. Everybody was putting a lot of extra effort into the program. It was a great time to be working with the experimental station.

In the summers we worked on counting seedlings down along Long Valley, on the Rim. So I got to go lots of different places, and got into a lot of different little projects with the experimental station. They were great to work with.

Garcia Hunt: We've looked up some research on you, Susan, and we found out that you were the very first woman to graduate from NAU in Forestry. Can you tell us a little bit about that also?

Billingsley: I've always thought back and thought if any of the professors had even taken ten minutes and said, "You know, Susan, this is probably going to be tough for you; this isn't something that women generally do, and it might not really be that appropriate. You might want to look someplace else," I probably would have said, "Oh! Oh gee, okay." Because I just didn't know. I can remember when all the students first got together and they called all the Forestry students to go over to such-and-such a building, and there weren't any women, I thought, "Well, this is a little strange. I don't think I'll get up with all of these people. I'll wait until the next English class is called and leave with them and catch up and go." So I did that.

The professors, there were only really two professors that made a point of being nice: Dr. Walnick [phonetic] and Dr. Kurmes both were always very, very nice to me. The rest of the professors just sort of put up with me, and you just always knew they wished I'd just kinda fade away into the background. Dr. Minor was the dean of Forestry, and he was very outspoken in the fact that as long as he was dean, there wouldn't be any women graduating from Forestry at NAU. He had to change a course—by the time I graduated, there had been a lot of changes, and there were a lot of women coming up, and he had changed that way.

I always felt bad that I didn't know Dr. Minor better, because he was a very interesting man. He was a Quaker, he was knowledgeable. And I think as another person I would have enjoyed knowing him a lot. As dean of Forestry, and being a woman, it was very uncomfortable, because he had a very sharp tongue. He was very bright, and he didn't have a lot of patience for people that weren't as bright as he was. And I was a mediocre student, at best. He probably could have handled it better if I had been a straight "A" student and was really top notch. And I wasn't, I was just an okay student. And he had a very sharp tongue for anybody that didn't make very good grades. So he could make it very uncomfortable not only for me, but for anybody that wasn't doing very well at NAU.

There were certainly some fellow students that took their cue from the professors and made it tough. But there were also some of the students, my friends John Werman [phonetic], and Applequist [phonetic], that supported me the whole way, that were always nice to me. So it kind of evened out. You know, once I got started, I really liked it. I just.... You know, I don't think I ever thought that anybody should make it easy for me to be in school, or that the teachers or anybody else should like the fact that I was there. It didn't bother me that they were unhappy I was there, or that they thought I shouldn't be there. That was just something, "Well, everybody feels the way they do because of how they're brought up, and all their different experiences." So that never bothered me. I didn't ever think I had a right to be there. So I didn't go through that period of women's rights. I just figured if I could get a job, I'd stay in and do it. But I was never angry that they didn't particularly want me there.

I don't know, I thought that if you just worked as hard as you could, and could do everything you were supposed to do, then it would just all fall into place. I think as I've gotten older, I realize that doesn't always happen. But at that time, it was just, "Well, I'll just have to work harder."

Garcia Hunt: From today's day and age — there's hundreds of women in the Forestry class here at NAU — how did it feel in the dorm back then when they found out that your major was going to be in Forestry? Was there any conflict?

Billingsley: With other women in the dorm?

Garcia Hunt: Yes, since it was still all women.

Billingsley: No. No problem there. I got a degree in Forestry at NAU, but to be perfectly honest, the reason I stayed for five years was that I hiked in the canyon every weekend. We had a group of friends in the NAU Hiking Club, and there were people from Geology, Forestry, all parts of it. And we went out every weekend and hiked in the Grand Canyon. And that's the major reason I stayed in school, was because I didn't want to miss out on that. So I got good enough grades, I got through in Forestry, it was fun. But the real reason I stayed was so I could hike in the canyon. So really, that's probably what got me through the whole five years, just doing that.

