face claim: Rodrigo Santoro
pronouns & gender: He/Him, Cisgender Man
birth date: July 12, 1977
time in town: Four Months
housing: Rural Countryside
occupation: Park Ranger at Merrock State Park and Freelance Nature Photographer
personality: Quiet and stoic, hard work and strong character is important to him, typically won’t contribute much to a conversation unless you bring something up that lights him up, observant and willing to help.
Diego is the youngest of three children. He is a first generation American born to parents who moved to New York City from Brazil three years before he was born. He is the only member of his family who was born in the United States, so unlike his two older siblings he doesn’t share memories of early childhood in South America except for family vacations or trips for special occasions.
Diego’s father worked as a contractor, which was back breaking work. However, he taught Diego many important life skills and the value of hard work as a means to care for others. His mother worked as a house cleaner when the children were young, but as they became more independent she was able to make her way through nursing school thanks to her older children looking after the house and a young Diego during the evenings, her husband’s hard work, and her own resilience. Her attainment of a degree created a familial expectation that all of the Cardoso children would attend college.
Diego wanted to follow in his mother’s footsteps when he went to school and enter the medical field in one capacity or another, but he had never been a good student like his older siblings. He was a hands-on learner and had more energy than what made a classroom an ideal learning space. He started in community college preparing to eventually transfer to a four year institution. To help funnel his energy into something more productive, he earned his EMT certification and began to work as an EMT part time.
When the summer after Diego’s first year in community college rolled around, Diego felt that working on school work had grown stale and he needed something to do other than to take summer classes. He applied to work as a summer junior ranger for the National Park Services and earned a job working at a national seashore.
By the second summer in community college, Diego hated school. Rather than applying for admittance into a four year program he spent his time applying to work for the National Park Service again. This time, he was hired at Acadia National Park for the summer season patrolling campgrounds and at a recycling station. It was dirty and sometimes mind numbing work, but he quickly gained favor among his supervisors and the park superintendent with his positive attitude, work ethic, and his ability to deescalate issues with surly, sometimes drunk and other times even violent, park visitors.
It was a difficult conversation when Diego informed his parents that he would not be pursuing a degree any longer. Instead, he was taking on the offer to stay with Acadia’s staff for another season or two. After that, he hoped to move west. He was going to be a park ranger, and he was chasing the dream of the crown jewel parks–the Grand Canyon, or maybe Yosemite or Yellowstone.
Instead of the stereotype of a ranger he’d had in mind when he signed on for more time at Acadia, he was continually assigned tasks like the recycling station, grinning and bearing long shifts at the gift shop, answering inane questions, and checking campsite permits. But his father instilled in him that all tasks that needed to be done were worth doing well, and the friends he had made in full-time rangers paid off. They allowed him to ride shotgun in their OHVs to watch rescues or provide an extra set of hands when park visitors needed to be addressed (or arrested).
Finally, he’d saved enough of his meager wages to buy a beat up old jeep and pay his way out to Arizona, but a job needed to come first. His work ethic paid off and his supervisor was able to pull connections to get him a job in Grand Canyon National Park. Housing was provided for a small fee, and Diego felt it was truly a small price to pay to live inside the park. However, when he got there he found out the job was administrative–mind numbingly so. Nonetheless, he continued to work hard at it, he volunteered for multiple, unpaid training to hone himself into a better prospective full time ranger. This ranged from formal training like coroner training, arrest training, rescue training, fire fighting courses to learning to rock climb, improving his stamina, and building up his strength and calluses during his free time.
It took a few years, years spent living in tent cabins making pennies and stretching meals, but he was eventually hired on as a full time ranger by his early twenties. Diego worked as a park ranger in Grand Canyon National Park for five years before transferring to Denali National Park for three rugged, frigid years. Then, he returned to the lower forty-eight to work in the Grand Canyon for five years before returning to Yosemite. In this stretch of time his days were occupied with guiding lost hikers back onto trails, dangling out of helicopters to strap injured guests onto backboard for rescue, recovering bodies, tracking animals, arresting felons or drunk spring breakers, pulling guests back from ledges, and handling death notifications. The experience hardened the man–the work wasn’t the idyllic stereotype many people projected onto national parks. He was a very present figment in the worst days of many peoples’ lives. The job was dirty and oftentimes thankless. It involved blood and sweat and tears. And death wasn’t a stranger.
Diego tried to take everything in stride. The years of administrative work, every kick or punch from a guest, every rescue and every recovery would build up to his ultimate goal of being a park superintendent himself one day.
The day that ended that dream started like any other. Someone had decided to solo climb El Capitan–an experienced, permitted climber. However, the weather chose not to cooperate, and instead of finishing the multi-day climb the climber was trapped on a small ledge shivering after a night of being pelted by sleet and freezing rain overnight. The thick blanket of snow and mechanical failures of snow vehicles was delaying a rescue and time was running out. Diego clipped into his harness in the precariously hovering rescue helicopter, took one deep breath, and stepped out of the aircraft to dangle at the end of a rope that would tether himself and the stranded climber to salvation. His concentration was fully on reaching the climber, but no one could have anticipated the frigid gust of wind that swayed the helicopter causing the tension in the rope to change dramatically. While maneuvering gear for the rescue the wind caused him to slam into the face of the rock structure, severely injuring Diego’s shoulder. Despite the extreme level of pain, he still pulled off the rescue.
Decades deep into a “rub some dirt into it” mentality, Diego ignored his injury for as long as he could. But the more he climbed, the more he had to tie technical knots for work, or control the reins of his patrol horse the more he knew something was wrong. When he finally went to a doctor they attempted surgery to treat the injury, but it was too late. The nerve damage that left his left hand numb and sometimes immobile, was permanent. And spreading. Within months, it had become disruptive and pervasive enough that he could not perform essential, basic duties.
For several months during his recovery, he worked as an interpreter at the visitor center and a few of the main lodges. Hovering around the visitor center and lobbies was unfulfilling work. It left him restless and agitated. His bitterness swelled and as it became more and more clear that this would end the work as he knew it, he became more and more resentful of the injury. There were days he wanted to fake improvement and days he felt it would be better to discard the arm entirely.
Eventually, he decided he would rather leave his post than spend his days watching others inch closer to a dream he’d been working on for decades. He moved to Islesbury to be closer to his family (but not too close) and the natural spaces in the East. The slower pace of a state park was more his speed, though his bitterness becomes more and more inflamed in him each day. The job does leave him more time to follow his secondary passion as a freelance photographer, though he is working on relearning how to photograph with the limited use of his left arm/hand.
