The way we see the world around us as youths heavily shapes who we are, and impacts us moving forward through life and into adulthood. This can clearly be seen in Anya Gupta’s upbringing and her frequent visits to see her family in India as a child.
Gupta, 20, now works for the fees division at Crater Lake National Park, and unlike some other rangers, her journey there was as straight as an arrow.
Everything began with those trips to India to see her mother’s side of the family. Her mother immigrated to the U.S. and settled down to build a life here, but her heart belongs in India, and it was very important to her that her children grow to carry a love for the country as well.
The family members they went to see mostly resided in the Northern part of India, in a part of the country that is a bit hidden away, untouched by most tourists and free from the crowded cities further south. It was there that Gupta fell in love with the world around her.
During those summer months they would spend their days outdoors, taking hikes and just generally surrounding themselves in nature, but as with most things, there were difficulties for her during those trips as well.
“Being in the northern part of India is very different from being in the major cities,” Gupta said. “As we got closer to being done with our trip and coming home, we would always slowly make our way back down to the Southern part of the country, and just seeing the trash and how people treat the earth out there was kind of crazy. To see those beautiful landscapes but then a total disregard for sustainability and stewardship, which I think stems from poverty as well as lack of education; it was heartbreaking.”
Those images of a worn-down India, of a worn-down piece of her culture and heart, really stuck with Gupta. She was young, so at the time there wasn’t much for her to do in terms of action, but she continued to go outside and hike and cultivate her relationship with the outdoors. Then in 2014, a school trip to Yosemite with her eighth grade class changed the course of her life. It was a week-long immersion trip and during her time there she was so inspired by their group leader, and the idea of living and growing in such an awe-inspiring place, that she made it her mission to get back to the park.
An opportunity to do just that presented itself to Gupta in 2018 and she took it with open arms. As a part of the Yosemite Youth Conservation Corps, she did trail maintenance for eight weeks with a group of like-minded individuals in the space she fell in love with four years prior.
“I took the six o'clock bus every morning to the park and we'd get back around five, it was so fun exploring and every single weekend I would go backpacking,” Gupta said. “From that I think that my family started doing a lot more National Park trips, especially after the 8th grade field trip, we started doing the Utah parks and the ones in California, all as a family.”
That’s the important thing for her, building relationships through nature, and as a park service employee she loves seeing those relationships forming in the families of visitors around her.
The Youth Conservation Corps was something Gupta did right after finishing high school, after that she went into college, but then the pandemic hit. Everything shut down, schools went online, and she didn’t feel like she could continue given everything. So, she withdrew from school and applied for a Student Conservation Association position and got a job working interpretation at Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. The position lasted from August to December of 2020 and although it was modified due to COVID, she was able to form real connections working in the park giving tours and presentations.
“I remember at Mammoth Cave towards the end of the season I was doing a cave tour and I heard a family coming out of the cave speaking Urdu, and Urdu and Hindi are pretty similar,” Gupta said.
Pre-partition of India and Pakistan Urdu and Hindu were one language, so while she can’t speak formal Urdu, she can keep a conversation going colloquially and did just that with the family from Mammoth Cave.
“We talked for like 20 minutes going back up the hill,” Gupta recalls. “Typically in Hindi you say ‘namaste’ as you're saying goodbye to somebody and in Urdu you say ‘Khuda Hafiz’ which means ‘God be with you’, and as we were separating at the top of the hill he said, ‘namaste’ to me and I said ‘Khuda Hafiz’. That was so wholesome and meant so much to me.”
Working at the fees division at Crater Lake, it’s a little more difficult to form connections. Usually, Gupta sees visitors for a few seconds before they drive off, but every now and again she can squeeze in a “namaste” and even those small moments spark joy for both her and the visitors.
She did have one more memorable experience while working overtime in interpretation. While heading back up from Cleetwood Cove and came across an Indian family speaking Hindu, she chimed in on their conversation and ended up walking the rest of the way with them. The young girl in the group, around four or five, clung to Gupta’s hand for the 20 minutes they were walking. At the end of the climb the family took photos and parted ways with huge smiles.
It’s those little moments of impact that she feels make the job one of her favorite things. Most importantly for her, it’s those moments of impact through shared language.
When Gupta was applying to park jobs after her position at Mammoth Cave, she found what are called language interpretive positions. There is a list of languages provided by the park service, and if you speak one of the languages, then you qualify for one of those positions. Had she found what she was looking for, she would have worked as an interpretive ranger, but specifically tailored to connect with people who spoke her same tongue.
“I saw that and was so excited,” Gupta said. “It's really something that I would have loved to do, but Hindi wasn't on the list. It was super interesting so I emailed the diversity and inclusion office and I was like, ‘hey you know you're disenfranchising an entire group of people by not including this language in the listing’. They forwarded my email to the hiring group for the region, but nothing changed.”
It was disheartening to see that an institution she values so much, being the Park Service, didn’t seem to make an effort to make a simple change and become more inclusive. She believes that for change to happen it has to come from higher up, and that those in charge need to create a demand for the jobs and recognize their importance.