Garcia Hunt: I don't know if there's a hiking club here at all yet, but can you explain a little bit about the hiking club? What did you do on campus? Did you prepare, did you get maps ready?

Billingsley: We'd just get together once a week and we'd show slides of the last hike, we'd talk about what we might want to do. At the beginning of the year there'd be thirty or forty students, and by the end of the year there'd be the same old eight or nine that were doing the hikes. We'd start off doing easy hikes around here, but as soon as we could, we'd start doing the hikes in the Grand Canyon. And it was great.

Garcia Hunt: Can you tell us a little bit about your most memorable hike in the Canyon?

Billingsley: Oh, gosh, there's been a bunch of them. Probably the one that stands out is when we came back to school—I'm not even sure which year it was, '99 maybe—and we thought if we got back early, we could do a hike that Dr. Butchart had told us about. And he had wanted somebody to kind of follow up on it. He had heard from the Walapais and Havasus that there was a trail down this canyon in the very western Grand Canyon, Mohawk, and you could get down it, and then hike out on the north side, Stairway Canyon, and that the Paiutes used to come down and raid across the river. And Dr. Butchart, that's all he did, was find routes in the Grand Canyon. So we had some time, we thought, well, we could miss the first couple days of school, that wouldn't be any problem.

And we got back early, and my husband—now—he was just in the hiking club at that time, George Billingsley—was doing his master's thesis in geology on the North Rim in Tuckup Canyon. So he and a friend went up there, so he could work on that. And me and John Werman, who was in Forestry, and Jimmy Sears, who was in Geology, went along the South Rim, and we were going to hike down Mohawk and cross the river on air mattresses, and hike out and meet George and a friend of ours, Jan Jensen.

And it was just one of those things that just went from bad to worse. We left Friday afternoon and it was rainy up on the plateau. We got stuck so bad we had to leave the truck. So we hiked twelve miles in the dark and got to the head of Mohawk Canyon, slept a couple of hours, started hiking at five in the morning. And it's a long canyon. We hiked all day long, got down to the first drop off at five that evening. And we weren't sure how many drop offs there were, so we didn't know if we could get down. So we slept that night, got up the next morning.

We were trying to figure out how to get down the drop offs, and worked out a system. And instead of trying to use our longest rope at the first one, John Werman was just going to let me down over this big chockstone. And as he did that, the rock I was holding onto gave off, and I flipped off backwards and landed on the stone, and cracked my head. So then we thought, "Well, that's it." But the thought of hiking thirty-five miles out of that canyon again was just gruesome.

So we went on down, got down to the river, crossed the river on air mattresses, hiked out all the rest of the day up Stairway. We got out at 5 p.m., up onto the Supai—it's not even out of the canyon. And then the next day we had to hike all day in and out of the canyon, get down to where we did the last bit of a hike out, and we got out at ten o'clock that night. George and Jan had left, and we were stuck up there. We had made these elaborate plans, and they had left theirs in their room and got mixed up on the time. They thought we were going to be out by five, and we said ten.

So we were stuck up there, and we waited. That was like Monday night, and we were stuck up there until Friday, with not very much to eat, not knowing why nobody would bother to come pick us up. And it was a real mind game.

In the meantime, George and Jan had come back to school and realized that we weren't there, and so they drove all the way around to Mohawk, found the truck stuck, got to the canyon, hiked all the way down the canyon, got to the river, saw the rock cairns we had made as a signal, which you couldn't see from two miles away, and realized that we had crossed the river, and hiked all the way out and came all the way back. And then the next morning they were going to come pick us up, and they made the mistake of mentioning it to a geology professor, and he said, "You mean there's people missing in the Grand Canyon?! Students?! And you haven't told anybody?!" And they said, "Well, we know where they are." He said, "Ohh noo."

