OUR NEIGHBORS: Summer volunteer time for retiree

MAT-SU — Retiring at 51 to sail around the world may sound like a dream to most people, but a part-time Valley resident found he and his wife needed more.

Jeff and Debbie Chabot have made Alaska their summer home since 2005. Unlike most retirees who are content to gaze at the scenery and reel in salmon, Jeff Chabot is a tireless volunteer and advocate for parks.

The Chabots jumbo motor home will be parked at the Museum of Alaska Transportation and Industry (MATI) through the end of this month, when they will store the rig and fly back East for a few weeks in Maine. Then it is off to the Virgin Islands.

For the Chabots, it isn’t just the ultimate snowbird experience; it’s a circuit of volunteering repeated each season.

Jeff Chabot’s passion for volunteering in the nation’s parks is taking him to Washington, DC, in October, where he is invited to meet with National Park Service officials about instituting new walk-in volunteer programs, including a volunteer day each week at popular parks.

Here mid summer, Chabot wielded a power washer and paint brush to help preserve the siding of the historic Breeden Barn at MATI. In recent weeks, he’s been cutting back encroaching brush. It’s one of his favorite volunteer duties — he loves to run a chain saw, he said.

“There are dozens of areas here for anyone who steps in to help,” Chabot said.

Cutting brush was how he got started volunteering back at Acadia National Park in Maine.

The story starts in 2003, when Jeff, who owned a property management company, and Debbie, a nurse practictioner, retired to sail the world for five years on their 42-foot boat. They got as far as the Virgin Islands and the plan fell apart. After spending very little time together as busy professionals, they were together 24/7. It didn’t work.

They came up the East Coast in the spring of 2004 and stopped at Mt. Desert Island, Maine. They had a big question to answer, Jeff Chabot said. “What are we going to do with our lives?”

They offered themselves as volunteers at Acadia National Park there. Twenty minutes later, they were on a crew.

“It was a match made in heaven,” he said.

When they sailed back into harbor in the U.S. Virgin Islands that winter, they tried to volunteer at the national park there. It took 18 months. When the Chabots were finally able to orchestrate a program emulating the one run by Friends of Acadia, it blossomed. It started with four people and grew to as many as 30 people a day, with 700 to 800 volunteers a season.

With the sailing-around-the-world plan scuttled, they moved on.

“We decided to merge plan A with plan B,” Chabot said. Plan B included some terrestrial adventuring, so they bought an RV in 2005 and headed west — destination, Alaska.

“Our honeymoon we wanted to come here,” Chabot said. They didn’t have the money. “We wanted to go at least one other time and couldn’t do it.” Now they could. They hopscotched from national park to national park, trying to volunteer as they went. They found NPS didn’t accept itinerant volunteers. The only volunteers were park hosts.

They hit Glacier National Park on its volunteer day, and turned north. When they reached Denali National Park, they stayed a month, trying to volunteer. Again, they were frustrated. They headed back to Acadia that fall where they knew their services would be welcome, and then on to St. John, V.I.

In 2006, they were back at Denali to volunteer.

“Denali wanted nothing to do with us that next season,” Chabot said. If they wouldn’t be park hosts, there was no volunteer work. By the time officials there changed their minds, the Chabots had found other outlets for their work.

“The parks desperately need the help but we’re bucking the status quo and the ‘old boy’ network,” he sad. “They’re afraid volunteers are taking their jobs away. In reality, it’s the politicians who took the jobs away by cutting the funding.”

It isn’t just the national park system that has left Chabot frustrated. He volunteered three summers at Independence Mine State Historical Park in Hatcher Pass. When he came back this summer to lend a hand, he found funding cuts and red tape had siderailed plans to further restore the mine buildings.

He’d spent two summers repairing buildings and seeking artifacts to restore the buildings used in the 1930s-1950s. He’d located pool tables, a barber chair, a generator and a film projector with what might be the last film shown the miners.

But the park lacked an accession program to intake articles, and Chabot said efforts to rectify that have bogged down.

This summer, Jeff and Debbie served as security hosts at Pioneer Peak Elementary for most of the summer, then moved the RV to MATI where Jeff was welcomed as a volunteer. Debbie works for Dr. Natalie Beyeler.

“Here it is the extreme in volunteering,” Jeff Chabot said Wednesday, sitting beside an old delivery truck at MATI. “They wrap both arms around you.”

Chabot said the museum has four to five groups of volunteers whose interest lies in particular collections — trains, planes, tractors, etc. He is happy to help anywhere and is still healthy enough to do some activities — like climbing a 40-foot ladder to paint the Breeden Barn — some of the other volunteers cannot.

It’s that ready acceptance and a long to-do list that will draw the Chabots from Acadia next spring.

“I’ll be back here in May,” Chabot said.

In the meantime, he will be campaigning for others to have the opportunity to offer their time to help national parks nationwide in return for a free campsite.

“There isn’t anything like the American park system anywhere in the world, yet the politicians …,” Chabot’s voice trails off in frustration. “We own it but we don’t take care of it.”