Volunteering and Friendship at Point Reyes National Seashore

By Ellen Greenblatt

Though volunteering for the National Park Service, especially at Point Reyes National Seashore, brings innumerable joys and surprises, even the most devoted of volunteers do not expect to find either a best friend or a spouse as part of their service.

But that's just what happened for some volunteers you are about to meet.

Let's start with Nik Epanchin and Tori Norman. Over the years, they became such close friends while volunteering as Winter Wildlife Docents that Nik's wife refers, all in good fun, to Tori as Nik's "Point Reyes Girlfriend," and Tori's longtime partner jokes about her "Elephant Seal Boyfriend."

Volunteers Nik Epanchin and Tori Norman at the Lighthouse Observation Deck at Point Reyes National Seashore. January 7, 2018.

Tori, a docent for 24 years, still looks forward to the training each year—"you just click with some people," she notes, adding that Nik's wife, who is not a volunteer, could relate to her since they are both nurses. The Nik-Tori long friendship started in a docent training, and it has continued over the years as they have scheduled their shifts to work together and answer visitors' questions in often freezing and windy weather.

Since Winter Wildlife Docents may volunteer for a full weekend, volunteers often overnight together (at least before the pandemic) on Saturdays at the Historic Lifeboat Station. As Nik and Tori described the Saturday night dinners and conversations with everyone joking and telling stories together, the depth of their special friendship was clear.

Tori ended our conversation about volunteering and friendship by confiding what she called the "secret" about volunteering, a secret I heard again and again in my conversations with other volunteers:

I want to put myself in positions where I feel good, and people who give of themselves are the people I want to hang with—they are good people.

From left to right: Volunteers Kaete King, Sam King, John Holloway, and Elaine Reed on Schonchin Butte at Lava Beds National Monument in 2004.

The Point Reyes trajectory of John Holloway, clearly another example of "good people," took a different path—and—spoiler alert—led to love and marriage! John began his volunteer career in January 1995 when he saw a flyer for a workday doing habitat restoration scheduled for Super Bowl Sunday. "I decided, on the spot, that I would rather go to Point Reyes than to a Super Bowl party." John became a regular, and one of the leaders of his habitat restoration group invited him to help on a Sierra Club senior trip in 2004 to Lassen Volcanic National Park—where John, a nurse, met Elaine Reed, a librarian, who was on her first-ever Sierra Club trip. They married in 2006, and their wedding officiant was—another Point Reyes habitat restoration volunteer—Sam King, who observed, "We were a core group that worked together for 10 to 15 years on habitat restoration—and became close friends along the way."

Sam King echoed Tori's "secret" about volunteering when he said, "We started with the love we had for Point Reyes and a desire to give to the park—and to be with other people who felt the same way."

Are you getting the idea about the rich and interlocking circles of friendship among volunteers?

Sam King and John Holloway, in my separate conversations with them, referred to each other as brothers. And, before Sam officiated at John's wedding, John was the witness to Sam's wedding to Kaete on a freezing New Year's Eve at Lava Beds National Monument. As Sam laughingly noted, "Since so few of us were there, John was both my bridesmaid and best man."

Volunteers Hannah Rouley and Michelle Van Aalst at the Elephant Seal Overlook near Chimney Rock in Point Reyes National Seashore on February 24, 2018.

Friendship connections among volunteers surprise many with how they can transcend age and roles. Hannah Rouley, who is now in her mid-twenties and at the beginning of her middle school teaching career, started volunteering as a Winter Wildlife Docent when she was a teenager. While at college, her enthusiastic accounts of volunteer adventures lured Michelle Van Aalst, a professor at Santa Rosa Community College, to join Hannah as a Winter Wildlife Docent. Starting 5 or 6 years ago, Hannah and Michelle began volunteering together, and they became such good friends that they travelled together to Paris. They still share videos and communicate regularly.

Volunteers are universally passionate about their "work" at Point Reyes, and the depth of the connections many have formed with fellow volunteers enriches their lives far beyond the boundaries of the park.