So they called in the sheriff and it took them three days, the sheriff's department, to get—it was Mohave Sheriff's Department—to get everything ready to come up and start looking for us. And they would not let George and Jan out of their sight. They took them all the way over there, and then they picked up friends all the way up to the North Rim, stopped and picked up friends, got steaks for a big steak.... You know, they were going to have this big party up there while they were searching for us. So it took them 'til Saturday to get up there, to get the search started. It was bizarre.

Meanwhile, we finally got tired of waiting and hiked out, and just about got out before the plane saw us, and all of the search and rescue vehicles came tearing down the road and almost ran us over. But then we got out. So that was probably my most memorable, just because it went on so long.

Garcia Hunt: Great. You mentioned your family. Would you like to mention if you have children?

Billingsley: Well, I married George. We've been married a long time, twenty-eight years. I've got two children. My daughter is working on the river right now as a boatman, and my son is out in California working, so I've got two kids. My son is twenty-four.

Garcia Hunt: Great. Could you tell us how you began your career in a fire crew at Coconino, in the Peaks, back when you were going to school here?

Billingsley: You know, I don't even remember how I ended up getting on that fire. I don't know if I was working for the experimental station at that time, or if I was.... For the first two years right after I got out of college, I worked for the Peaks Ranger Station in their Youth Conservation Corps Program, where they would take high school kids and do projects throughout the summer. So when I first got out of NAU, I guess that was my first job, working for Peaks Ranger Station. I forgot that. I did that two years, I think. And so that's probably where I ended up working on the fire, was at that time. And it was just a dinky little fire out in the cinder hills.

I ended up going out there and working, and it was—I can remember at the time thinking that I really had to prove myself, because instead of fighting the fire, they just stood around and watched me. It was ridiculous, so I felt under a lot of pressure to do good. So I wore myself out working. I thought, "Well, this is a ridiculous amount of work for working fire." I never particularly thought I'd like to go into that full-time. But really, I only worked on one fire. I worked mostly with the experimental station, and we certainly didn't go on fires.

Garcia Hunt: Could you tell us about some of the different positions you've held at the Peaks then, besides fire crew? You did mention Youth Conservation and with the experimental group, but did you have any experiments that you were doing on your own, or were you just working with other individuals?

Billingsley: No, I just mostly worked as a technician with the experimental station. But I worked out in the Gus Pearson Natural Area, which is out in Fort Valley. They had done, there was a tremendous amount of studies set up out there on thinning, because there's so many doghair thickets out there. And they had done thinning projects out there from leaving it alone as doghair thickets, which when we used to go out and count those trees and those thickets—I mean, they were trees an inch in diameter from 1919. And we would have to string yellow tape to cordon off areas to grow. And you would just stand in one spot and count a hundred of these little trees, all jammed together. You couldn't even get through them. So from that, over to some of the other thinning projects they had—and mostly the project leader was Dr. Schubert [phonetic], and he was excellent. He always was very supportive of women. He gave me my first real job. He always took me everywhere that he went on projects, him and the other students that were working with me at that time. He was a great person to support young kids getting into forestry.

They knew, they had everything already studied on the densities of forests that work, and the different densities, and how much you could thin without the trees being snow damaged in the winter. And that information was out there for the Forest Service to use. I look at this now where they're talking about cleaning up the forest and doing the thinning to make the fire danger less, and all of that was known thirty years ago—it was just that the politics weren't right to put any money into thinning — it was all building roads for logging, and getting as much money as the Forest Service could, out of the trees. But it wasn't into developing the forest for later use. And I look back on that now and I think.... All of this that we're going through now with the wildfires and the burning, trying to get rid of the brush, could have been going on thirty, forty years, if people.... But that's the way it is: it's what brings in the money that makes the policy, and that's what it was, bringing in money for cutting trees.

Garcia Hunt: When you were out doing these little projects out there, would you carry any fire gear in case there was a type of fire? I was just wondering if you had—nowadays they have Nomex—did you have any type of fire equipment, or just shovels?

Billingsley: No, we didn't. We never even thought about wildfires when we were out there. It wouldn't have been something that, even if we had seen a wildfire, we probably would have concerned ourselves with. We would have called it in. And of course the fire crews at that time, that's what they did, they suppressed every fire that came along. But we wouldn't have really gotten involved. What we could have done would have been small anyway, and there was always other people that could do it better and more efficiently. And as far as feeling like you would ever get trapped in a wildfire, that just wasn't a concern. I don't think it would have ever happened.

Garcia Hunt: Could you tell us some of the toughest experiences you've had during your days in the Forestry Department, besides that one day with your first forest fire?

Billingsley: (chuckles) You know, I don't think there were that many tough days. There were some great days working that winter with snowshoes and doing surveying. It was just great going down to Long Valley and counting seedlings. It's just beautiful down there. I just loved doing that type of work. I think the hardest thing I ever did in forestry was to get through the Forestry program at NAU. And I think by the time I got through the Forestry program and had caught up with people wishing I wasn't around, and just the attitude, and then even the few times I've worked with a regular Forest Service, dealing with the attitude of people that had been working there for twenty, thirty years—the thought of going into it full-time had just lost its appeal. I just didn't feel at that time that I needed to prove myself to them anymore.

And I could have had probably—they would have handed me any job at that time, when as a woman graduating from Forestry, I could have had my pick of jobs. But at that point, I had come to realize through being a part of it, that at that time, being a professional in forestry, they moved you all the time, every few years you were moved to a different place. And I'm not that type of person, I like to belong to one place. I just realized that I did not want to do that for a living. I did not want to work with people where I had to put up with innuendos and attitudes all the time. And I didn't want to be moved around all the time.

Of course the option for working on the river came up about the same time, too. That may have had something to do with it.

Garcia Hunt: Were you ever frightened of being in the Forest Department because of this type of a....

Billingsley: I think only one time. Most of the time it was just kids my age being obnoxious. In Forestry at that time, you had to spend a summer in the Forest summer camp. You had to go out and you had to do all these different projects, and you'd have to camp out a week. At that time they were doing it over in the White Mountains. I can remember getting through the summer okay, and then having to go over to the White Mountains. We were lucky in that we ended up staying over in Hannagan Meadows, and there was a Forest camp over there. There was probably a dorm on one side of the road, and then there was a rec hall and a lab on the other side of the road.

The last week was really just a fun-drink-lots-of-beer-and-have-a-party week. You know, we'd do little field trips to the paper mill and stuff, but mostly it was just going out and camping out and partying. And it got very, very uncomfortable. I was staying in the lab, so I did have a place to myself. But one evening I can remember a bunch of former Forestry students that were working over there came out and everybody was drinking a lot. I can remember being in the rec hall thinking, "This is really uncomfortable." And from the professors down to the students, they were just making remarks. And I thought, "You know, this is uncomfortable enough that I think I'm going to take my...

…I went out and I camped out, and I can remember hearing people calling my name in the middle of the night. You know, they were just drunk and feeling good, but I never regretted that I took that chance and left for the evening. But that was the only time that I really felt uncomfortable.

Garcia Hunt: You've just answered three questions I was actually going to ask.

Billingsley: Oh, great! I could just probably cover everything, you know.

Garcia Hunt: It was like, "What were some of the difficulties you faced as a woman amongst a majority of men?" And then, "Could you tell us a story about when you might have been confronted in an uncomfortable situation?" (laughs) We're going to jump to my next question. You've been involved in river running for some years now, from the research that we've looked at. Could you tell us how you got started in the business, and especially why you enjoy it so much?

Billingsley: Well, I think we got started, my husband was doing geology in the Canyon from the time he came to NAU, and then he worked for the Museum of Northern Arizona, and now he's at the USGS. Mapping the Canyon was the only thing he could ever imagine doing—he loved it. And so in order to get down and see more, he had taken a commercial river trip, maybe in 1967 or something. And he thought it was so great, some of us in the hiking club decided to try and go down on a trip in the summer. And there were, I think, six or seven of us that managed to do it.

We went down and did the trip, and my husband at that point decided he wanted to do that for a while. So he was able to get a job with the company Grand Canyon Expeditions. And so I went up and swamped for him for one season. And that's just going down and being a helper on the motor rig boats. And then we thought, "Well, gee, it would be so nice to work together," if I could get a boat too. At that time there weren't a lot of women. There were some women rowing, and it was a pretty tough job to get into. I'm not quite sure why I was able to pick up the job. One reason, of course, being that my husband was already a boatman.

And then I think—I'm not sure why he gave me a chance, Ron Smith, who owned the company. He was a great guy, he gave lots of people good chances. He felt like he really wanted to be a part of the, be a friend to the boatmen that worked from him. It was a little different feeling back then between the companies than it is now. Now it's almost owner way over here, and the boatmen over here. (gestures) But back in that time in the early seventies, late sixties, it was really a family. I mean, the owners were almost a father figure to a lot of these boatmen.

And I think it would be a wonderful story for somebody to research and do a book on the history of the commercial boatmen down in the Grand Canyon, because when I started, so many of the boatmen were Vietnam vets, who had just got back from Vietnam and were trying to find themselves, or to forget everything that had happened. They were down there to party, they were down there to have a good time. They were down there to forget everything that had happened to them. So a lot of them had drinking problems. Their life was just out there to have fun. So the owners really were big brothers. They were really taking care of these guys that were trying to find themselves.

And it's evolved so far from that point to where now it's a really professional position to be a boatman in the Grand Canyon. You have to be very knowledgeable, you have to take the time and the effort to learn the natural history, the geology, be good with people. It's gone a long, long ways. It would be interesting for somebody to do a project on that.

I got started, I got my chance, and my husband and I ran together as a team. In those days, and probably even now, most of the motor rigs would have two boats that went together. We'd have maybe twelve, thirteen, fourteen people on a boat, and there would be the boatmen for each boat, and then we could pick whoever we wanted as a helper. And we'd go down and do the trip.

I have been very lucky in my life to have wonderful parents, and I've got a wonderful husband, and he just always felt like he would rather run with me as a partner, than with anybody else. And there were a lot of boatmen down there that were happy to have their wives go down and be swampers, but they wanted another guy on the other boat, to be the other boatman. It just happened that George and I got along well enough that we worked together good as a team, and neither of us felt like we were missing anything, not having somebody else as part of it. So I guess just luck comes into so many things, and having a husband that enjoyed just having me along as a person made a huge difference as far as getting a job. It's still tough to get a job as a boatman in the Grand Canyon. It's a tough, tough thing.

Garcia Hunt: Can you describe what type of training you would need, or is that on-the-job? I'm looking at specifically, just by what you were saying, many years in which you can either do it in, or either, as yourself, maybe just fall right into it.

Billingsley: You still need to get the time on the river, learning the river. So I had worked as a swamper for a year. And so there would be times when I would be driving the boat, learning the rapids, doing that. I think, back then, there wasn't any [purchase of?] license or anything like that. Now you have to have a license and you have to have something like six river trips in the Grand Canyon before you can get your license or an equivalent. And it's pretty hard to get down there six times when you're just working as a swamper and not making any money. It's a real commitment for young kids to take one or two seasons out of their life and work for almost nothing to get that experience, to go down and become a boatman. But mostly it's just getting down there and doing it and then having the luck of somebody mentioning your name and getting you in.

Garcia Hunt: You touched on, as one of the first women in such a nontraditional role as a river guide. How were you received back in the earlier days, just knowing that you were a swamper?

Billingsley: You know, back then it was really a family feeling. And there's a lot of difference between how things worked out at a motor company, and how things worked in an oar company. I've worked as a reservationist in two oar companies, and I've been around the boatmen and everything. And in an oar company you've got six or seven boats going down at one time, so you've got six or seven people. Maybe they hire a cook, maybe they do the cooking. But it's a lot different. There's a whole team effort, and then along with that comes all the personalities involved in working on the river and working with other people.

I've been surprised at how much harder I think it would have been for me to work for an oar company back then, and to fit in as a team member, rather than just working with my husband on the river. I mean, we had other boatmen that we saw on the river as we went down, and then we'd de-rig and we'd clean everything up at the warehouse together, and rig out at least there together. But when we're on the river, it's just George and I. So I think I was insulated from just a lot of the things that maybe some of the women at that time, working for oar companies, had to put up with. I just missed out on all that. I was pretty lucky.

Garcia Hunt: So for people that don't know what an oar and motor company is, could you explain what that is?

Billingsley: Sure. You know, in the Canyon you've got different types of boats: the motor rigs are like thirty-three feet long, two boats go down together, each boat has an outboard motor on it, and you go down as a group. On the oar trips, you've got maybe an eighteen-foot inflatable with a frame on it, and the boatman is rowing through the rapids with a set of oars. And they'll carry two to four people, so you have to have, say, four boats carrying the people, and then one or two boats carrying gear, so you end up with a much bigger crew on the river, than you would with a motor company.

Garcia Hunt: You're a member the Doney Park Planning Committee. Would you tell us a little bit about your community and your participation in this group?

Billingsley: You know, that's kind of like pulling up from my memory. I haven't even much thought about it since I didn't—I went into the planning committee hoping that we could do some good—mostly just wanting to insure that Doney Park remained rural, and that a lot of the problems could be addressed, while still keeping the whole feeling of Doney Park as it was. As I got into it, I realized that the planning—I'm not sure what his title is—Bill Tyler of the county. He was kind of overseeing the meetings, and he would come and he would lay out issues and things that we might talk about. And then he would kind of give us parameters on what might be possible, and what probably wouldn't work at all as some solutions to work with.

And as we went through the process, I started to feel more and more like we were being as a group just kind of shepherded through this public policy.... There were some people that were fairly knowledgeable on the board, but a lot of us had never really been involved in public policy type stuff. And we had some good ideas, but I think we were talked out of them by somebody that just because they knew kind of what to expect, I think any of the ideas that were a little off the wall, maybe they would have worked, but they really didn't fit right into the normal planning process. They were very good at having us just kind of drop them without us even knowing that we had.

We were kind of being led down this path to this end—not a specific end that they had planned or anything, but into this narrow focus and way of thinking, that I think limited maybe some good things that could have come out of it. So I feel good that I went through the process. I don't feel like it was, in the long run, worth very much. It was a public policy thing that the county has to go through, and it does give an idea. I mean, Doney Park is still rural, and when things come up, they'll still say, "Well, we want to keep the larger acreages and keep the rural flavor." But I don't know that anything that great came out of it. I just felt like it was something that needed to be done, and it was done.

Garcia Hunt: Myself and Jennifer have taken a trip out to the area to do an interview. Jennifer noticed how close to the forest some of the homes are. Could you discuss what you know about the Flagstaff Model for urban interface? What do you think about the current state of the forest, and what should be done to improve its condition?

Billingsley: Oh, wow, you could keep me talking for hours on that, I think. I do live right on the edge of the Forest Service, where we live out there now. We live right at the base of a cinder cone, which has absolutely amazing archaeological sites on it—amazing ruins. It's fantastic. But then anyplace you go out in Doney Park has archaeological ruins on it. The whole place was used back then. So as far as, you know, I think, "Gosh, the Forest Service should really put our area into protection so it can't be developed, because these sites are so amazing," but there's so many out there. I'm not sure where they would even start.

I think when we first moved out there, it was still people really felt like they moved out to the country and they could do anything they wanted. I think that's one of the things that [people], their concept of Doney Park is, that people have their little piece of land, and they live out in the woods or out in the open in the country, and they can do anything they want. That's both bad and good, because if you have two-and-a-half acres out in the middle of an open flat, it's no different than living in town with a house right next to you and trees around you. There's no buffer out there. So anybody that makes a noise, you can hear it. Any dog that barks, you can hear it. Anybody riding a three-wheeler around or something, you hear it. You do impact your neighbors all the time out there. So somebody that says, "I live out in Doney Park and I've got two-and-a-half acres and I have a right to do anything with my acreage as I please," is wrong, because you're impacting your neighbors. Being inconsiderate is a really fine line out in Doney Park. So I have strong feelings about that.

I have strong feelings that the Forest Service does not have the money or the people or the time to be out anywhere in the national forest taking care of it. There's just too many people. And even in Doney Park, the number of people that live out there, and the impact that I have seen just from where I live, and out behind in the forest is unbelievable. The number of roads that have increased out there, just from people driving off the road to cut down trees for firewood. Those tracks don't leave for twenty, thirty years—they're there. And then somebody else will come drive it, and pretty soon you've got another road. The number of roads is unbelievable out there right now.

We don't have a huge problem with people doing three-wheelers and four-wheelers, but it's ongoing all the time. You always see the effects out there. That's something you wish you could just do away with, never having had that ever got started out there.

Shooting—that's another big thing out in the forest and Doney Park—just people going out and just shooting their guns, target practice or something like that. With so many people out there now, it's really dangerous to go out and ride your horses or go for a walk, because when people drive along the roads and shoot from their cars, they have no concept that somebody might actually be walking out there. So that's gotten to be, I think, a big problem. And I'm afraid that—you know, they were starting this big target range out west of town, but I don't see the type of people that live in Doney Park, a certain type of people, driving over to the west side to go shoot their guns. They're still going to go out in the forest and target practice wherever they want to. So the impact on people is just tremendous out there now, and the Forest Service has no way of dealing with it any more than they do anywhere else in the national forest. It's kind of depressing.

And if Bush had kept all that money, instead of giving this ridiculous refund, they could put some money back into the infrastructure of the government. (inaudible)

Kern: (faint voice, far from microphone) How about (inaudible) projects being implemented under the new National Fire Plan in your area? Do you see beginning projects or talk of them?

Billingsley: A little bit in places. We don't have the type of land out in Doney Park that has this same undergrowth as you do out on the west side. You don't have the doghair thickets because it's cinders, and you just don't have all of that growth. So you don't see that. I do see that now when there's a lightning strike and a fire, they don't come out and put it out right away, which is interesting. But yeah, it's not the same problem out in Doney Park as out on the west side.

Garcia Hunt: Susan, with the questions that we've asked, would you like to express anything else that might be on your mind with any type of projects, or either community programs that might be emphasized about the forest itself or preventing fires in the community, or within the Flagstaff area?

Billingsley: You know, I don't think so. Looking at the way the Forest Service has to do business today, with all of the public meetings and the policy decisions, I think that I would hate to work for the Forest Service right now. You would not be doing forestry, you would be doing public relations. And trying to come up with a plan based on science that's been done, you can't do that anymore. You have to come up with a plan that makes everybody happy, and so you come up with a watered-down plan that isn't really workable, and isn't going to have a very good effect. So I look at the Forest Service now, and I think that would be a super-tough job, to have to have right now, because the policies are not going to come out being good, because of all the politics involved.

Everybody has their own idea of how something can be done. And with different groups being able to sue, there's no chance of moving ahead. I think they've done a wonderful job with the fire program they've got. Even with all of the opposition we've had to it, they've been able to at least get started on it. How long it will go, I don't know. But I do look at forestry now and think, "Boy, it's not the same job as it was when I looked at it when I got out of Forestry. You don't do the same things at all."

Garcia Hunt: Well, thank you, Susan, for coming into the Cline Library, and I hope this can be a continuing project, for you to come in every once in a while, when someone gives you a call, and maybe you update information for us.

Billingsley: Well, thanks for having me. That was great.

Garcia Hunt: Thank you, Susan.

[END OF INTERVIEW]